It’s always important to have a healthy sense of competition in music. There are plenty of people that can do things completely by themselves and be just fine, but if there’s someone to work off of every time you walk into the studio, it makes it a lot more fun trying to one-up each other and come up with something better before the person next to you can get to it. The Beatles already had that kind of back and forth between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but Macca always knew when they had made something that no one else would ever see again.
The band had already hit some of the greatest peaks of all time when they took over for Elvis Presley as one of the biggest forces in pop music, but they wanted to go further. Presley had been relegated to becoming a half-hearted version of his old self by the time he hit his later years, and when the band started to become less interested in live performance, anything went as long as they had the right idea behind them in the studio and George Martin was around to help them.
Whereas the studio was initially a stopgap in between legs of a tour, it was a lot more fun for them to get strange sounds that they didn’t think anyone had heard yet. Obviously, people had listened to what a string quartet sounded like in the context of a classical piece, but since ‘Yesterday’ had a beautiful accompaniment behind McCartney’s acoustic performance, there was no way anyone was expecting them to perform the tune live with an orchestra behind them.
So if there were songs that weren’t going to work live, why keep trying to make tunes that people weren’t going to hear anyway? No one could make out anything the band was playing half the time, so it was only natural for them to take a few chances, and Revolver was the real departure point. Rubber Soul had teased something new on the horizon, and Sgt Peppers was their introduction to being a studio-only band, but McCartney considered Revolver the moment where they went past every one of their peers.
People like The Rolling Stones were progressing by the day, and even the fresh faces out of America were giving them a run for their money, but McCartney said there was no chance that anyone could touch what they had done, saying at the time, “This time, we had all our own numbers, including three of George’s, and so we had to work them all out. We haven’t had a basis to work on, just one guitar melody and a few chords, and so we’ve really had to work on them. I think it’ll be our best album yet. They’ll never be able to copy this!”
Brian Wilson was certainly gaining on them when he released Pet Sounds with The Beach Boys, but whereas that album spread things out in terms of harmony, the studio techniques used here were unprecedented. ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘God Only Knows’ had help from The Wrecking Crew, but no one was even thinking about what went into making a song like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, complete with backwards guitar and sampled vocals.
Even though not every song was tied to a particular concept or anything, there were previews of what was to come as well. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was the start of McCartney’s interest in using classical musicians for his ballads, and with George Harrison coming to the forefront, songs like ‘Taxman’ showed him to be equally as capable of making his own material as his bandmates.
There are a lot of avenues that Revolver went down across 14 tracks, but for anyone working on their own projects in 1966, this should have been too intimidating for words. We all know where the Fab Four would go from here, but if this was the kind of sonic force they were working with then, it was going to be insane hearing them get to Abbey Road a few years later.
