Revolver

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A funny thing happened to the Revolver album on its way to the U.S. marketplace in the spring and summer of 1966 -- it somehow managed to lose three songs, all written and featuring lead vocals by John Lennon. In its U.S. incarnation, Revolver was downright strange -- and unique. In some ways it's the perfect counterpoint to The Beatles' Second Album, another U.S.-only creation -- on that 1964 release, John Lennon dominated the lead vocals, while here, Paul McCartney owns five of the lead vocals (and six of the songs, as composer) on the U.S. album's 11 tracks, and George Harrison has three. Meanwhile, John Lennon's voice and songwriting have just two places on the album, thus making the U.S. version of Revolver the only Beatles album in creation in which George Harrison is featured more prominently as a singer and songwriter than John Lennon. (And that is not necessarily a complaint, but nevertheless it's an extraordinary detail for most Beatles fans that, had Capitol Records executives been thinking more clearly, might have been taken into account in mid-1966.) Thus, in raw math alone, the album is bizarre -- though mere numbers ignore the fact that the two Lennon songs that are here still come off as astounding, amazing pieces of music today, never mind how they seemed in 1966, and were placed for maximum impact, at the end of each side. Revolver was, of course, planned by the Beatles and their producer, George Martin, as a 14-song LP, and was released that way in the U.K. and Europe in early August of 1966. But as was usually the case in those days, EMI's U.S. division, Capitol Records, had other ideas based on its own needs, and the record's shape in the U.S. involved decisions made months before Revolver's release. At that time, the company got early access to three of the songs from the upcoming LP, Doctor Robert, And Your Bird Can Sing, and I'm Only Sleeping, all written by John Lennon. At the time, Capitol was sitting on a few orphaned tracks, including freestanding singles (Yesterday, Nowhere Man, Day Tripper) and B-sides, which had never been on a U.S. album, plus a handful of songs that had been pulled off of the modified and reconstructed Rubber Soul, and which had never been released in America. As there was this relatively long gap between Rubber Soul and Revolver, Capitol wanted to exploit those songs, which didn't quite add up to an album -- and they ended up throwing in the three Revolver tracks by Lennon and issuing the whole spliced-together mess in early June of 1966 as Yesterday...

and Today. With Doctor Robert, And Your Bird Can Sing, and I'm Only Sleeping already used there, they were unavailable for Revolver in the U.S. when it was released in August, with the result that Americans got an 11-song LP that was still pretty amazing, if with a considerably different balance. Opening with Harrison's Taxman, the record moves on to the ornate McCartney string-driven Eleanor Rigby and, absent John Lennon's moody I'm Only Sleeping, takes a turn to the East with Harrison's sitar- and tabla-based Love You To, and then goes back to McCartney territory on the ballad Here, There and Everywhere and the Ringo Starr-sung Yellow Submarine (originated and mostly written by McCartney). And five songs in, Lennon finally gets a hearing on one of the two boldest songs on the record, She Said, She Said -- which, strangely enough, is strong enough so that his profile isn't quite as badly compromised on the first side of the record as those song slots would lead one to expect. Side two brings listeners back to McCartney with Good Day Sunshine, which here is not followed by Lennon's exuberant And Your Bird Can Sing -- instead, it's more Paul on the exquisitely textured For No One (which introduced a lot of young listeners to the sound of the French horn, courtesy of Alan Civil). Then, in place of the absent wry Lennon song a clef Doctor Robert (all about a real-life London physician who was free with his prescriptions for pills), the album moves to Harrison's guitar showcase I Want to Tell You; Paul gets another hearing on Got to Get You into My Life ( which, along with Good Day Sunshine, was one of the two lost singles from the album); and, finally, John closes out the whole abbreviated long-player with Tomorrow Never Knows -- and, as with the first side, the song is almost strong enough to have made up for some of Lennon's reduced presence elsewhere. When most Americans first heard Revolver in 1966, they were delighted with its nearly 28 minutes of music. In 1966, they weren't thinking of the Beatles' music as art any more than Capitol Records was, and didn't realize it was supposed to be more like 35 minutes of music, with a rather distinctively wry and poetic compositional voice weaving in and out of the McCartney-generated pop. The missing Lennon songs were already out there on Yesterday...

and Today, so Americans only missed them in context and juxtaposition here, and this album missed some of their impact as personalized statements and trippy, punchy rock & roll (especially Doctor Robert and And Your Bird Can Sing). What was here was still a masterpiece (albeit a reduced one), and an odd curio from a time when the Beatles were getting much more serious about their music than their record label was prepared to be -- a factor that would change once the money started rolling in and the press clips building up from Sgt. Pepper's in the year that followed, and the bandmembers started to throw their weight around where it also counted a great deal, with the company's management as well as the studio engineers. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide