This led to what McCartney would call a “big ominous noise”: The band “played the rhythm track really fast,” during recording, “so that when the tape was played back at normal speed everything would be so much slower, changing the texture,” remembered Emerick.
The track came out of “what would arguably be the most revolutionary week of their recording career… working closely with their beloved producer George Martin and an eager young EMI engineer named Geoff Emerick.” In “Rain,” specifically, they took full advantage of a discovery made on “Tomorrow Never Knows” - the impact of slowing down recordings. There’s much more to the story of “Rain,” as you’ll hear in the You Can’t Unhear This video above. Somehow it got on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint. I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana… and, as I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day. But Lennon gave credit for the backwards voices and guitars to “Ja,” telling Playboy in 1980: Lennon claimed the song as his, although McCartney later claimed co-authorship. (He conceded that the novelty hit “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Haaa!” got there a little earlier, “but it’s not the same thing.”). Before Hendrix, before The Who, before any f*cker,” John Lennon bragged. In fact, “Rain” was “the first backwards tape on any record anywhere.
Though not especially innovative musically or lyrically, “Paperback Writer” was the first Beatles’ recording to bring Paul McCartney’s bass forward in the mix, showcasing the utterly distinctive playing that would later form the backbone of songs like “Come Together.” The record’s B-side, “ Rain,” moreover, is the first Beatles song to use backwards tape, a staple of psychedelic music thereafter. Its ultimate track, “ Tomorrow Never Knows,” was “the greatest leap into the future” up to that point in their career, argues pop culture writer Robert Rodriguez, who literally wrote the book, or a book, on the sea change that was Revolver.Ĭritical to discussion of this period, however, is a single that appeared at the same time, and proved just as important to the Beatles’, and thus pop music’s, evolution. The album’s first track, “Taxman,” announced “a sweeping shift in the essential nature of the Beatles’ sound,” writes music historian Kenneth Womack.
Pepper’s, Abbey Road, The White Album, and Let it Be. The Beatles 1966 Revolver, a mini-masterpiece, contains all the elements that would inform the band’s revolutionary late-60s sound on Sgt. “That one was the gift of God… of Ja actually-the god of marijuana, right? So Ja gave me that one.”