Dividing audiences since late 1968, John Lennon’s sound collage ‘Revolution 9’ was an exercise in musique concrète influenced heavily by Yoko Ono and the avant-garde art world.
The recording emerged from ‘Revolution 1’, the final six minutes of which formed a lengthy, mostly instrumental jam. Lennon took the recording and added a range of vocals, tape loops and sound effects, creating ‘Revolution 9′, the longest track released during The Beatles’ career.
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.
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
Although he made no direct contribution to ‘Revolution 9’, being in New York at the time, Paul McCartney had led work on a similar sound collage, the unreleased 14-minute ‘Carnival Of Light’, 18 months previously.
‘Revolution 9’ was quite similar to some stuff I’d been doing myself for fun. I didn’t think that mine was suitable for release, but John always encouraged me.
Anthology
The other Beatles and George Martin are said to have persuaded Lennon not to include ‘Revolution 9’ on the White Album, to no avail. Although McCartney had long been interested in musique concrète, particularly Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’, it is likely that he was concerned at the effect ‘Revolution 9’ would have on the group’s public perception.
I don’t know what influence ‘Revolution 9’ had on the teenybopper fans, but most of them didn’t dig it. So what am I supposed to do?
Anthology
It wasn’t only the group’s teenage fans who were confused by ‘Revolution 9’. Charles Manson found a wealth of symbolism in the track’s loops and effects, and thought that Lennon’s shouts of ‘Right!’ were, in fact, a call to ‘rise’ up in revolt.
Manson drew a parallel between ‘Revolution 9’ and the Bible’s book of Revelation. He thought The Beatles were variously four angels sent to kill a third of mankind, or four locusts mentioned in Revelation 9, which he equated with beetles.
‘Revolution 9’ was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution. All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects. One thing was an engineer’s testing voice saying, ‘This is EMI test series number nine’. I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number nine it. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I didn’t realise it: it was just so funny the voice saying, ‘number nine’; it was like a joke, bringing number nine into it all the time, that’s all it was.
Rolling Stone, 1970
‘Revolution 9’ also featured in the ‘Paul is dead’ myth, after it was discovered that the ‘number nine’ motif, when played backwards, sounded like ‘Turn me on, dead man’. A number of other elements of the recording featured in the myth, including the sound of a car crashing followed by an explosion.
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.