“It was beautiful”: The guitar solo Paul McCartney thought no one could play
The Beatles would never settle for anything less than revolutionary in the 1960s. The rock world had begun to spread out a lot more, so it wasn’t out of the question to start testing the studio’s capabilities and seeing how much they could get away with while still being one of the biggest names in pop music. Although Paul McCartney liked the idea of making tried and true ballads occasionally, he admitted that George Harrison made the kind of guitar solo that was impossible to replicate by the time of Revolver.
It can be a bit of a touchy subject in The Beatles’ camp when talking about lead guitar duties. No matter how many times Harrison could be counted on to make a great solo, it probably didn’t feel great to have Macca just come in and bash out a solo for a tune because he thought he could do it better on tracks like ‘Taxman’ and ‘The Night Before’.
Those two solos were still technically playable, but after experimenting with substances on Rubber Soul, Revolver was the moment that they turned the studio into a playground. They would still tour around the world, but it didn’t matter whether they translated every guitar part exactly as it was on the record or pulled off massive overdubs in a live setting.
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ had already sent the benchmark for where they could take the studio, but ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ felt like the beginner version of their experimentation. Most were used to John Lennon making these folksy songs, but this ode to being as lazy as possible features one of the first backwards guitar solos committed to tape.
Since Lennon had discovered the trick when accidentally putting one of their demos around backwards when working on ‘Rain’, everything had to be played backwards at some point, but this wasn’t just a patchwork job. Harrison had to take his time carefully crafting every note to sound right when it was reversed, and for something that should be incoherent, the guitar break appears to be beamed in from another galaxy whenever the solo break starts.
Despite not having anything to do with it, McCartney thought this was the best way they could have progressed their guitar playing forward, remarking in Rolling Stone, “It was a beautiful solo. It sounds like something you couldn’t play.” Everyone else would then try their hand at making backwards music any way they could, but by the time of Sgt Peppers, the group seemed to be already moving onto the next phase.
But despite the remarks about the tune being impossible, Harrison wasn’t suddenly about to return to his bag of tricks, either. Compared to what he would be doing on Abbey Road, Harrison moulded himself into the kind of guitarist that no one else could compete with, practically using the instrument as another voice in the band alongside the lead vocal on ‘Something’ or ‘Let It Be’.
Even if he was looking to break away from backwards music and into the traditional Indian tunes of his later years, Harrison had become more than just a great lead guitarist on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. He was a musical inventory, and the rest of the 1960s had to take a few more months before catching up to what he was doing.
