Xmastime Always Knows

Like everybody else Revolver has been on my mind thanks to Tomorrow Never Knows being played on Mad Men, and while it's a Lennon song I'm reminded of this fact:

But in some ways, it was Paul who forged the frontier and John who raced to catch and exceed him. From 1966 to '68, John lived a weird, sleepy, deeply interior life. He spent days on end dropping acid and watching television. Paul, meanwhile, threw himself into the London art world and its "happenings"—performances that blurred the boundary between artist and audience. In 1965, their music publisher Dick James gave them each a Brenell Mark 5 tape recorder. While John used his to record rough demos, Paul, immersed in the experimental work of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, jiggered the machine to disable the erase head and make tape loops of layered sounds. He brought these to the Beatles sessions to create the sound for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the famous "John" song.

I've always fought the good fight in the Paul/John battle that didn't actually exist, which bleeds perfectly into Revolver, when Paul really started taking over the band:

It's also of note that it was McCartney, who spent a lot of time before Revolver dicking around with tape loops he made from tapes of such avant-garde stuff as Stockhausen while Lennon laid on his couch getting fat in wedded suburban bliss, which led to the innovative, psychedelic hypersonic musical leap the album provided. Mythology will have you believe Lennon sat around coming up with weird, trippy stuff while McCartney whistled How Much for the Doggie in the Window? over and over.