TheBeatlesOnline

Geoff Emerick will never forget Wednesday April 6, 1966, the day the Beatles began recording the album that would eventually be entitled Revolver.

A few weeks beforehand, 18-year old Emerick had been promoted to replace Norman Smith, who had decided to move on to produce a promising new band called Pink Floyd.

Emerick had already worked as an assistant on many Beatles recording sessions, but he was still very nervous going into his first session as the group's chief engineer.

And that morning, young Emerick was put on the spot immediately by John Lennon who announced that he wanted the vocal on his new song, later entitled to Tomorrow Never Knows, to sound like the "Dalai Lama chanting from a mountain top, miles away."

It was of course a mammoth task for the teenage engineer. This was 1966 and very few studio effects were available at the time. Remarkably Emerick solved it, by feeding the microphone through a Leslie organ amplifier in order to create the eerie, distant sound Lennon was after.

And Lennon was thrilled with the result!

Lennon's Dalai-Lama-on-mountain-top request pretty much summarized the Beatles' spirit during the recording of Revolver: They wanted everything to sound different!

They introduced tape loops, varispeed and backwards recording (recordings played back faster and/or played back backwards) and Indian instruments such as the sitar and the tambura.

Paul McCartney's somber master piece Eleanor Rigby featured an eight piece string quartet but no guitars or drums. Lennon's Tomorrow Never Knows had a multitude of effects, and the lyrics were based on Timorhy Leary's book The Psychedelic Experience from 1964, which referred to experiments with LSD. George Harrison's Love You To was a pure Indian composition, with Indian musicians participating on the recording.

In short, a pop record had never before sounded like this. With Revolver, the Beatles had once again turned the world of pop upside down.

But despite their experiments with new sounds and instruments, Lennon and McCartney, and also Harrison, remained faithful to their fundamental musical talents. The melodies they crafted were as compelling and diverse as ever before. It was the presentation that had changed.

Revolver topped the US and UK charts for six and seven weeks, respectively.

Back to chapters