Exploitation, isolation and death - revisiting the Beatles’ Revolver

Exploitation, isolation and death: revisiting the Beatles’ Revolver

http://www.newstime.co.za/column/Mer...olver/87/2280/

In the introduction to the third edition (2000) of his All-Time Top 1000 Albums, Colin Larkin writes arrestingly: “The music is the real driving force, and that is why people have their favourite album of all time. It is something you can go back to time and time again and it will never let you down. Relationships may come and go, best friends may betray you, but your favourite album will always be there to lift your spirits or make you feel melancholy. There is no more powerful force in my opinion.”

All-Time Top 1000 Albums was based upon the views of over 200 000 music fans, experts and critics. And strangely, the record which was voted the best album of all time by those it surveyed was the Beatles’ August 1966 release, Revolver. Not Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, not the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, not Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, not Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, not the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, but Revolver. This led Larkin to pay the album a gushing tribute: “A shamelessly perfect record, its position fully justified. Music critics have always preferred Revolver to its famous successor [Sgt Pepper], while fans were at first a little wary of the brilliantly bizarre ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the eastern promise of ‘Love You To’ or the goodtime brass of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’. Years of repeated listening unfold quiet gems such as George Harrison’s exceptional ‘I Want To Tell You’ and John Lennon’s wondrously hazy ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, or as he sings ‘I’m only seeping’. Paul McCartney was also on a creative roll with the unabashed and brave romanticism of ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and the classical sadness of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Subtly original and beautifully recorded.”

Larkin’s All-Time Top 1000 Albums is a British book, but an American one, VH1’s 100 Greatest Albums (2003), edited by Jacob Hoye, comes to the same conclusion. Explaining Revolver’s Number One position in this survey (which was conducted among 700 musicians, songwriters, disc jockeys, radio programmers and critics), New York writer Eric Wybenga makes the following remarks: “It ranks without doubt among the finest of the Beatles’ work . . . . The Beatles’ achievement, with Revolver, was in expressing the psychedelic experience aurally. . . . More than anything, the Beatles with Revolver declared rock and roll to be a wide-open field, something that could encompass the orchestral and the eastern, the romantic, the transcendental, and the whimsical. They accomplished this through the songs but also through some of the most innovative and gorgeous production heard then or since (for which George Martin must also be mentioned). It is an album that sounds quite unlike anything else, even prior or subsequent work by the Beatles. Revolver exists in its own universe . . . . Listening to the CD now, I’m struck once again at how accomplished they were, how groundbreaking their sound and style was, how fine their songwriting. . . . Unfortunately, it also sets an impossibly high standard for whatever follows. You’ll leap with eagerness into the thicket, but you won’t find many more this good.”

The Rolling Stone coffee-table book The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2005) is only slightly more reserved, rating Revolver as the third-best album of all time (after Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds) and writing that “Revolver, finally, signaled that in popular music, anything – any theme, any musical idea – could now be realized”.

Every book I own that reviews albums from the 1960s gives Revolver a five-star rating, and writes of it in ecstatic language. Typical of these is The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), where the reviewer, Rob Sheffield, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine, concludes his assessment of Revolver as follows: “These days, Revolver has earned its reputation as the best album the Beatles ever made, which means the best album by anybody.”

There is no doubt that Revolver is a classic, which fully deserves the five-star ratings heaped on it by one reviewer after another. But it has never resonated with me to the same extent as Sgt Pepper, The Beatles (the White Album), Abbey Road or even (dare I say it) Let It Be, all of which I regard as preferred listening. Among the critics, the one sceptic is Sean Egan, who in his The Mammoth Book of the Beatles (2009) hits the nail on the head when he calls Revolver “something to admire, not to love”. Egan even adds that to him “large parts of it will always sound like The Beatles as approximated by a computer”. While this last remark goes, I think, a step too far, Revolver is not even one of my 100 favourite albums and I don’t particularly warm to it, despite the fact that I hugely admire many of the individual songs on it. So I sat down and listened again, over a dozen times through, to the recently remastered CDs of Revolver, in both its mono and stereo configurations, and tried to figure out why I feel as I do about this celebrated album. Is there something I have been overlooking about Revolver all these years?

My revisitation of Revolver reaffirms my earlier view that it is a brilliant album. But the problem is that it is also a cold and dark one, whose main themes are exploitation, isolation and death. These are hardly joyous or engaging topics – and they have been dealt with more profoundly by John Lennon on his 1970 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and in a more riveting and compelling manner by Pink Floyd on all of the albums they released between 1973 (Dark Side of the Moon) and 1983 (The Final Cut).

The front cover of Revolver, designed by Klaus Voormann at a time of exploding Technicolor, consists of monochrome line drawings of the faces of the four Beatles with photographs of eyes (and in George’s case lips) pasted in, combined with a collage of black-and-white photographs of the lads, many dating back to early in their careers. The absence of colour from the front cover was startling enough, but it is really the back-cover photograph that sets the tone for the album. Shot in the Abbey Road Studios on 19 May 1966, the black-and-white photograph has a completely black background, appears to have been treated so as to darken the Beatles’ clothing as much as possible, and shows Paul, George and Ringo wearing dark impenetrable glasses, behind which their eyes are totally concealed. This cuts them off from eye contact with those around them, and gives the first clue to the leitmotif of loneliness that runs through many of the songs on Revolver. The principal task of an album cover is to prepare listeners for the music that lies within, and this one betokens a preoccupation with sombre and even funereal concerns, which are echoed in much of the music on the album.

Revolver starts discordantly and chaotically, with coughing, tape-sped guitar sounds and a distorted voice counting in the opening track, “Taxman”, and ends with discordant and chaotic piano chords that close out “Tomorrow Never Knows”. (Were they the inspiration for Mike Garson’s anarchically brilliant piano solo on David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)” seven years later?) “Taxman” documents the exploitation of income-earners by the British tax system of the day: “There’s one for you, nineteen for me” and “Should five per cent appear too small/Be thankful I don’t take it all/’Cos I’m the Taxman/Yeah, I’m the Taxman/ . . . And you’re working for no one but me”.

cont...

The album then moves into “Eleanor Rigby”, the first of its songs about isolation, and certainly the best song ever written on the subject of loneliness. A reclusive figure who picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been, who (by implication) arrives only after everyone else has left, and who seems as afraid of human connection as she is haunted by the lack of it, Eleanor Rigby meets the other solitary character in the song, Father McKenzie, only in death, as he gives her a lonely burial. McCartney’s brilliantly evocative writing on this track yields perhaps the most heartbreaking lines in all of rock: “Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name/Nobody came”.

“I’m Only Sleeping”, which follows “Eleanor Rigby”, opens John Lennon’s songwriting contribution to the album with a superficially innocent song about lying in. But it has dark undercurrents: the protagonist sleeps – a solitary activity – only in order to escape from the world around him: “Please don’t wake me, no, don’t shake me/Leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping”.

Next is George’s second song on Revolver, “Love You To”, which exhorts its listeners to “make love all day long, make love singing songs”. But it does so as an escape from the exploitation and death that surround them: “There’s people standing round/who’ll screw you in the ground/they’ll fill you in with all their sins”, and “Love me while you can/before I’m a dead old man./A lifetime is so short,/a new one can’t be bought”.

Paul brings some brightness to the proceedings with his next two contributions, “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Yellow Submarine” (the latter sung by Ringo), but listen closely and you realize that the singer on the former track is also alone (“To lead a better life, I need my love to be here”/“if she’s beside me I know I need never care”), while “Yellow Submarine”, joyous as it is on the surface, is actually a reverie about isolation, recounting how wonderful life could be if one were removed from the outside world, living beneath the waves in a yellow submarine. Musically, “Yellow Submarine” is one of the few rays of light on Revolver, reminding us of how exultant the Beatles used to be before this album – but it also shows us how gloomy much of the rest of the album is, by contrast.

“She Said, She Said”, one of several Lennon drug songs on the album, continues Revolver’s preoccupation with death, purporting to document a conversation with a girl who claims to know “what it’s like to be dead”, which makes the singer “feel like [he’s] never been born”. (Even before this point in the album, the theme of dying has already reared its head on three earlier songs: “Taxman” (“Now my advice for those who die:/Declare the pennies on your eyes”), “Eleanor Rigby” and “Love You To”.)

The second side of Revolver opens with another of the brighter songs contributed by McCartney, “Good Day Sunshine”, albeit with a hint of darkness implied: “I need to laugh, and when the sun is out,/I’ve got something I can laugh about”. Why does the singer “need to laugh”? And when the sun isn’t out, what then?

“And Your Bird Can Sing” is a put-down by Lennon of those not on the same emotional plane as him, particularly materialists, and is probably a precursor of “Imagine” that followed five years later (“When your prized possessions start to wear you down,/Look in my direction/I’ll be round, I’ll be round”). Its successor, McCartney’s “For No One”, continues the theme of loneliness with its account of the break-up of a pair of lovers, to the disbelief of the man, who cannot come to grips with the fact that the woman no longer needs him. This leads into “Doctor Robert”, an ode by Lennon to his drug dealer, who relieves his depression with hallucinogenics (“If you’re down he’ll pick you up . . . helping everyone in need”). But the relief, of course, is only temporary (and artificially induced), and on George’s “I Want To Tell You” the singer again struggles to break through and make meaningful contact using lines of conversation he has pre-rehearsed in his head. He fails: “when you’re here,/all those words they seem to slip away./When I get near you,/the games begin to drag me down,/ . . . I feel hung up and I don’t know why”). And although McCartney’s “Got To Get You Into My Life”, which follows “I Want To Tell You”, is another sunny song on the surface, the lyric is a statement of determination to connect by a protagonist who is still alone and trying to reach out: “I want you to hear me,/say we’ll be together every day”.

The closing track on Revolver is the most remarkable on the album, Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows”, with its distorted vocals and guitars, screeching-seagull sound effects and backward instrumentation, above a weird and surreal lyric that paraphrases The Tibetan Book of Dead: “lay down all thought surrender to the void” and “play the game existence to the end/Of the beginning, of the beginning”.

What is one to make of all this musical doom and gloom, with only the occasional ray of (dappled) sunlight? Certainly, Revolver is musically inventive and thematically expansive – the Beatles’ Great Leap Forward (as Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the All Music Guide to Rock has called it), opening the doors of rock music to rooms and vistas which no one at the time even knew existed. And without it, we may not have had Sgt Pepper and we certainly would not have had Pink Floyd (who formed the year after Revolver appeared). But for me its joyless songs, however pioneering and cleverly constructed, will never cohere with its few sunny ones, and Revolver remains for me an album that is less than the sum of its parts, and one that will stay on the shelf when I want to listen to the Fab Four’s more complex material.

Interesting. I think the writer does a bit of retrofitting to squeeze some of the songs into the model he's fashioned, but he does make a good point about that strong thread of alienation. I hadn't looked at it that way before.

Neither had I.

Frankly, I think the majority of the canon is tinged with themes of isolation, loneliness, angst, self-doubt, alienation, recrimination, etc... and not just the John songs!

The few songs that exude pure joy (I Feel Fine is one example) or peace (Mother Nature's Son) become almost bittersweet when set in front of the darker backdrop that is the Beatles oeuvre.

But that's what makes their songs so great. If everything were sunshine and roses, there would be no weight... their music would be pure pop, full of canned sentiment and cliched optimism. Luckily, they never really plunge too deeply into the dark side (although John gets close... as does George once or twice)... just enough to make the emotions real.

All great art is born of pain. (Well, almost all... )

I suppose you can interpret REVOLVER as a "doom and gloom" album, but it seems a bit of a stretch to say "Good Day Sunshine" is tinged with darkness because Paul sings that he NEEDS to laugh.... that reminds me of a friend replying to a remark I made the other day about how much I love fall, by saying "oh, you mean you don't like summer??" -- her (very incorrect) reasoning was autumn marked the end of summer, so for me to love fall, I must therefore hate summer.

To me, REVOLVER is just a fantastic-sounding record, with lots of great edgy guitar, powerful social commentary, and just plain-old good rock-and-roll. I can't really think of it as a doom-and-gloom album, and to my ears, it ranks right alongside ABBEY ROAD and the "White Album" as the Beatles' greatest LP's.

retrofit yes. doom and gloom, no. there are deeper themes at work here that just plain vanilla isolation and obscure emotional output.

Hello;

For about a stretch of a year whenever I went to play a Beatles

album I always chose Revolver even though I like Pepper better.

So I can easily understand why it has such great acclaim.I also

prefer the U.S./Canadian version of it even though it has less

songs because that is the version I grew up with.

Carl Balzamo