Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 09/09/2009
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 à 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
;)
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