What is the strange cymbal sound in The Beatles song ‘Hey Bulldog’?
It’s a curious entry in The Beatles‘ discography, a contractual obligation nestled between their mythologised double album and the fractured Let It Be sessions. Released as a soundtrack to their 1969 animated feature, Yellow Submarine compiles studio outtakes and previously released singles, coupled with EMI producer George Martin’s orchestral score for the picture across its second side and exists amid their musical oeuvre as an EP masquerading with inflated ‘album’ status.
It’s George Harrison’s pieces that merit Yellow Submarine‘s attention. Cut during the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions, ‘Only a Northern Song’ fuses Hammond organ and kaleidoscopic brass for a hidden Harrison gem that’s both psychedelic and sarcastic, bemoaning his publishing trap with Northern Songs Ltd, the company later publically floated and infamously snapped up by Michael Jackson in 1985.
Then there’s the acid-rock jam ‘It’s All Too Much’, inspired by his dabble with LSD and its epiphanous gateway to spiritual enlightenment, the raga-soaked cerebral stomp struts like a lysergic ‘Helter Skelter’ and one of the band’s finest curios.
With film production company United Artists demanding another song for Yellow Submarine, John Lennon threw them a piano-thumping hard rock piece about nothing, taking little interest in the cartoon soundtrack as The Beatles were gearing up for the real work to be done on Let It Be.
With songs like ‘I Am the Walrus’ behind him and ‘Come Together’ in the works, Lennon knew how to make gibberish sound good, effortlessly penning a lyrical splash of faceoffs between a sheepdog and a bullfrog, plus a frightened tent for good measure. Each line gels and intermingles nicely in the only way Lennon can manage, offering a surrealist vignette that evokes his childhood love for Lewis Carrol’s nonsense poems.
Not hiding the song’s carefree throwaway, Lennon and Paul McCartney end the cut with a bizarre canine back-and-forth riffing as if the pair are transforming into master and Man’s best friend there and then on tape: “There’s a little rap at the end between John and I, we went into a crazy little thing at the end,” McCartney revealed in 1998’s Many Years From Now. “We always tried to make every song different because we figured, why write something like the last one? We’ve done that”.
Attentive listeners to ‘Hey Bulldog’s 2023 remaster on the expanded and reissued 1967–1970 ‘Blue Album’ compilation that year noticed a strange cymbal sound more prominent in its new mix. Long thought to be a studio quirk of Ringo Starr’s drum kit, the cavernous clang that beat along ‘Hey Bulldog’ is a punch or kick to an amplifier featuring a reverb spring inside. Pioneered by Laurens Hammond of his organ fame, the reverb spring featured a transducer at one end and a pick-up at the other to artificially create a sense of expanded acoustics.
This sonic trick would resurface 20 years later on Pixies’ opener to Bossanova, ‘Cecilia Ann’ similarly features a good thump from guitarist Joey Santiago on his Peavey Bandit amp, adding a spike of thunder to the track’s racing surfer rock.
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