She Said She Said

Song infobox
Name = She Said She Said


Artist = The Beatles
Album = Revolver
Released = 5 August 1966
track_no = 7
Recorded = Abbey Road Studios 21 June 1966
Genre = Psychedelic rock, Hard rock
Length = 2:37
Writer = Lennon-McCartney
Label = Parlophone
Producer = George Martin
Misc = Extra tracklisting
Album = Revolver
Type = studio
Tracks = ;Side one
# "Taxman"
# "Eleanor Rigby"
# "I'm Only Sleeping"
# "Love You To"
# "Here, There and Everywhere"
# "Yellow Submarine"
# "She Said She Said";Side two
# "Good Day Sunshine"
# "And Your Bird Can Sing"
# "For No One"
# "Doctor Robert"
# "I Want to Tell You"
# "Got to Get You Into My Life"
# "Tomorrow Never Knows"

"She Said She Said" is a song by The Beatles from their 1966 album "Revolver", recorded in June of that year.

Inspiration

John Lennon was the primary writer of "She Said She Said," which was about one of his first LSD trips. He described it as "an 'acidy' song."

As part of The Beatles' six-day respite from their U.S. tour in late August 1965, Brian Epstein rented a house for them at 2850 Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, California. Soon, their address became widely known, and the area was besieged by Beatle fans who arrived by car, backing up traffic all the way to Sunset Boulevard. Their huge, rented Spanish-style house was tucked into the side of a mountain, on stilts. The nearly sheer drop did not stop fans from trying to climb the steep cliff face, and the police department detailed a tactical squad of officers to protect the band and the house. Other fans rented helicopters to spy from overhead. The Beatles found it impossible to leave home much and hosted actors Eleanor Bron (who co-starred in “"Help!"”), Peggy Lipton, and folksinger Joan Baez. On one particular day, The Beatles hosted the Byrds and actor Peter Fonda and, except for Paul McCartney, took LSD.

As Fonda wrote for Rolling Stone magazine:

cquote|I finally made my way past the kids and the guards. Paul and George were on the back patio, and the helicopters were patrolling overhead. They were sitting at a table under an umbrella in a rather comical attempt at privacy. Soon afterwards, we dropped acid and began tripping for what would prove to be all night and most of the next day; all of us, including the original Byrds, eventually ended up inside a huge empty sunken tub in the bathroom, babbling our minds away. I had the privilege of listening to the four of them sing, play around, and scheme about what they would compose and achieve. They were so enthusiastic, so full of fun. John was the wittiest and most astute. I enjoyed just hearing him speak and there were no pretensions in his manner. He just sat around, laying out lines of poetry and thinking–an amazing mind. He talked a lot, yet he still seemed so private.

It was a thoroughly tripped-out atmosphere, because they kept finding girls hiding under tables and so forth; one snuck into the poolroom through a window while an acid-fired Ringo was shooting pool with the wrong end of the cue. “Wrong end?” he’d say. “So what fuckin’ difference does it make?”

Later in the day, the group passed time in a large sunken tub in the master bedroom. Fonda brought up his nearly fatal self-inflicted childhood gunshot accident, writing later that he was trying to comfort a frightened George Harrison. Fonda said that he knew what it was like to be dead. Lennon snapped, “Listen mate, shut up about that stuff,” and as Fonda recalled, "You're making me feel like I've never been born." Lennon explained, "We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip, and the sun was shining, and the girls were dancing (some from "Playboy", I believe) and the whole thing was really beautiful and Sixties. And this guy - who I really didn't know, he hadn't made "Easy Rider" or anything - kept coming over, wearing shades, saying 'I know what it's like to be dead,' and we kept leaving him because he was so boring. It was scary, when you're flying high: 'Don't tell me about it. I don't want to know what it's like to be dead!'" "... [H] e was showing us his bullet wound. He was very uncool," Harrison added.

McCartney recalls, more charitably: "Fonda seemed to us to be a bit wasted; he was a little out of it. I don't know if we expected a bit more of [Henry Fonda|Henry [Fonda] 's] son, but he was certainly of our generation, and he was alright."

When someone realized that they had not eaten all day, the group tried to make dinner in the kitchen, but Lennon was too confused from the drug to use his knife and fork properly and as he tried to stop his food from moving around on his plate, he spilled it onto the floor. Later, during this same visit to Los Angeles, The Beatles visited Elvis Presley.

Recording

This was the final track recorded during the "Revolver" sessions, and was hastily added when the album lineup was found to be a song short. It took nine hours to rehearse and record the entire song, complete with overdubs. After the recording of the song, The Beatles producer George Martin is reported to have said: "All right, boys, I'm just going for a lie-down."

Paul McCartney's degree of participation in the song remains unclear. McCartney recalls that the band had an argument before the track was recorded, with McCartney walking out and thus not participating in the recording and McCartney does not contribute a vocal to the song.

Personnel

*John Lennon: lead and harmony vocals; lead and rhythm guitar; Hammond organ.
*George Harrison: electric guitar,bass, harmony vocals.
*Ringo Starr: drums.

Music

The song uses mostly just three chords: B flat (I), A flat (flat-VII), and E flat (IV). The song is in the key of B flat Mixolydian modulating to E flat major during the bridge sections. The modulation is affected with an F minor (v minor) chord, a pivot chord they'd used to modulate to the key of the subdominant before on 'From Me To You' and 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'.

A guitarist's keen ear finds that the song is being played in A; the chords being played are actually A, G, D, and E minor (rather than B flat, A flat, E flat, and F minor). The song was either sped up one semitone from the original recording (by this time The Beatles routinely played with varying tape speeds), or the guitarists moved a capo up a single fret.

The coda features a canonic imitation in the split voice parts, an interesting development of the idea originally presented by the lead guitar in the verse.

The song is also often noted as one of Ringo Starr's most innovative contributions. The spinning, whirling drumming seems to have no connection to the vocals or any other instrument, yet still connects with them somehow in a remarkable way. Some drum enthusiasts have referred to Starr's performance on this track as one of the best drum tracks ever recorded in pop music. Fact|date=April 2007

Denver memorabilia collector, Chris Lopez discovered a tape made by John Lennon of his composing the song. The source was Anthony Cox, ex-husband of Lennon's second wife, Yoko Ono. He sold it along with other recordings made by John at Christie's Auction House in London for a record six-figure sum.

Influence

*The Chords covered the song in 1980 and included it on their debut album "So Far Away".
*Ween covered the song for their 1987 album "".
*The Snake River Conspiracy included their version on the Vulcan single in 1999.
*The Black Keys covered it on their first album "The Big Come Up" in 2002.
*Gov't Mule perform the song live, quite frequently, as a medley with "Tomorrow Never Knows". The song appears on their 1998 album "Dose".
*The Dead with Joan Osbourne had covered the song on their 2003 tour, 7/1, 7/7 & 8/3; and again on 12/30.
*British hard rock band Lone Star covered the song on their eponymous album in 1976.
*Mark Mulcahy recorded a version of "She Said She Said" for the UK release of "Mojo: Revolver Reloaded", released July 2006.
*The song has been covered by side-projects of the band Phish.
*The song has been recently covered by the band Govt Mule.

References

*Brown, Peter and Gaines, Steven, The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles, McGraw-Hill, New York (1983), pp. 186-189.

*Fonda, Peter, Don’t Tell Dad: A Memoir, Hyperion, New York (1998), pp. 207-209.

*Miles, Barry, The Beatles Diary Vol. 1: The Beatles Years, Omnibus Press (2001), p. 208.

*Dowlding, William J, Beatlesongs, Simon & Schuster, New York (1989), p. 140.

*The Beatles, Anthology, Chronicle Books, San Francisco (2000), p. 190.

External links

* [http://fab4lyrics.stonegauge.com/albums/revolver.htm#07 Song lyrics]
* [http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/ssss.shtml Alan W. Pollack's Notes on "She Said She Said"]
* [http://www.geocities.com/shesaidshesaidstuff/robynhitchcock.html Robyn Hitchcock's commentary about "She Said She Said"]