Putting the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ in perspective

What does it say about the Beatles’ seemingly bottomless well of inspiration that their most creative and cohesive album, full of dash, daring, musical innovation and a brilliant explosion of unexpected colors, came packaged in an austere, black and white jacket with a simple line drawing of their four famous faces and a single word – Revolver, the title of the album?

What does it say about Revolver that many consider it the Beatles’ greatest achievement, stronger even than the vaunted Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which followed it less than a year later inside a multicolor, summer-of-love, look-at-me cover?

And what does it say about Revolver that more than five decades after it arrived in 1966, and nearly as long since the band split up, that people are still talking about it as if nobody has yet to make a better pop record?

That last, of course, is arguable, but one thing is without question: Revolver was a watershed in rock ‘n’ roll, and a supernova in pop culture.

Rattle off a few of the song titles: “Eleanor Rigby,” “Here There and Everywhere,” “She Said She Said,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” “For No One,” “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and the groundbreaking – more like ground-shattering – “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which was famously used in an episode of Mad Men to point an otherwise clueless Don Draper, 1960s advertising shill, towards the future of popular music.

These songs are still very much with us today.

Revolver was re-issued this week in what’s known as an SDE (Super Deluxe Edition), over five CDs in one boxed iteration, and four vinyl LPs in another. Each comes with an oversized history-of-the-album book.

Giles Martin, son of the late Sir George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, has re-mixed the album (it’s his fifth such project with the group’s archives). This means he returned to the original 1966 session tapes, separated out each instrument, voices and other effects, and re-assembled them using his father’s much-loved original as a blueprint.

Happily, this doesn’t result in a “re-imagining” of Revolver – it hasn’t been turned into a hip hop record, for example, with suddenly thumping bass-and-drums – but a sort of clean-and-scrub job. The sonic palette in 2022 is infinitely broader than it was back in the day, and Martin the Younger has made use of better studio reproduction equipment (and a new “separation” technology developed by Peter Jackson and his team while tweaking the audio for last year’s Get Back documentary) to make the space between the instruments broader and brighter.

It’s still Revolver. And, somehow, it’s bigger than ever.

As with Martin’s SDEs for Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be, the big draw for Beatles fanatics (and completists) is the inclusion of session outtakes, peeks behind the creative curtain as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – in their mid 20s at this stage – work (alongside the irreplaceable Sir George) through various arrangements of the songs that would become Revolver.

Such was the Beatles’ level of success that the company bosses at EMI Records granted them unlimited studio time, which they were only too happy to use. This was the album where experimentation became the motus operandi: Guitars recorded and then played backwards, Indian drones, tapes sped up or slowed down, strings, horns, tape loops and eerie sound effects.

On paper, that all sounds terribly pretentious. Without songs this good, maybe it might have been.

What does it say about Revolver that it’s as fresh and inviting as it was in 1966?

Ten top takeaways from Revolver Sessions, included in the Super Deluxe Edition:

Got To Get You Into My Life (Second version) – Unnumbered mix. Before somebody got the idea to add a fiery Motown brass section, this propulsive McCartney number was thick with guitars. Here is an astonishing glimpse into the group’s creative process: It’s already a great recording, but – perhaps because it almost sounds like an outtake from Rubber Soul, their previous album – they decided to take it several steps further.

Yellow Submarine (Songwriting work tape – Part 1). A short demo, discovered among Lennon’s home recordings, in which he mournfully sings the lines “In the place where I was born, no one cared, no one cared …” That, of course, morphed into the opening to the Beatles’ iconic kiddie singalong.

Yellow Submarine (Songwriting work tape – Part 2). Lennon and McCartney, on acoustic guitars, work out the chords and the lyrics, joined at the musical hip. Since “Yellow Submarine” was always thought to be a mostly-McCartney composition – happy and go-lucky – this and the previous track are revelations.

Yellow Submarine (Highlighted sound effects). A remix of the finished, familiar track with the homemade underwater and shipboard sound effects brought to the fore. There are many, and this version sounds oddly like a scene from the 1968 Yellow Submarine cartoon film, with which the Beatles were barely involved. Maybe it gave the filmmakers an idea.

Here, There And Everywhere (Take 6). To this day, McCartney believes this is the best song he ever came up with (Lennon, incidentally, loved it too). Here he’s singing a lovely guide vocal, almost in falsetto, making the song even more delicate. This was released in 1995, as a bonus track on a CD single from the Beatles Anthology project, along with the “sound effects” version of “Yellow Submarine.”

Love You To (Take 1). Harrison’s droning Indian song is a highlight of Revolver, because it works beautifully set against McCartney’s melodicism and Lennon’s glibness. Without its sitar, tabla, tamboura and buzzing electric guitar, this draft is utterly different – it’s just George, playing two chords on an acoustic guitar and singing. (A later take includes a dissonant harmony from McCartney that was ultimately rejected.)

Rain (Take 5 – Actual speed). One of Lennon’s dreamiest, druggiest psychedelic pop numbers came about because the instrumental backing track, packed with jangling folk-rock guitars, loopy bass and Starr’s best falling-down-the-stairs drumming, was recorded at breakneck speed and then slowed down before the lead vocals and harmonies were added. This is the backing as it was performed. (“Rain” and “Paperback Writer,” while recorded during the album sessions, were released as a single and were not part of Revolver.)

And Your Bird Can Sing (Second version) – Take 5. Revolver was created through trial and error. If something didn’t work, they simply changed the approach. The first and quite different arrangement of this punchy Lennon number was released on Anthology 2 all those years ago (it’s included here, too) but the real gem is this early run-through of the second arrangement – the one we know and love. Lennon’s single-tracked vocal is front and center, the bass and drums pulse underneath, and the famous twin lead guitars are still being worked out. And there’s an “ahhhhh” section over the instrumental break, later eliminated, that brings to mind the breathtaking “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul.

Eleanor Rigby (Speech before Take 2). Here, George Martin talks with his hired string octet, asking if they prefer playing with vibrato, or without? They try it both ways, and decide it’s better without. McCartney, from the upstairs control room, tells them he can’t hear the difference. But Sir George can, and moments later he and the players cut one of the most enduring strident string arrangements in pop music history.

She Said She Said (Take 15) – Backing track rehearsal. On the last day of the Revolver sessions – they were about to leave for their final European tour – the Beatles cut, in a single session, Lennon’s searing, guitar-drenched psychedelic childhood dream song. There are no vocals on this take, just a cocksure rock ‘n’ roll band making a joyful noise and sending it across the universe.

Rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest photobomb

@2004 Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers

You want to talk about being in the right place at the right time?

Paul Cole, a retired salesman on Florida’s Treasure Coast, is in one of the most beloved, most reproduced and most iconic photographs of the past 35 years.

Get out your copy of Abbey Road, the final Beatles album, and still the best-selling record of their illustrious career. You’ll see the four Beatles walking single-file on the crosswalk in front of their recording studio, which just happened to be on Abbey Road in north London.

In the background, just behind John Lennon, is Paul Cole.

The picture was taken on the morning of Aug. 8, 1969. Photographer Iain McMillan brought the four Beatles outside, had them walk back and forth a few times, shot for 15 minutes and called it a day.

The picture everybody liked found the Beatles stepping symmetrically.

At that very moment, Cole – on vacation from Deerfield Beach – had opted out of entering a museum on Abbey Road with his wife.

“I told her ‘I’ve seen enough museums. You go on in, take your time and look around and so on, and I’ll just stay out here and see what’s going on outside,'” says the 93–year-old Cole, who was in his 50s at the time.

Parked just outside was a black police vehicle.

“I like to just start talking with people,” Cole says. “I walked out, and that cop was sitting there in that police car. I just started carrying on a conversation with him. I was asking him about all kinds of things, about the city of London and the traffic control, things like that. Passing the time of day.

“I don’t know why he was sitting there for so long; maybe he knew that was coming, I don’t know. But he showed no evidence of it at all.”

Cole and the police van are visible in several of McMillan’s available alternate shots, all taken from the same spot (atop a stepladder in the middle of the street).

“I just happened to look up, and I saw those guys walking across the street like a line of ducks,” he recalls. “A bunch of kooks, I called them, because they were rather radical-looking at that time. You didn’t walk around in London barefoot.”

About a year later, Cole first noticed the Abbey Road album on top of the family record player (with Paul McCartney sans shoes). He did a double-take when he eyeballed McMillan’s photo.

“I had a new sportcoat on, and I had just gotten new shell–rimmed glasses before I left,” he says. “I had to convince the kids that that was me for a while. I told them ‘Get the magnifying glass out, kids, and you’ll see it’s me.

“And they saw it, and they went ‘Oh, boy!’ We had a laugh about it.”

 

 

 

The White Album in context

People who remember when vinyl records were the only option often complain about how streaming or downloading music denies the listener the total experience – no graphics, no photos, no lyrics, no nothing. The same people said that about CDs, too, and now that CDs are on the way out, we seem to be left with downloads and streaming. And reissued vinyl, I suppose, but to me reissuing vintage albums seems like putting the cart after the horse. As it were. The point of this eludes me. And they’re so bloody expensive.

Coming in Nov. 9 – on CD and vinyl and download – is the 50th anniversary reissue of The Beatles, the 93-minute magnum opus everyone has always referred to as The White Album.

All you hipsters, allow me to put The Beatles in context. The year 1968 had been a difficult one for the Fabs. Their journey to India in the spring, to study transcendental meditation, had ended badly. On his return, John Lennon immediately hooked up with Yoko Ono, and the press – notably Britain’s famous Fleet Street – had a field day.

They hated her. The slant-eyed jokes and insulting editorial cartoons were vicious. Our John left his sweet blonde Liverpool wife for this? Understand that England saw the Beatles as public property, and divorce, and a very public affair with a married Japanese “artist,” were not in the least acceptable.

When they got a look at the full-frontal cover for John and Yoko’s experimental album Two Virgins, the press really released the hounds on the Beatles. This was some freaky shit, man.

Into this atmosphere came the Paul McCartney-penned “Hey Jude,” such a wonderful, exhilarating and unexpectedly happy single, with John’s ferocious “Revolution” on the B-side. This record was impossible to ignore, Yoko or no Yoko, and it not only became the soundtrack for the fall of 1968, it became the best-selling single the group ever had.

Nobody could have predicted what would come next.

Albums had pictures on them. Happy-go-lucky photos of the Fab Four (in the early days), smart and arty-looking designs (Rubber Soul and Revolver) and multi-colored pastiches (during the band’s psychedelic period).

The Beatles appeared on November 22, almost exactly five years to the day after “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

This album jacket was all white. No pictures, no printing. The title, The Beatles, was embossed on the cover in awkward block letters, and each cover was individually numbered, like a lithograph. When you were a kid, and you knew nothing about art, you didn’t understand any of it. In those days, after all the media attention given Two Virgins, we were sure the record company had whitewashed another naked album cover.

The song titles were not revealed until you tossed the shrink wrap and opened the cover up. And there were those four individual black and white photos, simple as block prints. Inside there was a big folded poster with a bunch of tiny photos spread out, collage style.

It was an ugly poster. It’s still an ugly poster. The lyrics were printed on the back. It was all very mysterious.

The four photos were included, too, as full color 8x10s. You’ve seen them here and there over the years, reprinted everywhere.

So The Beatles, as you played the two records, had no visual reference points. Like you would put on Sgt. Pepper and marvel at all the weird stuff photographed on the front cover, or wonder what all those dumb cartoons were about inside Magical Mystery Tour.

The music, from the first note to the last, was sublime. It was all over the place. It was different. It was great to hear John still at the top of his game, and not crashed in some opium den with his freaky girlfriend. He contributed “Julia,” a love song to Yoko. And the bitter “Sexy Sadie,” a dig at his Indian guru. And “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” And “Dear Prudence.” And “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” which made zero sense to us, but was one of the most joyous, exhilarating songs on the record.

The music is sharp, pointed, and occasionally angry. The snarling electric guitars had never been better recorded. The drums pounded and resounded.

McCartney is both whimsical and fierce (see the bookends “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Martha My Dear,” “Blackbird” and “Helter Skelter”) and even George Harrison is on fire, turning in four fine songs. None of them, I remember being glad to discover, were dreary like his ’67 dirge “Blue Jay Way.” There was no filtered Indian pseudo-mysticism on display.

The whole point seemed to be, LISTEN TO IT and don’t focus on what we look like, or whether we look happy (they weren’t, as we all found out later, but so great were the Beatles that they could turn their bitterness towards one another into cool creative music). There was absolutely NOTHING predictable about this album.

Each record label had a bright green apple on one side, a sliced apple on the other. That was different, too.

These days, I still don’t think the White Album songs belong on compilations next to “Penny Lane” or “Yellow Submarine.” It is its own experience.

The Beatles seemed to think so too, as “Hey Jude/Revolution” – remember, THE BIGGEST SINGLE THEY EVER HAD – was not included on the album. Instead, they put 30 more songs on it. And none of the LP tracks were issued as singles.

I can’t explain what it meant to be a 10-year-old kid, staring at that blank cover and listening to “Revolution 9” for the first time. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me, and I didn’t know why. There were no smiling Beatles looking back, reassuring me that the world was still OK.

@2014 and 2018

The Man From APPLE: A few words with Peter Asher

The world remembers two Peter Ashers. One, of course, was the bespectacled, slightly nerdy-looking redheaded half of ’60s pop duo Peter and Gordon, hitmaking crooners of A World Without Love, I Go to Pieces and Lady Godiva.

(Beatle fans of course know that Peter and Gordon cut the Lennon/McCartney tunes Nobody I Know, I Don’t Want to See You Again and A World Without Love because Paul was dating Peter’s sister Jane, and actually lived in the Asher family home in the first few Beatlemaniacal years. Then, of course, there’s the song Woman, written for P&G by Paul under the nom de tune Bernard Webb.)

In the 1970s, Peter Asher was the bespectacled, slightly nerdy-looking redhead who both managed and produced James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, two of the Me Decade’s most successful recording and concert artists.

In between these two prestige gigs, Asher was the head of Artists & Repertoire for the Fabs’ utopian record company, Apple. Asher was only at Apple for a year, but he produced two quintessential LPs: James Taylor and the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Under the Jasmin Tree.

We managed to snag Asher recently, at the tail end of an interview about Linda Ronstadt (for another magazine), and ask him about his time at the Longest Cocktail Party.

What specifically was your entry into Apple?

Paul and I were very close friends. Prior to that he’d been living in my house. So we knew each other very well, and he told me all about his plans. This was after he moved out. He was at Cavendish Avenue. But I would hang out there a lot while he was formulating his Apple plans.

He had liked some of the records I’d been producing at that time. Initially our first conversation was, would I produce some things for Apple? I said I’d love to, and then later on it grew into, would I be head of A&R for the label, and I said yes. So the job offer came from Paul.

Have you found that the things written about Apple have been accurate?

In general, people got it. I mean, there’s mistakes in all the books. They get stupid stuff wrong all the time. You realize how little people do actually check their facts. I’ve just been reading this new Barry Miles one, about the ’60s, and there’s bits in it that are really good and interesting and bits that just have mistakes in them. But that’s kind of the way they are.

It was a bit disorganized in some respects. People tend to write about what was going on in Derek Taylor’s office, for example. But at the same time, there was an awful lot of good stuff getting done. We did put out some good records.

As head of A&R, did you have input with all the artists on Apple?

We had A&R meetings once a week, at which some kind of quorum of Beatles would turn up. We talked about works in progress, and who to sign. I had some overall influence, but none for example on John’s projects – on Two Virgins, there was no input. And when George was off producing Jackie Lomax, he pretty much knew what he wanted to do. I didn’t really have anything to do with it.

But with some of them, I certainly helped. Paul with the Mary Hopkin album, I was very much hands-on. Paul was producing it, but I was certainly there and doing stuff.

And obviously James was very much my baby, and I produced it myself.

For the record, how did you get involved with James?

I’d been in a band with Danny Kortchmar – he played guitar in a backup band for Peter and Gordon. And after that, he was in a band called the Flying Machine, with James. It broke up, Danny gave James my phone number.

James came to London, played me a tape and I loved it. I told him I had just started working for this new label and I’d like to produce his record. He said OK.

Did you have to get approval from the Beatles before signing James?

As a courtesy, of course, I wasn’t going to sign him without telling anybody. I brought it to the A&R meeting. Paul loved it, John didn’t really care that much one way or the other. I said ‘Look, I’m signing this.’ I think I probably would’ve quit if they’d said no. But that wasn’t even an issue. You make me the head of A&R and I find an act I love, I’m signing it. And they all went ‘Oh yeah.’

To be honest, those meetings were always kind of woolly, so if you came in and said ‘I’m the head of A&R and I’m signing this act’ everyone would go ‘Right!’ You could get away with a lot just by being decisive.

To your thinking, were the Beatles actively involved will Apple?

I had contact with all of them. They all had different degrees of interest at different times in different things. It wasn’t consistent.

Was there a sense around Apple that the Beatles were really in trouble?

I think there was a sense that Apple might be in trouble. They closed the clothing shop, there was a lot of chaos, and the record company was existing with some difficulty. So there was a sense that things were in a muddle.

The Beatles were having big rows, but they were always having rows. They were always yelling at each other. But bands always do. I wasn’t out there at Twickenham, I was working, doing other stuff. I wasn’t at the Let it Be sessions. So I didn’t have that sense, no. You did get the sense that they didn’t get on that great, but I don’t know a band that does.

Is that you on the roof in Let it Be, holding a clipboard in front of John with the song lyrics?

No, it’s not. I wasn’t there that day.

Were you involved with Mortimer, the band that almost came out on Apple?

Yes. I can’t remember who first heard them or liked them, but we thought they were pretty good. I think it was two guys and a conga player. We were looking for songs, and Paul let them record  “Two of Us.” I can’t remember if I produced a whole album, or just some tracks for an album.

I do know that Paul, at the time, thought the Beatles weren’t going to cut “Two of Us,” and then they did. And obviously, there’s no point in trying to compete.

And I remember, before the Beatles had it out, a conversation I had with Phil Everly, telling him that they should cut it. That the Beatles would probably let them have it first, because they were such Everlys fans. And that never happened.

Could you say that it was in the air that Apple wasn’t going to last much longer?

Apple as it was originally conceived, it was very clear it wasn’t going to last. Because at the beginning everyone had believed in Magic Alex, and believed in the shop and all that stuff, and that had all been shattered. The question was what Apple would become. And I knew that whatever it would become, under the leadership of Allen Klein, I probably wouldn’t like.

Did you get the sack when Klein came in?

No, I left. I quit. I would have been fired anyway. He fired Ron Kass.

I knew a lot about Allen anyway. I knew people who’d worked with him, with the Rolling Stones, and knew him well. And I thought he was bad news.

Klein was brought in for the big business overhaul.

It did all change. Maybe it wasn’t viable as it was. It probably did need some business organization, but Klein wasn’t the right man for the job.

Did you have to negotiate James’ contract away from Klein?

I didn’t negotiate anything. I just left and took the tapes with me. The rumor is that they were gonna sue, and that Allen wanted to sue. One story is that George talked him out of it, but I don’t know any of that for a fact. But I also know that no one could find any of the contracts, anyway.

Allen Klein certainly said he was suing us. He did a Playboy interview and said that he had sued James and me each for $50 million. When in fact nothing had happened.

I went to Warners and made a deal, but I had to make them indemnify us against any possible lawsuits. Which record companies wouldn’t do now, but they did then.

In the early days, how did Peter and Gordon wind up with those Lennon/McCartney songs? Did Paul play them for you, or give you a demo?

The first one, World Without Love, he played it to us before we had a record deal. He’d just been playing us some songs, and I liked that one. I think he’d written it for Billy J. Kramer, and he didn’t do it, and the Beatles didn’t want to do it. It didn’t have a bridge – it was just two verses. After we got a record deal, we asked him for that song, and he wrote a bridge and gave it to us.

He and I shared the top floor; we had adjoining bedrooms. He would play me a song on the guitar one day, and say ‘What do you think of this?’

Did you feel like you were in a lucky position, with first shot at those songs?

It wasn’t like that. They didn’t write that much for other people. It was after the success of the first one, which had come around by accident – a song he’d written which basically had no home – we’d established a successful relationship, and then he wrote a couple more songs for us.

So of course we felt fortunate. But it wasn’t as if we got first shot at something that was otherwise gonna go out to the song-pluggers or something, because it wasn’t.

Do you still have some of his demos sitting around?

I think somewhere I’ve got a tape of “World Without Love” without the bridge, and “Ill Follow the Sun” or some other song as well.

At what stage did Paul’s song “Woman” get credited to a pseudonym?

I think it was later on, after we liked the song and decided we’d love to do it. Because everyone was starting to say oh, anything they do is automatically a hit because of their names. So he said ‘Would you mind if we said that someone else had written it?’ We said of course not. So then we invented this story that it was a friend of his from school or something, Bernard Webb. Who’d written it – and because Paul had found the song, that’s why it was published by Northern Songs.

Last question: Do you still see Paul?

We’re not as close as we were, but when we see each other, it’s all very friendly.