‘The Word’: The Beatles’ first official psychedelic lyric
Something that has always followed rock music around like a shadow is a good scream. Look at The Who, for instance; their song ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is enjoyable throughout, but it remains iconic because of the scream that comes towards the end. The majority of the time, these kinds of screams rebel against some form of society; however, The Who was taking aim at half of their audience with this vocal release.
Roger Taylor and Pete Townshend admitted that the song was written about Woodstock, vocalising their disdain towards the psychedelic hippies who attended. They were never fans of people who said that “Love always finds a way” and who believed the world could be fixed with some songs, drugs, peace and love. However, regardless of The Who’s disdain towards this mindset, there is no escaping that it was a very popular one at the time.
One of the most popular bands in the world were big believers in love triumphing over all, as The Beatles wrote a number of songs that veered into this psychedelic way of thinking. There were classics such as ‘All You Need Is Love’ and some of John Lennon’s solo material like ‘Imagine’. However, one of the first songs that saw the band embrace this mindset was ‘The Word’.
The song featured on their record Rubber Soul, which famously saw John Lennon inspired by the work of Bob Dylan and subsequently keen on making music that resonated in a similar way. To do this, Lennon looked inside himself a great deal when putting the record together, and in doing so, he found how important love was to him in both the creative process and his everyday life.
“It sort of dawned on me that love was the answer, when I was younger, on the Rubber Soul album,” said Lennon, “My first expression of it was a song called ‘The Word’. The word is ‘love’, in the good and the bad books that I have read, whatever, wherever, the word is ‘love’. It seems like the underlying theme to the universe.”
It wasn’t just Bob Dylan who inspired the band’s creative process on this album. Yes, they were writing songs that were a lot more introspective and honest than some of the others they’d written previously; however, the creative process was changing too, namely, they were smoking weed. The story goes that Bob Dylan was the first person to give The Beatles a joint, which also played a part in embracing their psychedelic side on ‘The Word’.
“We smoked a bit of pot, then we wrote out a multicoloured lyric sheet, the first time we’d ever done that,” recalled Paul McCartney, “We normally didn’t smoke when we were working. It got in the way of songwriting because it would just cloud your mind up – ‘Oh, s**t, what are we doing?’ It’s better to be straight. But we did this multicoloured thing.”
While some might be against using love as the answer to all of life’s problems, it was a popular way of thinking at the time, and John Lennon easily stumbled upon it the moment he started thinking internally when writing songs.
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