COLUMN: The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ finally gets the magic touch
Published 1:00 pm Friday, November 4, 2022
The Beatles made their last recording 52 years ago but the quartet continues to delight their fans in new ways, which is quite a feat considering two of them are dead.
The sheer brilliance of their music is untarnished by time.
Even with John Lennon gone since 1980, and George Harrison since 2001, the songs they made with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney have lost none of their original capacity to thrill, enchant and enrich listeners.
Including millions who, like me, weren’t yet born when the group disbanded in the spring of 1970.
Technology, which can make past achievements seem plain, or even irrelevant in their quaint simplicity, has had precisely the opposite effect on the work The Beatles produced in the latter half of their career.
(Their output is prodigious in quantity as well as unsurpassed in quality. Compared with modern pop music, when artists frequently let several years pass between albums, The Beatles were incredibly prolific. During eight years of recording they released 13 albums, including two albums each in 1963, 1964 and 1965. They also put out multiple standalone singles in each of those years.)
Since 2017, the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ most famous album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” producer Giles Martin, son of the band’s original producer, George Martin, has remixed five albums, starting with Sgt. Pepper’s.
The basic concept with remixing is to start with the original tapes — actual magnetic tapes in this case; the emergence of fully digital recording was far ahead — and use computer tools to burnish the songs so they’re as close as possible to the sounds the band actually created in London’s Abbey Road studio.
The changes Giles Martin wrought are subtle yet revelatory.
He didn’t introduce any new sounds.
Rather, he used modern production techniques to enhance what was always there on the aging tapes — for instance, making McCartney’s melodic bass lines and Starr’s inventive drum fills more prominent, or doing the same with the group’s peerless vocal harmonies.
When I first listened to the remixed Sgt. Pepper’s more than five years ago I marveled at how these songs, all of which I’ve heard many dozens of times, rang in my ears with a new potency despite their familiarity.
I wouldn’t have believed I could enjoy The Beatles’ music more than I had.
But I was wrong, and rarely so happy to be wrong.
In the ensuing years I have enjoyed the subsequent remixes of “The Beatles” (1968’s double album, better known as the White Album), “Abbey Road” from 1969 and “Let It Be” from 1970 (released after “Abbey Road” but recorded before).
Yet ever since Sgt. Pepper’s came out I have been preoccupied with one question: What about “Revolver?”
That’s the 1966 album which for many fans — including me — marks the apex of The Beatles’ recording career.
Sadly, the consensus seemed to be that “Revolver,” due to the comparatively rudimentary four-track recording techniques The Beatles and George Martin employed in 1966, was not suited to Giles Martin’s audio alchemy.
For the same reason the band’s earlier albums, including such achievements as 1965’s “Rubber Soul” and “Help!,” were likely to be poor candidates for remixing.
Then Peter Jackson got involved.
Thank goodness for hobbits and orcs and the prodigious financial resources they afforded Jackson, the film director.
He’s also an avowed Beatles aficionado.
Jackson created “Get Back,” the three-part documentary that chronicles the January 1969 recording sessions that eventually resulted in the “Let It Be” album a year later.
While working on that project during the pandemic, Jackson’s company, WingNut Films Productions, and engineer Emile de la Rey devised a process known as “demixing.”
The technology befuddles me — it involves artificial intelligence, for one thing — but I can grasp the basic concept.
In effect, the process separates each part of a recording — down to individual guitar parts and even individual drums in Ringo’s kit.
Jackson’s team employed the technology in “Get Back” to make dialogue audible.
The director also offered the proprietary process to Giles Martin, who suggested that it might make possible to remix “Revolver.”
To my eternal gratitude, it was indeed possible.
A CD of the new “Revolver” remix showed up in my mailbox on Tuesday, Nov. 1. Less than an hour after I got home from work I was listening to the songs and marveling, just as I did five years ago with Sgt. Pepper’s, at The Beatles’ inimitable ability to craft songs that, to my ears, will never sound anything but fresh.
I had, I suppose, become accustomed to hearing The Beatles’ old songs in a new light — the audible equivalent of looking through a pane of glass that’s just had its layers of dust rubbed away.
But “Revolver” was different because, until recently, I had presumed its songs would not be refreshed like those of later albums.
To reiterate, Giles Martin didn’t change the original recordings. He honed them, bringing listeners as close as possible to an experience none of us can ever have, which is to be with The Beatles in the studio.
Martin’s deft touch revealed details I had either never heard, or that were difficult to distinguish among the other sounds.
On “For No One,” Paul’s gorgeous but melancholy ballad, I hear a piano figure that I never noticed before.
There’s also a brief, recurring electric guitar riff in “She Said She Said” that I didn’t remember.
Those are just two examples. I suspect all fans will discover their own bag of riches from this kaleidoscope of sounds.
The remixed “Revolver” package includes a bonus that I appreciated far more than the usual selection of alternate takes of songs. Giles Martin also performed Jackson’s demixing magic on the classic double A-side single The Beatles released in 1966 — “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.”
That single, along with “Revolver,” would constitute a credible career for most bands.
For The Beatles it was only one year.