McCartney Times

The Beatles‘ Revolver, one of the earliest albums of the psychedelic era, debuted in the U.K. on Aug. 5, 1966; its U.S. release came three days later. To design the cover, the band recruited Klaus Voormann, a friend from their Hamburg days. Voormann’s spacey collage of drawings and photos complemented songs that reflected the Beatles’ LSD experiments during its production.“We knew he drew and he’d been involved in graphic design,” recalled Paul McCartney in Anthology. “I must admit we didn’t really know what he did, but he’d been to college. We knew he must be all right, and so we said, ‘Why don’t you come up with something for the album cover?’”Voormann told The Guardian that John Lennon approached him during the recording of Revolver: “He just said, ‘Got any ideas for our new album cover?’ I thought,: ‘S—! Doing a cover for the most famous band in the world!’ At moments like that, you could suddenly forget that they had once been scruffy little Liverpool boys. I thought, ‘My God, I can’t do that!’”The Beatles invited Voormann to the Abbey Road studio for a preview of what they’d recorded. “When I heard the music, I was just shocked, it was so great,” he said. “So amazing. But it was frightening because the last song that they played to me was ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’”

Source: The Story Behind the Cover of the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’