TL;DR:
- John Lennon said a track from The Beatles’ The White Album has random lyrics that he never wrote down.
- He said George Harrison and Yoko Ono helped him put the track together in the studio.
- He compared creating the song to throwing a pair of dice or using the I Ching to predict the future.
John Lennon said a song from The Beatles’ The White Album has “random talking” for lyrics. In addition, it includes snippets of music from Ludwig van Beethoven. Notably, the random qualities of the song are an asset.
A track from The Beatles’ ‘The White Album’ isn’t a song in the traditional sense
The book Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon includes an interview from 1968. In it, John discussed “Revolution 9” from The White Album. “Revolution 9 “isn’t a song in the traditional sense — it’s more of a collage of different sounds.
“You know, but all the words on ‘Revolution 9’ were just random talking,” he said. “There was nothing written down, bits of film script, this and that. I think it was just George, Yoko, and I. I did a lot of it with loops and chopped-up old Beethoven that was lying around EMI or any bits and pieces, stuck them together.”
John Lennon’s teatime conversations with George Harrison appear on ‘The White Album’
John gave fans more insight into the composition of “Revolution 9.” “And we did songs sort of like priming the canvas … tracks that I didn’t know if they were going to be for [‘Revolution 9’] or not,” he said. “Just where we had the tape on, a bit of echo on, and a cup of tea or something, and George and I just talked for about 20 minutes.”
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John discussed what became part of the finished song. “Just anything,” he recalled. “I mean, we’ve been doing it for years on tape around the world. Just, ‘And so, brother, we’d like to say to you, welcome.’ Y’know just any rambling.” He compared creating the song to throwing a pair of dice or using the I Ching to predict the future.
Why the unpredictability of The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ makes it a masterpiece
Randomness isn’t a bad musical quality. The bizarre lyrics of “Revolution 9” make it a disorienting experience somewhere between a David Lynch movie and a bad LSD trip. That’s boundary-pushing to which every artist should aspire. By making a song as strange as “Revolution 9,” The Beatles were opening the door for a lot of avant-garde music that came after them, as well as John’s later experiments, like Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.
In addition, the title of “Revolution 9” might be the key to understanding it. The discordant sounds, terrifying screeches, and baby cries could be understood as a symbolic representation of a revolution. Revolutions are often scary and chaotic, and “Revolution 9” captures that better than most history books.
“Revolution 9” has random lyrics but it seems there was a method to the madness.
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