John – lead
vocals, rhythm guitar, Hammond organ
George – harmony vocals, lead guitar, possibly bass
Ringo – drums, percussion
From the very early days as live performers, the Beatles had been taking stimulants of one form or another just to keep going. In Hamburg, they needed the blue pills to be able to perform night after night on insufficient food and sleep. Then, in 1964, Bob Dylan introduced them to marijuana, which became their staple diet in the following years – as John later commented, A Hard Day’s Night was pills, Help! was pot. But with his uncertainty over his marriage and over fatherhood, as well as over the musical direction of the Beatles, John needed to shed the responsibilities he felt mounting, and gain what Cynthia called his “mental freedom”. He needed something more liberating than marijuana. In LSD he found rather more than he bargained for.
In early 1965, George and John and their wives were invited to a dinner party at the flat of a dentist friend who had all four Beatles and their wives on his books. (The name of the dentist has never been officially disclosed by those involved, but is freely reported on the internet. It can be fairly safely disclosed here that he lived at 2 Strathearn Place, Paddington.) After the meal, four lumps of sugar, which had been on display on the mantelpiece throughout the meal, were ceremoniously dropped into the coffees of the four guests. After having been persuaded to finish their coffees (Pattie for one was naturally sceptical), they were told that the sugar lumps had contained a dose of LSD. Thinking it may be an aphrodisiac and that the dentist was planning some kind of orgy, they made their excuses and left. High farce followed. The four piled into George’s car and, followed by the dentist and his girlfriend in a taxi, and as the drug began to take effect, made for the lights of the West End. It seems they stopped at the Pickwick Club near Leicester Square where Klaus Voormann was due to be performing, and then went on through Leicester Square to the Ad Lib club. Unable to cope with the myriad sensations of melting lights and coloured sounds, they decided to drive to the safety of George and Pattie’s house in Esher. Crawling along at ten miles per hour, John was constantly talking and joking, Cynthia sticking her fingers in her throat in an attempt to bring the sugar cube back up, and Pattie pleading to be let out so she could sit in a field. “You can’t play football now, Pattie,” laughed John. The women both had nightmarish times until the drug wore off early in the morning, but George and John’s experiences were, fortunately, more positive. “For the first time in my life,” said George, “I wasn’t conscious of ego.” Although he had carried out an appallingly irresponsible act, the dentist had flung open a door. John was intrigued by what he found there.
Nevertheless, it was several months before they tried it again. On the final leg of the 1965 American tour, the group rented a house in Los Angeles. One afternoon, with Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, among others, John, George and Ringo took LSD, this time of their own volition. John, probably not feeling tremendously secure at the time, began to get irritated by Peter Fonda, who was telling George, then him, then everyone “I know what it’s like to be dead”. This observation was not wholly acid-related – it was the result of a near-death experience during an operation following an accidental gun-shot wound when aged eleven. John eventually had Fonda removed.
John’s first trip had a direct influence on psychedelic songs such as ‘Rain’. The second led directly to ‘She Said She Said’.
Although the incident with Peter Fonda had taken place back in August 1965 and John had recorded demos of the song at his home studio in Weybridge in March 1966, by the time the group came into the studio, the song was still tentatively called ‘He Said, He Said’. An original manuscript of the song reveals that John’s doodling lyrics had contained the lines “I said, who put all that crap in your head / You know what it’s like to be mad / And it’s making me feel like my trousers are torn / No, no, no it’s wrong, no it’s wrong”. During the course of the recording session, as John took the group through several hours of necessary rehearsal for this highly complex piece, the title and lyrics were firmed up. The session took up almost nine hours of the last day of the 33 Revolver sessions – at the end of a full day’s mixing for the album – ending at 3.45 in the morning. It was made under a degree of pressure, and was one of just two tracks on the album to be completed in a single day.
George’s fuzz-guitar introduction sounds oddly familiar – it is the phrase “I know what it is to be dead”, but played on the first instead of the third beat – before the rhythm section kicks into their riff, like an overstretched ‘Taxman’. Throughout the verse, a high-pitched feedback-like Bb on the organ drifts in and out of focus, which George accompanies, breaking only to echo the lines of the verse.
Mirroring the actual LSD experience, it is George rather than Paul who provides the harmony vocals. In fact, despite the studio documentation implying that the basic track consisted of drums, bass and two guitars, Paul remembers he wasn’t even there. “I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we’d had a barney or something and I said, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it’, I think George played bass.” This could also explain the fact that, for 1966, the bass lines are decidedly low-key. With Ringo turning in another outstanding ‘Rain’-like performance, the point is well made that the experience relates to three of the four Beatles. This was territory in which Paul had yet to tread, and it’s possible that the “barney” was a result of the other three needling Paul about not having taken the drug.
In contrast to the moribund theme of the song, the bridge provides a brief and enlightening throwback to a host of earlier songs – ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (“When I’m home everything seems to be right”), ‘Help!’ (“When I was younger, so much younger than today”), and the nostalgic sentiments of ‘In My Life’. It is as if the singer can take no more of her pronouncements – he won’t let her explain further and quickly changes the subject to security and stability. The change from double to triple time indicates that he doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to. With everything going on in the verse, we need to take a breath. After the complex rhythmic accompaniment to the 4/4 verse, the 3/4 waltz of the bridge is left uncluttered. The bass and lead guitar walk through arpeggios, and rhythm guitar elects for straightforward strummed chords. Ringo reverts to simple marching quavers on the snare drum. All the tension of the bridge is provided by the contrast of metres, offset against the attitude of the lyric.
The ever-present subject of death, echoed by the title, is mirrored by “making me feel like I’ve never been born”. Life before birth and life after death are jumbled in acid-drenched logic. Although he says he’s ready to leave, he cannot, and is left spinning in limbo, finally repeating himself “I know what it’s like to be dead…”
The song is technically in Mixolydian mode – that is, a scale which has the semitone interval between the sixth and seventh (i.e., a flattened seventh). So, rather than the standard key of Bb, with two flats, the song can be transposed with three flats, the chords Ab (bVII – “she’s making me feel”) and Fm (v – “when I was a boy”) being predominant. In this mode, resolution is naturally from IV–I, the so-called plagal cadence that features in ‘Let It Be’. ‘She Said She Said’ doubles this move by repeating, with small variations, Ab–Eb–Bb7 (bVII–IV–I7).
This is stretching the terminology of modes somewhat – normally they are confined to ecclesiastical music, and used to classify plainsong. Some distance away from the psychedelic imagery of this Revolver track.