The Beatles’ Revolver

The Beatles, prior to releasing Revolver, had been viewed as very much the quintessential upbeat, teen love pop group. They refused to be pigeonholed into doing the same thing for their entire careers, and so decided to go into an entirely new direction. In this case, they changed their happy-in-love style to a grittier, more contemplative and explorative experience. They had many influences on their new style of music. For example, George Harrison during The Beatles journey through India, became borderline obsessed with that culture and music, as becomes plainly evident for the remainder of his tragically short life. On the home front, Bob Dylan introduced the boys to marijuana, which they wound up being quite keen on. Right around the same time, John had begun experimenting with LSD, and the rest of the group soon followed suit, producing perhaps the first example of an “acid rock” record. The first time one hears the album, particularly for fans of their earlier material, it is quite a jarring experience. Personally, I was shocked and didn’t quote know how to feel about it at first (I was always partial to Sgt. Pepper anyway), but it quickly became one of my favorite records of all time by the second or third play through. Especially when listened to on vinyl, the sonic quality is simply outstanding and the ingenuity of the engineers and producers, as well as the band. In particular, the use of the Leslie rotating speaker used on John Lennon’s voice in the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” was absolutely brilliant, giving it the character of taking place in a truly distorted reality. In addition, John’s obsession with double-tracking his vocal lines spurred and engineer to invent a new style of tape delay to give the effect of chorusing from double-tracking but without the need to perfectly replicate a performance (which John apparently was not particularly good at doing anyway). As an industry professional, this album has given so much to the world of music, and I partially got into this industry because of this record, and I would like to use it’s influence in today’s music.

01 Nov This entry was published on November 1, 2015 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.