7
REVOLVER
August 1966
Revolver was another evolution, even revolution, in that it revolved, hence the title, another jokey one. The album cover was also different from anything so far: instead of a photograph, drawings of the Beatles by Klaus Voormann, a friend from their Hamburg days, are interspersed with cut-out photos of them and other bits, very arty and psychedelic. One of their ideas for Revolver was to have no space between the different tracks, so that it all flowed on, one continuous sound, but EMI said no.
They were now doing so many clever things in the studio, fashioning and sculpting the sounds, that they were creating songs they could not perform, and did not perform live on stage. None of the fourteen new tracks on Revolver got included in their stage shows. They were fed up with touring, and this gave them one more reason to want to give up playing in public.
In 1966 when I started interviewing the Beatles, I asked whether they listened to their own music. Many creative artists can’t bear to revisit their work. It depresses them, seeing how it didn’t turn out they way they hoped, or depresses them in another way, wondering how they did it, whether they can manage to do it all again.
John and Paul both said they never listened to their old stuff–except as an aide-mémoire before a new album, to see where the were up to. ‘I used to play the first four albums, one after the other,’ said John, ‘to see the progression musically, and it was interesting. I got up to Revolver and it got too many. It would be too much listening time, but you could hear the progressions, as we learnt about recording and the techniques got refined.’
Both John and Paul could not understand why anyone was surprised that they seemed to keep on progressing, wanting to do different things. It seemed to them utterly natural. In an interview with Michael Lydon, published in Newsweek in March 1966, Paul said:
If someone saw a picture of you taken two years ago, and said that was you, you’d say it was a load of rubbish and show them a new picture. That’s how we feel about the early stuff and Rubber Soul.
There was no mystery about our growth, it was only as mysterious as a flower is mysterious. There’s no more point in charting it than charting how many teeth I had as a baby and how many I have now. Nobody thought that was miraculous, except perhaps my mother. We were just growing up.
Revolver was issued in August 1966, during what turned out to be their last tour. This was their third and final USA trip, and their performance at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, on 29 August 1966 was to be their last live concert performance anywhere. Their final UK concert appearance had been in May 1966, at a New Musical Express event at Wembley.
From now on, they could take as long as they liked in the studio, and not have to break off to tour the world. They became a recording band, not a performing band. It also meant they were creating for a different sort of public. Instead of performing for audiences of screaming girls they were going underground, reflecting and inspiring the hippie, druggie, psychedelic, turned-on generation.
In Revolver, the lyrics covered subjects which would have seemed totally implausible just four years earlier: taxation, submarines, Buddhism, lonely spinsters, druggie doctors, sleep. Far-out topics and weird sounds, but Revolver also included some of the most beautiful songs they had written so far.
Paperback Writer
Recorded around the same time as the Revolver album, in April 1966, but came out before the album, in June, as a single, and set the pattern for writing about things that had nothing to do with romance or relationships. It was Paul’s creation, supposedly as a result of one of his aunts suggesting they wrote a song which was not about love.
Paul’s own memory is that while driving down to John’s house one day, the idea came to him for a song in the form of a letter. It would begin with Dear Sir or Madam, in the classic manner, and progress from there. He had had a letter from an aspiring novelist, wanting help, and liked the sound of ‘paperback writer’, knowing it was something he could easily fit a rhythm to.
An author called Peter Royston Ellis believes he was the paperback writer they had in mind, as the Beatles played the backing music to a poetry reading he gave in 1960. They had also had two paperbacks written about them in 1964. The True Story of the Beatles by Billy Shepherd was for the fans, published by the people behind the Beatles Monthly magazine. The other was more upmarket: The Beatles Progress was written by an American journalist called Michael Braun who had accompanied them on a few of their tours. This was published by Penguin–who in those days only did paperbacks. John of course had had two books out–small, thin hardbacks at first, later reissued as paperbacks.
Paperbacks were a post-war phenomenon in the UK, but mostly they were slim volumes in comparison to the one referred to in the lyrics. A thousand pages long? Dear God, no one in their right mind would have mentioned that to a paperback publisher.
Paul, right, signing autographs before The Ed Sullivan Show in New York, 9 February 1964.
The lyrics don’t in fact have a lot of logic to them. The reference to Lear was presumably Edward Lear, who never wrote novels, though John as a boy loved his nonsense poems. They’re fun nonetheless, with daft things thrown in like a dirty story of a dirty man, his clinging wife and a son who reads the Daily Mail–which John often did, looking for inspiration. The novelist is offering all the rights, insisting it will sell millions, promising he can make it longer, change the style–that’s typical of letters publishers receive even today.
The manuscript is interesting because Paul has written it out as if it is a letter–prose rather than verse, which is how lyrics are usually set out. Only when you read it do you realize it is the lyrics to the song, exactly as they were sung.
He signs it at the end: ‘yours sincerely Ian Iachimoe’. One of Paul’s jokes, apparently–what his name sounds like when played backwards.
The music itself contains a joke–which I must admit I had never spotted till I read Ian MacDonald’s erudite Revolution in the Head. In the second chorus, George and John are not singing ‘Paperback Writer’ but can be heard in the background chanting ‘Frère Jacques’.
‘Paperback Writer’, released as a single in June 1966, in Paul’s hand, written out as if it really is a letter, not verses.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear,
And I need a job,
So I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
It’s a dirty story of a dirty man,
And his clinging wife doesn’t understand.
His son is working for the Daily Mail
It’s a steady job,
But he wants to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.
It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few.
I’ll be writing more in a week or two.
I could make it longer if you like the style.
I can change it round,
And I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
If you really like it you can have the rights.
It could make a million for you overnight.
If you must return it you can send it here,
But I need a break,
And I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
Rain
I’d forgotten ‘Rain’, in fact I am not sure I ever listened to it properly at the time. It was the B side of ‘Paperback Writer’ and B-sides never got the same attention. Still not loved or known much by ordinary humming-along, Fab Four Beatles fans–but boy, the musicologists have gone to town on it over the years, seeing hidden musical depths, praising all the clever tricks, the backwards tapes, the heavy amplification, Ringo’s superb drumming, saying it was at least twenty years ahead of its time. According to American musicologists Stuart Madow and Jeff Sobul in their 1992 book The Colour of Your Dreams, it was the Beatles ‘first truly psychedelic song’.
To me, it still sounds like a dirge, with a vague Indian mono beat in the background, and a lot of assorted noises as they try out stuff to amuse themselves and give George Martin and the technicians something new to do.
John says he discovered the joy of the backwards tapes at home while enjoying himself with some herbal stimulants; he accidentally threaded a tape of the stuff they had recorded that day into his machine backwards, and out came this weird sound.
The lyrics are, on the surface, totally banal. It’s about rain. You know, that wet stuff that falls down, that people are always moaning about. That’s what set John off–people complaining about the rain. He then moves on to say that rain and shine are just a state of mind. How true. How very sixth-form philosophical debating society.
I can see that it could be psychedelic in that the words and music were probably influenced by herbal concoctions, but I think interpreting it as some sort of hippie bible–that John is trying to give us a message, we should rise above rain and shine, transcend good and bad, and just rise up in the air, man–is pushing it a bit.
Taxman
The first track on the album–written by George, given pride of position for once. They were kind enough to include three of his songs altogether, his biggest tally so far.
George had been incensed when he discovered how much money they were giving the taxman. In the second line of the lyrics he says ‘one for you, nineteen for the taxman’, but in fact the top rate in 1966 for the highest earners was nineteen shillings and sixpence in the pound (95 per cent), the highest it has ever been in the UK. Or probably anywhere.
None of the Beatles could be accused of being mercenary or money-mad, John least of all, but at various times they all did a bit of fretting and moaning about where their money was going. George, despite being the youngest (he turned twenty-three in 1966) was the first to express his anger about the government taking most of their money while they did all the work.
John helped with the lyrics, after George had rung him up, asking for ideas–another reason John was upset not to be thanked in I Me Mine. George says little about this song in the book: ‘Taxman was when I first realized that even though we started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. It was and is so typical. Why should this be so? Are we being punished for something we have forgotten to do?’
Brian Epstein tried a few tax-saving devices–sheltering one million with a financial wizard in a tax haven in the Bahamas. The money disappeared–and Epstein was too embarrassed and humiliated to confess it to the Beatles. He was not exactly the toughest or cleverest of businessmen, despite his public image.
George’s manuscript has a discarded verse and a few bum lines which possibly John and the others persuaded him to drop, such as ‘You may work hard trying to get some bread, you won’t make out before your dead’. The crossings-out suggest he wasn’t sure himself. Equally clumsy was the line: ‘so give it to conformity’. John’s input made it wittier and sharper and the finished lyrics were much better: ‘If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat. If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat.’
There is one line I don’t quite follow: ‘Now my advice for those who die, declare the pennies on your eyes.’ It sounds clever and visual, but does it mean your body parts have a value for transplant? Unlikely in 1966. (The first heart transplant was in 1967 in Cape Town.) More probably it was a reference to the custom of putting pennies on the eyelids of corpses?
There is one good joke in the finished, recorded version where you can hear the others in the background singing about Harold Wilson–who had won a landslide election for Labour in March 1966–and also Edward Heath, leader of the Conservatives. It was the first time living folks had got a name check in a Beatles song.
They had met Harold Wilson, MP for a constituency in the Liverpool area (Huyton), who always tried to cash in on reflected glory for the global success of the Beatles. He had been Prime Minister when the Beatles received their MBEs in 1965.
Now let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
’Cos I’m the taxman, yes, I’m the taxman
Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don’t take it all
’Cos I’m the taxman, yeah I’m the taxman
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.
Don’t ask me what I want it for (ha ha Mr Wilson)
If you don’t want to pay some more (ha ha Mr Heath)
’Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
’Cos I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
And you’re working for no one but me.