“Revolver” marked a turning point for The Beatles.
Brash and bold, yet also filled with sensitivity, the 1966 album ushered in the band’s penchant for musical unpredictability that would continue to develop through “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (which they began recording later that year) and “The White Album” (1968).
The 14-track album has received a grand remixing by producer Giles Martin – son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin – and engineer Sam Okell.
The special edition of “Revolver” arrives Oct. 28. But among the trove of unearthed gems are demos of “Yellow Submarine” as a drastically stripped-down ballad featuring John Lennon on plaintive vocals rather than a singsong Ringo Starr and the high-hat heavy backdrop on early versions of “Got to Get You Into My Life.” Both are available Friday and can be heard here.
Martin and Starr recently spoke with USA TODAY about the history of the album and some of its surprising elements.
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The drummer maintained a reputation as the quirky, funny guy in the band, which might be why Lennon and Paul McCartney earmarked certain tunes as “Ringo songs.”
Lennon’s working version of the song – just more than a minute long – finds him quietly repeating the lyric “In the place where I was born, no one cared, no one cared” as he works in other modifications such as “and the name that I was born, no one cared” and “in the town where I come from, no one cared.”
By the time “Yellow Submarine” was presented to Starr – the band recorded it on May 26 and June 1, 1966 – it was already in “Ringo song” form.
“The boys used to write a song for me and they’d present whatever they thought would be good for me. They had this song and they decided to liven it up,” he says. “I think Paul thought of (a yellow submarine). It could have been in a green submarine, but a yellow submarine is much better. Or a deep purple submarine, that would have been like, ‘What are they talking about now?’ But, yeah, it was a Ringo song, like ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ was a Ringo song.”
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John Lennon’s demo of ‘Yellow Submarine’ was a ‘complete discovery’
Martin jokes that people think he spends all his time listening to outtakes of The Beatles. But finding Lennon’s original version of the song was one of the happy accidents that often occur when mining tapes.
“I had no idea it existed. It was a complete discovery and I was surprised,” Martin says. “One of the thrills I get when doing this is for people to experience the same thing I experience. Going through the cobwebs and finding the gold – that’s what I want to transfer to other people.”
Part 2 of the working version of “Yellow Submarine” retains Lennon’s acoustic guitar backdrop, but it also includes Lennon and McCartney discussing how to march forward with a robust folk-style version of the song, which by that point included the famously recognizable chorus.
Martin says he understood why The Beatles opted to steer the tune in a perkier direction.
“It wouldn’t have been as commercial in that original form, and you can hear them working together and pushing each other in different directions,” Martin says. “Which, of course, was their downfall in the end. But at this stage, they were delighted by the way they were creatively pushing each other.”
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In Martin’s view, 1965’s “Rubber Soul” is stocked with the Merseybeat sound, the British music genre that developed in Liverpool in the early ‘60s and blended rock, pop,…
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