1966 - The Beatles escape the madness of the road to create Revolver

The Beatles in '66

"You clink a couple of glasses together, or take bleeps from the radio, then you loop the tape to repeat the noises at intervals."

By 1966, the Beatles' music was starting to reflect their indulgence in marijuana and LSD. The extra time the band would have in the studio led to a much greater level of experimentation. The first fruits of this psychedelic vision appeared on Revolver in August 1966. It has come to be seen as their high point, musically. 

The band had begun recording sessions in the Spring of 1966, at a time when they were still playing live. They played their final show on August 29 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, concluding that they were stagnating as a band because they couldn't be heard above the screaming.

In his interview for the 20th anniversary of Rolling Stone magazine, George Harrison said he had wanted to stop touring in 1965.

The NME's reappraisal in 1976

"I was getting very nervous. They kept planning these ticker-tape parades and I was saying I absolutely do not want to do that. I didn't like the idea of being too popular."

On one occasion, he said the Beatles landed in Houston. "There were thousands of kids - and four policemen. The kids were actually running along the runway. The pilot brought the plane to a stop and within minutes they were all over the outside of the plane, knocking on the windows and all over the wings. It was ridiculous."

The retrospective review of Revolver by the NME's Steve Clarke in 1976 (pictured here - click on it to read the clipping) reflects a growing appreciation of it as "their most listenable and durable work".

Revolver was still largely a Lennon and McCartney show, but George was tangibly more involved at this point, contributing three songs including the opening track 'Taxman' - "a tight, spare rocker," said the NME. Clarke notes how the band had evolved as players, with Paul's bass lines being "vibrant and imaginative" and the guitars harder and louder.

In the mid 60s, the majority of vinyl albums were still released principally in mono. Stereo was emerging but for bands like The Beatles it was still an afterthought. There were mono and stereo versions of Revolver released and the mixes were often very different between the two formats. 

For example, on Taxman, the mono version gives more prominence to the bass guitar and John's rhythm guitar has more attack. A cowbell appears prominently in mono but is buried in the stereo version. 

While John's songs reflected his increasingly cerebral preoccupations, Paul's work on Revolver showed a classic songwriter in the making. Songs such as Here, There and Everywhere, For No One and Eleanor Rigby would become standards covered by many other artists.

Eleanor Rigby is such a unique but assured piece of work, really one of their best compositions - probably more Paul than John but once again proof of their potency as a writing partnership. 

The psychedelia is turned up a notch for John's 'I'm Only Sleeping', with its dreamy feel the result of vari-speeding of the vocals and rhythm track, and some 'backwards' guitar (actually written out backwards and played as a melodic run by George).

The Fabs pay the price for standing up Imelda

World tours interrupted the sessions. On one leg of the tour, in the Philippines, the band failed to attend a reception arranged for them at the Presidential Palace by Imelda Marcos. "I'm very pleased to say that we never went to see those awful Marcoses," said George. 

"They sent people out there to beat us up. We couldn't even get a car ride to the airport. After half the people with us were beaten up, we finally got on the plane. Then they wouldn't let it take off. They announced that Brian Epstein and our road manager Mal Evans would have to get off the plane. 

"We sat there for what seemed like eternity. Finally they got back and they let the plane go. But they took all the money we earned at the concerts from us."

George and sitar master Ravi Shankar

On their return from Manila, The Beatles made their first brief visit to India, where George pursued his interest in the sitar, first used on Rubber Soul's Norwegian Wood. This resulted in the Indian raga-influenced track 'Love You To'. 

It is the wide variety of styles and the sheer quality of the songs that is so remarkable about Revolver. Even Yellow Submarine was "perfectly in tune with Ringo's persona," said Clarke. "It's simplicity was engaging, rather than dumb."

Yellow Submarine certainly captured the imagination of a younger audience. I started junior school in the Autumn of 1966 and one of my abiding memories is sitting next to the window in my classroom and hearing a young pre-schooler in his back garden singing "We all live in a Yellow Submarine" over and over again. 

The American version was significantly shorter

Three tracks from the Revolver sessions - I'm Only Sleeping, And Your Bird Can Sing and Dr. Robert were omitted from the North American release of Revolver, having been used on a US release 'Yesterday..And Today'. This definitely spoils the flow of the album for those of us who were used to the UK original release. 

Yellow Submarine aside, there was a maturity about the songwriting and the subject matter. The extra time in the studio allowed the band to work on arrangements and to get the bass and drums sounding more solid. Most importantly, it gave them the freedom to experiment, which culminated in the album's final statement, Tomorrow Never Knows.

Ringo created an iconic drum track

This was where the various influences - psychedelia, Indian raga, electronic music, came together. It starts with a drone and Ringo's drum pattern, which is absolutely essential to the atmosphere and feel of the song. The seagull-like noise is a distorted and sped up guitar. John said he wanted the vocals to sound like he was singing from a Himalayan mountain top.

There is all manner of sound effects, sped up and run backwards - primitive stuff by today's standards, but an act of true artistic creation in the context of the very basic analogue recording techniques they had at their disposal.

The willingness to not only try new ideas, but work out a way of getting the required sounds, is credited to Geoff Emerick, then just 20 years old and newly installed as The Beatles engineer, working under producer George Martin's direction. 

According to Mark Lewinsohn's book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, "Geoff walked in green, but because he knew no rules, tried different techniques. The chemistry of George Martin and Geoff was perfect. With another producer and engineer, things would have turned out quite differently."

The Beatles all had their own home tape machines and Emerick recalled that Paul in particular would come into studio 3 at Abbey Road with little reels of tape saying 'listen to this'.

"We did a live mix of all the loops," remembered George Martin. "All over the studios we had people spooling them onto machines with pencils, while Geoff did the balancing. There were many other hands controlling the panning". 

This was a performance in itself. "I laid all the loops onto the multi-track recorder and played the faders like a modern-day synthesiser," said Emerick.

The solution to John's request to sound like the Dalai Lama on top of a mountain was to feed his vocal through a Leslie speaker. "It meant breaking into the circuitry," said Emerick. "I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker. After that, they wanted everything shoved through the Leslie!"

The lyrics left no doubt as to the direction The Beatles were headed.

But listen to the colour of your dream
It is not living
It is not living

In the 1970s, after their break-up, the Beatles were still held to be at the pinnacle of pop music. The 1975 list of the 100 greatest albums, voted on by the writers of the NME, had Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band  at number one, Blonde on Blonde at two, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds at three and Revolver at four. 

Sometime in the 1980s, this hierarchy changed and Revolver eclipsed Sgt. Pepper, to judge from lists compiled of the greatest all-time records. 

In 1985, hipsters had hijacked the NME listings, placing John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album at number 9, two places above Revolver. (Yeah, right. I mean, come on). And Sgt. Pepper? Nowhere to be seen in the '85 top 100.

But by 1993, a degree of sanity had been restored to the NME writers' list, with Revolver up to Number 2 behind Pet Sounds. Sgt. Pepper was back in at 33.

It's all down to personal taste, of course, but it's hard to disagree with the view that Revolver is their high point, when you consider the scale of their musical maturity in 1966.

However, this new mature and experimental sound was something many Beatles fans found less appealing. This was a long way from "She Loves You, yeah yeah yeah!" though it would be a few more months before their loyalty was severely tested.

The following year, during the making of Sgt. Pepper, a Life Magazine profile noted that the group "are stepping far ahead of their audience," but the possibility of losing support "does not bother them in the least."

Elsewhere on this blog:

LIFE magazine reports on 'The New Far-out Beatles', 1967

Sgt. Pepper Is The Beatles - Who Knew?
 
At Home With the Lennons, 1967

A Night With John Lennon - The Fab Faux at Radio City Music Hall

Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan's artistic peak in the 1960s 

Neil Finn - New Zealand's own Beatle

Neil Finn is almost certainly New Zealand's greatest popular music export. For the sheer quality of his songwriting over a 40-year career, there's no one to touch him. Finn is New Zealand's Paul McCartney, the creator of a great many memorable tunes, including 'I Got You' for Split Enz, 'Don't Dream It's Over', 'Weather With You' and many others for Crowded House.

Me with Neil messing about on the river in 2008

Comparisons with McCartney are not so far-fetched. Neil's melodies are clearly influenced in some ways by The Beatles and Neil is a big fan of Paul. On my one meeting with Neil, on a boat cruise along the River Thames in 2008, he talked about McCartney and in particular how much he loved the album 'Ram', Paul's 1971 solo album. 

In his solo career, Neil has also collaborated with his brother Tim and American songwriters such as Shawn Colvin, Jeff Tweedy and Wendy & Lisa. 

 

I first saw Neil live in 2001, just a few weeks after my family and I had emigrated to New Zealand. He was promoting a new solo album, One Nil, which featured songs he had created with Prince's former associates Wendy & Lisa. It's a great album and you can hear the positive influence that Wendy & Lisa had on his music. I wish he had done more work with them. The Beatle influences are there too, on songs such as Wherever You Are, Last To Know, and Turn And Run. The whole album is rich in melody and harmony, it deserves to be better known.

The live shows in Auckland to promote One Nil, at the St James Theatre, were billed as '7 Worlds Collide, Neil Finn & Friends', featuring Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and Johnny Marr from The Smiths, with Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway from Radiohead. Neil was clearly very comfortable in this collaborative setting and the concept was extended in 2008 when he convened a second '7 Worlds Collide' project. 

This yielded the double CD 'And The Sun Came Out'. Singing and songwriting contributions were divided amongst the group, which featured Jeff Tweedy, Glenn Kotche, John Stirratt and Pat Sansone of Wilco, Radiohead's Phil Selway, Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall and New Zealand songwriters Don McGlashan and Bic Runga. 

I mentioned to Neil when I met him on the Thames that I have enjoyed these collaborations, including the work with Wendy & Lisa, almost as much as his regular solo gig and the Crowded House albums. He said it was all part of keeping things fresh and interesting, for him as much as for the listener. 

When Crowded House reformed in 2007, I saw them play at Hyde Park in London. The show was notable for the fact that when they played 'Weather With You' Neil was rapping with the crowd about how the sun was shining in Hyde Park, while it was raining at Glastonbury - huge cheers. Soon enough, the dark clouds loomed overhead. A little later, after Neil had told the black clouds to go away (he didn't say it as politely as that..) the heavens opened.

I've seen him a few times since then, on the boat in London, playing with his wife and son Liam as the group 'Breakfast Club' - and back in Auckland with Tim when they had an album out together. 

Then he joined Fleetwood Mac in 2018, which came right out of the blue. He wouldn't have been on anyone's list of people likely to replace Lindsey Buckingham - except for the one person who mattered, Mick Fleetwood. 

Here's TVNZ's interview with Neil about how he got the gig.

When the live shows were announced for Auckland, I grabbed some tickets, mainly because I wanted to see Neil coming home to play in NZ. 

And it was emotional. On the Thursday night, the first of four shows at Auckland's Spark Arena, Fleetwood Mac - with NZ boy Neil Finn fronting them - put on a great show. From the moment he first engaged the crowd with "Kia ora, Auckland!" and launched into a hearty version of 'Second Hand News' it was clear Neil was fired up for this homecoming. 

He got a lovely reception from his home crowd and it really was emotional to see him fronting the Mac, belting out the Split Enz classic ‘I Got You’ and the wonderful ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ - watch this clip:

In their between-song chat, Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks showed the utmost respect for Neil, his songs and what they meant to audiences around the world. Referring to 'Don't Dream It's Over', Fleetwood said, "Many years ago, I heard the most beautiful song. I had no idea who was singing it ... or from whence they came ... but it stayed right in my heart and all these years later, we play it together, now with a dear, dear friend of mine, who came from these parts here."

What a proud moment.

Here are two different views of 'I Got You' in Auckland:
Part 1

and Part 2

Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan's artistic peak in the 1960s

Cool Bob, 1966

Like many a 1960s classic album, Blonde On Blonde is a record that is very much of its time, but one that still resonates down the years as an important milestone in rock music. 

It marked the end of an era for Dylan himself, the culmination of two years of intensive writing, recording and touring that could have turned him into another rock and roll casualty. He was too smart to fall into that trap, though. Or maybe he was just lucky.

In 1965, Bob Dylan had consolidated his move into electric music with the album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and its iconic single ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. He had toured Europe, confronting the hostility towards his new electric sound from folk purists who called him Judas for abandoning the protest movement and his acoustic guitar.

In his contemporary review of Blonde on Blonde for Crawdaddy magazine in July 1966, Paul Williams had words for those who continued to boo Dylan at his live shows.

Electric Bob, cool suit

"As long as people persist in believing that Dylan should be playing his new songs on a folk guitar instead of with a band, they will fail to realise that he is a creator, not a puppet, and a creator who has now reached musical maturity. If you’re interested in what he’s saying, you must listen to him on his own terms."

By the end of 1966, Dylan would be in hiding, burnt out from the road and keen to embrace family life. But as the year opened, he was on top of the world commercially. He had sold 10 million records worldwide and had begun recording a double album (a first in the rock era) that would be the culmination of his early 60s rise to stardom. 

On Blonde On Blonde, in contrast to his previous albums, two things stood out for Paul Williams: “the uniform high quality of the songs chosen for this extra-long LP and the wonderful, wonderful accompaniments.”

Recording sessions had begun in New York in October 1965, but whatever Dylan was looking for, he wasn’t getting it from these sessions. His producer Bob Johnston recognised that Bob wanted to craft an album with greater refinement than his previous efforts. Organist Al Kooper and guitarist Robbie Robertson were retained from the New York dates and in early 1966, the sessions moved to the CBS studios in Nashville, using their highly experienced session players.

“Not only is Dylan’s present band easily the best backup band in the country, but they appear able to read his mind,” said Williams. “On this album, they almost inevitably do the right thing at the right time. They do perfect justice to each of his songs, and that is by no means a minor accomplishment.”

My vinyl copy is an original 1966 UK CBS version, with inner sleeves advertising
Andy Williams and Doris Day alongside Dylan, The Byrds and Miles Davis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the first Nashville session on Valentine’s night, Dylan recorded a keeper version of ‘Visions of Johanna’, side one track 3 of the original vinyl. Dylan biographer Greil Marcus suggested the song had been written during the blackout that shut down New York in November 1965, which might explain lines like “the heat pipes just cough” and “lights flicker in the opposite loft”.  

When people refer to this song as an example of Dylan’s genius, it’s down to the atmosphere he creates with the lyrics and their delivery.

"Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo, 'this is what salvation must be like after a while'
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles"

While folkies complained that he wouldn’t sing ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ any more, rock fans puzzled over the meaning of these new words. Dylan's command of language and his own skewed and playful lyrics were a key part of the intrigue - and he wasn't about to enlighten anyone as to their meaning.

"Only when it is amplified by music and declamation," wrote the poet Gerard Malanga, "does Dylan's verse stand forth in all its living strength and beauty. In the subtle distinction of its peculiar rhythm...an entirely new language prevails."

On 'Memphis Blues Again', Dylan relates specific episodes and emotions in his offhand, impressionistic manner.

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well
And I would send a message
To find out if she’s talked
But the post office has been stolen
And the mailbox is locked
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again

This track sounds fresh and full of bounce, which is amazing considering it was Take 20, finally completed in the early hours of February 17. Dylan did a lot of lyric writing in the studio, so the musicians needed to be patient. 

Contemporary reviews referred to Dylan as a poet - how he "knew" and how he was "telling it like it is". But as NME writer Mick Farren admitted in a retrospective mid-1970s assessment of Blonde On Blonde, "If Dylan was really telling it like it is, we'd all know exactly what he was talking about. We wouldn't have been sifting through his symbolism, in the vain attempt to find his particular Rosebud." That sifting has only intensified in the intervening 50 years.

The gatefold of Blonde on Blonde and the NME reassessment by Mick Farren

It’s not just the words though. Credit must go to the musicians for providing such sympathetic accompaniment. The keyboards and the guitar playing, the bass and drums are all excellent. That must have been inspiring to Dylan himself, pushing him to produce his best work.

“Blonde on Blonde is - in the quality of the sound, the decisions as to what goes where, the mixing of the tracks, the timing - one of the best-produced records I’ve ever heard. Producer Bob Johnston deserves immortality at least,” said Williams in his ’66 review.

Bob and Joan Baez

There's a strong romantic thread running through much of the album. It's a key factor that made Blonde On Blonde so powerful for the listener. Dylan’s love songs up to this point - like ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ (“I'll only let you down”) or ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ (“Valentines can't buy her”) - had been less than tender.

Blonde On Blonde has a handful of truly romantic songs that stand today as classics, where the tenderness outweighs the bitterness; notably I Want You, Just Like A Woman and Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

The day after recording ‘Visions of Johanna’, the session for Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands began at 6 pm, but Dylan hadn’t finished the words. Finally, at 4 am, the musicians assembled for a take. This link has them working out an arrangement.

Though they were reasonably familiar with the song, the band hadn’t appreciated it would run for almost 12 minutes. Drummer Kenny Buttrey recalled they'd be looking at each other thinking, “man, this is it, this is gonna be the last chorus and we've gotta put everything into it we can. We're cracking up. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago.”

Part of the intrigue of the romantic songs on Blonde On Blonde was who Dylan was writing about - it could often be Joan Baez, on ‘Sooner Or Later’ or ‘4^th Time Around’, for example. Dylan later acknowledged the debt he owed to Baez - who nurtured his career early on - but he did a poor job of repaying it in 1965, when Joan accompanied him to the UK.

You feel for her, watching the movie 'Don't Look Back'. the film about Dylan's UK tour in April 1965. By this time, Bob was already involved with Sara Lownds, but he hadn't told Joan. It was Sara, while working at the film production division of Time Life, who had introduced Dylan to D.A. Pennebaker, the director of Don't Look Back. It must have been humiliating for Baez, realising she'd made a big mistake in coming on that tour.

Sara poses for an unused version
of the Highway 61 album cover

.Bob would later say he was just trying to deal with the craziness of his life at that point; and it was crazy. Joan should never have gone with him to the UK. She described it as hell (everyone else was on drugs - she was straight). And Bob didn't - as she had expected - reciprocate Joan's generosity by inviting her onstage to perform with him.

Bob and Sara married in secret in November 1965. On ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, it was his new wife he was serenading.

In his book 'Bob Dylan - An illustrated history', Michael Gross called Blonde On Blonde "letter-perfect rock and roll. Here was an album with a song that lasted a whole side. The symbolism was Dylan's but the situations were everyone's. If any one disc recorded in the Sixties can stand as a psycho-historical recreation of the times, this is it.

"With its passionate love songs and descents into Dylan's dramatic, urban landscape, is not an album to pin down. Like the ‘ghost of electricity, howling in the bones of her face,’ it is more something to feel.”

The first single from Blonde On Blonde in April 1966 saw Dylan being as plain as could be about smoking marijuana, while also deflecting to avoid censure. Knowing that a song called ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned’ might be banned before it even got out of the traps, he called the song ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’.

In The Rolling Thunder Logbook, Sam Shepard quotes a character called Johnny Dark saying, “I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw ‘Everybody must get stoned’ on the jukebox. I mean there it was, right in front of everybody. Right there in the restaurant. I couldn’t believe you could play that kind of stuff in public while you were eating your cheeseburger.”

Regardless of the cryptic title, it’s a wonder the song wasn’t banned anyway. It did inevitably fall foul of conservative programmers at some radio stations in the US and it was excluded from playlists at the BBC. But exposure on pirate radio stations was sufficient to see it rise to No. 7 in the UK. It made it all the way to No. 2 in the US.

With Francoise Hardy, 1966

Blonde On Blonde was so entwined with the unique circumstances of the sixties – the flowering of youth culture and rebellion against the cultural norms of the time - that sober reflection was difficult for those who had lived it.

"One of the main problems approaching Blonde On Blonde after all this time (my italics) is the temptation to take the whole thing far too reverently," said Farren in 1976. 

Indeed, so here we are, another fifty years down the track and the album is still resonating.   

The playfulness and wilful surrealism of some of Dylan's imagery doesn’t detract from the power and fascination of this record. Even as a teenager, I could tell this was something to get lost in. Blonde On Blonde was the first Bob Dylan album I bought and it was another of those records that fired my imagination. Did I get the full message on those first listens? Certainly not, but what I did hear was an atmosphere and a sense that this music really had depth to it. I was tapping into an unattainable bohemian lifestyle.

In his book ‘The Ballad of Bob Dylan’, Daniel Mark Epstein described seeing Dylan’s comeback show at Madison Square Garden in 1974. “Now, at the age of 25, I could understand lyrics that meant little to me when I heard them at 17. Poetry grows with you.”

In the year when punk rock broke through in the UK, Farren was still in awe of Dylan's achievement 10 years earlier.

"It is certainly Bob Dylan's finest hour and there are less than a handful of other works that can seriously challenge it for the title of the greatest rock album of all time."

In fact, a year earlier, the NME writers had judged it to be, in their collective wisdom, the second greatest album ever, after Sgt Pepper.

In April 1966, Dylan’s friend Richard Fariña died in a motorcycle accident in California, just as he was launching his first novel. It was his partner Mimi Baez’s 21^st birthday. Tragic in every way. 

Three months later, Dylan came off his bike near his home in Woodstock, New York. He knew he could have died on his motorcycle, as Fariña had.

Ironically, the accident offered him the perfect excuse to go into hiding.

Dylan wrote, in his memoir, Chronicles, Vol 1: “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”

In his excellent book ‘Positively 4th Street’, about how the lives of Bob, Joan, Mimi and Richard had intertwined, David Hadju wrote: “For a year and a half after the accident, Dylan stayed in seclusion in Woodstock, while rock musicians absorbed and drew upon his ideas.

“The trio of records uniting poetry with elements of folk and rock and roll – Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and the double Blonde On Blonde, came to be acknowledged as pop masterworks and charted a whole new style of music. 

“When Dylan began making music again, it was wholly for his own pleasure.”

He made very few public appearances once Blonde On Blonde was released and did not tour again for almost eight years.

Here's Dylan on the 1966 UK tour, singing 'Visions of Johanna' unaccompanied.

Also on this Blog:

Bob and Joan and Scarlett and Joni... Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue

Bob Dylan live in 1976 - A spirited 'Idiot Wind'