Rain (Beatles song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Rain" by the Beatles arrived on the 30th of May 1966 as the B-side to "Paperback Writer", and it carried something listeners had never quite encountered before. Hidden inside a three-minute rock song was a backwards vocal coda, a droning bass that contravened studio regulations, and a drumming performance that Ringo Starr would later call the best of his entire career. How did a song John Lennon described as being about people moaning about the weather end up as what some critics call the birth of British psychedelic rock? And why does a B-side, a throwaway flip, still place among the greatest songs ever recorded?

• 2. The Philosophy of Weather

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  Lennon linked "Rain" to an idea he had first put into song three years earlier, in the Beatles' 1963 track "There's a Place", where he sang about the power of the mind over circumstance. By 1966, hallucinogenic drugs had sharpened that philosophy considerably. Author Nicholas Schaffner identifies "Rain" as the first Beatles song to present the material world as an illusion, a theme Lennon and George Harrison would explore at length through the band's psychedelic period.

  Paul McCartney remembered the song's premise in his 1997 authorised biography Many Years from Now: "Songs have traditionally treated rain as a bad thing and what we got on to was that it's no bad thing. There's no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back." Lennon, however, called that reading an oversimplification, one that skipped past the philosophical dimension of what the song was actually doing.

  The question of who wrote it has never fully settled. In an early-1970s article on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, Lennon named "Rain" as a song he wrote alone. McCartney's recollection places the authorship at "70-30 to John", with genuine collaboration. Beatles biographer Steve Turner considers McCartney's rain-as-no-bad-thing framing a reduction that misses the point. The disputed authorship would continue to trail the song for decades.

• 3. Building the Sound

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  Recording began at EMI Studios in London on the 14th of April 1966, in the same session as "Paperback Writer". The track was completed two days later on the 16th of April, with overdubs and mixing done the same day. At that moment, the Beatles were actively dismantling the conventions of pop studio work, experimenting with sonic texture in ways that would define their seventh album, Revolver.

  Engineer Geoff Emerick taped the backing track faster than normal. When played back at a slower speed, the music carried what he described as "a radically different tonal quality". Lennon's lead vocal was treated with the opposite approach: his voice was recorded with the tape machine slowed down, so it sounded higher on playback. The instruments themselves were notable. Lennon played a 1965 Gretsch Nashville; McCartney used a 1964 Rickenbacker 4001S bass; Harrison played a 1964 Gibson SG; Starr played Ludwig drums.

  McCartney's bass required a specific workaround. To boost the bass signal, Emerick recorded McCartney's amplifier through a loudspeaker that EMI technical engineer Ken Townsend had reconfigured into a microphone. The resulting volume was so powerful it broke EMI's own regulations, which existed because a loud signal could make a record buyer's stylus jump. "Rain" and "Paperback Writer" therefore became the first release to use Automatic Transient Overload Control, a device invented by EMI's maintenance department, allowing the record to be cut louder than any previous single.

• 4. The Accident Backwards

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  The coda of "Rain" features backwards vocals. Lennon claimed it was the first use of the technique on a record, though the Sydney band The Missing Links had already released a backwards-tracked song called "H'tuom Tuhs" in October 1965. What is undisputed is how strange and affecting the effect is on "Rain". The backwards portion is edited from Lennon's own vocal track and contains three elements: the word "sunshine", a drawn-out "rain" from one of the choruses, and the opening line, "If the rain comes they run and hide their heads".

  Both Lennon and producer George Martin claimed the discovery was theirs. Lennon's account, given in a 1966 interview, is that after the session ended at around four or five in the morning, he went home with a tape, put it on his own machine while exhausted and intoxicated, and heard it come out backwards by accident. In a 1980 interview, he elaborated: "Somehow I got it on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint... That one was the gift of God, of Jah, actually, the god of marijuana." Harrison confirmed the creative accident.

  Martin's version, given to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn in 1987, places the initiative with him: while Lennon was out, Martin lifted a portion of Lennon's vocal, put it on another spool, reversed it, and slid it until it fitted. Lennon, he said, was amazed when he returned. Emerick supported Lennon's version and noted the broader consequence: from that session onward, almost every overdub recorded for Revolver was tried backwards as well as forwards.

• 5. Indian Textures and Structure

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  Musicologist Alan Pollack observed that despite containing no sitars or other instruments from outside the Western rock tradition, "Rain" strongly evokes Indian classical music through its droning harmony and, at times, florid melody. Ethnomusicologist David Reck considers it a more subtle absorption of Orientalism than "Tomorrow Never Knows" or "Love You To", but one that achieves its Indian sound through Harrison's distorted lead guitar, Starr's drumming, and the reverse tape effects.

  Lennon's singing borrows from the flat timbre and ornamentation of Hindustani vocal music, a technique known as gamaka. Pollack describes the song's opening as "a ra-ta-tat half-measure's fanfare of solo snare drums" followed by a guitar introduction. The song sits in G major, though the final mix pitches it about a quarter of a semitone below that key, while the backing track was originally taped in A flat major.

  McCartney's bass, in critic Allan Kozinn's description, functions as "an ingenious counterpoint that takes him all over the fretboard". While Lennon and McCartney harmonise in fourths on a melody with a slightly Middle Eastern quality, McCartney hammers on a high G note for twenty successive beats on the beat. The refrain, though it runs at the same tempo as the verses, seems to move more slowly. Pollack attributes this illusion to the change from a bouncing rhythm to something more regular and plodding for the first four measures. After the Hindustani gamaka vocal technique appeared here, several bands adopted it in the late 1960s: the Moody Blues on "The Sun Set", the Hollies on "King Midas in Reverse", and Crosby, Stills and Nash on "Guinnevere".

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  In the United States, "Rain" peaked at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the 9th of July 1966 and held that position the following week. The "Paperback Writer" A-side reached number 1 in the UK, the US, Australia, and West Germany. At the time of release, music journalist Jon Savage described the two tracks as "saturated in clanging guitar and Indian textures", each reflecting a different side of the psychedelic coin.

  In 1984, Starr reflected on his performance: "I think it's the best out of all the records I've ever made. 'Rain' blows me away... I know me and I know my playing... and then there's 'Rain'." Both Ian MacDonald and Rolling Stone used the same word for his drumming: "superb". In 2006, Mojo ranked "Rain" 20th on its list of the 101 greatest Beatles songs, compiled by a panel of critics and musicians, and credited it with launching what the magazine called "a countercultural downpour". Rolling Stone placed it 463rd on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time in 2004 and 469th in 2010.

  Music critic Jim DeRogatis calls it "the Beatles' first great psychedelic rock song". Music historian Simon Philo sees its release as marking the birth of British psychedelic rock. Musicologist Walter Everett identifies the closing section as an early example of what he calls the "fade-out-fade-in coda", a device the Beatles later used on "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Helter Skelter", and which Led Zeppelin replicated on "Thank You". Alexis Petridis of The Guardian called it "simultaneously thunderous and dreamy psych", and "perhaps the best Beatles B-side of all".

• 7. The Films and "Paul Is Dead"

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  Three promotional films were made for "Rain", following the band's first attempts at the medium for their December 1965 single. Authors Mark Hertsgaard and Bob Spitz both treat the 1966 promos for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" as the first examples of music videos. The films were directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had worked with the Beatles on the television programme Ready Steady Go.

  Two clips were filmed on the 19th of May at a sound stage at EMI Studios: one in colour for The Ed Sullivan Show, one in black and white for UK broadcast. A third was filmed on the 20th of May at Chiswick House in west London, showing the band walking and singing in the gardens and conservatory. The band also promoted the single by miming to both songs on the BBC show Top of the Pops on the 16th of June.

  McCartney had been injured in a moped accident on the 26th of December 1965, about six months before filming. Close-ups in the "Rain" film reveal a chipped tooth. That visible detail would later be drawn into the "Paul is dead" rumours of 1969. The version of the film most people now know, included in the Beatles Anthology documentary, is actually a re-edit combining the Chiswick House promo with shots from the black-and-white EMI clips and unused colour footage from the 20th of May. Richie Unterberger noted that this Anthology edit, which uses rhythmic fast cuts and backwards film effects created in the 1990s, creates a misleading impression that the 1966 originals were technically complex and innovative in ways they were not. The actual first use of backwards film effects in a Beatles promo came later, in the "Strawberry Fields Forever" film of January 1967.