Paperback Writer

• 1. Introduction

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  "Paperback Writer" arrived in May 1966 as the A-side of the Beatles' eleventh single, and it came loaded with an unusual distinction: it was the first Beatles single since "Love Me Do" in 1962 to generate something less than universal acclaim. Critics called it brash. Fans wrote letters of complaint. One columnist raged at the "importation of American sick humor into the United Kingdom." And yet it topped charts in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, West Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. How a song about an aspiring novelist managed to both disappoint loyal listeners and conquer the world's charts is a story that touches on Paul McCartney's Aunt Lil, a Wilson Pickett record, a Rickenbacker bass guitar, and a country house in west London called Chiswick House.

• 2. Aunt Lil's Challenge

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  Paul McCartney traced the origins of "Paperback Writer" to a family rebuke he had carried for years. McCartney recalled his Aunt Lil telling him: "Why do you always write songs about love all the time? Can't you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" He filed it away as a standing challenge. The specific trigger came backstage at a concert, according to Radio Luxembourg DJ Jimmy Savile, when McCartney spotted Ringo Starr reading a book and declared he would write a song about it.

  McCartney began working out the framework during his hour-long drive from London to John Lennon's house in Surrey. He and Lennon completed the lyrics in April 1966, under pressure from EMI for a new single early in the sessions for Revolver. The lyrics took the form of a letter from an aspiring author to a publisher, opening with "Dear Sir or Madam." McCartney told Alan Smith of the NME that year that the characters in the letter were not drawn from real life. A 2007 piece in The New Yorker complicated that account: McCartney said he had started writing the song in 1965 after reading a story in the Daily Mail about an aspiring author, "possibly Martin Amis" - who would have been a teenager at the time. The Daily Mail was Lennon's regular newspaper, and copies were at his Weybridge home when the two were working.

  Aside from the subject matter itself, McCartney had a formal ambition baked into the song. He wanted a melody that rested on a single, static chord, in the manner of "Long Tall Sally." He credited himself with nearly achieving it: the verse stays on G through to the end, where it briefly pauses on C. Lennon confirmed the song's authorship plainly in an interview with Hit Parader in 1972, saying the tune was mainly McCartney's and that he may have helped with some of the lyrics.

• 3. The Sound of the Bass

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  The Beatles recorded "Paperback Writer" at EMI Studios in London across the 13th and the 14th of April 1966. The session on the 14th drew a photographer from Beatles Monthly, while EMI engineer Phil McDonald kept handwritten notes documenting the band's work through the overdubs. George Harrison briefly played bass guitar during the search for the right arrangement, and producer George Martin contributed on tack piano sent through a Leslie speaker and on Vox Continental organ. None of Martin's contributions made it to the finished track.

  What defined the record's sound was a bass guitar unlike anything the band had put on tape before. McCartney played a Rickenbacker, and the engineering team pushed its presence further by positioning a loudspeaker directly in front of the bass speaker cabinet. The moving diaphragm of that second speaker generated the electrical signal that was captured. Geoff Emerick, who had just been promoted to the role of the Beatles' recording engineer for the Revolver album, described it as the first time the bass sound had been heard in all its excitement. The push for a heavier low end came in part from Lennon's question: why did the bass on a certain Wilson Pickett record exceed anything the Beatles had achieved?

  The harmony vocals were also worked out during the session rather than pre-planned. George Martin later reflected that the slow, contrapuntal statements from the backing voices represented something no one had really done before. Over the third verse, Lennon and Harrison wove in the melody of the French nursery rhyme "Frere Jacques." The entire single was then cut louder than any previous Beatles record, thanks to a new piece of mastering equipment the EMI maintenance department had devised, referred to as "Automatic Transient Overload Control."

• 4. Promotion and the Butcher Cover

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  Promotion for "Paperback Writer" in Britain opened with a photograph that stopped people cold: the Beatles draped in raw meat and decapitated baby dolls. The same image appeared in full colour on the cover of Disc and Music Echo, carrying the caption "Beatles: What a Carve-Up!" It was that cover that prompted the complaint about American sick humor entering the country.

  The photograph would travel further. Capitol Records briefly used it as the sleeve for the American album Yesterday and Today, and it became permanently known thereafter as the "butcher cover." For the actual US single picture sleeve, Capitol took a different approach: it showed the Beatles playing live, but with Lennon and Harrison's images flipped so that they appeared to be playing left-handed.

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed four promotional films for the song across the 19th and the 20th of May 1966. On the first day, the band recorded a colour performance at EMI Studios intended for The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on the 5th of June. They also recorded two black-and-white clips for British television, which were broadcast on Ready Steady Go! and Thank Your Lucky Stars on the 3rd and the 25th of June. The Beatles filmed a personal introduction to Ed Sullivan with their faces hidden behind colour transparencies of the butcher image.

  On the 20th of May, a second colour film was shot at Chiswick House in west London, where the band mimed to the song in a statue garden and inside the conservatory. The clip was first broadcast in black and white on BBC-TV's Top of the Pops on the 2nd of June. Both the 19th of May colour film and the 20th of May film were included in the three-disc version of the Beatles' 2015 video compilation 1+. The Beatles also appeared in person on Top of the Pops on the 16th of June to mime to both "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" - the band's only in-person appearance on the BBC's flagship pop music show of the era. BBC archiving practice erased the recording, but in 2019 a collector discovered 11 seconds of footage, and a longer 92-second section was found later the same year.

• 5. Charts, Critics, and Context

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  The US release arrived on the 30th of May 1966 via Capitol Records, carrying the catalogue number 5651 and "Rain" as the B-side. The UK release followed on the 10th of June on Parlophone, catalogue number R 5452. It was the Beatles' first UK single since the "Day Tripper" / "We Can Work It Out" double A-side in December 1965. Apart from a brief performance at the annual NME Pollwinners Concert on the 1st of May, the promotion for the single marked the first public activity by the band since the start of the year.

  Derek Johnson, reviewing for the NME, wrote that the song "swings along at a thundering pace" and praised what he called Ringo Starr's "cymbal bashing" and the "sudden breaks in tempo." Penny Valentine, writing in Disc and Music Echo, noted a "marvellous dance beat" and called it "very striking." Cash Box predicted the group would continue their run of blockbuster singles. A 2016 Rolling Stone review praised the song's innovation in paving the way to Revolver.

  But the more widely held response was, according to author Peter Doggett, one of disappointment. NME critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler wrote in The Beatles: An Illustrated Record that "Paperback Writer" was the first Beatles single to receive less-than-universal acclaim, saying criticism centred on the triviality of the lyric and a suspicion that the band were merely playing at being songwriters. The song entered the Record Retailer chart at number 2, behind Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," before moving to number 1 the following week. On Melody Maker's national chart, it debuted at number 1 and stayed there for four weeks. Despite those figures, UK sales were the lowest for any Beatles single since "Love Me Do" in 1962.

  In the US, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two non-consecutive weeks. It displaced the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black," was then pushed aside by Sinatra's single for one week, and then returned to the top. The Recording Industry Association of America certified it gold on the 14th of July. Social historian Arthur Marwick, writing about the 1960s, identified "Paperback Writer" as the song that best captured the period's "new class-defying tide of individualistic enterprise" - a claim set against the context of London being celebrated by the US media as the "Swinging City" of international culture.

• 6. Legacy and Later Life

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  "Paperback Writer" was the only new song the Beatles added to their 1966 tour setlist, and it was also the last new song they played on what turned out to be their final tour. The band found they could not reproduce the layered vocal effects of the studio recording on stage, a gap that became a source of embarrassment.

  The Monkees drew directly on the song's structure when building their debut single, "Last Train to Clarksville." Among the many other artists who recorded cover versions were the Bee Gees, Kris Kristofferson, Kenny Rogers, 10cc, the Shadows, the Charles River Valley Boys, the Cowsills, Sweet, and Floyd Cramer. McCartney continued performing the song in concert for decades; live versions appear on his 1993 album Paul Is Live and his 2009 album Good Evening New York City.

  The question of who played the song's distinctive opening guitar riff remained contested. In the July 1990 and November 2005 issues of Guitar Player magazine, McCartney said he played it on his Epiphone Casino, and photographs from the recording session appear to support that. Ian MacDonald's 2005 edition of Revolution in the Head gives the lead guitar credit entirely to Harrison, while scholars Robert Rodriguez and Walter Everett credit McCartney with the main riff and Harrison with adding lead guitar fills over his initial rhythm part.

  The song debuted on the 1966 UK compilation A Collection of Beatles Oldies. American listeners first encountered it on the 1970 compilation Hey Jude. It appeared on subsequent collections including 1962-1966 in 1973, Past Masters, Volume Two in 1988, and 1 in 2000. In 2012, it was included on the iTunes compilation Tomorrow Never Knows, which the band's website described as gathering the Beatles' most influential rock songs. A vocals-only mix existed as early as 1995, when it was among the tracks considered for the Anthology albums but ultimately left off.