By Stuart Mitchner

It was around this time half a century ago that people began to suspect the Beatles of being the creation of supernatural forces. Had they signed a pact with Lucifer? The “more popular than Jesus” frenzy that led to the burning of their records in crazy America demonstrated that, yes, they were unthinkably, absurdly big. The “Paul McCartney is dead” madness caught fire for the same reason. Nothing less than mysterious death or divinity could explain the phenomenon; the resulting paranoia of disbelief had reached the “who really wrote Shakespeare?” level. All this cosmic commotion and they had yet to astonish the world with albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper and singles like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” “I am the Walrus,” and “Hey Jude.”

“Tomorrow Never Knows”

Fifty years ago today, April 6, 1966, when the Beatles began recording Revolver in EMI’s Studio Three at Abbey Road, a tall, elegantly handsome gentleman with no evident resemblance to Mephistopheles, and no pact signed in blood in his pocket, guided John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr to the top of Mt. Revolver. The overseer of everything they put on record from “Love Me Do” to “Carry the Weight,” Sir George Martin died on March 8. Two months before, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, the producer spoke of the Beatles to Udiscover.com: “They did flower, they blossomed, and they astonished me with their ideas. Each song they brought to me was a gem, and I said to myself, ‘It can’t last.’ I’d say to them, ‘That’s great, now give me a better one.’ And they did. I was so thrilled with what they gave me.”

It wasn’t simply what they gave him; it was what they asked of him. During the making of Revolver, which began with the album’s groundbreaking closing track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the most difficult, daring, out-there performance the Beatles had ever attempted, John Lennon told Martin that “he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountain top.” He also requested “the sound of 4,000 monks chanting in the background.” Engineer Geoff Emerick, who had just turned 20 when he joined the expedition, says another of John’s ideas was that “we suspend him from a rope in the middle of the studio ceiling, put a mike in the middle of the floor, and give him a push and he’d sing as he went round and round.” Without knowing it, John was setting the terms for the eventual title of the album, which was finally chosen in Hamburg in late June where the Beatles legend had been born.

Sharing It in Salzburg

In late August 1966 in a Salzburg record store listening booth, an American couple on their way to a New York marriage are hearing Revolver for the first time, 14 brand-new songs, each one a revelation. As they listen, they take turns holding the album cover, admiring the Aubrey-Beardsleyesque design by the Beatles’ old Hamburg pal Klaus Voorman. As the second track, “Eleanor Rigby,” is playing, they agree, with a smile, that Revolver will be their first purchase as a couple.

“All play the game existence to the end of the beginning” is the message that follows them out of the record store, Lennon’s voice submerged, embattled by the hypnotic Tibetan Book of the Dead dynamic driven by Starr’s incessant endgame drumming and the yelping of a wolfpack of demons. These are among the moments when the Faust legend comes to mind. Can it be the Lads from Liverpool, those teenybopper moptops, are telling you “when you die, declare the pennies on your eyes” while a lonely minister is “wiping his hands as he walks from the grave” and “no one was saved.” Rubber Soul, the previous LP, itself a tremendous advance musically and lyrically, began and ended in the conventional rock and roll reality of McCartney singing “Baby you can drive my car” and Lennon going “nah, nah, nah” in “Run for Your Life.” In Rubber Soul, it’s “I’d rather see you dead, little girl”; Revolver says “I know what it’s like to be dead,” and the Indian-inflected music seems to know not only where you’re going but where you’re coming from after walking dazed down muddy lanes in the Vale of Kashmir (“It is shining”) or hanging on for dear life to the back of trucks on crumbling mountain roads (“I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there”) or diving in and out of two weeks of fever in Katmandu (“It is not dying”).

She Said, He Said

For the couple, Revolver was a 14-part variation on that perennial trope of romance, “They’re playing our song.” Around the time the Beatles began recording the album, an April exchange of letters led to a rendezvous on St. Mark’s Square in Venice on June 21, the same “exceptionally hectic day” that the studio work on Revolver was completed, according to Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988). At the time, the couple knew nothing of the coincidence, which might not be worth mentioning except for the fact that “the new song” that day, the 14th and final track being taped after nine hours and 22 takes, was John Lennon’s then-untitled “She Said She Said,” which contains a line that relates to every he and she since Adam and Eve: “She said you don’t understand what I said/I said no no no you’re wrong,” especially when the couple in question is dealing with such things as sore throats and rashes, wrong turns and scary rides, and all ups and downs and ins and outs of a summer hitchhiking down through Italy and up through Greece (let’s go this way/no it’s that way/but it has to be this way/let’s eat there/no, let’s eat here). So it was that a he said/she said roadshow preview of marital reality landed in the listening booth of a Salzburg record store to share one thing they were in passionate agreement about, the music of the Beatles.

The Family Revolver

While writing this appreciation, I’ve kept that first shared purchase, the family Revolver, as it were, close at hand. The other day I took the disc out of its sleeve and put it on the turntable for the first time in at least 25 years, admiring the way the shiny blackness caught the light in its spinning shimmering motion, as if the music within were waking from an enchantment. The minute the needle touches down, what a sound! To call it “surface noise” would be an insult. In those few roaring seconds before George’s voice comes on counting out the time for his gutsy, gritty “Taxman,” I’m thinking of the places it’s been, the grooves like trails in time, one leading to another with every playing from that first day in Salzburg to the suburb of London where we shared it with friends, to New York where we half-seriously thought of asking the Community Church to play it before and after we took the vows, to our first home in Ann Arbor, to Cambridge, then graduate school years in New Brunswick dancing to “Got to Get You Into My Life” while our long-suffering landlady held her ears, then to Highland Park, where we turned up “Tomorrow Never Knows” to drown out the barking of the poodles next door and the endless orgies of polka music, and finally to Princeton, a garrett on Patton Avenue, where a newborn infant is rocked to sleep to it, night after night, drifting off even into the guitar-delirium of John’s “Dr. Robert” and George’s relentless “I Want to Tell You” as well as the McCartney meadows of “For No One” and “Here, There, and Everywhere.” Willful from birth, he of course never slept during “I’m Only Sleeping.” And so it goes until December 8, 1980, when someone “killed the Beatles” and the records had to be put out of sight until the shock diminished a decade later.

Shades

The four men pictured on the back of the album cover look more like jazz musicians than rock stars, George and Paul masked in shades (Ringo wearing typically goofy round ones) while John has his specs on, maybe the first time he was allowed to wear them on an album, anathema to fans if only slightly less so than the fact that he was married and had a son. The suggestion of controlled substances in the dark-toned ambience of the back cover is obvious, though perhaps not for listeners unaware of the coded references to grass and LSD throughout the album; even Paul, an acid virgin at the time, insists that the desired object of “Got To Get You Into My Life’” is marijuana rather than any real life Mary or Jane.

The masking effect is also in evidence on the front cover where the eyes of Paul, John, George, and Ringo are as if hidden behind Voorman’s pen and ink renderings of each familiar face.

The Beatles are at the summit. But as before, the questions surface: how did they do it? where did they really come from? what forces, dark or divine, made this miracle?