Harrison’s distorted guitar then kicks off a hot, scuzzy riff as some spartan bass drum thumps from Ringo Starr follow below, all of it further energized by five, rapid tumbling McCartney bass notes, and away we go into the verse.Ī bass guitar had never sounded like this, and one can imagine the looks McCartney and engineer Geoff Emerick must have exchanged, as if they had just unlocked a whole new realm of potential for the instrument. Paul McCartney’s voice starts the song, before John Lennon and George Harrison add to a rich counterpoint, the title words cleaving into Cubist sound fragments.
Right from the get-go, there is something otherworldly about “Paperback Writer,” even though this is in essence a sonic short story about a would-be writer.
Paperback writer full#
Revolver would be the full flowering of the Beatles’ next phase but first, there was “Paperback Writer,” the cheeky tease of a song that cajoled you away from the world of Rubber Soul, and into a new galaxy. But now that mid-period game was about to be kicked up another notch. A most organic sound, both of nature and the metropolis. No one had thought to blend folk music with rhythm & blues, as the Beatles had just done, in essence adding an earthy groove to the wifty-wafty strains of cannabis set to music. This was a Beatles album unlike any other, one you couldn’t have been prepared for, clearly marking that a new era had begun.
Rubber Soul had just been released in December 1965, knocking the listening public on its collective ear, and still dominated the charts in the spring. And yet, “Paperback Writer” – “just a little bluesy song,” according to its modest/understating author, Paul McCartney – which was cut 50 years ago in mid-April 1966, and released May 30th of that year, is perhaps the single that best suggests how the Beatles were about to change things up in their most radical way yet.
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