Credit: Far Out / iam_os

What is the first song to feature a backwards guitar solo?

Wed 19 March 2025 4:00, UK

Any guitarist is going to want to explore more than the major scale whenever they’re soloing. After all, that piece of wood with wires and strings is a relatively new instrument in the grand history of instrumental work, so it’s not a stretch to think that we haven’t begun to explore its potential. So that means getting a bit strange with every guitar part, which might not mean everything being recorded properly.

As far back as rock and roll’s inception, everyone was trying to make weird sounds with their guitars that no one had heard. Everyone’s hair was blown back the minute that they heard the opening notes of ‘Johnny B Goode’, but listening to Ike Turner wail away on ‘Rocket 88’ was the first time many people had a listen to a distorted guitar, leaving every other guitarist wondering how to make their instrument growl like that.

Although bands like The Rolling Stones and The Kinks were responsible for that snarl in rock and roll, there weren’t many parts of the genre that The Beatles didn’t cover. From working with different studio techniques to the occasional track where they would use jazz harmony, some of the biggest techniques that most people take for granted nowadays only became commonplace because the Fab Four were able to go outside the realm of typical rock and roll and make something weird.

When thinking of new sounds for the album Revolver, John Lennon had a major revelation while stoned. He had put one of his demo tapes on backwards, and when the tape machine started playing this warped version of what he had laid down, he knew that he needed that effect on everything. So if a song like ‘Rain’ sounded great with backwards vocals, it wasn’t long before George Harrison got in on the action.

So, what was the first backwards guitar solo?

Whereas artists like Glen Campbell had been toying with the concept of backwards music around the same time, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ was the first major guitar solo that was recorded entirely backwards. It might seem easy to create some psychedelic effect nowadays, but the version that we hear today on Revolver was going to take the band hours upon hours to sound right.

Since they couldn’t anticipate what the backwards version would sound like, Harrison thought that the only way for him to record the song correctly was to sculpt out the solo and learn it backwards so that it would sound the way he wanted when it was reversed. The psychedelics may have been the catalyst for this kind of thing, but looking back on it, engineer Geoff Emerick remembered how much concentration had to go into the record.

Reminiscing in Here There and Everywhere, Emerick recalled how painstaking it was to get the right take, saying, “I can still picture George hunched over his guitar for hours on end, headphones clamped on, brows furrowed in concentration. George Martin conducted them from the window of the control room, using grease pencil marks I had put on the back of the tape on each beat as a reference.”

Considering how much time and effort they put into making it, though, the fact that they only used it sparingly in the final mix tells you everything you need to know about how the Fab Four saw their experiments. It might not have lasted long within the context of the song, but if they had the right idea behind their tunes, they were going to put themselves through the wringer if that meant getting the final take.