The Beatles song that copied a Ravi Shankar composition
In the mid-1960s, The Beatles were among the earliest and most prominent pioneers of psychedelic music following their quest for spiritual enlightenment outside of hallucinogenic drugs. This chapter began with a trip to India following suggestions from George Harrison, who was particularly interested in Eastern culture.
Beginning with their first visit to the country in 1966, The Beatles’ odyssey in India, under the mentorship of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, taught them the powers of the Hindu belief system and the benefits of transcendental meditation. Over this period, The Beatles brought Eastern beliefs and values to Western culture, incorporating Indian influences into their music through the sitar and lyrics inspired by Hindu incantations.
The Beatles’ first experimentation with Indian music came in 1965 with Harrison’s sitar contributions in the Rubber Soul track ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’. The so-called Quiet Beatle had first discovered the stringed instrument while working on the set of the band’s second film, Help!
“We were waiting to shoot the scene in the restaurant when the guy gets thrown in the soup, and there were a few Indian musicians playing in the background,” Harrison recalled in a 1992 conversation with Billboard. “I remember picking up the sitar and trying to hold it and thinking, ‘This is a funny sound.’ It was an incidental thing, but somewhere down the line, I began to hear Ravi Shankar’s name. The third time I heard it, I thought, ‘This is an odd coincidence.’ And then I talked with David Crosby of The Byrds, and he mentioned the name”.
“I went and bought a Ravi record; I put it on, and it hit a certain spot in me that I can’t explain, but it seemed very familiar to me. The only way I could describe it was: my intellect didn’t know what was going on, and yet this other part of me identified with it. It just called on me… A few months elapsed, and then I met this guy from the Asian Music Circle organisation who said, ‘Oh, Ravi Shankar’s gonna come to my house for dinner. Do you want to come too?'”
Encouraged by this strange spiritual connection to the instrument, Harrison made a purchase. “I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft — it stocked little carvings and incense,” Harrison said via Beatles Bible.
“It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. Anyway, we were at the point where we’d recorded the ‘Norwegian Wood’ backing track, and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up — it was just lying around; I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous: I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted, and it worked.”
Following the positive reception ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ received – save for Bob Dylan’s derision – Harrison worked on his sitar skills under Shankar’s mentorship. “I had heard of the Beatles, but I didn’t know how popular they were,” Shankar once told Rolling Stone. “I met all four, but with George, I clicked immediately. He said he wanted to learn [sitar] properly.”
“I said it’s not just learning chords, like the guitar,” Shankar added. “Sitar takes at least one year to [learn to] sit properly because the instrument is so difficult to hold. Then you cut your fingers to this extent [shows tips of two fingers – purple, with calluses]. He said he would try. He seemed so sweet and sincere that I believed it.”
Ostensibly, Shankar took Harrison under his wing to furtively right the wrongs committed in ‘Norwegian Wood’. “To tell you the truth, I had to keep my mouth shut,” Shankar continued. “It was introduced to me by my nieces and nephews, who were just gaga over it. I couldn’t believe it because, to me, it sounded so terrible.”
The second outing of Harrison’s sitar in the studio was for the 1966 Revolver cut ‘Love You To’; the sitar also featured on the album’s kaleidoscopic closer, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. His playing had vastly improved by this point, but the sitar odyssey would reach its climax the following year in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.
‘Within You Without You’ was Harrison’s major contribution to the psychedelic masterpiece, appearing as the first track on side two. The transcendental composition and its spiritual lyrics were wholly befitting of the concurrent hippie era in the Western world, but the sitar arrangement was lifted from a larger classical Hindustani piece written by Shankar.
“‘Within You Without You’ was a song that I wrote based upon a piece of music of Ravi’s that he’d recorded for All-India Radio,” Harrison remembered in The Beatles Anthology book. “It was a very long piece – maybe 30 or 40 minutes – and was written in different parts, with a progression in each. I wrote a mini version of it, using sounds similar to those I’d discovered in his piece. I recorded in three segments and spliced them together later.”
Listen to The Beatles’ ‘Within You Without You’ below.
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