以下内容引自RollingStone特刊
THE BEATLES Album-by-Album Guide
All rights reserved
WITH "Revolver", The MOP-tops were laid to rest. It was the sound of a band reinventing itself, and the dawn of a new kind of epic experimentation in pop. Released as the Beatles were finishing up their fi...(0回应)
以下内容引自RollingStone特刊
THE BEATLES Album-by-Album Guide
All rights reserved
WITH "Revolver", The MOP-tops were laid to rest. It was the sound of a band reinventing itself, and the dawn of a new kind of epic experimentation in pop. Released as the Beatles were finishing up their final tour ever, Revolver exploded with the band's strangest, most beautiful and most wide-ranging music to date - a mix of acid-fueled reveries, heavy-lidded resignation and sunny pop, all of it augmented by tape loops, backward vocals, horns, sitars, strings and chattering sound effects. The album would have been tough to reproduce live. Having turned the studio into their playground, the Beatles didn't even try. The band members had started expanding their use of the studio on their last few albums, especially on Robber Soul.(George Harrison said，"I don't see too much difference between Rubber Soul and Revolver.To me, they could be Volume One and Volume Two.")
But leading up to the Revolver sessions, the Beatles were bombarded by new influences at such a rapid pace, their music was evolving almost daily. Following the conclusion of a UK tour at the end of 1965, the Beatles had nothing on their schedule for almost four months - their longest period of downtime since 1962. They took the opportunity to pursue various of interests, separately and together. They went to London discos with Mick Jagger, watched horse race and attended the Alfie film premiere. Paul McCartney explored art galleries, listened to avant-garde composers and traveled with Jane Asher. Harrison quietly married Pattie Boyd, and he became more seriously involved in the study of Indian music. It was John Lennon's activities, though, that would cat the longest shadow on the group's music going forward. By 1966, the Beatles had tried LSD, but during these idle months, when he felt stuck in his suburban estate with his wife and son, Lennon started consuming psychedelic and reading some of the drug culture's central text. like Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience, a poetic reinterpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
When the Beatles returned to EMI studios on April 6th, these influences surfaced immediately. The first song they cut for Revolver was the most experimental of all; Lennon had given it the working title "The Void", but it was referred to in the studio as "Mark 1" for fear of freaking out the EMI brass. "This one's completely different than anything we've ever done before," Lennon told George Martin. "It's only got one chord, and the whole thing is meant to be like a drone."
"I was wondering how George was going to take it," said McCartney, "because it was a radical departure…He said,'Rather interesting, John. Jolly interesting!' "Lennon wanted hi voice to "sound like the D**** Lama chanting from hilltop, " recalled Geoff Emerick, who was working his first-ever session as the Beatles' official engineer. ("I'd imagined in my head that the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting." Lennon said.) They got the desired effect by putting his voice through a rotating Leslie speaker, giving it a distant, wobbly feel. When it was played back McCartney shouted, "It's D**** Lennon!"
For such an innovative song, a conventional guitar solo just wouldn't suffice. McCartney had been inspired by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen to experiment with tape loops. He brought a plastic bag full of loops to studio, and by borrowing all the tape machines at Abbey Road, got them running simultaneously. Martin and Emerick manipulated the mixing desk as it were an instrument, bringing the various odd noises up and down in the track as the Beatles shouted instructions("Let's have that sea gull sound now!" "More distorted wineglasses!")
"It is the one track, of all the song the Beatles did, that could never be reproduced," Martin said. "It would be impossible to go back now and mix exactly the same thing." The song's lyrics were adapted from Leary's text, and when Lennon sang "Listen to the color of your dreams" his intention was clear. "It was almost the first acid song", he said. But to take the edge off the solemnity of the words, Lennon gave the song a title that he'd taken - like 'A Hard Day's Night' - from one of Ringo Starr's deadpan malapropisms. The breakthrough recording became known as "Tomorrow Never Knows".
The sound and feel of "Tomorrow Never Knows" might suggest the Beatles were chemically altered all through their time in the studio. Starr, however, claims there was too much work to do. "Though we did take certain substance, we never did it to a great extent at the session", he said. "We were really hard workers." Indeed, says Emerick, "my strongest memory of those sessions is how utterly draining they were."
Tomorrow Never Knows
以下内容引自RollingStone特刊 THE BEATLES Album-by-Album Guide All rights reserved WITH "Revolver", The MOP-tops were laid to rest. It was the sound of a band reinventing itself, and the dawn of a new kind of epic experimentation in pop. Released as the Beatles were finishing up their fi...(0回应)
以下内容引自RollingStone特刊 THE BEATLES Album-by-Album Guide All rights reserved WITH "Revolver", The MOP-tops were laid to rest. It was the sound of a band reinventing itself, and the dawn of a new kind of epic experimentation in pop. Released as the Beatles were finishing up their final tour ever, Revolver exploded with the band's strangest, most beautiful and most wide-ranging music to date - a mix of acid-fueled reveries, heavy-lidded resignation and sunny pop, all of it augmented by tape loops, backward vocals, horns, sitars, strings and chattering sound effects. The album would have been tough to reproduce live. Having turned the studio into their playground, the Beatles didn't even try. The band members had started expanding their use of the studio on their last few albums, especially on Robber Soul.(George Harrison said，"I don't see too much difference between Rubber Soul and Revolver.To me, they could be Volume One and Volume Two.") But leading up to the Revolver sessions, the Beatles were bombarded by new influences at such a rapid pace, their music was evolving almost daily. Following the conclusion of a UK tour at the end of 1965, the Beatles had nothing on their schedule for almost four months - their longest period of downtime since 1962. They took the opportunity to pursue various of interests, separately and together. They went to London discos with Mick Jagger, watched horse race and attended the Alfie film premiere. Paul McCartney explored art galleries, listened to avant-garde composers and traveled with Jane Asher. Harrison quietly married Pattie Boyd, and he became more seriously involved in the study of Indian music. It was John Lennon's activities, though, that would cat the longest shadow on the group's music going forward. By 1966, the Beatles had tried LSD, but during these idle months, when he felt stuck in his suburban estate with his wife and son, Lennon started consuming psychedelic and reading some of the drug culture's central text. like Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience, a poetic reinterpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. When the Beatles returned to EMI studios on April 6th, these influences surfaced immediately. The first song they cut for Revolver was the most experimental of all; Lennon had given it the working title "The Void", but it was referred to in the studio as "Mark 1" for fear of freaking out the EMI brass. "This one's completely different than anything we've ever done before," Lennon told George Martin. "It's only got one chord, and the whole thing is meant to be like a drone." "I was wondering how George was going to take it," said McCartney, "because it was a radical departure…He said,'Rather interesting, John. Jolly interesting!' "Lennon wanted hi voice to "sound like the D**** Lama chanting from hilltop, " recalled Geoff Emerick, who was working his first-ever session as the Beatles' official engineer. ("I'd imagined in my head that the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting." Lennon said.) They got the desired effect by putting his voice through a rotating Leslie speaker, giving it a distant, wobbly feel. When it was played back McCartney shouted, "It's D**** Lennon!" For such an innovative song, a conventional guitar solo just wouldn't suffice. McCartney had been inspired by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen to experiment with tape loops. He brought a plastic bag full of loops to studio, and by borrowing all the tape machines at Abbey Road, got them running simultaneously. Martin and Emerick manipulated the mixing desk as it were an instrument, bringing the various odd noises up and down in the track as the Beatles shouted instructions("Let's have that sea gull sound now!" "More distorted wineglasses!") "It is the one track, of all the song the Beatles did, that could never be reproduced," Martin said. "It would be impossible to go back now and mix exactly the same thing." The song's lyrics were adapted from Leary's text, and when Lennon sang "Listen to the color of your dreams" his intention was clear. "It was almost the first acid song", he said. But to take the edge off the solemnity of the words, Lennon gave the song a title that he'd taken - like 'A Hard Day's Night' - from one of Ringo Starr's deadpan malapropisms. The breakthrough recording became known as "Tomorrow Never Knows". The sound and feel of "Tomorrow Never Knows" might suggest the Beatles were chemically altered all through their time in the studio. Starr, however, claims there was too much work to do. "Though we did take certain substance, we never did it to a great extent at the session", he said. "We were really hard workers." Indeed, says Emerick, "my strongest memory of those sessions is how utterly draining they were."
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