In 1966, after being played an acetate of the then unreleased Beatles track Tomorrow Never Knows, Bob Dylan provided Paul McCartney with what was surely the first known review of the direction the Liverpudlian quartet would take in their career’s second act. “Oh, I get it,” Dylan said. “You don’t want to be cute anymore.”
Later that year, audiences around the world heard Tomorrow Never Knows as the final track on Revolver. This week, on August 5, this most exalted of rock ’n’ roll albums celebrates its 60th birthday.
Today, there exists a spirited camp of Beatlemaniacs who, given the slightest provocation, will make a lengthy and strenuous case that Revolver’s 14 songs constitute the Fab Four’s finest hour. (Or, to be precise, their finest 35 minutes and one second.) At the time of its release, however, the LP was the seventh to bear the Beatles’ name in the space of just three and a half years. 1966 was the first year in which the group released just one, rather than two, LPs. For many contemporaneous listeners, it was difficult to keep up.
As the author Robert Rodriguez notes in his book Revolver: How The Beatles Reimagined Rock ’N’ Roll, at that time: “There was no speculative build-up or public wondering about what the Beatles were about to unleash. Further, its issue came under a cloud: just as the band were preparing to undertake what became their final tour, a scandal prompting bannings and bonfires swept America, dwarfing their stunning achievement.”
A retreat from America
On March 4 1966, John Lennon had told Evening Standard journalist Maureen Cleave that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that: I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
In a reaction of which the country can be proud, Lennon’s remarks caused barely a ripple in Britain. Across the Atlantic, the sacrilege of calling out Christ and his acolytes ignited an uproar and the Beatle faced a reckoning when he and the band travelled to the New World for live dates that summer.