What is the hidden backwards message in The Beatles’ ‘Rain’?
It says a lot about the mindset of America at the dawn of the counterculture movement that the art of ‘backmasking’ kicked off a moral panic. It perhaps says even more about The Beatles that they went from smiling young lads to the centre of this supposed crisis.
It all began in 1966. The release of the Fab Four’s frenetic single ‘Paperback Writer’ was a significant moment for the band in several respects. Not least because it was one of the first singles to feature a pre-recorded video, which was to be shown on The Ed Sullivan Show in lieu of an in-person appearance from the band. But also thanks to its highly innovative B-side ‘Rain’.
Hardly deserving of its relegation to the bottom side of a seven-inch disc, ‘Rain’ famously features Ringo Starr’s most creative drum part on a Beatles song, with the sticksmith championing it as his proudest moment. It’s groovy classic that marked a new era not just for the band, but popular music at large.
What’s especially remarkable about this part is that Starr had to play it considerably faster than what we hear on the record. The original studio recording was slowed down to create a hazy, droning effect, particularly on Lennon’s lead vocal, imbuing the track with a spaced-out quality typical of drug-fuelled psychedelia.
This innovation was decided on quite early in the recording process for the song, hence the need to tape the rhythm track at a high tempo. But just as they were wrapping up the final mix with producer George Martin, Lennon arrived with another stunning piece of ingenuity. “I know what to do with it, I know,” he told the rest of the group excitedly. “Listen to this!”
In an interview with David Sheff for the biography All We Are Saying, published in 1980, Lennon claimed it was a happy accident when he was playing the song back to himself at home that led him to reverse the recording for part of his vocal for the song. Martin later suggested that he was the one who introduced the backwards vocal into the final mix, to Lennon’s delight.
Either way, the singer himself seems to have had something to do with the initial idea. It was a revelation, as The Beatles became the second artist in rock music, after The Missing Links the previous year, to place a backwards recording into one of their songs purposefully. And the nature of how it came about defines the importance of their relationship with the Fifth Beatle they had as a producer.
But what’s being sung backwards?
The backwards vocal arrives around two minutes and thirty seconds into the song, after a final drum flourish from Ringo and a high-pitched monotone bass lick from Paul McCartney. “I lifted a bit of [John’s] main vocal off the four-track,” Martin recalled in Mark Lewisohn’s book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.
It was two pre-existing lines from Lennon’s lead vocal track that the producer cut out to perform his control-room magic trick. One of the lines he used was from the beginning of the first verse, “When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads,” while the other was a single-word line from the chorus, in which Lennon simply sings the title, “Rain”, for four bars.
Martin explained to Lewisohn how he took this part of the lead vocal track, “put it onto another spool, turned it around and then slid it back and forth until it fitted.” A real-time cut-and-paste job long before the days of digital recording and mixing. And thanks to Martin’s technical skill and musical precision, it works a treat. It also set up plenty of further innovation to come on the likes of ‘A Day in the Life’.
In fact, this was only the first in a series of novel embellishments using tape reversals and loops that The Beatles applied to their songs during the recording sessions for their 1966 album Revolver. In fact, these embellishments have come to epitomise the band’s sound during the period of that revolutionary record that changed the face of music for good. A giant leap forward via a few seconds played backwards.
There was nothing sinister to be found when the powers that be pried at the trickery, but perhaps the fact that they were even looking was proof of the subversive force that The Beatles had suddenly become. They didn’t need subliminal messaging to change people’s worldviews, that was happening by virtue of the magic of their art anyway.
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