From the beginning of Mad Men’s seven seasons that first broadcast in 2007, there was discussion among fans of how the quintessential television series about the 1960s, known for its exacting detail in everything from Brooks Brothers’ suit cuts to mid-century restaurant menus, Grand Central Station train schedules, and furniture design, would depict the cultural phenomenon of the Beatles.
Would Matthew Weiner’s series have an episode in which the advertising executives at Sterling Cooper attempt to land a spot on the Ed Sullivan Show when the band made their first major American appearance in 1963? Would we see a scene in which Don Draper takes his daughter Sally to see A Hard Day’s Night? What song – for which the rights would have to be purchased from the infamously stringent Apple Corporation – could we expect to hear: “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “She Loves You”, “Help”?
For years Weiner attempted to secure usage rights from Apple, but to no avail, telling Dave Itzkoff and Ben Sisario of The New York Times in 2012 that it was “always my feeling that the show lacked a certain authenticity because we never could have an actual master recording of the Beatles performing,” describing them as “the band… of the 20th century.” As it was, Apple relented that year in what was the only permission ever granted, to date, of an original Beatles track performed by the band appearing in a television show, after they had approved the Weiner-penned script from season five, and the American Movie Classics network agreed to the unprecedented usage fee of a $250k, which remains the highest amount ever paid by a TV series for the rights to a song.
Had Mad Men used “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “She Loves You”, pop masterpieces though they are, it wouldn’t have kept with the kind of subtle cultural gesture that the show exulted in; after all, this wasn’t a series that amounted to a mere checklist of memorable Boomer totems in the manner of a Forest Gump. Rather, the episode “Lady Lazarus” ends with an unexpected number, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the last track off the groundbreaking 1966 album, Revolver .“Tomorrow Never Knows” is hardly a deep-cut for Beatles’ fans, though more casual listeners wouldn’t necessarily be as familiar with a song that isn’t rewarded with the same kind of classic rock radio format circulation that the band’s more accessible music does.
Composed by John Lennon and reflecting the Beatles‘ increasing interest in Eastern religion, avant-garde music, and hallucinogenic drugs, the 2:58 minutes of “Tomorrow Never Knows” features enigmatic lyrics inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or at least Timothy Leary’s interpretation of it) is played as a frenetic drone on the Hammond organ, tambura, and sitar. Musically sophisticated though the early bubble gum compositions of the Beatlemania iteration of the mop-topped band may have been, Revolver functions on an entirely different musical plain, as if Taylor Swift had suddenly decided to start recording classical ragas.
When Paul McCartney played “Tomorrow Never Knows” for Bob Dylan, Dylan reportedly said “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to be cute anymore” before walking out of the room. That was no less accurate a response than that of music critic Tony Hall, in a May piece for Record Mirror written in anticipation of the summer release of Revolver, when he called it the “most revolutionary [song] ever made by a pop group.”
During the last few minutes of the Mad Men episode, Draper (played with shark-like efficiency by Jon Hamm) pours himself a Scotch and drops the needle on the vinyl, Revolver, a gift from his second wife, Megan. He then walks off in socked feet, adjusts his black tie, and sits down in his expensive, Møbler-designed black-leather recliner. As the song first plays, viewers watch a wordless montage of several different scenes involving other characters (a broken affair, two younger ad writers sharing a joint at the office), before a befuddled, if not angry, Draper abruptly pulls the needle and the song ends as the screen cuts to black and the credits roll (the remainder of the song then plays, Mad Men gets its full $250,000 worth).
For Weiner’s purposes, “Tomorrow Never Knows” provides the perfect means of expressing how Draper – who, when the series begins in the buttoned-down, sartorially conservative but politically optimistic early 1960s, is the hip advertising genius at his firm – has begun to lose footing in a culture that is rapidly leaving him behind. When the music suddenly stops, and we hear only the ambient lower Manhattan traffic outside Draper’s apartment, the audience intuits what it would be to listen to the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or attend the exhibition opening for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1916. That is, what it would be like to be in the presence of something that was, for a time, genuinely new.
Revolver’s Perfect Aim
For decades the critical consensus had been that the most revolutionary of Beatles’ albums was 1967’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the penultimate in their middle-period quartet that begins with 1965’s lauded Rubber Soul and that ends with the uneven 1968 movie, Magical Mystery Tour (a Yellow Submarine soundtrack with mostly ersatz orchestral compositions written by their producer George Martin is also in there). The last few years have seen Sergeant Pepper’s stock sag; the conceit of the loosely organized concept album and the baroque maximalism of that record is perhaps less appealing to subsequent generations of critics trained on punk or lo-fi shoegaze. The Beatles’ later trio of albums, the self-titled “White Album” (an experimental mess and masterpiece), the narrative complexity of Abbey Road, even Let It Be after it was finally stripped of its original Phil Spector over-production, all feel more current than Sergeant Pepper.
Revolver has steadily overtaken its follow up in many estimations of the “best” Beatles’ album, with Eric Wolfson in 2024’s Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music describing Sergeant Pepper as (for many modern listeners) “hermetically sealed off like a museum piece,” while Robert Rodriguez in Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n’ Roll (2012) opining that his subject was the band’s “high-water mark… an album cackling with potent immediacy.” Recorded on the verge of the band’s abandonment of live touring, the Beatles were about to become genuine recording artists, maybe really the first, and on Revolver the studio became an instrument as integral as guitar, drums, or bass.
Revolver’s title, with its aural congruences to the word “revolution”, was appropriate, as out of Apple studios emerged an album that innovated not just the use of non-western instruments (after all, “Norwegian Wood” on Rubber Soul already featured a sitar), but also automatic double tracking, tape-loops, backmasking, close-miking, and tape-speed variation, not to mention experiments with sampling and electronic music. Listening to Revolver as a triumph of production today, especially a track like “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and there is the uncanny feeling (in a manner that there isn’t with their other records) that this isn’t an album from 60 years ago, but from the future.
Occasionally this sound is labeled “psychedelic”, which is understandable, though that adjective is more often first applied to the garage rock classic The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, that eponymous band releasing their album two months after Revolver. In many ways, the overall aesthetic of the album is obviously different from later psychedelic works like Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and Sergeant Pepper itself.
Cover designer Klaus Voorman’s black-and-white ink drawings and collage art, dream-like though they may be, are distinctly not psychedelic in their limited color palette. More important than whether or not Revolver is psychedelic is that it’s unified as an album in a manner that earlier rock albums weren’t, not even the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which predates it by three months. The general history of the album as a genuine artistic form – defined by being a collection of organized and cohesive songs rather than just a playlist of singles – is shockingly short, arguably inaugurated with Frank Sinatra’s 1955 In the Wee Small Hours, now suffering a prolonged obsolescence during the streaming era, but Revolver was really the first rock album.
Though Revolver has any number of songs that are certifiably canonical – “Yellow Submarine,” “Eleanor Rigby” – it has to be understood as a whole, even while Capitol Records didn’t necessarily think that way, releasing an 11-track version of rearranged songs in the United States as opposed to the 14-track version in the United Kingdom (those excised tunes ultimately appearing on LPs, as singles, or in annual compendiums).
Beginning with George Harrison’s “Taxman”, a propulsive guitar-driven introduction (owing much to the criminally underrated Ray Davies of their British Invasion compatriots the Kinks) with its vaguely libertarian-inflected lyrics castigating both Prime Ministers Wilson and Heath and ending 35 minutes later with the anti-materialist spiritualism of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, there is a kind of pilgrimage in Revolver, an ascent of the soul. From “Taxman”, which The National Review (whose founder William F. Buckley described them in 1964 as the “crowned heads of anti-music”) in 2006 unironically ranked the second best “conservative” rock song of all time, through to the Buddhist-inspired lyrics of Lennon imploring listeners to “Lay down all thoughts / Surrender to the void”.
There’s not quite enough cohesion to describe Revolver as a concept album (albeit Sergeant Pepper doesn’t have much more in the way of cohesion), but there is more than in Rubber Soul, which was still composed mostly of love songs (or in some cases soured love songs). Yet there is something to this movement from the cynicism of “Taxman” to the idealism of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, a far fuller encapsulation of humanity and its contradictions (and the transcendence of that same humanity) than had ever been explored by the Beatles before (or, really, by any other rock band for that matter).
In the interim 12 songs there is the tragic short story of McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” who “died in a church and was buried along with her name”, scored for a string octet by the classical-music-loving Martin (who also added a harpsichord to the heartbreaking “For No One”). Revolver then moves on to the ominous surrealism of “Dr. Robert”, inspired by an LSD-crazed dentist who spiked their drinks at a London party; and the incantatory energy of tracks like “She Said She Said”, “And Your Bird Can Sing”, and “Got to Get You Into My Life”.
Even the peppiness of “Good Day Sunshine” recommends itself, despite Bill Wyman (not the Grateful Dead bassist, incidentally) ranking it the worst Beatles song in a list for Vulture. Not incidentally, part of the genius of Revolver is its collaborative quality in a way that earlier Beatles’ albums (and some later) weren’t, with the brilliant influence of George Harrison obvious in his own tracks like the Indian-flavored “Love You Too”, composed under the strong influence of Ravi Shankar.
A mark of a certain kind of contrarianism is often expressed by a variety of music snobs who thrill in exclaiming that the Beatles were overrated, and a half-century of their influence has served to ironically soften the public perception of just how radical they were, which is what’s so thrilling about the Mad Men scene. Whatever the alchemy was between Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr, it was a combustion that burnt incredibly hot and for a very short time.
Consider that if some Beatles-like-band had appeared on an Ed-Sullivan-Type-Show in December of 2023, a month not so different from the present with plenty of headlines about Ukraine, Gaza, and Trump, then Revolver would come out today. In seven short years and 13 albums, the Beatles continually reinvented themselves in a manner now unthinkable, while contemporary bands (as rock has largely lost its cultural relevance) take years between releases.
“Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention,” argues David Marx in his cultural history of the 21st Century, “there is now a blank space.” This isn’t completely fair, or maybe even fair at all, and it can court the worst sort of Boomer nostalgia (even though neither Marx nor I are Boomers). After all, the economics, technology, and context today are totally different.
To use Marx’s argument with Revolver, what would an album like that even look like in 2026, especially since albums have ceased to be the sine qua non of musical genius? Making the comparison is a kind of category mistake. Yet there is a purity in the immediacy of the aesthetic experience, of hearing something like “Tomorrow Never Knows” with fresh ears, if possible.
Like Don Draper, I didn’t know what would come out of the record player when I dropped the needle onto my father’s 1966 copy of Revolver. Unlike Draper, though, I’d let that track play to the end. Then I would play it again.