The Beatles, Revolver (1966)

Side A: Taxman//Eleanor Rigby//I’m Only Sleeping//Love You To//Here, There and Everywhere//Yellow Submarine//She Said She Said

Side B: Good Day Sunshine//And Your Bird Can Sing//For No One//Doctor Robert//I Want To Tell You//Got To Get You Into My Life//Tomorrow Never Knows

The span of time between 1966 and 1984 was a golden age for pop music. Technology had to be invented and refined to allow it to happen, and the music since has either tried to reconfigure its elements in a new postmodern image, or has rejected the notion of “pop” entirely. At either post is an iconic, lauded album: The Beatles’ Revolver from 1966, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was released in 1982 and topped Billboard’s Year-End Hot 200 Albums chart for the next two years. The intense creative output of the era was inextricably tied to its dominant medium, the 33 1/3 RPM vinyl album.

The 33 1/3 RPM album, known as “long-play” (LP) speed, was introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, a time when “albums” were literal books of 78 RPM records. The LP was part of a move towards industry-standard “microgrooves” that used a smaller needle than those required by thick shellac 78s, thereby holding more music — and having the consumer buy a new system.

LPs came in 10- and 12-inch variants. The longer 12″ LPs were reserved for soundtracks and classical pieces, while popular music for adults, like Frank Sinatra’s early albums, were released on the 10″ LPs. Music aimed at the new “teenage” demographic was distributed to AM radios and jukeboxes on 7-inch, 45 RPM “singles”. The 10″ LP was phased out around 1956, but the demographic split stayed. Looking at the relative sales of the formats during the first half of the 1960s, all of the top-selling LP albums were Broadway and film soundtracks, while the singles charts were topped by the likes of Frankie Avalon, Elvis Presley, and Bobby Vinton. If those hits were gathered on LP, the 45-minute running time was often padded with covers and dubious “comedy” tracks. Superstar producer and “Tycoon of Teen” Phil Spector, whose iconic singles revolutionized how music could sound, famously wrote off pop albums as, “two hit songs and ten pieces of junk.”

In 1965, two youth-oriented acts approached the pop album with thematic continuity on the level of the grown-up soundtrack LPs of the day. Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home in March emphasized the two sides of the album by stunning listeners with an electric set on side A and an acoustic set on the reverse. The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, released in December, is a staggering collection of all band compositions, made even more cohesive in the US when Capitol Records re-sequenced the album to have more of a “folk rock” sound. Brian Wilson, the primary creative force behind The Beach Boys, was stunned that it was possible to make “a whole album of all good stuff.” No singles were released from Rubber Soul in America: the album’s success stood entirely on its own.

Brian Wilson took the ethos from Rubber Soul to make his own album of “all good stuff,” which we’ll talk about more in the next installment. The Fabs themselves followed up Rubber Soul with Revolver, an even more astounding accomplishment. There is almost nothing about Revolver that has not already been said, yet all of it is well earned. John Lennon was at a peak, Paul McCartney had been gaining more sway in the band, and George Harrison contributed more songs than he ever had before. Even Ringo gets his most iconic vocal and several incredible drum parts.

1966, especially in English music, was the year everything crystallized: it was the year Time magazine called London “The Swinging City.” The Beat groups and the Mod scene of the first half of the decade had been built primarily on reheated, amphetamine-fueled covers of American R&B: debut albums by The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds, and The Rolling Stones are separated from the original blues classics by miles of political, geographic, and racial differences. Revolver could only be made by The Beatles, with their own obsessions: raga drones, baroque orchestration, Stax grooves, Stockhausen tape experiments, and acid-damaged Beat poetry combine in varying ratios over the electric Rock base. Instantly, all that came before sounded dated; the bands that had been aping Howlin’ Wolf for years before were now writing such classics as “Waterloo Sunset,” “Pictures of Lilly,” and “Ruby Tuesday.”

Only Revolver‘s status as a beloved artwork belies that it was released half a century ago today. The eight months between Rubber Soul in December 1965 and Revolver in August 1966 had been fraught: the band had gone on a disastrous tour, and their records were being burned by churches across America after an exhausted Lennon claimed that the band was “more popular than Jesus.” Walling up in EMI’s Abbey Road Studios proved to be the perfect escape. Without the need to compose songs that could be played live, producer George Martin explained, “Their ideas, now, were beginning to become much more potent in the studio, and they would start telling me what they wanted, and they would start pressing me for more ideas.” Paul McCartney, in 1966, said, “Normally, we go into the studios with, say, eight numbers of our own and some old numbers…This time, we had all our own numbers, including three of George’s, and so we had to work them all out…we’ve really had to work on them.” That ground-up work ethic resulted in a album thoroughly outside fad: lesser bands have based entire careers off of “Good Day Sunshine” or “For No One,” but none capture what makes the originals last.

Also of note is the album’s repeated statement of its status as an album. The title is a literal description of what the platter does on the turntable, and the whole thing opens with a count in, someone coughing in the studio, and the sound of tape being rewound. Several of the tracks, including the epic psychedelic closer “Tomorrow Never Knows,” are impossible to recreate live. The Beatles, who never toured again, did not bother trying. Revolver is a work where the form and medium are thoroughly welded together.

The Pop Album Era began with Revolver. It sat at the top of Billboard’s album charts for six weeks, and the arcane mathematicians at Acclaimed Music rate it as the second most critically-acclaimed album of all time. It is a feat of universal adoration that many aim for, but only, perhaps, the last album in this story achieves. Much of the discourse surrounding creativity in pop has a central conflict between critical acclaim and moving units. In this series, I will look at the most acclaimed album of the year and Billboard’s top album for the year by sales. The story of our music and culture exists in the space between those two accomplishments, informing and illuminating how we define “pop.”

Revolver, for all its glory, still is not the most acclaimed album even of 1966…

Next Time: Two Concepts by the Wrecking Crew (1966)

Sources:

“78 Speed on Way Out; LP-45 Trend Gaining.” Billboard. 2 Aug. 1952: 47. Print.

Dickinson, Geoffrey. “Time Magazine Cover: London.” Time. 15 Apr. 1966. Web. 20 Jul. 2016.

Lambert, Phillip. Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys’ Founding Genius. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.

“Revolver.” The Beatles. Apple Corps. Web. 14 July 2016.

“Revolver.” The Beatles Bible. The Beatles Bible. Web. 14 July 2016.

Wakeman, R.J. “The Origins & Many Uses of Shellac.” The Antique Phonograph Society. The Antique Phonograph Society, 6 May 2016. Web. 30 July 2016.

Williams, Richard. Phil Spector: Out of His Head. London: Omnibus, 2009. Print.