The unspoken rule of any good rock and roll song comes from the roar of the guitars. Even though many great rock legends have come to the forefront without a six-string across their back, the defining characteristic of all their tunes comes from either session musicians or the unsung guitar heroes giving little bits of ear candy to the listener at every turn. Although The Beatles were known as one of the greatest innovators in rock history, even they knew when to take the guitars out of the equation.
When first cutting their teeth in Hamburg and Liverpool, the thought of any Beatles number being played without a guitar felt inconceivable. From the moment that he saw acts like Chuck Berry, John Lennon didn’t want to do anything else except play music with a guitar slung low around his waist, doing his best impression of Berry, Elvis Presley, or Roy Orbison depending on which song the band were playing.
As they ventured into the studio, the band started to expand their instrumental palette through the help of producer George Martin. Being indebted to classical music and having worked with comedy acts, Martin would become a central figure in the group’s career, scoring arrangements for added instrumentation that would complement the rest of the band. Although guitars still dominated the first half of the group’s career, things began to take a turn when working on tracks on Rubber Soul.
For the first time, the band had turned their studio into an instrument, using different sonic textures to suit their songs. While they had still been playing out on the road, no one seemed to care that songs like ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘In My Life’ couldn’t be played live, instead focusing on expanding their craft the satisfying the crowds that wanted nothing more than to scream at them whenever they played.
Looking to follow their last album up with an equally ambitious undertaking, Revolver was the next phase of the group’s musical expansion. Featuring a balanced approach to songwriting, every track on the record felt like a new creative endeavour, from the psychedelic stylings of Lennon’s ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ to the searing funk bravado of George Harrison’s ‘Taxman’. From the second on the record onward, The Beatles managed to get their point across without any guitar accompaniment.
While Paul McCartney had been known to use various pianos and orchestral arrangements for his ballads, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was the first song the group made not to feature any of them playing instruments. Despite McCartney conceiving the melody on guitar, all of the instrumentation on the album was done by studio string players conducted by Martin.
Telling the tale of a lonely old woman who lives to pick up the rice in a church, the only Beatles that show up for work are Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, with Ringo Starr left absent due to no drums needed for the arrangement. While the song would become a landmark track in the band’s history, it was just one of many reinventions that Revolver had in store.
Even though tracks like ‘Love You To’ may have featured guitar, it was about deliberately misconstruing the traditional guitar roles, using different tape loops or letting the piano do the heavy lifting on tracks like ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘For No One’. While The Beatles were still on the cutting edge of what rock would become, their future didn’t need to cater to traditional rock instrumentation anymore.
