The Beatles song George Harrison wrote about working against the government
By 1965, George Harrison was no longer the naive baby-faced member of The Beatles that he once was. After having conquered America and solidified his voice in the band as an equal songwriter with his two contributions to Help!, Harrison had grown up into a man with strong opinions and viewpoints. As he soon found out, being rich and famous wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
The Beatles had to deal with a remarkably high tax rate in 1960s Britain. That ludicrous amount later inspired one of Harrison’s most vitriolic and sarcastic tracks, ‘Taxman’ from Revolver. But before that, Harrison’s mind had been expanded by his use of LSD, causing him to question authority for perhaps the first time. As a direct result of this questioning, Harrison wrote the Rubber Soul track ‘Think For Yourself’.
“Think for Yourself” must be about ‘somebody’ from the sound of it,” Harrison explained in his 1979 book I Me Mine, “but all this time later, I don’t quite recall who … Probably the Government.”
To link up with Harrison’s new aggressive outlook, The Beatles decided to add a bit more grit to their sound. Specifically, Paul McCartney pulled out his recently acquired Rickenbacker bass and plugged it into a Tone Bender fuzz box.
“Paul used a fuzz box on the bass on ‘Think For Yourself’,” Harrison explained. “When Phil Spector was making ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’, the engineer who set up the track overloaded the microphone on the guitar player, and it became very distorted. Phil Spector said, ‘Leave it like that, it’s great’. Some years later everyone started to try to copy that sound and so they invented the fuzz box. We had one and tried the bass through it and it sounded really good.”
Fuzz wasn’t a brand-new concept, as Harrison pointed out. Distortion could be traced back as early as the 1940s, and the mid-1960s proved to be a golden age of fuzz innovation. 1964 saw the release of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, while 1965 saw The Rolling Stones drop ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, one of the first tracks to make use of the fuzz box. Since The Beatles were always looking to stay ahead of the curve, it was only natural to include some fuzz on ‘Think For Yourself’.
Check out ‘Think For Yourself’ down below.
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