Love You To

• 1. Introduction

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  "Love You To" arrived on the Beatles' 1966 album Revolver as something rock audiences had simply never heard before. Tabla drums, a droning tambura, a sitar introduction that author Jonathan Gould described as "one of the most brazenly exotic acts of stylistic experimentation ever heard on a popular LP" -- and yet the man who made it described his own sitar recordings as merely "experiments". That man was George Harrison, and the gap between his modesty and the song's actual impact is one of the strangest stories of the decade. How did a Beatles guitarist, with only a handful of private lessons under his belt, produce what ethnomusicologist David Reck would later call the first Asian music transferred into a Western pop setting "with sympathy and rare understanding"? And what does a hallucinogenic drug, a pair of Indian hand drums, and a fruit variety called Granny Smith have to do with it?

• 2. A Long Break and a New World

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  Harrison wrote "Love You To" in early 1966 during an unusually long stretch free of professional commitments, the result of the Beatles' inability to find a suitable film project. Journalist Maureen Cleave noted in a contemporary article that the sitar had "given new meaning to" Harrison's life. He spent the downtime honeymooning in Barbados with his wife, English model Pattie Boyd, attending music recitals at the Asian Music Circle in north London, and watching Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar perform at the Royal Festival Hall.

  The Asian Music Circle, based in north London, was more than just a lessons venue. Its founders, Ayana and Patricia Angadi, maintained a network of friends and visitors who broadened Harrison's self-education across art, culture and politics. It was through Patricia Angadi that Harrison would later source tabla player Anil Bhagwat for the recording sessions.

  Harrison's appetite for the sitar had been building since 1965, when he introduced the instrument on John Lennon's "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" on the Rubber Soul album. His own composition on that record, "If I Needed Someone", reflected Indian influences in its melody and suggestion of drone. "Love You To" was conceived as a full step further -- a showcase for the sitar and, for the first time in a Beatles recording, the tabla, a pair of Indian hand drums. Music critic Richie Unterberger described the song as the Beatles' "first all-out excursion" in raga rock, a genre that author Nicholas Schaffner said was "launched" by Harrison's sitar work on "Norwegian Wood".

  LSD was also in the picture. Harrison credited the drug as a catalyst for his growing interest in Eastern philosophical concepts, and those ideas feed directly into the song's lyrics. The recording engineer Geoff Emerick, tasked with giving the unnamed new composition a working title, settled on "Granny Smith" -- after the variety of apple.

• 3. Structure and Sound

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  "Love You To" is in the key of C and follows the pitches of Kafi thaat, the Indian equivalent of Dorian mode. Its structure maps onto three movements from Hindustani classical music: an opening alap, a central gat, and a closing drut gat at accelerated tempo.

  The alap opens in free tempo, with sitar tracing the song's melody in the style of an Indian raga. Harrison biographer Simon Leng described the seven-note motif that closes the alap as "essentially an adaptation of a blues lick". That motif returns as a recurring figure through the main gat section. The shift into metered time after the alap marked the first change of metre in any Beatles composition; Lennon's "She Said She Said" would follow the same approach shortly after.

  The gat runs at madhya laya, or medium tempo, over a driving rock rhythm with heavy tambura drone. Eight-bar "A" sections alternate with twelve-bar "B" sections in an A-B-A-B pattern. The vocal line largely avoids the melodic embellishment typical of the khyal tradition Harrison was drawing from, with the exception of melisma over the last line of each A section. Harmonically, the composition stays close to its I chord of C; the only deviation is a series of implied VII chord changes in the B sections, consistent with the minimal harmonic movement of Indian classical music.

  Mid-song, the sitar takes the melody from the alap and raises it by an octave. The song then returns to verses before the drut gat closes the piece at an accelerated tempo, though Harrison's version is briefer than the Hindustani tradition would typically allow. The lyric "Each day just goes so fast / I turn around, it's past" provides a temporal anchor inside the opening verse -- a pointed contrast to the alap's lack of any fixed time signature.

• 4. The Session at EMI

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  The basic track for "Love You To" was taped at EMI Studios, now known as Abbey Road Studios, on the 11th of April 1966. "Love You To" was only the third track the Beatles had recorded for Revolver at that point, after "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Got to Get You into My Life". Harrison began the session by singing and playing acoustic guitar, with Paul McCartney on backing vocals. Three takes of the song were completed by the end of the first session, and Harrison introduced the sitar on the last of them.

  Work resumed at 8 pm that same evening, with Anil Bhagwat arriving to play tabla. Bhagwat later recalled: "George told me what he wanted and I tuned the tabla with him. He suggested I play something in the Ravi Shankar style, 16-beats, though he agreed that I should improvise. Indian music is all improvisation." Additional musicians from the Asian Music Circle played tambura and sitar. After many rehearsals together, Harrison and Bhagwat recorded the sitar and tabla parts on top of the vocal and guitar performance taped earlier that day.

  Take 6 was selected as the best performance. On the 13th of April, a reduction mix was made to free up space on the four-track tape, creating what was labelled take 7. Harrison then overdubbed a second vocal and added fuzz-tone electric guitar, controlled via a volume pedal. Ringo Starr played tambourine. Paul McCartney contributed a high harmony vocal over the words "They'll fill you in with all their sins, you'll see", but the part was cut from the final mix. Producer Tony Visconti later marvelled at Harrison's guitar sound on the song, saying it "sounds like a chainsaw cutting down a tree in Vermont".

  Who actually played the sitar on the recording has been a point of debate. Author Ian MacDonald attributed the main sitar part to the AMC sitarist rather than Harrison. But Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, in his official history The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, stated clearly that Harrison played the sitar. Musicologist Walter Everett agreed, as did Peter Lavezzoli, author of The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. Bhagwat himself put the question to rest: "I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout."

  Final mixing took place on the 21st of June 1966, as the Beatles raced to complete Revolver before their world tour began.

• 5. What the Lyrics Said

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  Harrison's lyrics for "Love You To" moved in two directions at once. Music critic John Harris identified the lines "There's people standing round / Who'll screw you in the ground / They'll fill you in with all the sins you'll see" as one of the earliest examples of the Beatles voicing an ideology aligned with the emerging 1960s counterculture -- placing them on the side of LSD-inspired perception against traditional social norms.

  Authors Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc read this and related statements in the song as part of a broader turn toward anti-materialism that Harrison and the group would pursue from 1966 onward. The LSD experience, in their view, supplied what they called a "psychedelic vision of society".

  Mark Hertsgaard focused on a different thread: Harrison's affirmation of life as a response to the fleetingness of time, through the invitation to "make love all day long / make love singing songs". Robert Rodriguez read the song as "a somewhat oblique expression of love directed toward his bride" -- that bride being Pattie Boyd -- "along with larger concerns regarding mortality and purpose". Ian Inglis found in the lyrics a simpler argument: that in a world of material dissatisfaction and moral disharmony, sexual pleasure offered genuine consolation.

  The song's title itself was a quiet in-joke. It referenced the Beatles' debut single "Love Me Do", substituting "You" for "Me Do" in a kind of abbreviated echo of their origins.

• 6. Release and First Reactions

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  Revolver was released on the 5th of August 1966, with "Love You To" placed as the fourth track. EMI had distributed the songs to radio stations throughout July, releasing them in increments to ease listeners into the direction the band had taken. Cultural historian Simon Philo described Revolver as representing "pop's most sustained deployment of Indian instruments, musical form and even religious philosophy thus far", with "Love You To" as its most concentrated expression.

  Anil Bhagwat's name appeared on the back cover of the LP, one of the rare occasions an outside musician received an official credit on a Beatles album.

  Critical response split across generational and geographic lines. Richard Green, reviewing the album for Record Mirror alongside Peter Jones, called the song "great" and "so different", and urged listeners to "play it again". A Melody Maker reviewer praised Harrison's sitar playing as "stunning" and "tremendous", calling the result "one of the most striking tracks". The NME's Allen Evans, however, described it as an "Oriental-sounding piece" with "sitar jangles" and a "Kama Sutra-type lyric" -- the kind of response that Turner later cited as evidence of older pop critics struggling with the new progressive music of 1966.

  An unexpected assessment came from Ray Davies of the Kinks, whose July 1965 single "See My Friends" was widely viewed as one of the first pop songs to incorporate Eastern elements. Reviewing Revolver for Disc and Music Echo, Davies said Harrison "must have quite a big influence on the group now", called the performance "well done", and added: "This sort of song I was doing two years ago -- now I'm doing what the Beatles were doing two years ago."

  In the United States, most reviews of Revolver were lukewarm, clouded by the reaction to John Lennon's remark that the Beatles had become more popular than Christ. New York critic Richard Goldstein was an exception, praising Revolver as "a revolutionary record" and later writing that the lyrics of "Love You To" "exploded with a passionate sutra quality". A reviewer for KRLA Beat called the song "well done and musically valid" but also "musically unrecognized".

• 7. A Meeting with Shankar

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  Harrison met Ravi Shankar in June 1966, at a social event hosted by Ayana and Patricia Angadi. Though Shankar was unaware of the Beatles' popularity and had yet to hear "Norwegian Wood", he was struck by Harrison's modesty: the guitarist described his sitar recordings as merely "experiments". Shankar agreed to take Harrison as his student.

  Soon after, Shankar gave Harrison his first formal sitar lesson at Kinfauns, Harrison and Boyd's home in Surrey. Harrison later described the effect of that first lesson with striking directness: "I felt I wanted to walk out of my home that day and take a one-way ticket to Calcutta. I would even have left Pattie behind in that moment." Later, Shankar and tablist Alla Rakha performed a private recital at Kinfauns for Harrison, Lennon and Starr.

  The association between the Beatles and Indian music had become visible to the wider world even before the album's release. At Harrison's suggestion, the band stopped over in Delhi on the return flight from their concerts in the Far East. All four members bought musical instruments from Rikhi Ram and Sons in Connaught Place, a visit that received significant public attention.

  In the Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, a brief portion of "Love You To" was used to introduce Harrison's character, presenting him as a guru-like figure standing on a hill -- a reflection of the cultural role the song had helped create for him.

• 8. Legacy

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  David Reck, writing in the journal Asian Music, set out the case plainly: "One cannot emphasise how absolutely unprecedented this piece is in the history of popular music. For the first time an Asian music was not parodied utilising familiar stereotypes and misconceptions, but rather transferred in toto into a new environment with sympathy and rare understanding." Reck named "Love You To" the first song in the Euro-American pop music canon to be scored predominantly for Asian instruments, with sitar, tabla and tambura replacing the standard rock band lineup.

  Peter Lavezzoli, author of The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, called it "the first conscious attempt in pop to emulate a non-Western form of music in structure and instrumentation". On Harrison's sitar playing, Lavezzoli was direct: "'Love You To' remains the most accomplished performance on sitar by any rock musician." Reck, for his part, viewed the song as the first in a series of Indian-based works by Harrison that would continue through his solo career, noting with some admiration: "All of this in a three-minute song!"

  Musical historians have traced lines of influence in multiple directions. The song helped propel Indian classical music into popularity among Western youth through Revolver's success. It encouraged other rock musicians to experiment with non-Western instruments, broadening the scope of raga rock. Its mixture of Indian instrumentation with distorted electric guitar fed into the development of 1960s psychedelic music. The song has also been recognised as a precursor to the world music genre.

  In a 2002 issue of Goldmine magazine, Dave Thompson wrote that "Love You To" "opened creative doors through which Harrison's bandmates may not -- and George Martin certainly would not -- have ever dreamed of passing". Rolling Stone contributor Greg Kot paired it with "Taxman" as two major contributions that saw Harrison come into his own as a songwriter on Revolver.

  Cover versions came from varied directions: the Trypes covered it on their 1984 EP The Explorers Hold; Ronnie Montrose recorded a version featuring a rare vocal performance on his 1986 album Territory; experimental rock band Bongwater included it on their 1988 debut album Double Bummer. In 2009, My Morning Jacket singer Jim James performed it on banjo for his EP Tribute To, recorded after Harrison's death in November 2001. Cornershop covered it in 2012 for Mojo's compilation Yellow Submarine Resurfaces. The breadth of those acts -- from art rock to country-inflected indie to British Asian pop -- reflects exactly the range of musical territory that Harrison opened on the 11th of April 1966.