HELLO COME IN

As a lifelong fan of The Beatles, I’m always surprised to come across a song I am less familiar with. This is the case with “Rain,” a fantastic, if lesser-known B-side found on the “Paperback Writer” single. While I have heard this song a small handful of times, it’s certainly not as ingrained within me compared to practically every other song in their repertoire.

Recorded in roughly two or three days in April of 1966, along with the aforementioned “Paperback Writer” during the Revolver sessions, “Rain” is a great upbeat jangly song. With those bright slightly crunched lead guitar lines, and the tight vocal harmonies its fairly typical for this era of The Beatles. But in many ways the song is an unsung transition point between the mod early period and the more experimental, psychedelic era to follow.

The song contains many musical elements that would be used later on such as Paul’s increasingly melodic bass lines, delicate string arrangements, boombastic drums (via close mic’ing inside the bassdrum, the droning chords (that foreshadowed the use of sitar and the influence of Indian ragas) and of course the backwords tape loops.

During this time, The Beatles, along with producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, began toying with new sonic sounds and effects. Emerick came up with ways to alter the sonic textures of a track by recording parts “faster than normal.” Then, when playing back normally,  the music’s tonal quality was radically changed. Similarly, the technique was used to alter Lennon’s lead vocal: recorded with the machine slowed down, which made Lennon’s voice higher when played at normal speeds.

Also in the song’s coda John’s voice can be heard singing the first lyrics of the song “When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads” played in a reverse.

According to sources found on Wikipedia, Lennon described the origins of this idea said:

“After we’d done the session on that particular song—it ended at about four or five in the morning—I went home with a tape to see what else you could do with it. And I was sort of very tired, you know, not knowing what I was doing, and I just happened to put it on my own tape recorder and it came out backwards. And I liked it better. So that’s how it happened.*“

George Martin, though also claims to have come up with the idea:

“I was always playing around with tapes and I thought it might be fun to do something extra with John’s voice. So I lifted a bit of his main vocal off the four-track, put it on another spool, turned it around and then slid it back and forth until it fitted. John was out at the time but when he came back he was amazed.**(Emerick, p. 117)”

Emerick also noted that the “‘Paperback Writer/”Rain’ single was the first to use a new device invented by the maintenance department at Abbey Road called ‘ATOC’ for ‘Automatic Transient Overload Control.'” The invention enabled the record to be cut at a louder volume, and as he put it, “louder than any other single up to that time.”

It should be said that many of these tricks had been experimented with by a few avant-garde composers and emerging electronic musicians. But in 1966, a pop song like this was revolutionary. This recording process also helped to re-energize the band creatively as they morphed from a performance entity to a more artistic studio force. Obviously later on, The Beatles experimental vision would be realized on Revolver‘s remarkable closer “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour and so on and on. (We all know this by now.)

It’s insane to think that this song, like many of the singles and b-sides by the group, were left off a proper album. While the one-two punch of “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” were hugely popular as radio hits, b-sides such as “Rain” received far less attention as they were eventually relegated to those Red & Blue greatest hits collections. But time has proven that these Revolver sessions songs are equally enduring and influential in The Beatles’ catalog, if not more so. All in all, “Rain” is an amazingly catchy pop rock tune.

Check out the promo videos (an early precursor to music videos) for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain”:

[youtube]fXOsi6gPvDs[/youtube]

**For more about Geoff Emerick’s work recording the Beatles, I highly recommend his memoir Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles.