He Said She Said She Said

Like many, I've been getting back into The Beatles in a big way since the release of their remastered catalog last month. I've been picking up their masterpieces one at a time and the first one I got, 1966's REVOLVER, sounds light years better than the 1987 version. With an absoultely mind-boggling range of genius songs including "Taxman," "Eleanor Rigby," "Yellow Submarine," "Got to Get You Into My Life" and "Tomorrow Never Knows," it is arguably their finest album and thus the finest rock album ever made.


One of the REVOLVER tunes I've been enjoying with fresh ears is John Lennon's "She Said She Said." With its tricky rhythms, blazing guitars and deft wordplay, it's one of Lennon's most interesting songs. And as Ian Macdonald's must-read Beatle book Revolution in the Head explains, it has an equally interesting backstory:

"It draws inspiration from the day in August 1965 when Lennon took LSD with Roger McGuinn and David Crosby in Los Angeles. He had just watched and been severely bored by Jane Fonda's new film Cat Ballou when her actor brother Peter turned up and insisted on telling him about a hospital operation during which he'd had a near-death experience. Already annoyed by Fonda's sister, Lennon was exasperated by his disturbing claim that he knew what it was like to be dead and, fearing a bad trip, had him thrown out. The unease of the encounter stayed with him..."


This style of angular, psychedelic power pop became a genre unto itself, especially in the early 1990s as practiced by Matthew Sweet, whose 1991 album Girlfriend is perhaps the most REVOLVER-indebted record of all time (excluding the anime-laden video):


Some cat on YouTube was kind enough to put up a fascinating history of "She Said She Said" taking shape as a series of acoustic ditties, long before it became a proto-psychedelic freakout.


"She Said She Said" is also notable for containing some of Ringo Starr's finest drumming. The much underrated Mr. Starkey was really in his element in the REVOLVER era, which also featured amazing work on "Tomorrow Never Knows." Amazingly, this ode to mind expansion, inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (there's a fun beach read) was animated for the Beatles cartoon series in the 60s and is even more f&$%ed up than the song itself.