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.
So, I support the song in theory, but supporting it in practice is another matter. Because when you look at the tracks that precede ‘Love You To’, it seems to kill all of the momentum of the first side before it truly gets started. Yes, Harrison’s song is a nice freakout, but hearing it come after the psychedelic haze of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ feels like a hit of bad acid in context.
It’s also strange to see it sandwiched in between two ballads, especially with McCartney’s pillowy ‘Here There and Everywhere’ coming directly afterwards. Maybe this was their way of breaking up the flow, but The Beatles were always good at making their transitions a lot more seamless than this.
Take the very next album, Sgt Peppers, for instance. Harrison’s ‘Within You Without You’ on that album is the most outright Indian-inspired tune he had ever put out, but since it opens the second side of the record, fans at least had time to internalise what they had just heard rather than having it thrown in their face.
And considering Harrison has three songs on Revolver instead of his usual two from Rubber Soul and Help!, it may have been a case of him trying to run before he could walk songwriting-wise. Still, ‘Love You To’ feels like a good time capsule of Harrison slowly transitioning towards his spiritual self, but if they had shuffled the track listing around a bit, we would have been in for a much different experience. Revolver is perfect for what it is, but if you had ‘Love You To’ swapped with ‘I Want To Tell You in the track order, it might have primed everyone for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ a lot better.
