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Which Beatles riff was most ahead of its time?

Thu 20 February 2025 16:00, UK

A forward-thinking dynamism surged throughout The Beatles‘ short few years together, boasting a body of work encompassing an incredible array of styles and intrepid sonic adventurism by the time the Fab Four had finally run out of gas in 1970. While they have suffered from a bloated rock heritage industry that deifies The Beatles with the ‘greatest band ever’ tag, the fact is they were a creative force that flexed breathtaking innovation and curiosity, leaving an artistic legacy of what a band can achieve that’s yet to be surpassed.

Alongside their conceptual ambitions and inventive pop craft, The Beatles enjoyed a significant bag of riffs, too. When their contemporaries boast the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Jeff Beck, it’s understandable that George Harrison’s lead guitar chops and John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s capable rhythm backing have been overshadowed by the era’s riff monsters, but The Beatles were capable of rock at its most electric.

From the opening stomp of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, ‘Helter Skelter’s raucous onslaught’, the progressive swagger of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, or ‘Help!’s striking opening chord, the Fab Four’s oeuvre shines with meaty guitar attacks.

But what stands as their most pioneering? Presaging stoner rock, 1990s slacker and college indie, we have to rifle through The Beatles’ B-sides for the riff most ahead of its time. Featured as the flip to ’66’s ‘Paperback Writer‘, ‘Rain’s swirling and heady guitar work documents their effortless evolution.

Released on the cusp of Revolver‘s giant leap forward, ‘Rain’ thrust the band one step further toward their final break from Beatlemania and devoting themselves as a pure studio project unreined from the screaming fans and punishing touring schedules.

What is ‘Rain’ by The Beatles about?

On the face of it, it’s a song about the English pastime of moaning about the weather, its heady lyrical beckoning to realms between the cerebral and the material wore LSD’s powerfully psychedelic effect on Lennon’s songwriting on its sleeve. As ever with the Lennon-McCartney songbook, later disputes regarding each others’ input have clouded exactly Lennon’s degree of authorship.

We all know it’s his general tune, but McCartney claimed a “70-30” contribution to the track: “I don’t think he brought the original idea, just when we sat down to write, he kicked it off,” McCartney told Barry Miles in ’97’s 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,” he said of its inspiration. “There’s no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back.”

Mixing Harrison’s newfound penchant for raga drone and the keen embrace of tape manipulation, ‘Rain’s molten trippy stew injected psychedelia straight into the mainstream, owed in large part to its disorientating yet infectious riff. Ringo Starr thought highly of his drum work, too: “I think I just played amazing. I was into the snare and hi-hat. I think it was the first time I used the trick of starting a break by hitting the hi-hat first instead of going directly to a drum off the hi-hat.”