In the studio
On 30 May 1968 The Beatles recorded ‘Revolution 1’, during the first session for the White Album.Take 18 became the basis for ‘Revolution 9’. The final six minutes of the recording formed an extended jam, which was cut from ‘Revolution 1’ and used as the starting point of ‘Revolution 9’.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono then assembled a range of effects and tape loops to add to the recording, and added a range of new sounds.
Work on ‘Revolution 9’, as a separate entity, began on 6 June, when Lennon prepared 12 effects tapes. Some of these were of his own making; others were taken from the Abbey Road archives. According to Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, five were marked ‘Various’; the others were titled ‘Vicars Poems’, ‘Queen’s Mess’, ‘Come Dancing Combo’, ‘Organ Last Will Test’, ‘Neville Club’, ‘Theatre Outing’ and ‘Applause/TV Jingle’. Not all were used on ‘Revolution 9’.
On 10 June Lennon spent three hours assembling a further three tapes of sound effects. The following day, while Paul McCartney was in Abbey Road’s Studio Two recording ‘Blackbird’, Lennon was in Studio Three compiling more effects.
The most significant day’s recording for ‘Revolution 9’ was 20 June 1968, in a session beginning at 7pm and ending on the following morning at 3.30am. Using Studios One, Two and Three, Lennon oversaw the live mix of his sound collage, with numerous tape loops being played across a number of Abbey Road’s tape machines.
We were cutting up classical music and making different-size loops, and then I got and engineer tape on which some test engineer was saying, ‘Number nine, number nine, number nine’. All those different bits of sound and noises are all compiled. There were about ten machines with people holding pencils on the loops – some only inches long and some a yard long. I fed them all in and mixed them live.
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
Lennon played a key role on the day, fading the various elements in and out in the control room. The following elements can be identified from the many that featured on the four-track master tape:
- George Martin saying ‘Geoff, put the red light on’, looped with heavy echo
- A choir accompanied by backwards violins
- Extracts from a symphony orchestral performance, edited and rearranged, and played backwards
- A repeated sample from the orchestral overdub for ‘A Day In The Life’, recorded on 10 February 1967
- A Mellotron, performed by Lennon and played backwards
- Various extracts from symphony and operatic recordings
- The final chord from Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony
- High pitched humming by Yoko Ono
- Lennon and George Harrison whispering six times the phrase ‘There ain’t no rule for the company freaks’
Most memorable, however, is the recurring ‘Number nine’ announcement, culled from examination tapes made for the Royal Academy of Music, formerly stored at Abbey Road. The phrase appears sporadically throughout the track, faded in and out as a constant thread running through an otherwise chaotic creation.
Also on 20 June, Lennon, Ono and Harrison recorded a series of seemingly random statements. These included Ono’s ‘You become naked’; Lennon’s ‘Industrial output, financial imbalance, the Watusi, the Twist’; Harrison’s mention of Eldorado; and Lennon’s ‘Take this brother, may it serve you well’.
The track used Abbey Road’s STEED – single tape echo and echo delay – reverb system. During the live mix the delay ran out, and at 5’11” the sound of the tape being rewound can be heard.
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.
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
A stereo mix of the song was made on 21 June, after a final set of sound effects were added by Lennon and Harrison. The following day the track was completed, with an edit taking its running time down from 9’05” to 8’12”.
When released on the White Album, ‘Revolution 9’ was preceded by two further recordings. The first of these was an ad-libbed Paul McCartney song commonly known as ‘Can You Take Me Back?’, taped during the 16 September 1968 session for ‘I Will’. The 28-second snippet was edited from the full 2’21” version.
The second recording, from an unknown session, featured Apple’s office manager Alistair Taylor apologising to George Martin for forgetting to bring him a bottle of red wine.
Taylor: …bottle of claret for you if I’d realised. I’d forgotten all about it George. I’m sorry.
Martin: Well, do next time.
Taylor: Will you forgive me?
Martin: Mmm, yes.
Taylor: Cheeky bitch.
These two snippets were added during a 24-hour session which spanned 16 and 17 October, in which The Beatles prepared the final running order, crossfades and edits for the White Album.
Sigh…where were YOU in 1968? I was 17. MLK & RFK were assassinated, there were race riots, cities burned, Anti-Vietnam demonstrations, all over Europe, there were student demonstrations. When MLK was killed, there were army tanks (ARMY TANKS!) in the field behind our house. There was a police riot in Chicago. Read up on 1968. There is actually a series called “1968” on cable.
First time I heard R #9, it made perfect sense to me. In retrospect, it still does. It is 1968.
It is the aural version of Guernica by Picasso.
@saxonmothersson, that’s a perfect description.
Why sigh? Lennon stated his core idea behind the song: loops. Also, the song was created in the first half of ‘68. Furthermore, the Beatles were prevalent in the US, but are a British band. I just think it’s odd to act like your take on a song is fact when the artist who created it has spoken about it and had a life and consciousnesses of their own. If that is what you take from the song I love it, but do not ignorantly put words in the mouth of the writer.
Guernica? Yes, Guernica! Spot on. Beautifully ugly like Hendrix’ Star Spangled Banner.
I said almost the exact description on another Beatles blog site. 1968 to a tee
One part of the song sounds like blood squeezed out ,another hint to Paul’s death.In other
ways,it’s my favorite song.
Actually, it hints at something even more sinister than the since-debunked Paul is Death myth. If you read Joseph Niezgoda’s The Lennon Prophecy, there are segments on this track that point to Lennon’s future assassination. He points out that you can hear John making odd choking / gurgling sounds, not unlike a man gasping for breath or who has been grievously hurt. There are sounds like gunshots heard at one point, as well as verbal references to ‘the night watchmen being unaware of his presence in the building’. ‘… between the shoulder blades’, and ‘on the third night… unfortunately.’
I love “Revolution 9”, and so do my friends. We never skip over it. It’s a masterpiece, and to be honest, it’s probably the most replayed track from the White Album for me at this point. There’s not another piece of avant-grade musique concrete I can think of that’s sequenced like it. It’s sequenced like a pop song, and it’s an incredible sound painting of the human collective unconscious filtered through a dreamscape.
It’s an art piece protesting against war, poverty, and injustice. I don’t believe its achievements have yet been fully recognized. It opens up a lot of possibilities in merging sound with music, creating an audio film without the need for visuals. John Lennon was onto something huge, but because of how abrasive and experimental it was, not to mention how bad his Unfinished Music albums were (I can admit to that), the public never gave him a chance.
Elliot, it hate to disagree with you, but you’re giving this “song” much more credit than it deserves. A sound collage doesn’t mean that it’s worthy or significant enough to be on a Beatles album. None of the other Beatles wanted this on the album.
I really do think the song is a piece of garbage. Overly influenced by Yoko OhNo. Paul at least had the intelligence to say that his version of this avant garde crap was unsuitable for release. john should have had that same sense.
Revolution 9 is an artist’s rendering of his/her creativity. Not everyone is going to get it. It takes tremendous courage to put someone’s art out for display where the artist knows they’re going to be criticized harshly over it. In Lennon’s case, he is considered by some to be equal to a Picasso or Monet in terms of artistic genius. I for one put on my headphones and listened to it over and over and it provided me insight, but not complete understanding, to the artist’s mind. A truly thoughtout piece by Lennon.
I’m with you until the last line.
I love that it’s not totally thought out.
It’s what he was feeling.
Produced viscerally to reflect the chaos of the times.
Whether this song or I Want You (She’s So Heavy), John was finding ways to plug into his Central Nervous System and let us wire into it with him.
Sometimes it’s grating. Sometimes it’s self-indulgent. But it’s never afraid and often opens up a perspective we would otherwise not experience. A pop star not afraid to produce something unpopular. This peaked with Plastic Ono Band, but John couldn’t completely pop. To me, that’s why his solo career is so uneven. Though the best of it is original and genius.
To this day, Paul is trying to get Carnival of Light released.
The White Album’s greatness would be greatly diminished without it. Whenever that stupid discussion comes up about making it a single album . I can’t go anywhere near it because Revolution 9 has to be included. It may be nearly unlistenable but it gets an “A+” for audacity on the most audacious lp ever recorded by a mainstream artist.
“Revolution 9” has always been a controversial piece in The Beatles’ canon work and I myself have always been ambivalent about it being included on The White Album.
Mark Lewisohn did state that “Revolution 9” contained backwards mellotron, but I’m not sure which section of R9 he was referring to – if he was referring to the flutey sounds after the first “Number 9” voice motif, it was actually a reversed tape loop of Schumann’s “Symphonic Etudes for Piano No. 1, Op. 13”, as played by Dame Myra Hess on the piano. I have listened to it in reverse and it was actually a backwards piano, not a mellotron.
Had The Beatles ever returned to live performances and became a touring act again, they would never have realistically been able to perform “Revolution 9” onstage.
“Revolution 9” is like “She Loves You”—both were borne of boredom. How many times can you write, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? How about, “SHE wants to hold your hand?” But, of course, this satisfaction too is fleeting. There is a sort of freedom in drifting from satisfaction to satisfaction—like a rider allowing the horse to wander as it will. But unless you are literally a horse this kind of satisfaction is also a form of despair diagnosed by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or (published in 1843).
Inauthentic and shallow despair is the anxiety we feel when we are uncertain where to find our next satisfaction—can I write another #1 hit song? Despair becomes authentic and deep when you “hover above yourself, and what you see down below you is a multiplicity of moods and conditions that you make use of in order to find interesting contacts with life.” Instead of endlessly looking for that next hit song, the songwriter recognizes themself as a persisting chooser existing separately from the choices made.
This is a new despair: scratch satisfies itch but what can possibly satisfy the Self that hovers. No choice, or finite string of choices, can fully express the Self that hovers above those choices. Can your song express the deep fact that the chooser has greater value than the choices made? What if the choices made are essentially random? The result would be an unsatisfying song that confronts us undeniably with the pure hovering Self in whom the freedom of choice is more valuable than any particular choice made. The result would be a revolution of the mind. The result would be “Revolution 9.”
Who’s voice is it saying the repetitive #9, #9?
Is it George Martin? Because it doesn’t sound like any of the Beatles voices. And although Revolution number nine may not be popular or liked very much, it’s still a brilliant Beatle compilation. To me, it’s similar to the middle and ending of A Day In The Life..
It doesn’t say who it was. The tape was sourced from an audio exam for the Royal Academy of Music and Stuart Eltham revealed that those tapes no longer exist.
No-one has mentioned George Harrison in all this. Have you listened to “Dream Scene” from Wonderwall Music? Mixed in February 1968. The current Wikipedia entry makes reference to a couple of quotes crediting Harrison with instigating Revolution 9. I’d also heard/read that Harrison instigated his own sound experiments, wanting the Beatle recordings to sound more unique by introducing new instruments. Honestly, if you’d listen to the earlier albums, you’d know they didn’t need Yoko to lead them into territory like this. Definitely a co-conspirator, though! The three of them must have had a ball.
I also suggest seeking out an article called “Playing God” by Todd Burns for Stylus magazine. I’ve followed his lead and much prefer my own versions of some of their albums.
I’m from the school that believes that all art should tell a story; it should start in one place and end up in another. It shouldn’t just be a bunch of random s**t. That said I do find the track entertaining once in a while.
My partner and I were couple #9 in a 30-hour charity dance marathon back in the 1980s. It included the chance for each couple to do a dance to whatever song they chose. At my insistence, we chose Revolution #9. My partner had never heard of it before, but she reluctantly went along. She was actually a very good dancer, and though she didn’t admit it, during our rehearsals I think she was getting into it. When the time for the dance contest came nobody, including the dj, could believe we’d chosen Revolution #9. It was fantastic. We did about the first three minutes of the song, prancing around as if we were mad, holding huge styrofoam 9s in the air. When it reached “They are standing still” we stopped in our tracks. I think we came in third place, but everyone thought we should have won.
I saw a documentary on graffiti many years ago on PBS. It showed the truly extraordinary artwork done by people in New York on the subway cars. It then showed two troglodytes. I mean these two talentless buffoons were truly dumber than dirt. What they did was go around the city defacing the artwork left by graffiti artists. They would simply spray paint black paint on the art, in hopes of totally striking it from view. They lacked talent, class and intelligence. They simply struck out at something beautiful: something that was beyond them, and destroyed it (out of anger, jealousy, envy? who knows). This is how I view yoko ono. She never accomplished a thing in her life. She is totally devoid of talent. Before she met John Lennon, she would hang outside his house like a deranged groupie. This noise (revolution 9) exemplifies what she is and what she does.
An interesting take on it, but keep in mind that Yoko was an up-and-coming artist (in more than one media) in the mid-sixties. I actually own a book published c. 1966 about popular ‘bohemian’ artists of that era, and Yoko is mentioned prominently – but without any connection to Lennon or the Beatles. (That ‘connection’ helped to make her more famous, obviously). Yes, Yoko did seek out the Beatles (Paul first, but he ended up passing on having anything to do with her), but she was by no means an ‘airhead groupie’ with nothing else going on.
This is why you don’t allow Yoko anywhere near a studio.Its tolerable for a minute but torture for 8minutes.
I find it telling how much of this comes back to focussing on Yoko Ono. I think that says a lot about the level of delusion (I call it Beatle Derangement Syndrome) some people still cling on to. Plus of course, the nasty racist and sexist information that goes into making those comments, but that’s by the bye. Of course, R9 is a different experience for those who lived through the culture it portrays than it is for those bandwagoneers who hiver around here thinking saying silly things loudly is some kind of proof of devotion. The first comment said it best – if you didn’t live through what went down in ’68, then you don’t know jack about this song. The white album is s machine greater than the sum of its part and R9 is one of the very greatest and most enduring parts of it. Ask yourself this – would it still be “The White Album” if you took Cry Baby Cay off it? of course it would. But it wouldn’t be the same at all if you took R9 off it.