Sometimes you take a closer look at a track not because of its artistic worth, but because the back story and the circumstances around its inception are interesting.
…or maybe you asked a cheeky friend and Beatle fan about which Beatle song to write about next, and she tried to throw you a curveball by suggesting Revolution 9. What she may not have considered is that the track, while obviously… less musical and more unique than most Beatle tracks, has a back story which is as fascinating as they come.
Revolution 9 is the universally least liked recording released under the moniker of The Beatles. It is the second-to-last song on the double album The Beatles, popularly referred to as The White Album.
This is not your typical Lennon/McCartney song. It is in fact not even a song or a composition in the traditional sense. It is an 8 minute, 15 second amalgamation of taped sound – a sound collage if you will – put together by John Lennon with good assistance from Yoko Ono and some assistance from George Harrison.
The Beatles made three songs with Revolution in the title during the White Album sessions: the single version (just called Revolution – the loud and raunchy hard rock version), the album version (called Revolution 1 – the acoustic version), and Revolution 9 (the sound collage).
The album version Revolution 1 originally clocked in at over 10 minutes, with more than half of it consisting of John and Yoko singing, screaming and moaning over a range of discordant sounds, created to stimulate the rumblings of a revolution. Subsequently, they decided to cut this somewhat chaotic section and use it as a basis of another track. That was the genesis of Revolution 9.
The recording of Revolution 9 was made during five hectic days (and nights) in June 1968. Due to the lack of sophisticated multi-track recording, all three Abbey Road studios had to be commandeered, with machines being specially linked together and tape loops held in place with pencils, much like the band had done a few years earlier when creating the sound effects for Tomorrow Never Knows. John would operate the faders to create a live mix.
During this time, home-made tapes of crowd disturbances were brought in and other sound effects were found in EMI’s library. With so many overlapping sounds, it is almost impossible to identify all the individual noises and spoken comments. Mark Lewisohn, who studied the original four-track recording, divided these into: a choir; backwards violins; a backwards symphony; an orchestral overdub from A Day In the Life; banging glasses; applause; opera; backwards mellotron; humming; spoken phrases by John and George, and a cassette tape of Yoko and John screaming the word ‘right’ (cut from Revolution 1).
The most memorable tape (which supplied part of the title) was the sonorous voice intoning ‘Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine’ over and over again. This was discovered on a library tape, where an engineer’s testing voice said “This is EMI test series number nine.” Lennon cut it up and that was the one that ended up being used. With nine being his favourite number (he was born on the 9th, Epstein had discovered the Beatles on the 9th, EMI has signed them on the 9th, their first album was recorded in the 9th month, John had met Yoko on the 9th, etc) it may have been cemented a bit that way, but Lennon would always primarily say “It was just so funny with the voice saying “number nine” like that. It was a joke, bringing number nine into it all the time – that’s all it was!”.
Many have wondered what the purpose of Revolution 9 was; what it was meant to express, if anything. Lennon said that he wanted to project the feeling of a revolution the way he envisioned it. Whether this was successful or not is open to discussion, but he claimed himself that this was music as people would listen to it in the future. Fifty years later, it is still very doubtful that the world will ever embrace this – a recording which mostly sound like a mix of a hundred blasting transistor radios mixed with sounds of hooligans clashing after a football match – ahead of a song like, for example, Hey Jude.
For a track that few Beatle fans would credit with high artistic worth, it certainly has gotten its fair share of attention – perhaps more so than some of their far more deserving works. People have attempted to analyse, explain, and understand Revolution 9 ever since its release. Books have been written, discussions keep going on, and people almost treat it like the artistic equivalent of the DaVinci Code – as if there is a code somewhere to be cracked.
I have a feeling that one should be careful in trying to analyse, search for hidden meanings, and generally read too much into Revolution 9. Perhaps what sounds like a random sound collage sometimes really is nothing more than a random sound collage. In reading a book like Revolution In the Head by Ian MacDonald, the myth of the song is built to such epic proportions that you almost get the sense that this title was the most important thing The Beatles ever released. That is of course obviously not the case.
One thing that is important to stress is that Revolution 9 is important – no doubt about it – but mostly as a symbol of artistic freedom. The truly remarkable thing about this song is that anyone at all was allowed to use unlimited time in one of the most expensive studios in the world to put together an eight minute orgy of sound that very few would be interested in listening to more than once. Lennon was allowed. Not because he was a brave artist who understood the value of avantgarde (in fact, in that field he was at best a happy amateur), but because he was associated with the most valuable band in the world. No matter what The Beatles recorded and released, it would generate income by the millions for EMI.
This made The Beatles the first band ever who had 100% artistic freedom in every far-reaching sense, and they stood alone in taking opportunity of that to this extent. This is the primary reason why Revolution 9 is important.
The track did not signal the start of a new and successful foray into avantgarde for Lennon. With Yoko Ono, he would release three full albums over the next few years in the same avantgarde category. None of them even came close to Revolution 9 when it comes to intensity, consistency, and (in spite of it all) listenability. It is unsure if this is a big source of comfort for Beatle fans.
“I think John and Paul saw a lot of magic in tape machines,” says music historian Alan Anbari. “Their obsession with this side of the recording process comes up in lots of outtakes of sessions, where they comment about the tape and acknowledge its presence. Even with simple things like calling out take numbers themselves, which engineers or producers usually did over the intercom. Tapes made their careers as musicians real. George Martin and engineers would write things down: studio notes, comments about mixes, studio setups, or even musical notation for arrangements that required outside (classical) musicians. But the Beatles, lacking all this training and discipline, had their instruments and saw tape as an extension of that to make their music real. The Beatles’ beloved Mellotron is just a fancy set of taped samples. Before its creation, composers did the same thing by splicing tapes. Revolution 9 is a pop culture masterpiece that echoes previous developments in other music. I never skip it.”
So how did the non-participating Beatle members feel about this unusual track?
Paul McCartney was in America on a business trip on behalf of their record company Apple when Revolution 9 was put together. It has long been claimed that he was disappointed by its inclusion on the White Album, but Paul was – contrary to popular belief – not at all against the inclusion of a sound collage. His disappointment came from not being part of the process and included in shaping the results. He was also unhappy with the destructive expression of the piece that John was going for.
Another element of this was that Paul had been pushing Beatles towards more experimental efforts for years. He had introduced Lennon to the avantgarde scene years earlier, and was by all accounts far more genuinely interested and knowledgeable about the scene than John. He had been making sound collages at home since 1966, and was the one who led the charge when Beatles worked with tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows. He brought experimental songs like Carnival of Light (unreleased recording from January 1967) to the band. Now he realised that John would be seen as the innovator and avantgarde aficionado in the group. He felt usurped.
What about Ringo? He stayed far away from anything having to do with Revolution 9 when it was made, and has barely commented on it since. This was far beyond anything he was interested in, both politically and artistically.
Facebook Comments