‘Love You To’: The Beatles song that threatens to overthrow ‘Revolver’
When The Beatles made Revolver, they didn’t need to worry about translating their songs live anymore. They would soon leave the touring life behind altogether, so the studio became their glorified workshop to mess around with whatever sounds they wanted and craft masterpieces in no time at all. Whereas Rubber Soul was their first step towards something creative, Revolver was the quantum leap, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t hit a few snags along the way like ‘Love You To’.
If you want to understand why ‘Love You To’ doesn’t work in the context of the record, it’s better to look at where George Harrison was in his songwriting journey. He had spent the last few years living in the shadow of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and by the time he started working on Revolver, some of the greatest tracks he would ever write were starting to come together, like ‘Taxman’.
These tunes were fantastic, but not all of them were necessarily rock. After toying around with a sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘Love You To’ was Harrison’s first straight-ahead foray into Indian music, complete with tablas, sitars, and staying on just one chord throughout most of the song to give a drone-like feeling to the tune.
The Beatles weren’t even averse to this kind of change, either. Lennon would throw in his most psychedelic track, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, as the closer, and while McCartney stuck with mostly ballads like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘For No One’, the tape loops he brought to the band gave them avant-garde credibility they didn’t have yet.
