What was the first Beatles song to use a sitar?
The Beatles were never content with merely being a run-of-the-mill rock and roll band. They still had their primary influences from people like Elvis Presley and Little Richard, but some of their best material often came from them wanting to go against the grain or trying something out of left field that no one had ever tried before. And since they had put everything from strings to horns on their tunes, what was stopping them from dipping into the world of astern culture with the sitar?
It’s not like that idea was pulled out of thin air, either. The band had slowly been incorporating everything from jazz to avant-garde music into their musical diet, and by the time they got to Rubber Soul, they had doused themselves deep into folk rock. Bob Dylan had already shifted the landscape, and it was time for the Fab Four to respond in kind with songs like ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ off of Help!.
During the making of their second film, though, George Harrison became fascinated listening to some of the background musicians during one of their scenes. With one of them playing the sitar, the guitarist quickly became enamoured with the instrument, eventually buying a cheap one from a local shop called Indiacraft to practice on.
He could hardly play the thing, but he was confident enough to give it a go when John Lennon suggested using it on ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’. Even though this was the garage-rock approach to what a sitar was supposed to be, the effect it had on the rock world made everyone turn their head the minute they heard it.
Where did The Beatles take the sitar?
Listening back to ‘Norwegian Wood’, Harrison is doing the bare minimum compared to the usual approach to the instrument. The whole point of a sitar is to have a specific drone ringing throughout the instrument and exploring scales above it, but since Harrison was still new to everything, his technique was a matter of finding the notes of Lennon’s riff and copying them when the time called for it.
Despite Harrison’s lack of knowledge, he did have that Eastern technique on other songs from that era. The tune ‘If I Needed Someone’ may have looked like a loving tribute to acts like The Byrds, but having that droning A note ringing throughout every chord is practically Harrison’s guitar-ified version of what Indian musicians were playing.
It didn’t take Harrison long to master everything, either. By the time Sgt Peppers was underway in 1967, the guitarist had turned himself into a more than capable sitarist, playing off of Indian musicians and going off on a traditional raga halfway through ‘Within You Without You’, which left John Lennon impressed with what his musical little brother had created.
While Harrison would hang up the sitar for years during his solo career, it didn’t seem to matter that much. Because when you’ve shattered the mould for what an Eastern instrument can be in a rock context, it doesn’t take long for the rest of the world to catch up with you, with The Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin eventually taking it further still on their records.
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