Today marks the 56th anniversary of the launch of Stir. The Beatles album so modern, complex and psychedelic that it is always back. Not only because Apple, its label, is rumored to be planning a deluxe release and remixed sometime in 2022 (like the reissues that started in 2017 with Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ), but because the gunpowder of their songs remains intact.
Year 1966. The Beatlemania it is a noise that begins to deafen the fab four, the four most creative musicians in the world. The tours are endless and fame, so tango, is pure fiction: it prevents them from going out on the street or even reaching the London TV studios to play live (and thus the idea of making recordings or “promos” was born to avoid moving : the video clip).
They all want to be friends with John, Paul, George and Ringo. and the only thing “greater than Jesus Christ” —Lennon’s phrase that led to the burning of his records in the US— is that media harassment that has nothing rock or swing about it. The Beatles seem to shout: “Help, I need someone”
That something or someone came in revelation form. of revolt The Beatles understood that in addition to being “the best friends in the world” (something they repeat in the documentary Anthologyas if the post-beatle time had broken that pact), they were four different individuals.
The Beatles before Stir
George Harrison was steeped in the music and spirituality of Ravi Shankar; McCartney, discovered contemporary musicrubbed shoulders with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and screened his experimental films with Andy Warhol. In Lennon, LSD transformed his compositional experience. And Ringo…was still the kind and perfect drummer of his.
Stir it shot itself. It was the return of the revolt, the successful shot of all his creative faculties of the Beatles. With their seventh album, the Beatles, aliens on earth, gods of the 20th century, did not sit down to rest, but they composed a new testament. The recording studio ceased to be a tool to become a means to project the phonogram: almost all topics Stir were born in abbey roadcomposed in “real time” and not in pre-rehearsals or pre-production.
And the Beatles riot and rebel too. They begin to demand more and more time from the recording studios that were still governed by English ballast customs so post-war. (at Abbey Road the orderlies wore brown overalls; the technicians wore white and the sound engineers, jackets and ties). They begin to ask George Martin for more experimentation, games with electronics, loops, Indian instruments and increasingly complex harmonies.
the Beatles Yesterday and today and the cover that was not
A curious story surrounding this album is that just two months before its release in England, an official album was released in the US that already contained three songs by Stir. Capitol, the American label of The Beatles, until then had a market strategy in which it “reordered” and recompiled for the American public (the word is valid because these were the albums that arrived in Argentina) the original content of previous albums . Today they are known as “The US Albums”.
But the Beatles Yesterday and Today it was a unique case. In its original cover, known as the “butcher cover”, the four Beatles appeared laughing, with white aprons, with headless dolls and pieces of meat. The cover to this day still looks quite disturbing and certainly cool. It was censored by the American record company and replaced by a much more nondescript cover in which they posed next to a trunk. Judging by their long faces and baggy mob suits, the Liverpool four would have preferred the former.
the cap of Stir was designed by Klaus Voorman. A friend of the Beatles since their formative years in Hamburg, he and Astrid Kirchherr were the fathers of the Liverpool Four’s look, including their famous haircut. The cover is an extraordinary collage of personal drawings and photos that each beatle was asked to do. Black and white contrasts with the multicolored and psychedelic hegemony of that time. In an interview with the newspaper Guardian explained how he made this visual pop masterpiece: on a small kitchen table and in the attic of his house. They paid him 50 English pounds.
how it was recorded Stir
heard today, Stir it doesn’t start with Harrison’s sharp “Taxman.” No. It starts earlier, with its “One, two, three, four; one two…” between toces and tapes passed backwards. Those first seconds were recorded separately and there Lennon’s voice quotes the big bang beatle: the initial count in “I saw her standing there”first song of the first album, please please me. But it is no longer about the account to emulate the feeling of “live”, nor are the typical humorous scouse (Liverpool dialect) by Lennon. What did they mean or do?
Here, like in “BreathlessGodard’s —that interrupts the flow of the story with cuts and axis jumps—, there is self-awareness. A beatle self-awareness that tells us: “look, this is being recorded now”. Stir it would be to rock, what the Nouvelle Vague is to the cinema: freedom, dating, melomania, studio room assembly, music practice and theory. Music as personal self-knowledge.
In a span of ten weeks of recording, each song pushed boundaries. In “Eleanor Rigby” the double string quartet was influenced by the soundtrack of “Psycho”.. And it was sound engineer Geoff Emmerick, not George Martin, who found that sound. Position the microphones as close to the instruments (defying the strict regulatory distances of the studios) it cost him a challenge from his superiors at EMI. But that’s how that biting cello sound was born. The sound, forever, of all the lonely people.
As reported, during the recording of “Yellow submarine” the cloud of marijuana invaded the entire studio while Mick Jagger and Brian Jones fluttered around as guests. Let there be tried to put a condom on the microphone and submerge it to achieve a hydro effect while Lennon made bubbles in a glass, helps to deduce the delirious spirit of the recording. During rehearsals they treated the song as a children’s song… and it reached number 1 on the radio.
tomorrow never knowstoday
Disconnect your mind, relax and let yourself gois heard in the song that is the beginning of the end: “Tomorrow never knows”. The one that closes the album and its highest spiritual frequency. “Dalai Lennon” asked for his voice to sound “like hundreds of Tibetan monks singing at the same time” and in the words of Ian MacDonald, author of Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties”, the song is a “pure sound event”. Decades ahead of its time, it became electronic music’s portable dogma ever since The Chemical brothers reinvented it and renamed it “Setting sun”. The album also finished demonstrating, with “Love you to” and “I want to tell you”, that Harrison was an undeniable songwriter.
On August 5, 1966 it went on sale Stir. Its title alludes to both a drum gun and a rotating vinyl deck (to revolve). William Cabrera Infanteto deactivate one of the most infamous phrases of Nazism (“when I hear the word culture, I draw my revolver”) once said, with typical wit, “When I hear the word revolver, I draw my culture”. You have to draw, again and again, on vinyl, CD or streaming, Stir. It is a detonated disc of musical culture. A sound arsenal that continues, 56 years later, charged with the future.
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The Beatles: 56 years after Revolver, the album of revolt | It was released on August 5, 1966