12 songs that prove The Beatles really rocked
During their ten-year career, The Beatles were responsible for more seismic shifts in music than any other band. But they rarely get the credit for playing such a formative part in the development of rock music. Here are a dozen tracks that show just how important they were - and how much they rocked.
I’m Down
Tired of having Long Tall Sally and Twist And Shout as their usual set-closers, Paul McCartney decided to write something where he could really let rip and rival John Lennon as the Beatle with the rock’n’roll edge. “I could do Little Richard’s voice,” he told Barry Miles in 1997. “Wild, hoarse, like an out-of-body experience.”
I’m Down (the B-side of the seven-inch of 1965’s Help!) was a last blast (for the time being) of the raucous stylings typified by Lennon’s versions of Money (That’s What I Want) and Chuck Berry’s Rock And Roll Music.
From 1966’s Revolver, it’s the one time a George Harrison track would open a Beatles album, but what a statement, and what an album. As biting musically as it is lyrically – thanks to a little help from a reluctant Lennon – it snapped at the heels of HM Treasury and signalled the baby boomer generation’s post-austerity awakening. A wild guitar break (by McCartney, at George Martin’s request) and wired mod groove still pays off today. Tomorrow Never Knows.
Here’s where LSD, The Tibetan Book Of The Dead and one of Ringo Starr’s malapropisms collide. Debuting a one-chord drone, Lennon attempts to sound “like a thousand Tibetan monks”, intoning lyrics inspired by Timothy Leary through a swirling Leslie speaker. Add McCartney’s avant-garde tape loops, processed beats and backwards instrumentation (that Taxman solo, reversed) and rock music shifted course once again.
Back In The USSR
This time Paul tried out his “Jerry Lee Lewis voice, to get my mind set on a particular feeling” on the lead track from The Beatles (1968). Fusing Chuck Berry’s Back In The USA with the Beach Boys’ California Girls, it sets off at quite a lick, tongue firmly in cheek as McCartney romanticises Iron Curtain life in a Cold War climate. Although ashram buddy and Beach Boy Mike Love was instrumental to the concept, in the US the track went over like a fart in church.
Source: loudersound.com/Jo Kendall
