The Album of No Return

Posted by Steve Gilliard
February 14, 2007

Revolver - Beatles Hi, I’m Steve Gilliard of The NewsBlog.net. I’ll be posting here when I have time.

Tomorrow Never Knows from Revolver is like looking at a sonic explorer, ready to cast off into the unknown. The song is trippy, but the album changed what rock could be. It wasn’t pop, it certainly wasn’t the blues fueled rock of the Animals and Yardbirds, and it wasn’t the rock and roll of the Stones.

Everyone talks about Sgt. Pepper as the ground breaker, but by that time Pet Sounds was done, and new bands had picked up the sound. It was Revolver which kicked off the journey.

Why?

Because the Beatles had nowhere else to go. The pop was strangling them. They had no public life. They needed to make changes and this was the start

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John Baker 2 years ago 1 point
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Revolver was seminal, no doubt about it. But these things happen incrementally, don't they. We'd already had Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man and In My Life on the Rubber Soul album. So Revolver, with the startling Eleonor Rigby and the innovative Tomorrow Never Knows were not a complete surprise.
OK, the signs were all there, and hindsight is a wonderful thing, but could anything have really prepared us for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?

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Viscount LaCarte 2 years ago 1 point
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Because the Beatles had nowhere else to go. The pop was strangling them. They had no public life. They needed to make changes and this was the start.

Agreed, but I think it actually started with "Rubber Soul," and then expanded upon with the "Paperback Writer" single.

On "Revolver" it took off like a rocket.

If you like this post and this album, you might be interested in Neddie's take on the same subject, "When I'm In The Middle of a Dream."

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Tom Watson 2 years ago 1 point
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Love Revolver - my favorite Beatles record. Funnily enough, recently read the Beatles biography by Bob Spitz and there's a lot of truth to what Steve says. No question that Rubber Soul was very different, but Revolver was the leap - and think about it preceeding Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane release. What a period of productivity. I think the songs on Revolver are actually better than the songs on Sgt. Pepper, and I play it far more often. Strange from our modern p.o.v that Strawberry Fields didn't appear on an album, but such was the custom in those days - if you had a single, out it went, alone.

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Slappy 2 years ago 1 point
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"The pop was strangling them. They had no public life."

How much of the Beatles new sound was due to their increasing drug use? I think it had a lot to do with it. Experimentation doesn't always create masterpieces but in this case it did.

Tom W, "Rain" is at the top of my list of favorite songs that never made it onto an album.

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Tom Watson 2 years ago 1 point
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Hey Jude, too...and yeah, their experimentation clearly was a huge part of this.

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Kit Stolz 2 years ago 1 point
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That's all? I kinda agree, but...more please!

(For a chaotic but entertaining discussion of this song, check out:
http://www.radioparadise.com/content.php?name=s...

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product fulfillment companies 1 year ago 1 point
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