Reddit reviews Revolver: How the Beatles Re-Imagined Rock 'n' Roll

Long Version: go read a book called Revolver: How The Beatles Reimagined Rock n' Roll by Robert Rodriguez, listen to the podcast Everything Was Right: The Beatles' Revolver from Paul Ingles, and watch this video on Leonard Bernstein playing and discussing many of the songs off of Revolver when they were new (Pre-Pepper).

Short Version:

The Beatles Revolver album is where the Fab Four really made a genuine effort to shed their poppy singles oriented past, though they started this transformation with Revolver’ predecessor Rubber Soul, that defined them for three years at this point. Revolver also shows where The Beatles were able to keep up with their contemporaries and able to raise the bar further for pop music. And while these accolades that have been stated are often reserved for Revolver’s follow-up Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and while Pepper is glorious for what it is and fully shed The Beatles image (mainly by their cosmetic changes) and went on to become a candidate for “The Album of the 20th Century” and etc., without the work on Revolver, The Beatles wouldn’t have been able to artistically grow. Thus, they might not have made other classic albums and push pop and rock genres further to make it more intellectually stimulating to their audience while inspiring countless numbers of musicians to follow the examples laid out by The Beatles. Revolver is the most important album released by The Beatles because it made the first real bold attempt to shatter the singles driven past that had defined them for three years and counting, it threw the gauntlet down for their contemporaries of pop to keep up to what they were doing by improving the lyrical content & audio techniques of pop songs, and it was a foundation point for the future of The Beatles and the future of popular music up to present day.

By Revolver’s release in 1966, The Beatles had debatably become the biggest band in the world with seemingly endless successes. In the rise of this success, The Beatles were exposed to different cultures and attitudes along with new influences which were all taken in. After perfecting their pop catering sound with their album Help!, which spawned three #1 hits, hearing how fellow 60’s rock icon Bob Dylan was advancing the medium with landmark albums like Highway 61 Revisited, (where he went full electric) along with becoming very captivated by the attitudes adjusting plant named marijuana, which they became engrossed with after a chance encounter with Bob Dylan.

Revolver is where the mop-tops really started going in directions that hadn’t been thought up in popular music before. Only four of Revolver’s tracks have to explicitly deal with love, two of them kind of deal with it and the other eight have nothing to do with love. Even the single released before Revolver to coincide with the album, “Paperback Writer,” had nothing to do with love but was rather a request from one of McCartney’s aunts to see if he could write a hit single that wasn’t about love and he was able to respond with the single going to #1 on the charts. Many other tracks off Revolver followed suit with how they wrote about other topics and thus shed their love single past.

Revolver was the album where The Beatles were not only able to keep up with the rest of pop but also advance it further by challenging it to grow up. After Rubber Soul, The Beatles biggest contemporaries responded to this change in 1966. Bob Dylan came out with Blonde on Blonde with the hit “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35,” The Rolling Stones released Aftermath with the chart topper ”Paint It, Black,” and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was so inspired to try to create the greatest rock album ever and went on to create Pet Sounds. The Fabs took serious note of this as they incorporated ideas they saw in their contemporaries and mimicked them with ease. Though George Harrison brought the sitar into the public consciousness with “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” off Rubber Soul, it wasn’t until The Rolling Stones used it on “Paint It, Black” that it became a chart topping sound and Harrison was then inspired to make the sitar a more predominate part of his sound when he composed the tune “Love You To” off of Revolver around this sound. The background harmonies in “Here, There and Everywhere” are a nod to Pet Sounds which McCartney had just heard and after hearing its track “God Only Knows,” McCartney wanted to replicate that sound on his own love ballad.

Also what should be noted is that the songwriters, John, Paul & George were also given three months to write songs, which was more than usual and in that time they relaxed and did drugs, mainly pot and LSD. The latter had an effect on Lennon’s songwriting as Lennon wrote about mostly psychedelic and other matters involving the hallucinogen. In the song, “I’m Only Sleeping,” Lennon refers to his daily life of waking in the afternoon due to his drug fueled evenings. On “She Said, She Said,” Lennon recalls his second acid trip in L.A. with actor Peter Fonda. Fonda told him that when he was a boy, he was accidentally shot and was pronounced dead for a few minutes until paramedics were able to revive him and thus Lennon wrote the phrase “He said, I know what it’s like to be dead,” though Lennon eventually changed it the She Said in order to protect Fonda’s identity. On “And Your Bird Can Sing,” Lennon recalls the incident when they all smoked pot with Dylan (explained earlier). That night, in his delusional state of mind, McCartney claimed he knew all the secrets to the world & it was the number 7 and Lennon referred to that inside joke with the line of, “You say you’ve seen seven wonders and your bird is green.” Though it’s never been confirmed, an educated guess could be made that the “green bird” that’s referred to is a marijuana cigarette. The track “Doctor Robert” is all about a pill pushing doctor and how his patients come to see him for his “special doses.” Again, it’s been theorized that Lennon is referring once again back to the first time he took acid which was when he, George, and both of their wives were unknowingly dosed with LSD in their coffee (though George hadn’t married Pattie Boyd yet). While all of Lennon’s contributions to Revolver all have psychedelic elements to them, the most of these elements are found in the final track “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

“Tomorrow Never Knows” is also a huge technical milestone for not only 1966 and The Beatles but for pop music in general. The track uses tape machines, backwards taping, and the first use of automatic double tracking or ADT. Before, double tracking was done by doing two takes and making sure that both of them sounded exactly the same to the average ear, this was often a very tedious process that was hated by The Beatles and Lennon in particular who expressed desire for a technical alternative. A newly employed engineer at Abbey Road named Ken Townsend was able to fulfill the request by discovering that if you take a vocal tape and feed it through a second tape machine while mixing the song and delay the second machine 1/16 of a second, the distance between them is small enough to where it seems like it’s double tracked. This technical advancement would be used for future recordings not only by The Beatles but for the future of analog recording of music. Thus without the advancements made on Revolver that were utilized on future recordings, the rest of The Beatles now legendary catalogue wouldn’t have been achievable along with many other pop recordings to come in the following years.

Revolver’s psychedelic, song and technical advancements would pave the way for future recordings by The Beatles and also for the future of popular music. Once Revolver was released, the whole music industry was once again taken aback and the response to the record was quick as The Beach Boys responded with the smash hit, “Good Vibrations” and The Rolling Stones fired back with Between the Buttons and the hit to come from there, “Ruby Tuesday/ Let’s Spend the Night Together.” These two forces help keep the Fabs on the top of their toes and made sure that their next record would have to try and be every bit as good as Revolver was.

Revolver’s success led to a serious reinvention of popular music at the time that its echo can still be felt today. With Revolver, the mainstream culture was finally catching onto the idea that popular music could be synonymous with high intelligence and thinking as the teenagers, who were the main target of this music, who bought the record listened in droves. Soon after, they started questioning their traditional views on life and thus started thinking of revolting against the conformity culture that they had been raised in. Still today, the appreciation for Revolver is still present as the new generations (i.e. Millennials mostly) are seeming to pick it up to almost spite their baby boomer parents who have been proclaiming Sgt. Pepper's as the greatest album for almost 50 years now as Pepper's original appeal with the whole culture at the time has fallen to the wayside and now all that's left is the music and many people are thinking that the songs & the way they were recorded were better on Revolver.

There's a book dedicated solely to making that claim. You could just read that book and summarize it.