April 6, 1966, Abbey Road Studios, London
The Beatles were not the only ones dropping acid and watching the world explode into a kaleidoscope of colors. Bob Dylan was a fellow traveler, using all kinds of chemicals to turn him away from folk music and toward creating a hurricane of sound and words that belonged totally to him. His landmark double album Blonde On Blonde, released in 1966, opened with the single “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35,” its chorus urging everyone to go and get stoned.
No need for elucidation there. Most of Dylan’s album fitted in perfectly with the emerging drug culture. His lengthy songs, elliptical imagery, use of instruments (a brass band on the opening track, for example) and his world-weary vocals brilliantly reflected the drug experience.
That was New York. Over in Los Angeles, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys was busy trying to replicate the sounds he heard while tripping the light fantastic. Wilson likened his trip to “a religious experience.” This was not unusual. Most trippers truly believed you could get close to God just by taking acid. In between trips, Wilson heard The Beatles album Rubber Soul and flipped. For him, The Fabs had created the first ever album. Up until this point, albums tended to carry a band’s hit singles and a few filler tracks. The Beatles had been edging away from that formula for some time now, as the Help! album suggested. Wilson’s response was to send The Beach Boys out on tour, and write, produce and arrange one of the great albums of all time—Pet Sounds.
In 1966, two weeks after Pet Sounds belated release in the UK, Revolver appeared and sent Wilson back to the drawing board, this time to work on his famous album Smile. McCartney loved Pet Sounds and you can see why. Wilson’s talent to conjure melodies, to create great waves of joy from harmonies and striking instrumentation, created a style that was totally unique. McCartney now set out to outdo Pet Sounds. He was certainly building up a formidable artistic armory with which to do so.
Of late, McCartney had moved out of girlfriend Jane Asher’s house on Wimpole Street, bought his own house in St. Johns Wood, London, and gone out to expose himself to as many different influences as possible. Living with Asher had already shown McCartney the joys of traditional art forms, such as classical music and the theater, and this had been reflected in some of his most famous songs, including “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby.”
But Paul wanted more. He wanted to get hip with London’s alternative scene. To do so, he called on his friend, Barry Miles. Miles was the proprietor of London’s first alternative bookshop called The Indica (after Cannabis indica) and cofounder of the underground newspaper The International Times. He now gave McCartney access to the alternative scene.
“I don’t think he would say I was a major influence, but he met interesting people through me,” Miles recalled. “I would take [Allen] Ginsberg or [William S.] Burroughs over to his house. He was very systematic in his exploration of the London scene … He had his antennae out.” McCartney’s interest in the weird and the wonderful does seem incongruous given his talent for writing highly commercial tunes that cross all divides. But Paul was always open to suggestion. He instinctively knew that his talent could only prosper no matter what he discovered. In fact, when he started exploring the works of challenging artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, he said that he thought such people weird. Later on, he thought that people who didn’t like the cutting edge were weird. It should be stressed, though, that McCartney did not like everything that was put him in front of him. He later admitted he liked only one Stockhausen record, the rest was a little “too fruity.”
The effect of being exposed to a multitude of ideas expressed itself when McCartney began creating his own avant-garde sound collages using a Brenell tape recorder at home, preceding Lennon and Ono’s Two Virgins experiment by at least two years. His most famous work was entitled “Carnival Of Light” and was recorded in January 1967. The genesis of the track came from designer David Vaughan who painted a psychedelic design on one of Paul’s pianos. Vaughan delivered the piano to McCartney’s Cavendish Avenue address, and asked if he would contribute a musical piece for the upcoming “Million Volt Light And Sound Rave,” an event held at London’s Roundhouse Theatre in early 1967. To Vaughan’s surprise McCartney agreed to make a musical contribution. “Carnival Of Light” was a 13-minute unreleased collage of, according to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, “distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds, a distorted lead guitar, the sound of a church organ, various effects (water gargling was one) and, perhaps most intimidating of all, John Lennon and McCartney screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘Barcelona!’”
His friend John, meanwhile, was content to let Paul do the exploring and report back to him. He was happy tripping out in Weybridge, much to his wife Cynthia’s angst. Reluctant to ingest the drug after “the dental experience” as George called it, Cynthia now had a ghost for a husband. Half the time he was in another world, for the other half he was coming down badly and screamed to be left alone. Cynthia and their son Julian walked on eggshells when John was around.
LSD served to open up a gap in the band as well. Paul’s wariness of its long-term effects meant that for the first time The Beatles were not moving as one. McCartney did eventually take the drug but only four or five times. In contrast, Lennon remarked that he had taken thousands of trips in an attempt to kill off his ego, an undertaking endorsed by the writer and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary.
Miles remembered McCartney bringing Lennon into his shop Indica to buy books, including Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience. The first song to be recorded for Revolver was Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which basically drew on whole chunks of Leary’s writing and then set it to the most radical Beatles music yet.
And what then of Harrison? By the time the band was making Revolver, Harrison had mastered the sitar well enough to create a whole song around the instrument called “Love You To.” Harrison had discovered the Asian Music Circle, an organization that promoted Indian arts. He spent three months visiting them in Finchley, London, and being taught various techniques.
John, Paul and Ringo were also impressed by Indian music and used some of its techniques in their own compositions. When Lennon played them “Tomorrow Never Knows” on his guitar, he used just one chord and sang his song over that droning sound. The fractured rhythms of songs such as “Rain” also expose a knowledge of the workings of Indian-style music.
The sense of experimentation surrounding the band extended itself to George Martin and his engineer Geoff Emerick. When the writer of “Tomorrow Never Knows” told his sound people that he wanted his song to sound like a thousand monks chanting on a hill and then walked away, what did one do?
“The group encouraged us to break the rules,” recalled Emerick. “It was implanted when we started Revolver that every instrument should sound unlike itself: a piano shouldn’t sound like a piano, a guitar shouldn’t sound like a guitar. There were lots of things I wanted to try …”
Although Lennon gets the credit for “Tomorrow Never Knows” it was really McCartney’s involvement that turned it into a classic. “Paul in particular used the make his own loops at home and walk into the studio with bags full of little reels saying ‘Listen to this!’ The seagull-like noise on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is really a distorted guitar,” said Emerick. (Other loops used on the track included the sounds of a wine glass and a speeded-up guitar.) “We did a live mix of all the loops,” Martin revealed. “All over the studios we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils while Geoff did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning.”
Where Revolver succeeds is by meeting McCartney’s determination that the band forged ahead sonically. The songs adopted many musical coats: early funk in “Taxman”; sublime love songs in “Here, There And Everywhere” and “For No One”; Indian influenced in “Love You To”; acid influenced in “She Said, She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”; a children’s song, “Yellow Submarine”; and sheer joyful pop in “Good Day Sunshine” and “Got To Get You Into My Life.”
The cover design was handed over to their old Hamburg friend, Klaus Voormann, now working as a graphic designer. He was given bundles of Beatles pictures cut out of the papers by John, Paul and Pete Shotton the night before. Using the memory of their old days together, Klaus took the band’s hair as his starting point and created a highly distinctive album cover that portrayed all kinds of images pouring out of the band members’ heads.
“I had a few strange ones where John was pulling a face, or Paul was laughing, but in general, the photos show their sweet side,” Klaus recalled. “There was one picture where Paul was sitting on a toilet. I think that photo was taken in Hamburg.”
Klaus took the design to George Martin’s office and set up the artwork on the filing cabinet. The band, Brian Epstein, George Martin and his secretary were present for the unveiling. Apart from George Martin objecting to the shot of Paul on the toilet, everybody loved it. Brian Epstein was even moved to tears, saying, “Klaus, this is exactly what we needed. I was worried that this whole thing might not work, but I know now that this is the cover. This LP will work—thank you.”
The cover for what many consider their finest album, Revolver. It was designed by Klaus Voormann, who they had befriended in Hamburg days. He later revealed that he had used the fuss surrounding their haircuts as his starting point.
McCartney may have been pleased with the album cover but that was nothing compared with his excitement about the music inside. On its release he said, “Unlike our previous LPs, this one is intended to show our versatility rather than a haphazard collection of songs. We use trumpets, violins and cellos to achieve new effects … We don’t intend to go back and revive ideas of 20 years ago.”
It is often said that Revolver is Rubber Soul Part Two but it might be better to view it as Sgt. Pepper Number One. Undoubtedly it has so much endeavor behind it that whether one is a hippy or a banker, a monk or a model, the music dives straight into your heart. The original title was Abracadabra. Magic might have been a better word.
