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Revolution 9
"Revolution 9" is a sound collage from the Beatles' 1968 self-titled double album (also known as the "White Album"). The composition, credited to Lennon–McCartney, was created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Yoko Ono and George Harrison. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. The composition was influenced by the avant-garde style of Ono as well as the musique concrète works of composers such as Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The recording began as an extended ending to the album version of Lennon's song "Revolution". Lennon, Harrison and Ono then combined the unused coda with numerous overdubbed vocals, speech, sound effects, and short tape loops of speech and musical performances, some of which were reversed. These were further manipulated with echo, distortion, stereo panning, and fading. At eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, it is the longest track that the Beatles officially released while together as a band.
"Revolution 9" was not the first venture by the Beatles into experimental recordings. The group had introduced avant-garde styling in their 1966 song "Tomorrow Never Knows" and, in January 1967, they recorded an unreleased piece called "Carnival of Light". McCartney said the work was inspired by composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. Stockhausen was also a favourite of Lennon, and was one of the people included on the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Music critic Ian MacDonald wrote that "Revolution 9" may have been influenced by Stockhausen's Hymnen in particular.
Another influence on Lennon was his relationship with Yoko Ono. Lennon and Ono had recently recorded their own avant-garde album, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. Lennon said: "Once I heard her stuff – not just the screeching and howling but her sort of word pieces and talking and breathing and all this strange stuff ... I got intrigued, so I wanted to do one." Ono attended the recording sessions and, according to Lennon, helped him select which tape loops to use.
In a 1992 interview for Musician magazine, George Harrison said that it was he and Ringo Starr who selected the sounds, sourced from EMI's tape library, including the "Number nine, number nine" dialogue. Authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter write that the content of Harrison's lesser-known experimental piece "Dream Scene", recorded between November 1967 and February 1968 for his Wonderwall Music album, suggests that Harrison had a greater influence on "Revolution 9" than has been acknowledged. In his book about the Beatles' White Album, titled Revolution, David Quantick lists Lennon, Ono and Harrison as the "actual writers", despite the Lennon–McCartney composer's credit. In the 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Ono says that "George, John and I made ['Revolution 9']" and that Harrison "sort of instigated it" and pushed them to create the piece.
"Revolution 9" originated on 30 May 1968 during the first recording session for Lennon's composition "Revolution". Take 20 of that song lasted more than ten minutes and was given additional overdubs over the next two sessions. Mark Lewisohn describes the last six minutes as "pure chaos ... with discordant instrumental jamming, feedback, John repeatedly screaming 'RIGHT' and then, simply, repeatedly screaming ... with Yoko talking and saying such off-the-wall phrases as 'you become naked', and with the overlaying of miscellaneous, home-made sound effects tapes."
Lennon soon decided to make the first part of the recording into a conventional Beatles song, "Revolution 1", and to use the last six minutes as the basis for a separate track, "Revolution 9". He began preparing additional sound effects and tape loops: some newly recorded in the studio, at home and from the studio archives. The work culminated on 20 June, with Lennon performing a live mix from tape loops running on machines in all three studios at EMI Studios, but during the live mix, the STEED system ran out and the sound of the tape machine rewinding can be heard at the 5:11 mark and additional prose was overdubbed by Lennon and Harrison.
More overdubs were added on 21 June followed by final mixing in stereo. The stereo master was completed on 25 June when it was shortened by 53 seconds. Although other songs on the album were separately remixed for the mono version, the complexity of "Revolution 9" necessitated making the mono mix a direct reduction of the final stereo master. McCartney had been out of the country when "Revolution 9" was assembled and mixed; he was unimpressed when he first heard the finished track, and later tried to persuade Lennon to drop his insistence that it be included on the album. Lennon said that the final editing was done by himself and Ono alone.
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Revolution 9
"Revolution 9" is a sound collage from the Beatles' 1968 self-titled double album (also known as the "White Album"). The composition, credited to Lennon–McCartney, was created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Yoko Ono and George Harrison. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. The composition was influenced by the avant-garde style of Ono as well as the musique concrète works of composers such as Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The recording began as an extended ending to the album version of Lennon's song "Revolution". Lennon, Harrison and Ono then combined the unused coda with numerous overdubbed vocals, speech, sound effects, and short tape loops of speech and musical performances, some of which were reversed. These were further manipulated with echo, distortion, stereo panning, and fading. At eight minutes and twenty-two seconds, it is the longest track that the Beatles officially released while together as a band.
"Revolution 9" was not the first venture by the Beatles into experimental recordings. The group had introduced avant-garde styling in their 1966 song "Tomorrow Never Knows" and, in January 1967, they recorded an unreleased piece called "Carnival of Light". McCartney said the work was inspired by composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. Stockhausen was also a favourite of Lennon, and was one of the people included on the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Music critic Ian MacDonald wrote that "Revolution 9" may have been influenced by Stockhausen's Hymnen in particular.
Another influence on Lennon was his relationship with Yoko Ono. Lennon and Ono had recently recorded their own avant-garde album, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. Lennon said: "Once I heard her stuff – not just the screeching and howling but her sort of word pieces and talking and breathing and all this strange stuff ... I got intrigued, so I wanted to do one." Ono attended the recording sessions and, according to Lennon, helped him select which tape loops to use.
In a 1992 interview for Musician magazine, George Harrison said that it was he and Ringo Starr who selected the sounds, sourced from EMI's tape library, including the "Number nine, number nine" dialogue. Authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter write that the content of Harrison's lesser-known experimental piece "Dream Scene", recorded between November 1967 and February 1968 for his Wonderwall Music album, suggests that Harrison had a greater influence on "Revolution 9" than has been acknowledged. In his book about the Beatles' White Album, titled Revolution, David Quantick lists Lennon, Ono and Harrison as the "actual writers", despite the Lennon–McCartney composer's credit. In the 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Ono says that "George, John and I made ['Revolution 9']" and that Harrison "sort of instigated it" and pushed them to create the piece.
"Revolution 9" originated on 30 May 1968 during the first recording session for Lennon's composition "Revolution". Take 20 of that song lasted more than ten minutes and was given additional overdubs over the next two sessions. Mark Lewisohn describes the last six minutes as "pure chaos ... with discordant instrumental jamming, feedback, John repeatedly screaming 'RIGHT' and then, simply, repeatedly screaming ... with Yoko talking and saying such off-the-wall phrases as 'you become naked', and with the overlaying of miscellaneous, home-made sound effects tapes."
Lennon soon decided to make the first part of the recording into a conventional Beatles song, "Revolution 1", and to use the last six minutes as the basis for a separate track, "Revolution 9". He began preparing additional sound effects and tape loops: some newly recorded in the studio, at home and from the studio archives. The work culminated on 20 June, with Lennon performing a live mix from tape loops running on machines in all three studios at EMI Studios, but during the live mix, the STEED system ran out and the sound of the tape machine rewinding can be heard at the 5:11 mark and additional prose was overdubbed by Lennon and Harrison.
More overdubs were added on 21 June followed by final mixing in stereo. The stereo master was completed on 25 June when it was shortened by 53 seconds. Although other songs on the album were separately remixed for the mono version, the complexity of "Revolution 9" necessitated making the mono mix a direct reduction of the final stereo master. McCartney had been out of the country when "Revolution 9" was assembled and mixed; he was unimpressed when he first heard the finished track, and later tried to persuade Lennon to drop his insistence that it be included on the album. Lennon said that the final editing was done by himself and Ono alone.