What was The Beatles’ “naughty chord”?
Despite being positioned as one of the best musical groups of all time, the Liverpudlians are often maligned as not very talented when it comes to being musicians in the strictest sense. Each member of The Beatles was a musical genius in their own way.
Although none of them were as well-versed in music theory as world-renowned composers, Quincy Jones was quite brutal in his assessment of the group as straight-up instrumentalists; they were always looking to push their music into places they hadn’t heard before. That meant beyond the 12-bar blues, beyond rock and roll, and in the case of George Harrison, beyond conventional harmony.
Long before they went down the rabbit hole of different studio techniques, the band would find themselves going around Liverpool trying to find someone who knew chords they didn’t. Famously in The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney told a story of going halfway across town because he found someone who knew the chord B7, which functions as the turnaround in a standard blues.
Between their usual intake of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, the band also delved into jazz. As they went through different music shops, their knowledge of music theory led them to stumble upon augmented and diminished chords, which produced a rather unpleasant sound if played by themselves.
Although many classic melodies have been made using such chords, they were normally reserved for classical music and occasionally jazz harmony. When used in that context, the chords are usually reserved to be passing tones, naturally leading the listener’s ear to the next major chord change. How then, did a band so seemingly hellbent on making pop records find themselves in pursuit of such a dysfunctional sound? Well, they wanted to be daring.
Though The Beatles quickly hit the top spots with their pop singles, underneath it all, they saw themselves as artists, and as artists, they knew that to become truly great, they must always keep pushing the envelope. Pushing their sound to the brink, or to paraphrase David Bowie, going so far out in the artistic seas that you can barely keep your feet on the ground.
So, when did The Beatles use the “naughty chords”?
Given their unharmoniousness nature, Harrison named them “the naughty chords”. Even if the chord might not have worked enough to base a whole song around it, Harrison found himself using it again and again in many Beatles songs, first turning up in their covers of old standards like ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Till There Was You’.
Since Lennon and McCartney were pumping out songs like clockwork, it didn’t take long to incorporate some of those nasty chords into context. One of the pivotal moments in the Rubber Soul classic ‘Michelle’ revolves around McCartney changing between various “naughty chords” before resolving at the end of the verse.
Harrison also claimed some of these unconventional chords for The Beatles, including the foreboding sound coming from his song ‘I Want To Tell You’ from Revolver. As the Fab Four began to spread their wings, each member began expanding their chord vocabulary into their solo careers as well.
Being the most technical musician of the group, various augmented and diminished chords can be found on Harrison’s solo masterpiece All Things Must Pass, turning up on classics like ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ and ‘Isn’t It a Pity’. Even when Harrison put together The Traveling Wilburys, he still had a fascination with it, with Tom Petty remembering during the recording of the song ‘Handle With Care’: “He used augmented and diminished chords a lot; he called them the naughty chords.”
Those chords also found a home on the final Beatles tracks, being a core part of the verse of ‘Real Love’, which became one of the few new Beatles tracks from the Anthology box set in the 1990s. George Harrison may not claim to be a musical savant, but there’s a certain amount of genius whenever he employs these unique chord voicings.
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