“You know, I’m prejudiced; I like my own you know. [Giggles].” In an interview, John Lennon expressed his preference for “Revolution #9” among other songs from The Beatles’ discography. One of the keystones of Lennon’s contribution to the group, the song displays both his commitment to pushing the limits of recording technology and his singular, albeit abstract, lyric-writing ability.
The White Album’s experimental track, which is the last tune, was The Beatles’ most sonically ambitious and ambiguous recording to date. It’s one of the starting points for a wide variety of audacious and imaginatively inspired music. Even though Ringo Starr and George Harrison contributed to the song’s conception, not every member of the Beatles thought it was great.
Paul McCartney initially disliked and misunderstood the song, which led him to want to keep it off the final version of the 1968 album. However, Lennon persevered, and in the end, the sound collage was included after the LP release.
Not only is it one of the band’s most avant-garde compositions, but it’s also one of The Beatles’ longest songs. However, Lennon acknowledged that it might have been considerably longer: “The slow version of ‘Revolution’ on the album went on and on and on, and I took the fade-out part, which is what they sometimes do with disco records now, and just layered all this stuff over it. It was the basic rhythm of the original ‘Revolution’ going on with some 20 loops we put on, things from the archives of EMI.”
Lennon playing the Mellotron backward, George Martin stating, “Geoff, put the red light on,” and Lennon and Harrison muttering the line “There ain’t no rule for the company freaks” six times were a few of those loops. The repeating “Number nine” statement, which was taken from test records that were first recorded for the Royal Academy of Music and kept at Abbey Road, is one particularly notable component. This motif appears sporadically throughout the song, gently fading in and out to provide a constant theme within the otherwise chaotic arrangement.
The song can easily be undervalued in comparison to the other tracks on The White Album when these peculiar sound conflicts are combined with Lennon’s fixation with numbers. Paul McCartney and George Martin attempted to talk John Lennon out of putting the song on the album as a result. When Lennon and the others assembled the collage, McCartney was out of the country. After Lennon presented the completed song to him upon his return to Britain, the bespectacled Beatle immediately argued that it should not only be on the album but also be a single, which sparked a furious argument between the two.
The inclusion of Yoko Ono could have been McCartney’s main concern. Macca was not in the studio, so the conceptual artist worked closely with Lennon over three days and nights to write the song. A lot of the track’s distinctive aural worlds were influenced by Ono. “I did a few mixes until I got one I liked. Yoko was there for the whole thing and she made decisions about which loops to use. It was somewhat under her influence, I suppose. Once I heard her stuff – not just the screeching and the howling but her sort of word pieces and talking and breathing and all this strange stuff, I thought, My God, I got intrigued, so I wanted to do one. I spent more time on ‘Revolution 9’ than I did on half the songs I ever wrote. It was a montage.”
Naturally, McCartney and George Martin wouldn’t achieve all they wanted in the end. The song made it into The White Album even though it was never issued as a single and is now a staple of the band’s history. Although it is simple to identify the Fab Four’s more melodic sides as the true turning points in their career, it should be remembered that the band would maintain their creative integrity during these instances of crossing the boundary into avant-garde territory.