John – lead
vocals, acoustic guitar
Paul – harmony and backing vocals, bass
George – harmony and backing vocals, lead guitar
Ringo – drums
The strong downward sweep of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ jolts us awake. From George’s predictable swipe at the Government, through Paul’s predictably brilliant slice-of-life vignette, we arrive at John’s familiar territory – boredom. But again, brilliantly conceived.
Of all John’s songs on Revolver, this stands out as being obliquely retrospective in that it was inspired by marijuana rather than LSD. It evokes a dragging, bleary-eyed stream of reclusive inertia. Even when awake, John lies and stares at the ceiling, dumbly waiting for consciousness to ebb away once again. On the surface, the song seems to be an early companion piece for ‘I’m So Tired’, which offers the other side of the coin in its three-o’clock-in-the-morning rant at his inability to get to sleep. In fact, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ touches a couple of John’s songs – the mockery of people rushing around achieving nothing with their limited awareness in ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ and ‘Rain’, and, more closely, the urge to lie back and float up/downstream that we revisit at the end of the album.
In keeping with the wish to be left alone, the song’s chord sequence doesn’t call a great deal of attention to itself, but nonetheless has a couple of choice moments. We’re in E minor, and, notwithstanding an uneven structure, the verse repeats Em–Am–G–C–G–B (i–iv–III–VI–III–V), but ending on the held G–C the second time around. The chorus shifts us gently but firmly into G major territory (the relative major of E minor) with G–Am–Bm–Am (I–ii–iii–ii), and ends on a lovely C maj7 (IV∆7) “I’m only sleeping”, before we sleepwalk back into E minor. The short bridge pulls us towards another key, this time A minor, again muddying the move back to E minor for the following verse, “Lying there and staring at the ceiling”, which comes at us abruptly ahead of schedule.
The rhythm of the vocal lines constantly tugs against the taunting backing vocals, while the melody restlessly see-saws, seeking refuge from the gentle stimulation.
The dragging reluctance is suddenly reversed before the “When I wake up early in the morning” of the final verse for the marvellous contrast of a petulantly predicted lilting beat.
This syncopation, combined with chord changes mid-bar, gives the impression of changes in time signature that aren’t there, a wrong-footing effect similar to the erratic way that time seems to pass when drifting in and out of sleep.
The guitar provides the link between the dreamy wish for sleep and the observation of the world going past at a rate too fast to contemplate. “Running everywhere at such a speed” introduces the curious, unfamiliar, yet compelling sound of George’s backwards guitar. It is hypnotic – both enthralling and soothing – and perfectly complements the facets of the lyric. Alongside the memorable gaping bass figure after the refrain and insistent strumming of the acoustic guitar throughout the song, it helps to provide depth and texture to the track. By developing the sound and arrangement piece by piece, shaping the tone of the instruments and the timbre of the vocal, the Beatles and their producer and his team began to realise that the boundaries set within the studio were surpassable and were theirs to transcend. With Revolver, the mixing sessions became recording sessions in themselves, providing the group with the opportunity to shape the track in as important a way as the playing of the instruments or recording of the vocals.
In fact, paying careful attention to the sound of the instruments on this track reveals some studio trickery – also evident if you try to play along with the song. Not only does John’s voice sounds curiously high-pitched, the guitar and drums sound a little spacier and looser than usual, and are pitched in Eb minor. The reason, of course, is that the speed of the tape machines was varied considerably during recording. The song was recorded in E minor – inconceivable that the group would record anything in Eb minor with its six-flat key signature – but with the tape machine running too fast. John then taped his vocal with the machine running a little slow, so that when played back at the right speed, the voice sounds high and the instruments slow. Simple, really.
The song was written just before it was recorded. John’s original lyric was scrawled on the back of a demand from the Post Office for £12 3/– for his car radiophone, dated 25 April 1966 –
Try to sleep again
Got to get to sleep
When I’m woken early in the morning
Lift my head stay in bed
When I wake up early in the morning
Lift my head stay in bed
Got to get to sleep while I’m still yawning
Lift my head I’m still yawning
I’m sleeping.
When I wake up early in the morning
Lift my head I’m still yawning
When I’m in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed float down up stream
Anthology 2 contains two very different takes of the song. The group originally taped eleven takes of the track on 27 April – starting, appropriately enough, just before midnight – with take 11 being deemed “best”. Two days later, Paul, John and George taped the vocals to ‘Eleanor Rigby’, and then set about reworking ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. Possibly the most surprising revelation offered on the release of Anthology 2 was a rehearsal for ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. This rehearsal take, was which nearly wiped when the tape was rewound to record the track proper, reveals a most unusual version of the song. For a track that is so tied in with the sound of the guitar, it is fascinating to hear a snatch of the song featuring, of all things, a vibraphone. The sound dominates the gentle acoustic guitar and two-in-a-bar drumming, and offers a wonderfully dreamy perspective on the song. Although John wanted the song to be more incisive, to contrast with the lyric rather than complement it, this forty-second tape of the rehearsal remains one of the key finds of the entire Anthology project.
According to the Anthology sleeve notes, after the vibraphone version, the group recorded five further takes of the song, only two of which were complete. The first take of this remake also appears on Anthology 2, curiously called “take one”. This is a strangely mechanical rendition of the song, which bears no relation to the vibraphone rehearsal, is vastly inferior to the 27 April recording, and seems to serve no purpose at all. Neither of these remakes were used, as all further work was carried out on take 11 of the song, recorded on 27 April.
Two overdub sessions followed. The first was to tape a guitar solo for the song, which consisted of an ordinary and a fuzz guitar taped backwards. In the book Many Years From Now, Paul remembers that this was the track on which they discovered backwards guitar – supposedly because the tape was accidentally spooled back to front during the session – although a backwards guitar first put in appearance in the recording of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. And it was apparently during ‘Rain’ that the attraction of backward vocals was discovered. However, recording the solo for ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ took the idea of a backwards guitar a step further. It was a decidedly laborious process as, rather than simply play the tape backwards and record a guitar solo onto it, George, later helped by Paul, worked out a solo and scored it in reverse. George then played this reverse solo with the tape running backwards so that, when the tape was played forwards, the melody of the solo was correct, but the sound was that of a guitar played backwards. Geoff Emerick’s heart sank when he realised they would spend what turned out to be nearly six hours “listening to the same eight bars played backwards over and over and over again”. And spare a thought for the tape operator, Phil McDonald, having to haul the heavy reel of tape off the machine and rethread it backwards and forwards for each attempt.
Oddly, the second overdub session, a mere matter of overdubbing vocal harmonies, took nearly twice as long as the guitar solo recording, but at least with that being done, the song was finally complete.
Between the second and third sessions for ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, the Beatles appeared at the NME Annual Poll-Winners’ All-Star Concert at Wembley’s Empire Pool on 1 May. The group played just five songs, rounding off with ‘I’m Down’. Not only was this the fourth and last time the Beatles performed at the NME’s annual concert, it was the only time they performed live in the UK in 1966. It was also their last ever live UK concert in front of an audience.
‘I’m Only Sleeping’, along with ‘Doctor Robert’ and ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, was issued on the American “Yesterday” … And Today album on 20 June, over six weeks before the UK release of Revolver. As such, the versions of all three songs on that LP are not definitive, in that final mono mixing had not been carried out. A special mixing session took place on 12 May, and mono versions of the three tracks were produced exclusively for Capitol. The stereo mixing session for the three tracks took place eight days later. George Martin clearly decided to knock off the UK stereo versions during the session, and so made a separate mix for each market (though the stereo ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ mixes are identical). However, between 12 and 20 May, the deadline for production of “Yesterday” … And Today had clearly passed. Capitol therefore resorted to creating mock stereo versions in the time-honoured way, replacing them on later issues of the album with the true stereo tracks. The differences between the UK and US versions of ‘Doctor Robert’ and ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ are fairly cosmetic, but for ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, thanks to its unique guitar overdub, the differences are quite marked.
In fact, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ exists in a number of guises, depending on where you bought which album, and whether it is mono or stereo. The differences are all concerned with the mix – the vocal and rhythm tracks are the same – that is, where and to what degree the backward and lead guitar sounds are introduced. There are essentially four distinct mixes – the stereo and mono versions of the UK and US albums (Revolver and “Yesterday” … And Today respectively) all differ. For most of the song, the guitar patterns are basically the same on most versions, but with the backward guitar faded in and out at slightly different positions. The clearest mono/stereo difference comes in the third verse, which has backward guitar (around “staring at the ceiling”) on mono versions only. Legend surrounds a supposed fifth mix on a French ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ EP, which has even been said to have the verses in a different order. In fact, the elusive “French EP” uses the UK mono mix for all its four tracks – ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘I’m Only Sleeping’.
There is an amusing touch before the last verse that is easily missed. Between “I’m only sleeping” and “Keeping an eye…” there are the two breaks for the bass arpeggio figure (at 1’56” and 2’01”). During the first of these, John calls out “Yawn, Paul,” and during the second, Paul does!
