Helter Skelter (song)

• 1. Helter Skelter

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  'I got blisters on my fingers!' That shout, at the close of 'Helter Skelter,' is one of the most famous unscripted moments in rock history. It arrived during a September 1968 recording session, after Ringo Starr threw his drumsticks across the studio in exhausted fury. He screamed into an open microphone, and the engineers left it on the tape. 'Helter Skelter' is a 1968 Beatles track from the White Album. It began as a dare that Paul McCartney set for himself. It became credited as a key influence on the early development of heavy metal. And it became entangled in one of the most disturbing episodes in American cultural history. The song's name appears, misspelled in blood, at a 1969 murder scene in Los Angeles. How a track rooted in a British fairground ride arrived at that point is a question worth following.

• 2. A Dare McCartney Set Himself

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  In a Radio Luxembourg interview on the 20th of November 1968, two days before the White Album's release, McCartney described what had sparked the song. He had read a review promising a record packed with 'echo on everything,' with a band 'screaming their heads off.' When he tracked down the actual record, it turned out to be 'quite straight' and 'very sort of sophisticated.' Nothing like the description. That gap pushed him to write the real thing: 'Oh well, we'll do one like that, then.' His specific inspiration came from Pete Townshend of the Who. Townshend had described his band's September 1967 single, 'I Can See for Miles,' as the loudest, rawest, dirtiest song they had ever recorded. McCartney's stated aim became 'the most raucous vocal, the loudest drums.'

  Paul McCartney described the title's central image as 'a ride from the top to the bottom,' evoking the fall of the Roman Empire. A helter skelter is a British fairground fixture: a tall spiral slide wound around a tower. The phrase also carries a secondary meaning of chaos and disorder. The song was also McCartney's answer to critics who called him 'the soppy one' of the band. Although officially credited to Lennon-McCartney, Lennon was unambiguous in a 1980 interview: 'That's Paul completely.' Musicologist Walter Everett later argued that beyond Townshend's music, the completed track 'sounds more like an answer to Yoko Ono.' Ono, as Lennon's new romantic partner, was a constant and sometimes tense presence throughout the White Album sessions.

• 3. The Sessions

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  The Beatles' first full attempt at 'Helter Skelter,' on the 18th of July 1968, produced a take lasting 27 minutes and 11 seconds. That sprawling version bore little resemblance to what ended up on the record. By the 9th of September, with George Martin absent, Chris Thomas stepped in to produce. Thomas later recalled that while McCartney tracked his vocal, George Harrison set fire to an ashtray. Harrison then ran around the studio holding it above his head. Abbey Road engineer Brian Gibson described the band as 'jamming away, completely oblivious to the world.' Management, Gibson noted, paid no attention to whatever happened inside the room that night. Starr himself later described the experience as 'total madness and hysterics in the studio.' Sometimes, he said, 'you just had to shake out the jams.' Built on just four chords, E, E7, G, and A, the song was structured around what musicologist Walter Everett called 'organized noise.' 'There is no dominant and little tonal function,' he wrote. The lyrics open by following the fairground title literally: 'When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide.' Author Jonathan Gould described what follows as turning the fairground colloquialism into a metaphor for adolescent fantasy, frenzied and operatic in character.

  The version on the album fades out completely at around three minutes and forty seconds. It then fades back in, drops out again, and finally surges back with three cymbal crashes. That extended ending appears in the stereo mix only. The mono pressing, originally issued on LP, closes on the first fadeout. On the 10th of September, the band returned for overdubs. Harrison added a lead guitar part, Mal Evans played trumpet, and Lennon fashioned a 'mouth sax' by blowing through a saxophone mouthpiece. Two musicologists later proposed that a Bartell fretless guitar of Harrison's was also used on the track. Kenny Jenkins of Leeds Beckett University and Richard Perks of the University of Kent both expressed this view. On the finished album, the song sits between 'Sexy Sadie' and 'Long, Long, Long.' A rare gap in the vinyl, called a 'rill,' preceded the song's arrival on the LP. That brief silence made the opening even more abrupt.

• 4. Divided Opinions

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  The double album arrived via Apple Records on the 22nd of November 1968, and reviewers split immediately over 'Helter Skelter.' Barry Miles, writing for International Times, called it 'probably the heaviest rocker on plastic today.' The NME's Alan Smith found it 'low on melody but high on atmosphere' and 'frenetically sexual.' Its pace, he wrote, left the band barely keeping up with themselves. Writing in Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner grouped the song with 'Birthday' and 'Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.' Together, he argued, they captured 'the very best traditional and contemporary elements in rock and roll.' Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian listed it among McCartney's 'perfect, professional songs.' William Mann of The Times, though he misidentified it as a Lennon composition, called it 'exhaustingly marvellous.'

  Ian MacDonald dismissed the song as 'ridiculous,' accusing McCartney of 'shrieking weedily against a massively tape-echoed backdrop of out-of-tune thrashing.' He compared the result to 'reproducing the requisite bulldozer design but on a Dinky Toy scale.' David Quantick, in his book Revolution: The Making of the Beatles' White Album, was equally withering. He called the song 'neither loud enough to bludgeon the listener into being impressed nor inspired enough to be exciting.' The 1971 WPLJ and Village Voice poll, one of the first to rank Beatles songs, voted 'Helter Skelter' the fourth worst. Musicologist Walter Everett has noted it typically appears among the five most-disliked Beatles songs for baby boomers. That generation made up the band's core contemporary audience.

  In March 2005, Q magazine ranked 'Helter Skelter' fifth on its list of '100 Greatest Guitar Tracks Ever.' Writing in 2014, Ian Fortnam of Classic Rock described it as 'one of the prime progenitors of heavy metal.' He also cited it as a major influence on 1970s punk rock. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted its 'proto-metal roar.' By 2018, Kerrang! had placed it in 'The 50 Most Evil Songs Ever.' That distinction had less to do with musicianship than with events in 1969.

• 5. Manson's Vision

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  In August 1969, investigators arrived at the LaBianca murder scene in Los Angeles. On the refrigerator door, they found a phrase written in the victims' blood. It was misspelled: 'HEALTER SKELTER.' Charles Manson had told his followers that several White Album songs contained a coded Beatles prophecy. Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi led the prosecution of Manson and four followers. He argued that Manson believed 'Helter Skelter' predicted an apocalyptic race war. Manson envisioned racist and non-racist whites destroying each other over the treatment of Black Americans. He and his 'Family' would wait out the fighting in an underground city. Emerging afterward as the only surviving whites, they would rule over a society unable to govern itself. Manson named this entire sequence of events 'Helter Skelter,' after McCartney's song. In his reading, the lyrics described the Family's emergence from hiding. Their refuge was a disused mine shaft in the desert outside Los Angeles. Bugliosi named his best-selling account of the murders Helter Skelter. That book became the basis for a 1976 television film of the same name.

  In October 1970, Manson's defence team announced plans to call John Lennon as a witness at trial. Lennon responded that his testimony would be of no use, since he had not written 'Helter Skelter.' In the last interview he gave before his murder in December 1980, Lennon dismissed Manson as 'just an extreme version.' The category, he meant, was listeners who found false messages in Beatles lyrics. He said the connection 'was built around George's song about pigs and this one, Paul's song about an English fairground.' It had, he added, 'nothing to do with anything.' In his 1997 authorised biography Many Years from Now, McCartney said the song had 'unfortunately inspired people to do evil deeds.' It had acquired, he wrote, 'all sorts of ominous overtones because Manson picked it up as an anthem.'

  Mike McGann, the lead police investigator on the Tate-LaBianca murders, stated bluntly: 'Everything in Vince Bugliosi's book (Helter Skelter) is wrong.' Bugliosi's co-prosecutor Aaron Stovits and detective Charlie Guenther both later discredited the song-as-motive theory. The film's popularity led Capitol Records to consider 'Helter Skelter' as the A-side of a single from its Rock 'n' Roll Music compilation. Capitol ultimately pulled back, concluding that exploiting the Manson connection would be in poor taste.

• 6. Covered and Performed

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  Siouxsie and the Banshees were performing 'Helter Skelter' at live shows from mid-1977, well before they committed it to tape. They recorded it as a Peel Session in 1978. A studio version appeared later that year on The Scream, their debut album, produced by Steve Lillywhite. Writing about the best-known covers up to 2002, David Quantick called the Banshees recording 'the best of all of them.' The Financial Times later commented on the Banshees' abrupt ending. It 'leaves the listener mentally stuck at the top of the slide with no way down,' the paper wrote.

  Motley Crue included 'Helter Skelter' on their 1983 album Shout at the Devil. Bassist Nikki Sixx recalled that the appeal came through the guitars and lyrics. It also came through the Manson murders and what Sixx described as the song's standing as 'a real symbol of darkness and evil.' The band's 1983 picture disc for the single featured a photograph of a fridge with the title written in blood. The Bobs released an a cappella version the same year. It earned them a Grammy nomination in 1984 for Best Vocal Arrangement for Two or More Voices.

  U2 recorded 'Helter Skelter' live at the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado, on the 8th of November 1987. That recording opened their 1988 album Rattle and Hum. Introducing the song, Bono said: 'This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We're stealing it back.' Aerosmith's cover was recorded in 1975 and appeared on their 1991 compilation Pandora's Box. It charted at number 21 on the Album Rock Tracks chart in the United States. In 2018, Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson collaborated on a version to promote their 'Twins of Evil: The Second Coming Tour.' Their recording peaked at number nine on Billboard Hard Rock Digital Songs.

  McCartney himself has performed 'Helter Skelter' in concert regularly since 2004, typically placing it near the end of his encores. On the 8th of February 2006, he played it at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. At the 53rd Grammy Awards in 2011, the live version from his album Good Evening New York City won Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance. It was his first solo Grammy since he won for arranging 'Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey' in 1972. On the 13th of July 2019, McCartney closed his Freshen Up tour at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Ringo Starr played drums alongside him that night. Swiss industrial black metal band Samael covered the song on their 2017 album Hegemony. In a 2021 music video, they credited 'Helter Skelter' as 'the first metal song ever recorded.'