Speaker 1: Pushkin. I was inspired by something I read where it
Speaker 1: was Pete Townsend talking about we have just recorded the loudest, dirtiest,
Speaker 1: rockiest thing ever. And I love that description. I just thought, Wow,
Speaker 1: what a great idea. So what we've got to do?
Speaker 1: Something loud and raucous and dirty. I know you've deceived
Speaker 1: me now years is.
Speaker 2: I know that you have because there's magic in my.
Speaker 1: Life I can see. So I came into the stereo
Speaker 1: sets of guys. Yeah, I just read about Pete saying
Speaker 1: this and think it's really a great idea. Let's just
Speaker 1: see how loud you can get and how raw was
Speaker 1: some Just let's just try and really make them meet
Speaker 1: us peak.
Speaker 2: I'm Paul won't do. And I've been fortunate to spend
Speaker 2: time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era.
Speaker 1: And will you look at me? I'm going to I'm
Speaker 1: actually a performer.
Speaker 2: That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
Speaker 2: book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty of songs, and we recorded many hours of
Speaker 2: our conversations.
Speaker 1: Actually a songwriter, My god, well that that crept up
Speaker 1: on me.
Speaker 2: This is McCartney. A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
Speaker 2: and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
Speaker 2: figures in popular music. In this episode, we'll trace the
Speaker 2: story of one of the wildest Beatles songs, which some
Speaker 2: consider to represent the beginning of heavy metal. Today, more
Speaker 2: people probably think of Helter Skelter as that raucous Beatle
Speaker 2: song with a strange title, rather than what it refers to,
Speaker 2: an innocent funfair ride.
Speaker 1: Not people in America don't know what a helter skelter is.
Speaker 1: I do you think it's a rollercoaster, but as you know,
Speaker 1: it's a sort of conical thing. Will slide around the
Speaker 1: outside of it. We used to go on those loads
Speaker 1: of times as kids. You'd you walk up in the
Speaker 1: stairs inside it, and then you'd slide down, and then
Speaker 1: you'd walk up again, and it was fun, you know.
Speaker 1: So I just used that. I was thought of symbol
Speaker 1: of life. I got up to the top, I stopped,
Speaker 1: and I turned and I come down to bon't I
Speaker 1: so you again? So I was really thinking of moods.
Speaker 1: You know, you're up, you get knocked down, you you're
Speaker 1: feeling euphoric and you're feeling miserable, such as the nature
Speaker 1: of life. We get to the don and I get
Speaker 1: back to the top of the stop.
Speaker 2: The the image of a child sliding down a cylindrical
Speaker 2: tower is in sharp contrast to what the song would become,
Speaker 2: and especially to how it would later be misinterpreted. But
Speaker 2: the funfair ride is a great metaphor for the sense
Speaker 2: of play the Beatles brought to the studio, as we
Speaker 2: can hear in this early version of Helter Skelter, when
Speaker 2: I get the lying of the hill where I stop
Speaker 2: and I tuned.
Speaker 1: And I gave a new grill.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty eight, when the Beatles recorded and released
Speaker 2: Helter Skelter, there was a new kind of rock and
Speaker 2: roll in the air. It was loud, distorted, heavy.
Speaker 1: Kass.
Speaker 2: There was of course the ho and there was the
Speaker 2: King of the electric guitar, so let's say once again
Speaker 2: the Jimi Hendrix experience. Things got heavier throughout the late sixties,
Speaker 2: setting the stage for Black Sabbath, who would released their
Speaker 2: first record in nineteen seventy. Throughout the late sixties, when
Speaker 2: the Beatles were at their peak, rock groups saw the
Speaker 2: rise of technological innovations in the studio, new signs, new
Speaker 2: production methods by the time Helter Skelter was released, most
Speaker 2: record companies had abandoned Mono had moved on to stereo recording.
Speaker 1: Well. I remember walking into the studio and there being
Speaker 1: two speakers, one on the left, one on the right,
Speaker 1: whereas it's always just been one in the middle, and
Speaker 1: we were, oh, you know, we were highly observant two speakers,
Speaker 1: So we immediately as were very thrilled because we assumed
Speaker 1: that many it would be twice as loud, and George
Speaker 1: Martin patiently explained to us, nosy's hystereopholic. Then, because it
Speaker 1: was there, it was available, we got into it. It
Speaker 1: was like a new toy, but we thought it in
Speaker 1: a different way than you do now. Now you just
Speaker 1: think it makes it more realistic, like listening to a
Speaker 1: band and you get a surround feeling when you listen
Speaker 1: to it. We thought, no, there's two speakers, we can
Speaker 1: have a thing wandering from one speaker to another.
Speaker 2: The Beatles White Album, which included Helter Skelter, was the
Speaker 2: last the band would record in mono. For their next album,
Speaker 2: Abbey Road, the stereo mix would become crucial to their
Speaker 2: creative vision. Individual instruments would start to move from one
Speaker 2: speaker to another.
Speaker 1: So a lot of our things in the mix is
Speaker 1: just go for walkies and decides to go over there
Speaker 1: for a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how active role did you yourself?
Speaker 1: Yourself or your the other Beatles playing in the sand
Speaker 1: by then quite a love. Yes, well, we always used
Speaker 1: to say, you know, the the lunatics were taken over
Speaker 1: the soul. We got control of pretty much everything, you know.
Speaker 1: Being a bit of a perfectionist, I would would sort
Speaker 1: of work out the song and then I'd say run
Speaker 1: up into the control room and listen to the drum
Speaker 1: sound and sort of say to the engineer, if you
Speaker 1: made this a bit hard, and I'd fuss and plush
Speaker 1: till it was like for health scalp till it was
Speaker 1: kind of quite raucous, you know, and really just try
Speaker 1: and coach the engineers and then you could leave them.
Speaker 1: They were brilliant and they would multiply what you suggested
Speaker 1: and sorted out make it, make it better.
Speaker 2: At that time, most of the sound engineers would have
Speaker 2: had classical production training with certain rules about arranging instruments
Speaker 2: and volume levels and preventing distortion. But as the Beatles
Speaker 2: drifted away from the sweet sound of their early pop hits.
Speaker 2: They realized that most rules exist to be broken.
Speaker 1: I remember Nowhere Man. Charl had brought this song in
Speaker 1: from Weybridge where he was feeling like I know where man,
Speaker 1: and we wanted the opening guitars to be really spiky
Speaker 1: and very trebling, super trebling, and they are if you
Speaker 1: listen to them there it's like a like a razor
Speaker 1: blade or something. You know, it's quite amazing.
Speaker 2: He's a real no man sitting in his now land
Speaker 2: making a now.
Speaker 1: Plans for So we said to the engineer, okay, so
Speaker 1: make it as treble as you can. So he put
Speaker 1: all the treble in. I said, can you make it more?
Speaker 1: He said, no, that's it. I'm sort of run out,
Speaker 1: you know, this is all that high made and treble,
Speaker 1: and that's all I can do. I said, well, could
Speaker 1: he put it through another lot of EQ So he did.
Speaker 1: He sent it through the next channel, and of course
Speaker 1: then this is like the game. Could you put even more? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So we had him going through I don't know, quite
Speaker 1: a few channels. Jesus Jesse. One wants to.
Speaker 2: See no man, can you see. As McCartney and the
Speaker 2: rest of the band learned to break the rules, of production.
Speaker 2: They were also playing with the rules of language, drawing
Speaker 2: on the literary tradition of nonsense poetry in.
Speaker 1: The verses that's sort of Alice in Wonderland, Will you
Speaker 1: won't you? Do? You don't? Let's lose cow Asuddy John
Speaker 1: and I both related to We like that lotten use
Speaker 1: things from.
Speaker 2: That, Things like the lobster quadrille from Alice in Wonderland
Speaker 2: here performed by Gene Wilder.
Speaker 1: See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance.
Speaker 1: They are waiting on the shingle. Will you come and
Speaker 1: join the dance dance? Will you won't you? Will you?
Speaker 2: Won't you join the dance dance? Many Beatles lyrics included
Speaker 2: playful phrases like this. Some of these phrases coined by
Speaker 2: the band have even crept into the common vernacular phrases
Speaker 2: such as a hard day's night, eight days a week,
Speaker 2: or for that matter, helter skelter. Most of the nonsense
Speaker 2: lyrics weren't meant to be interpreted. They were meant to
Speaker 2: be felt in keeping with the playful energy. However, some
Speaker 2: of the lyrics nodded toward that which couldn't be played
Speaker 2: over BBC waves.
Speaker 1: Don't let Me break you. Yes, it's just sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, something to hang a song of desperation, little
Speaker 1: sexual she's coming coming down fast, and perhaps a little
Speaker 1: drug which I want to throw it all in.
Speaker 2: Helter Skelter wasn't the only song to which the Beatles
Speaker 2: added clever euphemisms and hidden messages. As the band's music developed,
Speaker 2: they inserted a few easter eggs that fans began to
Speaker 2: crack open, including phrases that could only be heard when
Speaker 2: played backwards.
Speaker 1: See people thinking, actually there is a whole set it
Speaker 1: up with a few little clues kind of things, you know,
Speaker 1: we did. We put little things in. Well, those things
Speaker 1: they were for our own amusement, you know, it was
Speaker 1: it was it was an effort to not be bored.
Speaker 1: So when we heard the beach boys singing, we thought
Speaker 1: that'd be great, to which on the session became Ti
Speaker 1: tit and we sniggered like school boards, you know, and
Speaker 1: really were happy. Jesus. The kind of girls down with
Speaker 1: bend and in Penny Lane for of fish and finger
Speaker 1: pied finger Pie was rude sexual reference. But we knew
Speaker 1: that people in Liverpool would get it, but no one
Speaker 1: else would. They would just think it was like a
Speaker 1: chef spire. So I think once people thought there's hidden references,
Speaker 1: they started they were looking for them, and I saw
Speaker 1: them in everything, you know, even stuff that wasn't really there.
Speaker 2: Sometimes interpretation can open up a song, reveale layers of
Speaker 2: meaning that weren't discernible on the first listen. Tribute to
Speaker 2: a song by listening to it, and sometimes we add
Speaker 2: significance of which even the lyricist wasn't conscious. Misinterpretations are
Speaker 2: mostly harmless, like when some fans took lyrics as evidence
Speaker 2: for the bizarre urban legend that Paul McCartney died in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty six and was replaced by a doubleganger.
Speaker 1: So Paul is dead came out of the fact that
Speaker 1: I wasn't wearing shoes on the Abbey Road crossing. Wait,
Speaker 1: that's a stretch in anybody's language, you know. And then
Speaker 1: there was a Volkswagen Beetle car in that which said
Speaker 1: two eight one F, which was translated he would have
Speaker 1: been twenty eight if he'd have lived.
Speaker 2: Okay, But when the wrong person looks too closely for
Speaker 2: something that's not there, the meaning can be corrupted, like
Speaker 2: when Charles Manson claimed Helter Skelter referred to a coming
Speaker 2: apocalypse and read into the song a justification for his
Speaker 2: heenous crimes.
Speaker 1: I didn't do it for years because of that. You know,
Speaker 1: when it was contemporary, I wouldn't have even thought of
Speaker 1: doing it, because that's the sort of horror show, you know.
Speaker 1: When we suddenly realized, I mean, we knew that there
Speaker 1: were sort of daft Americans who read way too much
Speaker 1: into everything we did. That's okay them, But when Manson
Speaker 1: did it, when when the Manson association with the murders,
Speaker 1: then that was, oh, okay, this is no longer funny
Speaker 1: this guy, because he really thought we were the four
Speaker 1: horsemen of the apocalypse. And we were horrified to learn that,
Speaker 1: you know that his song was Helter Skelter, because of course,
Speaker 1: you know, it was just sparked by this translated quote
Speaker 1: that I've read, this idea of you know, just loudest,
Speaker 1: let's go in now, you know, let's go on and
Speaker 1: just make it the loudest.
Speaker 2: When I get to the bat and I get back
Speaker 2: to the tap of the stopt.
Speaker 1: So we're not going to turn our guitars town. And
Speaker 1: the tournament was a loud you know, I'm going to
Speaker 1: ask the engineer to be loud and it's dirty and
Speaker 1: give us distortion, the kind of thing that we eventually
Speaker 1: got on Revolution. You know, that was the epitome of
Speaker 1: the distortion thing. It's at the heart of the matter, really,
Speaker 1: isn't it. You know it's I mean, we liked, we
Speaker 1: liked that, we liked it's it's very much part of
Speaker 1: rock and roll, you know. It's whereas.
Speaker 3: Orchestral music or dance and music will be trying to
Speaker 3: be pretty gentle and romantic, rock and roll was kicking that.
Speaker 3: You know, we're kicking out of.
Speaker 2: H The studio sessions for Helter Skelter became quite physically demanding,
Speaker 2: gone with the cut school boys serenading their fans with
Speaker 2: lovely Doo and eight days a week this music, shredded, clashed, roared.
Speaker 2: The Beatles recorded several takes of Helter Skelter, including an
Speaker 2: unreleased version that ran at twenty seven minutes, not eleven seconds.
Speaker 2: It's no wonder then at the end of the song,
Speaker 2: Ringo's Star would cry out.
Speaker 1: It was that kind of thing where you had played
Speaker 1: the hell out of it, And it was sometimes credited
Speaker 1: by people as being in the start of heavy metal. Yes,
Speaker 1: I've read that's I don't know whether that's true, but
Speaker 1: you know it's pre heavy metal, so you know, you
Speaker 1: think it might have inspired someone in the same way
Speaker 1: as the twsit quote expired me.
Speaker 2: McCartney doesn't remember which song from the Who towns End
Speaker 2: was referring to. It may have been I can see
Speaker 2: for miles. But it only took the idea of cranking
Speaker 2: up the volume and rocking as hard as possible to
Speaker 2: inspire Helter Skelter, a song which in turn would inspire
Speaker 2: the next generation of heavy metal bands, like the band
Speaker 2: Motley Crewe, who regularly performed their own cover of the
Speaker 2: song Helter Skelter from the Beatles nineteen sixty eight self
Speaker 2: titled record also known as the White Album. This concludes
Speaker 2: the first season of our podcast We'll be back soon
Speaker 2: with more episodes drawn from this treasure drove of lyrics,
Speaker 2: including McCartney's own favorite McCartney song.
Speaker 1: Leader Metal.
Speaker 3: My Nema.
Speaker 2: Yeah, statuned and subscribed to McCartney A Life in Lyrics,
Speaker 2: Changing the wave of no McCartney. A Life in Lyrics
Speaker 2: is a co production between iHeartMedia, n p L and
Speaker 2: Pushkin Industries.