REVOLVER

Love them or hate them, The Beatles have left an impression on the music world that I doubt will ever be duplicated. Although they could never be truly considered progressive rock, they were certainly the most progressive in the genre of rock. Just listen to Please Please Me and then to Abbey Road(Let It Be was recorded before Abbey Road but released afterward) and it does not seem like a mere six years between the two. Those two albums are light years apart! In fact, it hardly sounds like the same band! Revolver, to me, is the first obvious connection The Beatles have to prog rock. There are three main reasons that I believe why. #1. Studio experimentation. Although The Beatles get all the credit as the songwriters, my hat goes off to George Martin and the studio team at EMI. Things had to be tried in ways never thought of before. Instruments being played and devices being used in ways that they were not intended. Sometimes things had to be invented. Imagine trying to make Lennon "sound like an orange!" Martin may have been the only person on earth that could translate what they wanted to do. So I give him as much credit as The Beatles in the technical aspect. And when listening to the album, don't forget this was done on four track tape! All overdubs had to be dumped down in order to make room for more overdubs. No computers. Loops were spooled by hand and fed into tape machines. There was no sampling. #2. Overindulgence. Spending a lot of time recording one song is common in prog rock, but, back then most bands went into the studio and bashed out their tunes that were either rehearsed on the road, or written by someone else, as quickly as possible. Singles were still more important than album tracks. The amount of attention paid to Tomorrow Never Knows alone for John Lennon to realize his vision is a good example; even though the song would have definitely not been chosen for release as a single at the time. All of the studio experiments, multiple takes and overdubs caused the album to take 300 hours to record and mix. Please Please Me took only 19. However, by the time the Revolver sessions began, money for studio time was not an issue. #3. Cover Art. Almost all rock album covers of the day were a posed picture of the band or artist, but this is an actual drawing/collage by an artist(Their friend Klaus Voormann). It could be said that the Rubber Soul cover with the elongated heads is art. Truth is, that was a happy accident! Later, elaborate artwork on prog rock albums would sometimes become as important as the music itself, with the entire package being art. Often times the artwork almost overshadows the musicians themselves and there are not even photos of the band members at all, but in the mid sixties, for the most part, only jazz album covers would have anything on them that could be considered art. Revolver is an album that is more musically serious than any of The Beatles previous efforts. It is the album that shows them going in a different direction from boy/girl songs riddled with personal pronouns to exploring what was really possible in music. Revolver still has elements of the mop top Beatles, but it was a vision of what was to come.