Helter Skelter

Pushkin.

I was inspired by something I read where it was Pete Townsend talking about We've just recorded the loudest, dirtiest, rockiest thing ever. And I love that description. I just thought, Wow, what a great idea. So what we've got to do? Something loud and raucous and urchy. I know you've deceived me our years are.

I know that you had, because there's magic.

In my I can see. So I came into the stereo sets of guys. Yeah, I just read about Pete saying this and think it's really a great idea. Let's just see how loud you get and how rowcus and just let's just try and really make them meet us peak.

I'm Paul will do And I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era.

And will you look at me? I'm going on to I'm actually a performer.

That is sir Paul McCartney. We work together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations.

Oh she'm a songwriter? My god, Well that that crypta homy.

This is McCartney. A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, we'll trace the story of one of the wildest Beatle songs, which some consider to represent the beginning of heavy metal. Today, more people probably think of Helter Skelter as that raucous Beatles song with a strange title, rather than what it refers to, an innocent funfair ride.

Not people in a marc don't know what a helter skelter is. I do. You think it's a rollercoaster, But as you know, it's a sort of conical thing. We'll slide around the outside of it. We used to go on those loads of times as kids. You'd you walk up in the stairs inside it, and then you'd slide down, and then you'd walk up again, and it was fun, you know. So I just used that. I was thought of symbol of life. I go up to the top, I stopped, and I turned and I come down to

When I get to the bottom, I got back to the top of the stop.

The image of a child sliding down a cylindrical tower is in sharp contrast to what the song would become, and especially to how it would later be misinterpreted. But the funfair ride is a great metaphor for the sense of play the Beatles brought to the studio, as we can hear in this early version of Helter Skelter when doing a lot.

Of lying up doing the hill where I stopped and I jumped and I did a little trill.

In nineteen sixty eight, when the Beatles recorded and released Helter Skelter, there was a new kind of rock and roll in the air.

It was loud, distorted, heavy, jes kass.

There was of course the ho and there was the King of the electric guitar, so let's say once again the Jimi Hendrix experience. Things got heavier throughout the late sixties, setting the stage for Black Sabbath, who would released their first record in nineteen seventy. Throughout the late sixties, when the Beatles were at their peak, rock groups saw the rise of technological innovations in the studio. New signs new

Well. I remember walking into the studio and there being two speakers, one on the left, one on the right, whereas it's always just been one in the middle. And we were, oh, you know, we were highly observant two speakers, so we immediately were very thrilled because we assumed that many it would be twice as loud, and George Martin patiently explained to us, no, Draxy's hystereophonics. Because it was there,

The Beatles White Album, which included Helter Skelter, was the last the band would record in mono. For their next album, Abbey Road, the stereo mix would become crucial to their creative vision. Individual instruments would start to move from one speaker to another.

So a lot of all things in the mix is just go for walkers and decides to go over there for a while.

Yeah, how active role did you yourself?

Yourself or your the other Beatles playing in the sand.

By then quite a love Yes. Well, we always used to say, you know, the the lunatics were taken over the asylum, we got control of pretty much everything, you know.

At that time, most of the sound engineers would have had classical production training with certain rules about arranging instruments and volume levels and preventing distortion. But as the Beatles drifted away from the sweet sound of their early pop hits, they realized that most rules exist to be broken.

I remember Nowhere Man Child had brought this song in from Weybridge where he was feeling like I know where man and.

We wanted the opening guitars to be really spiky and very trebling, super trebling, and they are if you listen to them there it's like a.

Razor blade or something. You know, it's quite amazing.

He's a real no man sitting.

In his now land making all now.

Plans for So we said to the engineer, okay, so make it as treble as you can. So he put all the treble in and I said, can you make it more? He said, no, that's it. I'm sort of run out, you know, this is all that high made and treble, and that's all I can do. I said, well, could he put it through not a lot of EQ So he did.

He sent it through the next channel, and of course then this was like the game could you put even more? Yeah, So we had him going through I don't know, quite a few channels.

Jesus Jessee, no can Yus.

As McCartney and the rest of the band learned to break the rules of production They were also playing with the rules of language, drawing on the literary tradition of nonsense poetry.

In the verses that's sort of Alice in Wonderland? Will you won't you?

Do?

You don't? Let's lose Carol abisonly John and I both related to we like that lotten use things.

From that, Things like the lobster quadrille from Alice in Wonderland here performed by Gene Wilder.

See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance. They are waiting on the shingle. Will you come and join the dance dance? Will you won't you? Will you?

Won't you join the dance dance?

Many Beatles lyrics included playful phrases like this. Some of these phrases coined by the band have even crept into the common vernacular phrases such as a hard day's night, eight days a week, or for that matter, helter skelter. Most of the nonsense lyrics weren't meant to be interpreted. They were meant to be felt in keeping with the playful energy. However, some of the lyrics nodded toward that which couldn't be played over BBC waves.

Don't let Me Break you. Yes, it's just sort of, you know, something to hang a song of desperation, of little sexual she's coming coming down fast, and perhaps a little drug component which I'll throw it all in.

Helter Skelter wasn't the only song to which the Beatles added clever euphemisms and hidden messages. As the band's music developed, they inserted a few easter eggs that fans began to crack open, including phrases that could only be heard when played backwards.

See people thinking. Actually there was a whole set it up with a few little clues kind of things, you know, we did. We put little things in. Well, those things they were for our own amusement, you know, it was it was. It was an effort to not be bored. So when we heard the beach boys singing La La, we thought that'd be great, to which on the session became Ti tit and we sniggered like school boys, you know, and really were happy.

Jesus kind of girl with wind.

And in Penny Lane for of fish and finger pied finger pive is rude sexual reference. But we knew that the people in Liverpool would get it, but no one else would they would just think it was like a chefspie. So I think once people thought there's hidden references, they started they weren't looking for them, and I saw them in everything, you know, even stuff that wasn't really there.

Sometimes interpretation can open up a song, reveale layers of meaning that weren't discernible on the first listen. We could tribute to a song by listening to it, and sometimes we add significance of which even the lyricist wasn't conscious. Misinterpretations are mostly harmless, like when some fans took lyrics as evidence for the bizarre urban legend that Paul McCartney died in nineteen sixty six and was replaced by a doubleganger.

So Paul is dead came out of the fact that I wasn't wearing shoes on the Abbey Road crossing. Wait, that's a stretch in anybody's language, you know. And then there was a Volkswagen Beetle car in that which said two eight one F, which was translated he would have been twenty eight if he'd have lived.

Okay, But when the wrong person looks too closely for something that's not there, the meaning can be corrupted, like when Charles Manson claimed Helter Skelter referred to a coming apocalypse and read into the song a justification for his heenous crimes.

I didn't do it for years because of that. You know, when it was contemporary, I wouldn't have even thought of doing it, because that's the sort of horror show, you know, when something realized. I mean, we knew that there were sort of daft Americans who read way too much into everything we did. It's okay, but when Manson did it, when when the Manson association.

With the murders, then that was, oh, okay, this is no longer funny this guy, because you really thought we were the four horseman of the apocalypse, and we.

Were horrified to learn that, you know, that his song was helter Skelter, because of course, you know, it was just sparked by this translated quote that I'd read, this idea of you know, just loudest let's going now, you know, let's go on and just make it the loudest.

We're not get to the da and I get back to the tap of the stadt.

So we're not going to turn our guitars down. And the turnament was a loud you know, I'm going to ask the engineer to.

Be loud and it's dirty and give us distortion, the kind of thing that we eventually got on Revolution, and you know that was the epitome of the distortion.

That it's at the heart of the matter, really, isn't it.

You know, it's I mean, we liked, we liked that, we liked it's it's very much part of rock and roll, you know. It's.

Whereas orchestral music or dance and music will be trying to be pretty gentle and romantic, rock and roll was kicking that, you know, kicking out.

Yeah.

The studio sessions for Helter Skelter became quite physically demanding, gone with the cut school boys serenading their fans with lovely Doo and eight days a week this music shredded, clashed, roared. The Beatles recorded several takes of Helter Skelter, including an unreleased version that ran at twenty seven minutes eleven seconds. It's no wonder then at the end of the song, Ringo's star would cry out.

It was that kind of thing where you had played the hell out of it, and it was sometimes credited by people as being in the start of heavy metal.

Yes, I've read that's I don't know whether that's true, but you know it's pretty heavy metal, so you know, you think it might have inspired someone in the same way as the Tansend quote expired me.

McCartney doesn't remember which song from the who Townsend was referring to. It may have been I can see for miles. But it only took the idea of cranking up the volume and rocking as hard as possible to inspire Helter Skelter, a song which in turn would inspire the next generation of heavy metal bands, like the band Motley Crewe, who regularly performed their own cover of the song Helter Skelter from the beatles nineteen sixty eight self titled record also

Beat.

My Name.

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