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The Beatles · S7 E6
Revolver
August 1966. From Taxman to Tomorrow Never Knows, twelve tracks that make everything recorded before them sound old. The greatest album of the decade
June 22, 1966, EMI Studios. The Beatles have spent three months recording fourteen tracks that use tape loops, backwards guitars, a sitar, a string octet, brass from Memphis, and a French horn from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and not a single one of them can be played live.
"Taxman" (The Beatles, 1966). George Harrison opens Revolver with a count-in, a cough, and the angriest lyric on the album. This is the quiet Beatle declaring that he has something to say, and what he has to say is that Harold Wilson and Edward Heath are taking 95% of his money. The guitar riff is pure attitude.
Taxman, The Beatles (1966)
Harrison wrote "Taxman" after discovering the Beatles were paying a 95% supertax rate under Harold Wilson's Labour government. The opening count-in and cough feel like a deliberate signal: this is George's album now, at least for the first track. Paul plays the stinging lead guitar solo, not George, a detail that surprised fans for decades until it was confirmed. The bass line is one of McCartney's funkiest, bouncing underneath with an energy that owes more to James Brown than to Liverpool.
Sources
MacDonald, Ian. "Revolution in the Head." Chicago Review Press, 2005.
The Beatles. "The Beatles Anthology." Chronicle Books, 2000.
The Studio as Instrument
Revolver is the album where the Beatles stop being a live band and become a studio. They no longer care about reproducing these songs on stage, which frees them to use tape loops, backwards guitars, variable-speed recording, and orchestral arrangements that would be impossible to perform. Every track sounds completely different from the one before it: Indian ragas sit next to Motown brass, string octets follow psychedelic drones. It's the first Beatles album that could never have existed without a recording studio.
Sources
Emerick, Geoff. "Here, There and Everywhere." Gotham Books, 2006.
MacDonald, Ian. "Revolution in the Head." Chicago Review Press, 2005.
“We were really beginning to find ourselves in the studio. We were finally using it as a musical instrument, rather than merely a means of capturing what we played live.”
— George Harrison
TAP TO REVEAL: What is 'Got to Get You into My Life' really about?
Kinfauns, Esher, Surrey
George Harrison's bungalow in the Esher stockbroker belt, where he wrote "Taxman" while stewing over his tax bill. The house cost £20,000 in 1964, but under the supertax regime Harrison was raging about, the Beatles were keeping only five pence of every pound they earned.
Revolver
Got to Get You into My Life, The Beatles (1966)
Paul McCartney channels Stax Records and Motown, building this track around a five-piece brass section that sounds like it was airlifted from Memphis. The horn arrangement was recorded at Abbey Road with session musicians, another sign that the Beatles were done thinking of themselves as a four-piece guitar band. It sounds like the most joyful love song on Revolver, which makes the secret behind it even better.
Got to Get You into My Life, The Beatles (1966)
"I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there." On the surface it's a love-at-first-sight story, but McCartney confirmed the "ride" and the "find" are about his first experience with marijuana. Every lyric maps perfectly: the breathless excitement, the need to have it every single day, the feeling that nothing will ever be the same. It's the happiest drug song ever written, disguised as a love song so convincing it fooled everyone for decades.
Who designed the famous black-and-white cover art for Revolver?
John Lennon tells a reporter the Beatles are "more popular than Jesus," and America burns their records in the streets. At Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966, the Beatles walk off a stage for the last time.
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