"Revolution 9" is the longest - and also the most controversial - Beatles track ever released. (Eight minutes, twenty-two seconds, or 8:22.) An offshoot of John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's work with avant-garde art, it was their attempt to sonically depict a revolution against the system. It was derived from the last six minutes of the full ten-minute rhythm track of Take 18 of "Revolution 1," that take providing the master recording of "Revolution 1" for the White Album. In those final six minutes, John produced some strident guitar noise while screaming, "All right, all right! Right! Right! Right!" over and over while Yoko muttered various phrases.
Along with that, John, Yoko, and Abbey Road technicians assembled and compiled various tape loops and spooled them onto tape machines. John and George Harrison even created new vocal tapes for the collage. John then mixed them altogether to get the magnum opus that appears on the White Album.
How on earth do you write about a track like "Revolution 9"? If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about a tape-loop collage is like using mime to describe quantum physics. But there is a definite structure to how the sound effects evolve and build up as the track progresses. Even if sound collages aren't your cup of tea, you have to concede that John clearly knew what he was doing. As Tim Riley noted, none of this was random. A trajectory was mapped out - either in advance or as John went along.
Before we get to that, though, I must acknowledge the compère of this sonic excursion: the faceless voice repeating the words "number nine." John heard it on an exam tape for the Royal Academy of Music - the voice artist was announcing the ninth question on the test - and thought it was, in the words of Abbey Road tape operator Richard Lush, a real hoot. So John made a loop out of it, fading it in and out of the mix at will. As spooky as it sounds when it kicks off the track with a plaintive piano in the background, what makes it spookier is that no one knows who the voice belonged to. The exam tapes for the Royal Academy of Music were disposed of long ago, and so there's no way to identify the voice artist who recorded them. It's a voice out of nowhere, calling from some long, distant past that was already long and distant by 1968. The Beatles and other musicians of their ilk had found success without having to go to some silly, elitist music school.
The intensity of "Revolution 9" is set by the muted, ironically contentious dialogue that precedes it, which is a studio control room recording of Beatles producer George Martin asking Beatles assistant Alistair Taylor about a promised bottle of wine and Taylor apologizing to Beatles producer George Martin for having forgotten it. They resolve things with Taylor asking, and Martin granting, forgiveness, for a laugh - "Cheeky bitch!" Taylor says as the "music" begins. The piano and the repeated words "number nine" suggest, to first-time listeners, an intro to an orchestrated, aggrandized version of the song "Revolution." John, cheeky bitch, quickly makes it clear that we're listening to nothing of the sort as soon as other elements of sound enter the mix and start to ratchet up the tension. Loops of string instruments, choirs, and repeated classical riffs filter in and out before a cacophony of horns takes over and leads into voices fading in and out, John and George offering random phrases in half-heard conversations. A disgruntled population of souls yields to and enters into samples of music spinning backwards and forwards. A woman's laughter turns into a child's panting (at about 1:58 into the track). Screams from "Revolution 1" briefly take over in isolation. Auto traffic goes back and forth. Children are crying. People are ready to revolt. Something is going to happen. There's a call to arms that gets repeated - "Hey . . . everybody!" Voices of authority try to reassure us that all is well ("They are standing still."). And that damned voice keeps reminding us we're in "number nine, number nine . . ." At about 4:01 into the track, another number is announced: "Number thirty!" Part of a head count of the foot soldiers in the revolution John and Yoko are depicting? (Not a reference to the number of tracks on the White Album, which wasn't finalized until long after this track was finished.) A few seconds later, at John's goading ("All . . . right . . ."), a crowd cheers and, at 4:27, the strings subsequently swell up against the horns. It keeps building, building, building . . .. Then, at the five-minute mark, all hell breaks loose.
The roar of a crowd takes over everything, sounding as if a government building - a palace, a prison, Parliament - is being stormed. A baby's cry is turned on; the pace of the car horns quickens as people yell and march . . . and that's when everything really goes off the rails. The cracking of plaster (at 5:43) is followed by the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and buildings collapsing, while the choirs keep singing. As the dust settles, John contemplates the aftermath in terms of reality ("industrial output . . . financial imbalance . . .") and, as the classical piano piece "Revolution 9" began on quietly returns, lost innocence ("the Watusi . . . the Twist . . ."), while George pines for a greater ideal ("Eldorado"). And then . . . "Take this brother, may it serve you well!"
"This" is a melody of piano notes that suddenly falls apart into static before collapsing completely with a fist on the keys, leaving a shell-shocked Yoko Ono to pick up the pieces. From her disjointed prose, a sense of defeat and disillusionment emerges, as operatic voices leap out from the catacombs behind her. An initially spirited piano riff turns mournful and fades into Yoko's final thought . . . "If . . . you become naked."
"Revolution 9" is, as John realized after the track was put together, anti-revolution. The structure of the piece and the strategic mixing in and mixing out of the sound effects paint a picture of the destruction that John had said in the single release version of "Revolution" he clearly wanted out of, a sonic equivalent of Guernica, Pablo Picasso's mural responding to the Spanish Civil War (which the bad guys won). It's an anti-war message, albeit a pretentious and self-indulgent one. As you can gather, I have a love-hate obsession with this track. And while many other Beatles fans simply hate it, many find it fascinating, no doubt in a morbid way, trying to explain and interpret it. And then there were those who heard it and thought that John Lennon had gone completely off his rocker (my mother heard a bit of "Revolution 9" and dismissed it as "sick John Lennon crap"). One of those people was George Martin, who was no fan of sound collages and found them non-constructive. Geoff Emerick confessed to finding it interesting, although, he added, "it seemed as though it was as much Yoko's as it was John's. Certainly it wasn't Beatles music." But then there was also Beatles author David Quantick, who called the track "one of the most exciting recordings ever made . . . the most radical and innovative track ever to bring a rock record to its climax." Really.
Incidentally, "Revolution 9" did not get its title from the fact that it fades out part of the way through the ninth minute, nor did it get its title from the "number nine" loop. EMI studio documentation shows that John was calling this piece "Revolution 9" from the moment he started gathering sound effects, before he stumbled on the "number nine" voice, and before he could have known the timing of the final master. Nine simply happened to be John's lucky number. He was born on the ninth of October, he first lived at 9 Newcastle Road in Liverpool, Brian Epstein first saw the Beatles perform at the Cavern in the ninth of November, which used to be the ninth month (hence its name), and the Beatles made their debut on Ed Sullivan's variety show on the ninth of February. And in 1974, the same year John's solo song "#9 Dream" peaked on the Billboard singles chart at number nine, his greatest nemesis, President Richard Nixon, who tried to have John thrown out of the United States, resigned his office on the ninth of August. Also, John noted, nine is the highest single-digit number. After that, it's back to zero.
Paul McCartney's reaction to "Revolution 9" is worth noting. When Martin insisted that the track be cut from the final album, Paul sided with him. But Paul was by no means opposed to sound collages. He'd made a few himself, under the influence of German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. He collaborated with John on a sound collage for the Carnival of Light show in London in 1967 at Abbey Road during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, much to the consternation of George Martin. Martin couldn't remember that session twenty years later (and told Beatles author Mark Lewisohn that he didn't care to!), and he'd reacted to the Carnival of Light session the way a father might react to a twelve-year-old son's silly drawings and doodles on scrap paper. Many Beatles fans suspect that Paul didn't want "Revolution 9" on the White Album because he didn't want John to take the credit for being the group's chief innovator with sound collages, while others thought that it was because he didn't think John's piece was good enough. More likely, it was because of what Emerick said - it wasn't Beatles music. Paul's only objection might simply have been, and probably was, based on the opinion that such avant-garde excursions didn't belong on a Beatles record. Besides, John and Yoko put out their own sound-collage record at the time of the White Album's release - Two Virgins, the album with the controversial cover of John and Yoko in the nude. But, of course, putting such a piece of musique concrète on a Beatles record would ensure that Beatles fans would hear a sample of the genre at least once, whereas Two Virgins was destined not to be a big seller (though it did chart higher than some of Ringo Starr's solo albums would).
Beatles author Dave Rybaczewski notes the importance of the placement of "Revolution 9" as the penultimate track of the White Album, a position "meant to leave the listener awestruck and in a jaw-dropped condition." That it did. And once fans got over their initial shock, those who had the stamina to hear it again (and again and again, just like the voice uttering "number nine" again and again) did so with the intention of seeking out new sounds they hadn't heard before. Sometimes this meant playing "Revolution 9" backwards; other times it meant hearing it with one of the speakers turned off (most people bought the White Album in stereo). Or cranking the volume up full blast, which probably blew a few speakers. Even today, fifty years later, listeners can still find new sound effects they hadn't heard before. I'm still trying to find that loop of George Martin instructing Geoff Emerick to "put the red light on." And there ain't no rule for the company freaks. (I'm still trying to find that quote in the mix, too.) And after all of this radical avant-garde stuff, listeners would inevitably need something soothing to listen to afterwards to close the album . . . something more conventional, more conservative, with, say, a Mantovani-style arrangement. Hmm, now what sort of song could fit the bill? A lullaby, maybe? ;-)
"Revolution 9" fades out with a crowd of spectators at an American football game exhorting the home team to intercept the visiting team's attempt at a field goal ("Block that kick!"). The symbolism is obvious. The people have resumed their silly games. The revolution is over. It failed.
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