John – lead
vocals, lead guitar
Paul – bass, organ
George – lead guitar
Ringo – drums
Nicky Hopkins – electric piano
Rolling Stone: Why did you make ‘Revolution’?
John: Which one?
Rolling Stone: Both.
John: There’s three of them.
And of course they are not simply called ‘Revolution 1’, ‘Revolution 2’ and ‘Revolution 3’, but ‘Revolution’, ‘Revolution 1’ and ‘Revolution 9’.
Except that ‘Revolution’ was also the working title of ‘Revolution 1’, which was recorded first, and formed the basis for ‘Revolution 9’.
However, the first to be released was the single ‘Revolution’, which was recorded after ‘Revolution 1’ and ‘Revolution 9’.
(Oh, and the promotional film for the single featured the backing tape of ‘Revolution’ with live vocals using the arrangement for ‘Revolution 1’ …)
Actually the recording history of the ‘Revolution’ family is not that complicated. Put very briefly, the group began working on the song on 30 May, during the first recording session on their return from India. That day’s final take ran to over ten minutes, and this was treated to vocal overdubs the next day. The following week, John began work on a new piece based on the last half of that recording, which, after about four minutes of conventional recording, had developed into screams and shouts, instrument feedback and bizarre incantations. These two tracks were completed and mixed on 21 and 25 June, and became the White Album tracks ‘Revolution 1’ and ‘Revolution 9’ respectively.
However, with echoes of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, John wanted to re-record the original song with a harder edge for release as a single, as Paul and George felt that the arrangement of ‘Revolution 1’ was too slow and not sufficiently commercial.
“The first take … George and Paul were resentful and said it wasn’t fast enough. Now, if you go into the details of what hit record is and isn’t, maybe. But the Beatles could have afforded to put on the slow, understandable version of ‘Revolution’ as a single, whether it was a gold record or a wooden record. But, because they were so upset over the Yoko thing and the fact that I was again becoming as creative and dominating as I was in the early days, after lying fallow for a couple of years, it upset the applecart. I was awake again and they weren’t used to it.”
So, on 10 July, they set about recording a harder, full-on remake. As he mentioned, John had been less than active in recording with the Beatles for about a year. His sole contribution to the nine songs released on the previous two singles and double-EP was ‘I Am The Walrus’. Now he was back with new energy and a fresh perspective. “You” and “I” would no longer be (ex-)lovers, but political activists. Instead of getting high with his friends he would need a fix because he was going down. Not just feeling so insecure, but feeling so suicidal. A Lennon was emerging with a darker, even more uncompromising side – a side that contrasted all the more starkly with the composer of ‘Julia’ and ‘Good Night’.
The recording of ‘Revolution’ provided a sound to match both the rediscovered passion and the underlying contradictions. The raucous distortion of the two guitars underlines the call for revolution – and yet John finally opts out of calling for destruction. Paul concedes it is “the hottest recording we ever did” (though ‘Helter Skelter’ obviously gives it a good run for its money – what a double A-side that would have made!), but points out that John sat on the fence with it.
The demo version, recorded in May, fresh from Rishikesh, states “when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out”. When ‘Revolution 1’ was taped, this had fudged to “count me out … in”, but by the time it came round to the single version he had come down firmly on the side of “out”. (“I didn’t want to get killed,” he told Tariq Ali. Yoko later claimed, “John was simply saying that his spirit was ‘in’ but his body was ‘out’.”) It would not be until ‘Power To The People’ in 1972 that he would nail his colours to the mast – “Say we want a revolution / We better get it on right away / Well get on your feet and out in the street” – while leaving the question of destructive protest unaddressed. As for ‘Revolution’, John later regretted the reference to Chairman Mao (wearing as he was a Chairman Mao badge at the time), which was also not in the original demo – “I was just finishing off in the studio when I did that”.
But it must be argued that the softer earlier versions are truer to the sentiment of the lyrics. While the guitars here scream revolution in your face, the lyric extols measured common sense. Yes, of course the world isn’t perfect, but you won’t get anywhere unless you come up with something constructive. Make a plan. I’ll support you in my own way, but I won’t donate to a hateful cause. “Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it is with flowers.” Now stop rattling on about changing the system, and just lighten up for God’s sake … Something about the “ahh shoo bee doo wop” backing and the lilting I–IV (Bb–Eb) key switches chimes with the reassuring “it’s gonna be alright”. While the song holds few harmonic surprises, there is a telling point of virtual dissonance on “count me out”, where John sings a B natural, having unexpectedly pulled a chord of G out of the bag, completely at odds with the Bb–Eb of the song.
Treating the album version as the “truer” version of the song may go against our image of John the revolutionary, but it does appear that he wanted the song re-recorded with a harder edge for essentially commercial reasons.
To achieve the characteristic sound of the track, archetypal Abbey Road trickery was used. The lead guitars were fed straight into the recording console, overloading the preamp circuitry and producing the outrageously distorted fuzz. “Not,” as tape operator Phil McDonald pointed out, “the thing to do.” But George Martin was game: “we had a lot of complaints from the technical people … But that was the idea: it was John’s song and the idea was to push it rights to the limit. Well, we went to the limit and beyond.”
And so here was grunge, twenty years ahead of schedule. Two separate drum tracks were recorded and both compressed and limited to match the guitar sound. The vocals were double-tracked, and the occasional fluff – such as “it’s the institution” instead of “that it’s evolution” in the first verse – was kept in, to add to the live feel of the track. With the addition of bass and electric piano, the track was complete.
On 4 September, the group filmed promos for ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’ with Michael Lindsay-Hogg at Twickenham Film Studios. The films show the group – and orchestra for ‘Hey Jude’ – playing live, although in fact only the vocals were live, all instrumentation being safely on a backing track … but don’t tell the Musician’s Union, for whose benefit, following the problems with ‘Hello, Goodbye’, this little charade was mounted. The ‘Hey Jude’ sing-along was augmented by some 300 what we might call “extras” who had been recruited from fans in Twickenham and outside Abbey Road. As the film of ‘Hey Jude’ was to be premiered on Frost On Sunday, David Frost was present for the recording to introduce the band, giving the illusion when the film was transmitted that the Beatles were in the studio for his own show. The ‘Revolution’ clip was shown just once on British TV, on Top Of The Pops. It is an interesting version of the song, combining the doo-wop vocals of ‘Revolution 1’ – which had not yet been released – with the grunge backing track of the single B-side.