The Beatles released some of the catchiest, most accessible and melodic songs in the history of music.
In the early days there were hits like ‘She Loves You’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Help!’. Even as they developed, you had songs like ‘Revolution’, ‘Something’ and ‘Let It Be’.
But The Beatles were never afraid to experiment.
With the help of the genius that was Fifth Beatle George Martin, even on their first records they pushed the technology available to its limits, marrying new techniques with their own unique style of songwriting.
But it was after they quit touring in 1966 that they really took advantage of the time and space available in the studio to get a little strange.
George Harrison jokingly dismissed some experimental music as… “Avant garde? Avant garde a clue!” , but he certainly got in on the act himself.
‘The Inner Light’ and ‘Within You Without You’ were a then-experimental fusion of Indian music with western pop sensibilities. ‘It’s All Too Much’ is a glorious racket of cascading sounds.
For John Lennon and Paul McCartney, after the backwards sounds on ‘Rain’, there was also the strange ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Wild Honey Pie’ ‘Sun King’, ‘A Day in the Life’ and, unreleased for years, glorious freak-out jam versions of ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Revolution’.
Most experimental – and divisive – of all though, there was ‘Revolution 9’. But do you know who wrote the song, who plays on it, how it came about, and why it’s actually a bona fide Beatles classic?
The Beatles had already stretched their quirky limbs with Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, but it was over the four sides of The Beatles (also known as The White Album) that they really went wild.
it was on The White Album where John, Paul, George and Ringo would occasionally go off and do their own thing, before it was all patched together in one album under The Beatles banner.
That’s why John Lennon didn’t appear on ‘Martha My Dear’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’, ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ or ‘Wild Honey Pie’, for example.
Less a “song” in the traditional sense and more of an experimental sound collage,’Revolution 9′ was credited, like most Beatles songs, to Lennon/McCartney, but not only as Paul McCartney not involved in making it (he was out the country for the entirety of the time it was made) he apparently didn’t even want it on the album.
John Lennon is widely credited as being driving force behind the recording, coming up with the tape loops, sound effects and some and screaming, as well as snatches of piano, Mellotron and cymbals.
Lennon had taken inspiration from experimental classical composers like Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen – the latter featured on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.
He was also inspired by his wife-to-be Yoko Ono, with whom he had already made the avant garde Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.
But over the years it’s emerged that George Harrison, despite his supposed cynicism, was also key to its creation.
Yoko said in 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World that “George, John and I” made ‘Revolution 9’ and even said that Harrison, who had already released the experimental Wonderwall Music album by this point, had “sort of instigated it”.
Yoko also pitched in some ideas, more tape loops and some of her own voice. Harrison came up with his own tape loops, FX, and even electric guitar.
There’s also some spoken word from George Martin and Brian Epstein’s PA Alistair Taylor.
While Ringo and Paul weren’t around when it was being put together, they were there in sound if not in spirit, as among the samples used in ‘Revolution 9’ were elements of of the extended take of ‘Revolution’, on which they both performed.
What’s more, in 1992 George Harrison told Musician magazine that it was he and Ringo who did a lot of the legwork in finding the sounds from EMI’s tape library for inclusion in the song, including that brain melting “Number nine… number nine…”.
But Lennon does deserve the credit for the overall direction, having come up with the idea after The Beatles (all of them) recorded at least a couple of 10-plus minute takes of ‘Revolution’ on May 30, 1968 (Take 18 and Take 20).
John decided the opening section of Take 20 would be one thing, with the last six minutes of chaos being the basis for something new.
It was less than a month later, on June 20, that he started cutting and pasting tape loops together, carrying on the work the following day, and finishing up on June 25, with Lennon and Ono doing the final edit themselves.
“I spent more time on ‘Revolution 9’ than I did on half the other songs I wrote,” Lennon said, disproving the idea that the song was some sort of throwaway joke.
People with keener ears than us have tried to unpick just what you can hear in ‘Revolution 9′. There’s some Vaughan Williams, Schumann and Sibelius, as well as snippets of The Beatles’ own ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
Intriguingly, there’s said to be a section taken from ‘Carnival of Light’, Paul McCartney’s own experimental soundscape that i) predated ‘Revolution 9’ and ii) has still never seen the light of day.
“‘Revolution 9’ was quite similar to some stuff I’d been doing myself for fun,” Paul said. “I didn’t think that mine was suitable for release, but John always encouraged me.”
Of his own intentions, Lennon was quoted as saying in The Beatles Anthology: “Revolution 9′ was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution.
“It was just abstract, musique concrète, loops, people screaming… I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution but I made a mistake. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.”
It adds up to eight minutes and 22 strange seconds, which some people decry as the very worst things The Beatles ever recorded. It was derided as “noisy, boring and meaningless” by Melody Maker and “a pretentious piece of old codswallop” by the NME. Avant garde a clue, indeed.
But those people are wrong, wrong, wrong.
‘Revolution 9’ a fascinating recording that – given its position on an actual album by the actual Beatles – was groundbreaking in bringing experimental art to the mass public, whether they expected it or not.
Ian Macdonald did more than anyone to unpick the intentions and impact of the song his peerless Revolution in the Head, calling the song “one of the most significant acts The Beatles ever perpetrated”, socio-culturally at least.
“This type of art was designed to change the way its beholders experienced reality,” he said.
“Merely to be excised to it was (in theory) to dispel the state, institutionalised consciousness which class-stratified society supposedly exuded like a kind of cognitive smog.”
That it was recorded in 1968, the year the world really shook, and was called ‘Revolution’, is really no coincidence.
It has its acolytes, too, and not just Charles Manson who (mis)interpreted the song as part of his belief that The Beatles were predicting an apocalyptic race war.
There’s been unlikely “covers” (of sorts) by the likes of Kurt Hoffman’s Band of Weeds, Phish, Alarm Will Sound and The Neil Cowley Trio, among others. We’ll always have a smile for Barney Gumble’s version for The Be Sharps in The Simpsons, too.
The totality of The Beatles’ reputation rests not just on their ability to pen a tune, or their mop tops, or the mania they inspired. It also rests on their forward-pushing experimentation.
If you bin that, you’re binning an important part of what makes The Beatles, The Beatles.
More than that though, it’s actually immense fun to listen to. One that you find new moments in every single time you put it on at maximum volume (headphones are recommended).
The White Album’s opener ‘Back in the USSR’ is an absolute riot, for sure, but you can get a little weary of its Beach Boys’ pastiche on the hundredth listen or so.
If you listen with open enough ears and let its quirky waves of sound and buried melodies wash over you, that never happens with ‘Revolution 9’.