Taxman

• 1. Introduction

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  Before the first note of "Taxman" sounds, a cough rings out and George Harrison begins to count the band in. His "one, two, three, four" is delivered in a grim, miserly voice, and a second, real count can be heard faintly behind it. The biographer Jonathan Gould heard self-mockery in the gag. In three years, he wrote, the Beatles had travelled "from the dance floor to the counting house". The song opened Revolver, their 1966 album, and it was the first time the group had written a topical song. Why would the most successful band in Britain begin an album with a grievance about money? Who really played the wild guitar solo in the middle? And how did one short complaint go on to turn up in election campaigns, tax commercials and a legislature's list of possible state songs?

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• 2. A Ruinous Tax Bill

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  In April 1966, the London accountancy firm Bryce, Hammer, Isherwood & Co. sent the Beatles a blunt warning. "Two of you are close to being bankrupt, and the other two could soon be." The report arrived just as George Harrison was writing his new song. Their earnings placed them in the top bracket, so they owed a 95 per cent supertax brought in by Harold Wilson's Labour government. That arithmetic explains the lyric "There's one for you, nineteen for me". Harrison looked back on it in his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine. He said the song marked the moment he first realised that, even after they started earning money, they were "giving most of it away in taxes".

  John Lennon helped finish the words, though he was not eager about it. In 1980 he recalled that he "threw in a few one-liners to help the song along, because that's what he asked for". Harrison came to Lennon because, in Lennon's account, he could not go to Paul McCartney, who "wouldn't have helped him at that period". Lennon said it was "enough to do my own and Paul's songs". He agreed anyway "because I loved him and didn't want to hurt his feelings".

  Harrison's anger was not only about his bank balance. In late February 1966, he gave Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard an interview titled "How a Beatle Lives". He objected that the huge sums the band paid were helping to fund the manufacture of military weapons. He also spoke against the Vietnam War and railed against authority in general. He compared Wilson to the Sheriff of Nottingham from the Robin Hood stories.

  The irony ran deeper, because Wilson himself had honoured the band. In June 1965, during his first term as prime minister, he nominated all four Beatles as Members of the Order of the British Empire. No pop musicians had received such an award before. The honour recognised how the band's 1964 international breakthrough had opened an export market for British pop for the first time. Tourism, fashion, film and the image of London as the "Swinging City" all benefited. The author Ian MacDonald put it neatly. The heavy tax the Beatles paid to the Treasury was, he wrote, the "price" of their MBEs. The lyric also names "Mr Heath", meaning Ted Heath, then leader of the Conservative Party, so the song aimed at both sides of the House.

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• 3. Soul in Abbey Road

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  For Revolver, the Beatles had wanted to leave EMI's Abbey Road studios in London behind. They were especially taken with the sound of records made at Stax Studio in Memphis. Their manager, Brian Epstein, looked into recording there, but the plan collapsed after locals began descending on the Stax building. Backup ideas, Atlantic Studios in New York and Motown's Hitsville USA in Detroit, were dropped too. McCartney later said that only "Taxman" and his own soul-inspired "Got to Get You into My Life" might have sounded better made in an American studio. Otherwise, he said, the band "found a new British sound almost by accident".

  The first attempt at "Taxman" on the 20th of April was left unused. On the 21st of April, the Beatles taped ten new takes. Ringo Starr's drums, McCartney's bass and Harrison's distorted rhythm guitar filled the four tracks. Overdubs followed, with McCartney on lead guitar, Harrison on lead vocal, and Lennon and McCartney singing backing vocals.

  The lead guitar solo caused an argument among the people who were there. The EMI engineer Geoff Emerick gave a withering account of Harrison's early efforts to work out a solo. The biographer Robert Rodriguez writes that this says more about Emerick's personality than about events, and that McCartney's and Harrison's memories do not support it. McCartney said he was talking through his idea with Harrison, who invited him to play it on the record. Harrison was not fussed about who played. "I was pleased to have him play that bit on 'Taxman'. If you notice, he did like a little Indian bit on it for me." McCartney recalled wanting something "feedback-y and crazy", and compared its attitude to early-period Jimi Hendrix.

  Take 11 shows how the lyric changed. It featured two rapidly sung refrains of "Anybody got a bit of money?" The chanted names of Wilson and Heath replaced them. The spoken count-in was added during an overdubbing and mixing session on the 16th of May. The last piece arrived on the 21st of June, when the section containing the guitar solo was spliced onto the end. It replaced a formal ending and ran on into a fadeout.

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• 4. Anatomy of the Groove

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  The key of D major anchors "Taxman", but the harmony refuses to sit still. The chords lean on the flattened seventh note, C natural, and often swap between a major and minor tonic chord. The result evokes either Mixolydian or Dorian modes. There is one F chord near the end, and unusually there is no A chord at all. The musicologist Dominic Pedler also points to a sharp-ninth chord that decorates the D7 at the end of each verse. At 1:29, a G chord turns "jarring" against the line "'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah - I'm the taxman".

  The author Steve Turner called it a "smart little pop art song", partly because it borrows from Neil Hefti's "Batman Theme" from the 1966 television series Batman. Gould heard the band shout "Taxman!" before the solo as a joke. In his view it set the tax collector, a "civil servant superhero", beside the DC Comics character.

  McCartney's bass line has been compared to the work of the Motown bassist James Jamerson, with active lines and glissandi between 0:55 and 1:08. In the third verse, he doubles his own pentatonic line. MacDonald hears the rhythms of hit singles by James Brown, Lee Dorsey and the Spencer Davis Group. The writer Rob Chapman instead points to Booker T. & the M.G.'s of Stax Records for Harrison's riff. Rolling Stone summed up the track as "skeleton funk", with a "screeching-raga guitar solo".

  The musicologist Alan Pollack describes that solo as made of "fast triplets, exotic modal touches, and a melodic shape which traverses several octaves and ends with a breathtaking upward flourish". MacDonald thought it went "far beyond anything in the Indian style Harrison had done on guitar". He suspected the likely spark was Jeff Beck's groundbreaking solo on the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things". Walter Everett places it in the Dorian mode, the same one Harrison had recently adapted for the sitar part of "Love You To".

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• 5. Release and Rows

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  Parlophone, EMI's label, issued Revolver on the 5th of August 1966, with "Taxman" placed ahead of "Eleanor Rigby". Nicholas Schaffner noted that three Harrison compositions on one Beatles album was unprecedented. Along with "Love You To" and "I Want to Tell You", the song made Harrison a third "prolific" songwriter in the band. The historian David Simonelli, in Working Class Heroes, groups it with "Eleanor Rigby" and the May 1966 single tracks "Paperback Writer" and "Rain". He sees all of them as "pointed social commentary" that consolidated the band's "dominance of London's social scene". He compares this with the Rolling Stones, whose songs now "had to comment on the values that marked affluence in Britain".

  In a 1968 interview, Lennon called it an "anti-establishment tax song". He said the band still objected to paying the government unless the money went to a "communal or Communist or real Christian society". The Dutch interviewer Abram de Swaan then criticised the song's message and insisted taxes should be high to benefit everyone. Lennon was taken aback.

  The song's place in the catalogue proved contested. The 1973 double LP 1962-1966 came out three years after the group split, and fans complained that it left out "Taxman" and every other Harrison song. In 1976, after the band's contract with EMI and Capitol ended, Capitol put it on the themed compilation Rock 'n' Roll Music. Later that year Capitol added it to The Best of George Harrison, ignoring Harrison's wishes that none of his Beatles-era songs appear.

  Credit for the lyric remained a sore point for years. Lennon was deeply hurt by how little space Harrison gave him in the 1980 autobiography. Harrison answered in a 1987 interview. "He was annoyed 'cos I didn't say he'd written one line of the song 'Taxman'. But I also didn't say how I wrote two lines of 'Come Together' or three lines of 'Eleanor Rigby', you know - I wasn't getting into any of that."

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• 6. Reviews and Rankings

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  Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice called Revolver the Beatles' "great leap forward" and picked out "Taxman" as the album's "example of political cheek". By naming both Wilson and Heath as "the villains", he wrote, the band "lay it right on the non-partisan line". Record Mirror ran a joint review. Richard Green called the song "Big beat rock 'n' roll" and added, "I liked it. Good idea." Peter Jones found it "a bit repetitive" but "Loved the wild, strident guitar mid-way". A reviewer at KRLA Beats thought it was among the best and most concise satirical comments on the tax situation, "not to mention our own!"

  Paul Williams of Crawdaddy! found the song funny, and he called lines such as "Ha-ha, Mr Wilson" "delightful". He dubbed it "Batman goes protest". He felt the Indian-style instrumental break was "out of place", unlike the one on "Love You To". MacDonald praised the whole group's input. He called McCartney's bass part "remarkable" and his solo "outstanding". Alex Petridis of The Guardian found it "faintly mind-boggling" that "Yellow Submarine" was issued as a single from Revolver, when "Taxman" would have been more worthy.

  The rankings came decades later. A 2006 Mojo panel of critics and musicians placed it 48th among "The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs". The singer Joe Brown praised how everyone chipped in, adding "There's no fat at all on it. And, it's very funny." Rolling Stone ranked it 55th in 2010, calling it "a crucial link" to the group's psychedelic experiments. Time Out London's music staff put it seventh in 2018.

  Guitar World's editors, in 2015, placed it third among "The Beatles' 50 Greatest Guitar Moments". They said the solo showed McCartney "coming into his own as a guitarist". Back in 2001, VH1 had named Revolver the greatest rock 'n' roll album of all time. Bill Flanagan cited "Taxman" among four tracks to support his claim. "If pop music were destroyed tomorrow, we could re-create it from this album alone."

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• 7. Riffs and Revivals

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  Rob Chapman, in his book Psychedelia and Other Colours, says Harrison's riff "runs like an unbroken thread through the development of English psychedelia". He also finds it as a trace element in many mod-pop mutations. Writing in January 2002 in Rolling Stone's Harrison tribute book, Mikal Gilmore praised the dissonance in the melody of "Taxman" and "I Want to Tell You" as daring for 1966. He judged it "perhaps more originally creative" than the avant-garde ideas Lennon and McCartney took from composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Igor Stravinsky. Revolver as a whole has been credited with anticipating punk rock, and "Taxman" is the example usually cited.

  The Jam's 1980 hit "Start!" took the riff and rhythm almost wholesale. The BBC critic Chris Jones called it "'Taxman' in all but name", done so wonderfully that complaints evaporate. David Fricke of Rolling Stone said the Jam "hijacked" the guitar rhythm, but did so "with love". Cheap Trick had paid its own homage in 1977 with "Taxman, Mr Thief", on their debut album.

  The Beatles never played any Revolver songs in concert, so Harrison first performed "Taxman" live on his 1991 Japanese tour with Eric Clapton. He introduced it as "a very old song written in 1873". He said its message held "regardless if it's the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties", because "There's always a taxman." The new words named John Major, George Bush and Boris Yeltsin and mentioned VAT. A fresh bridge ended with "If you wipe your feet, I'll tax the mat / If you're overweight, I'll tax your fat."

  Others have reworked the song in very different ways. The garage-psychedelic Music Machine stayed close to the original, according to Richie Unterberger, while Junior Parker explored its soul side. Chris Ingham of Rough Guides counts avant-garde cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm's 1992 version, recorded at New York's Knitting Factory, among the "bizarre Beatles covers". Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played it for Harrison at the Concert for George at London's Royal Albert Hall in November 2002. Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman contributed a version to the 2003 tribute album Songs from the Material World. "Weird Al" Yankovic wrote a parody called "Pac-Man" in late 1981, first released in 2017. Beatallica's 2004 track "Sandman" merges "Taxman" with Metallica's "Enter Sandman".

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• 8. Taxman in Politics

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  During the 1996 US presidential election, Republican candidate Bob Dole's publicity said he would play a tape of "Taxman" at his rallies. It was a reply to his Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, who told a story from his student days in England. In it, Clinton defended Ringo Starr in a Liverpool pub brawl. In early 2002, according to the musicologist Russell Reising, one of the largest tax preparation companies in the United States used a version of the song in its television commercials.

  In 2006, Virginia State Senator Ken Cuccinelli, a future Republican candidate for governor, introduced an amendment to make "Taxman" the state song of Virginia. He argued that taxes were central to Virginia history and cited Patrick Henry's fierce opposition to British taxation during the American Revolution. The measure did not pass.

  The Quartz reporter Aamna Mohdin calls the song "the mother of all tax protest songs". A 2019 article in Tax Journal said the Beatles' legacy lives on in the tax world, and the song had become a "karaoke favourite" of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. The same article pointed to the "Beatles clause", a targeted rule against entertainers turning highly taxed income into lower-taxed capital receipts. The writers also warned against a return to Wilson's supertax levels. In support of Harrison, they called it "outright theft".

  The cultural commentator Christopher Bray finds the song highly amusing and calls Harrison "one of the Sixties' greatest poets of sybaritic hedonism". Yet he reads "Taxman", alongside the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon", as a sign that a generation which had gained from postwar welfare policies took them for granted too soon. He sees that attitude as paving the way for Margaret Thatcher's "neo-liberal revolution" of the 1980s. On the 14th of October 2022, a music video for the song, directed by Danny Sangra, appeared on the band's official YouTube channel to promote the deluxe edition of Revolver.

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