Revolver is the Beatles' most revolutionary album*

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by manco, Jun 28, 2018.

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  1. Hermes

    Hermes Past Master

    Location:
    Denmark
    Abzach: Which are your favorite Beatles albums and why?
     
  2. rockerreds

    rockerreds Senior Member

    Rubber Soul beats both of them.
     
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  3. Psychedelic Good Trip

    Psychedelic Good Trip Beautiful Psychedelic Colors Everywhere

    Location:
    New York
    Revolver a blueprint for Pepper. IMHO

    Pepper took elements from both its predecessors in Rubber Soul and Revolver.
     
  4. JoeF.

    JoeF. Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey, USA
    You're point about the image change can't be understated. It had a huge impact. John Lennon's Sgt. Pepper makeover (glasses, stache'0 was aped by every college professor for the next 20 years--even though Lennon had changed his look again by the time of Magical Mystery Tour--if not sooner.
     
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  5. JoeF.

    JoeF. Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey, USA
    Rubber Soul has some great songs. But it gets docked for a couple of clunkers.

    It is their best cover imo.
     
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  6. Dr. Pepper

    Dr. Pepper What, me worry?

    Revolver 500% .better than Ruber Soul, just no it's not.
     
  7. Dr. Pepper

    Dr. Pepper What, me worry?

    Not on the improved as intended version with Penny Lane ending side one and Strawberry Fields starting side two. This version beats Revolver and every album ever made, imho. Imagine your favorite album with the two best songs removed, that is what Pepper is, and it's still considered by many to be the greatest album ever even without those two extrodinary tracks. I always listen to my extended version now, just love the flow better.

    The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper Extended, a playlist by Dr. Pepper on Spotify

    P. S. It also helps balance the Paul heavy side two of the album when John's mastepice Strawberry Fields opens that side.
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2018
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  8. ash1

    ash1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    bristol uk
    I'm firmly in the Revolver is best camp but since abandoning Beatles in stereo when the mono box came out I find Pepper a more enjoyable listen than I used to. Whereas Revolver is a solid 10, Pepper for me is an 8.5 today.
    Anyway, one of the things I like about Revolver that is possibly revolutionary and hasn't been mentioned yet is the fact that no consecutive song has the same lead singer. Now personally, I think that is absolutely brilliant and I'm struggling to think of a band that has managed this. One of my problems with Pepper is 3 Paul songs in a row on side 1, none of which (in my opinion) are anywhere near as good as his songs on Revolver which are quite possibly the finest set of songs he ever wrote.
    In terms of the revolutionary, I think Tomorrow Never Knows wins hands down. Everything on Pepper is distinctly subtle compared to TNK.
    The studio effects used on Revolver are a huge jump from Rubber Soul. Perhaps the only really new effect on Pepper is phasing. ADT, backwards, heavy limiting, Indian music sounds, tape loops, sound effects, heavy brass and strings etc.. are all to be found on Revolver.
    They're both quite good though, aren't they.....
     
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  9. JoeF.

    JoeF. Forum Resident

    Location:
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    If you take "The Word" and "What Goes On?" off Rubber Soul, I would agree with you.
     
  10. Hardy Melville

    Hardy Melville Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York
    The US Rubber Soul had no clunkers.
     
  11. teag

    teag Forum Resident

    Location:
    Colorado
    You should have been there.....then you would know why.
     
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  12. Hardy Melville

    Hardy Melville Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York
    I much prefer Pepper's over Revolver. Ftr I have UK Revolver at #4 on my favorite Beatles albums behind the US Rubber Soul and MMT. Here's why:

    1. Yellow Submarine. An awful kid's song. There's nothing nearly as bad on Pepper's.
    2. People overrate Tomorrow Never Knows. Sure it's different and I love to listen to it. but too much is made of its being "revolutionary". Lennon to his credit took the drone concept and added special effects to it. The world did not shake when it came out, though. What did it lead to? It's great to listen to when you're stoned, and very good at other times. But it doesn't transform the overall effect of the album.
    3. A Day in the Life is better. It's equally if not more trippy than TNK, but in a way that is more effective and less a consciously conceptual effort. It ties in its experimentalism with melody and real life. One of their best songs ever.
    4. McCartney's efforts on Revolver are concededly but not uniformly impressive, and For No One might be my favorite song by him. But Revolver fans tend to downplay his work on Pepper's, which is unfair. The title song itself and reprise are Paul at his rockingest (if you will), more so than anything on Revolver, and at the other end there is the sublime She's Leaving Home. Fixing a Hole and Feeling Better are awesome, and I guess unlike some I love Lovely Rita - great lead by Paul. Meanwhile I've heard Got to Get You Into My Life too often, and skip it, while the mostly appreciated Good Day Sunshine is sometimes just too poppy for me.
    5. Revolver is a collection of songs, while Pepper's is meant to be listened to as a whole. I wonder if this is part of the apparent generational divide for these two - those who were listening to music at the time they came out could not help but notice that Pepper's was meant to be listened to all the way through, and usually was. Not that you could not listen to Revolver all the way through, but it wasn't the same. Perhaps those not of that time are okay with Revolver being a collection of songs, but by the OP's metric here, that hardly made it revolutionary.
    6. I simply do not hear evidence supporting the argument here that in terms of production Revolver was the great advance, which Pepper merely followed up on. Pepper to my ear is much more advanced on the technical level. Take something like Mr. Kite, often overlooked I guess. What on Revolver approached it?

    I could go on with this list, including how Taxman is so tendentious, the US version was confusing and suffered from the absence of the 3 Lennon songs, and the obvious point that Pepper had a much bigger impact on the public when it came out.

    In any case they're both great albums. And people are perfectly entitled to prefer Revolver. But conclude a convincing case has been made that Revolver is more revolutionary?

    No.
     
  13. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member

    Location:
    Bretagne
    As said by others here, Pepper was a more complete experience. The concept, the artwork, the production, the song blends, the sound effects (orchestra tuning up, audience noise, mellotron, fairground music, cock-a-doodle-doo, dog whistle,...) and that ultimate climax, the unheard of, gigantic "A Day In The Life". Phew, what a trip!
    Even if I prefer the previous revolution that was the richly varied, awesome "Revolver".
     
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  14. JoeF.

    JoeF. Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey, USA
    You're right about "Yellow Submarine", but Sgt. Pepper's has "When I'm 64" and "Within You, Without You", both of which kind of don't fit--for different reasons. And they're back to back.
     
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  15. tables_turning

    tables_turning In The Groove

    Location:
    Mid Atlantic, USA
    Pepper is decorative, artsy, ornate, and somewhat playful in spots -- a further development of using the recording studio as an instrument rather than just a room to record in.
    Revolver is ballsy, visceral, vital, alive, and rocking -- a carefully crafted yet sizzling statement of vitality from a band with several more tricks up its eight sleeves.
    Pepper may be the icing, but Revolver is several substantial layers of very tasty cake.
     
  16. bob_32_116

    bob_32_116 Forum Flaneur

    Location:
    Perth Australia
    And that's the point, surely? When people who were actually there at the time know from their own experience that Pepper created more of a buzz than Revolver - which it did, a great deal more, I know because I was there too - then I don't see why people would wish to deny that fact. It is not a matter of giving opinions on which album is better, however that may be defined, but about how it was actually received at the time. You prefer Revolver? Fine. But to suggest that it was more revolutionary than it's successor is - well, the polite term is "revisionist" A less polite term comes to mind, but I think the board would censor it.
     
  17. NumberEight

    NumberEight Came too late and stayed too long

    There must have been some pretty strange-looking women professors at the college you went to...:)
     
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  18. MikeM

    MikeM Senior Member

    Location:
    Youngstown, Ohio
    Although I'm personally not a fan of "You Won't See Me," overall I agree with this assessment. The U.S. Rubber Soul is a much more cohesive group of songs than the UK original.
     
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  19. Oliver

    Oliver Bourbon Infused

    Personally I'm glad they didn't just make Revolver (as great as it is) #II but instead went into a different direction. While the whole concept album thing may be a bit overblown as far as having a cohesive theme, it is very different from Revolver in that it's much more theatrically based, almost fantasy. I still think it holds up very well and on par with their best work. Then again I don't typically find albums that are considered "dated" a bad thing.
    To be honest I am a bit surprised that it gets so maligned these days when it seems like it was the gold standard for such a long time. Honestly it reminds me a bit of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and even the Wall-both considered landmarks at the time but now "overrated" being overtaken by a lot of people by Animals. Not that I don't think Animals is one of their best works, it's that the others seem to have saturated the market for too long and are a bit taken for granted (sort of like Sgt Pepper). That's just coming from my perspective though.
     
  20. idleracer

    idleracer Forum Resident

    Location:
    California
    :hide: I actually prefer this. Instead of just verse verse verse verse verse, it actually has a chorus (and a catchy one at that):

     
  21. MikeM

    MikeM Senior Member

    Location:
    Youngstown, Ohio
    Rather than "revisionist," I think the correct term is "put into context."

    A previous poster outlined some of the reasons why the release of Revolver overall wasn't as big of a deal at the time, along with contextual reasons — many of which didn't have anything to do with the music it contains — why the release of Sgt. Pepper was.

    I was "there at the time," too...and I would never try to minimize the impact Sgt. Pepper had back then. But there's nothing unusual about looking back on a piece of music (from any field, not just rock) many years on and reassessing the nature of it. The history of rock is littered with songs, albums and artists that were the be-all and end-all at the time, but when viewed from today cause us to shake our heads.

    At the time of Sgt. Pepper's release, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight. Now we do. So we can, for example, evaluate which of the two albums had a more lasting impact on artists and albums that followed (and not merely in the short term — I think we can all agree that Sgt. Pepper's short-term influence brought about a lot of laughable efforts from lesser artists).

    And in the end, despite this thread's title, what matters most is not whether we want to label either album "revolutionary," but what's in the grooves. That's the gold standard for evaluation of any music from any era.
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2018
  22. erocky

    erocky Senior Member

    I can't agree with that. Rubber Soul is also a masterpiece. Any album with In My Life, Nowhere Man, Girl and Norwegian Wood is hard to beat. That's not even counting the Paul songs ha ha ha. Drive My Car, and I'm Looking Through You? Classics too.
     
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  23. unclefred

    unclefred Coastie with the Moastie

    Location:
    Oregon Coast
    Revolver is a great LP, I sure liked the British release better as it included 'And Your Bird Can Sing' and 'Dr. Roberts'.
     
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  24. erocky

    erocky Senior Member

    On the John songs in particular, there is a lot more electric guitar on Revolver. How many bands in the 90's not from Seattle wanted to just sound like John's 5 songs on Revolver.
     
  25. bob_32_116

    bob_32_116 Forum Flaneur

    Location:
    Perth Australia
    I have my own theory on this. Among people of a certain age, nothing is seen as being more uncool than liking the same thing that your Dad likes. Saying that Sgt Pepper or DSOTM are "overrated" (most overrated word ever) gets you lots of "indie points".
     
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