While the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album has reaped reams of critical acclaim as a milestone in the group’s recording career, the album that preceded it, Revolver, for many, is deemed the watermark recording in their history. It’s a trailblazing album that changed everything marking a pivotal moment when The Beatles’ sound transformed from black and white into vibrant wide-screen technicolor. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were peaking as songwriters during this time — “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Eleanor Rigby” for starters — and George Harrison truly blossomed as a songwriter “in his own write” with “Taxman,” “I Want To Tell You” and “Love You To.” As latter day Beatle albums, Sgt. Pepper, The White Album, Let It Be and Abbey Road, have been given the super deluxe-edition treatment, thanks to radical de-mixing technology spearheaded by Emile de la Rey at Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films Productions Ltd., the band’s spectacular 1966 long player Revolver is the next set replete with a new stereo mix and revelatory outtakes of most of the songs on the record. Goldmine spoke with Klaus Voormann who did the groundbreaking artwork and design for the lowdown.
GOLDMINE: It’s late June 1966, and the phone rings. Who is it?
John called me and said, “It’s John,” and at first I was thinking, “John who?” I didn’t know who it was. Well, it’s John Lennon ,and he said, “Do you have an idea for our next album cover? We don’t know what we want on there, so if you have any album. At first, my impressions of the music they played me was that it was just incredible. It was just really hard to explain. It was so far ahead of whatever any pop group had done before. This was going into Stockhausen and other kinds of avant-garde music, and suddenly you had the Beatle fans from the early days and now you had this new music. I didn’t know if they’re going to accept it or not. It was really a big step into the future.
