Beatles' 'Revolver': 15 Things You Didn't Know
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band marked the Beatles' cultural apex, effectively re-tuning the zeitgeist of Western society in 1967's Summer of Love, but its predecessor – Revolver, released August 5th, 1966 – was the band's biggest musical watershed. Never had the Beatles emerged with such a brace of high-quality songs. Never had Paul McCartney written so well. John Lennon wasn't far behind. Never had a band enmeshed itself so thoroughly with studio wizardry. Never, simply, had a musical collective done so much to change the very concept of how sound could be produced, at the level of sheer fun, and the level of full-on art.
Sgt. Pepper yielded a number of legends about how it was made and what it wrought, while Revolver has always lagged behind in that department, a fact that deserves redressing as this immortal LP turns 50. In that spirit, here are 15 things you might not know about this still-stunning classic.
1. "Yellow Submarine" almost killed John Lennon.
On Wednesday, June 1st, 1966, the Beatles, with a coterie of fellow madcaps including Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and George Harrison's wife, Pattie, gathered in Abbey Road's Studio Two to outfit "Yellow Submarine" with sound effects.
Zaniness had always been a special interest of John Lennon's, going back to his passion for The Goon Show. Getting into nautical mode, Lennon pressed Revolver engineer Geoff Emerick to record him singing underwater, after having first attempted to sing while gargling.
By: Colin Fleming
Source: Rolling Stone
