Remembering When The Beatles Recorded a Song Without Paul McCartney in 1966

Looking through their catalog, you’ll find many Beatles songs that didn’t include all four members playing on the track. As the years progressed, several Fab Four songs even featured just a single member playing.

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Still, you won’t find too many tracks where Paul McCartney was absent while the other members carried on without him. “She Said She Said”, a standout track off the 1966 album Revolver, stands out as one of them. Or at least it might be. Conflicting reports about a 60-year-old song make it difficult to say for sure.

Help Me, Fonda

The Beatles were expanding their musical palette with seemingly every recording they made in the mid-60s. Revolver made waves as one of their more experimental albums to date. The forward-thinking nature of it showed up in both the music and the lyrics.

“She Said She Said” emerged from an incident that occurred when The Beatles, while touring the US in 1965, rented a Los Angeles home and threw a party for various West Coast luminaries. Among them was the actor Peter Fonda, who gave John Lennon the inspiration for the song.

At the party, George Harrison, who had taken LSD, was purportedly having a bad trip. Fonda, in an effort to help him, was recounting an incident as a child where an accident caused his heart to briefly stop. Hence the opening line in “She Said She Said”: “She said I know what it’s like to be dead.”

Paul in a Pique

The Beatles recorded “She Said She Said” on June 21, 1966, for inclusion on Revolver. At some point, an argument broke out between Paul McCartney and the rest of the band. McCartney left the studio in a huff before the track was completed.

Why? No one knows for sure. Maybe the fact that the song referred to an LSD trip and Macca had been the last holdout among the Fab Four to try the drug caused the row. Or maybe there’d been a simple disagreement about how the song was to be recorded, a possibility since, as a Lennon track, John would have the ultimate say on the artistic direction.

In any case, Macca later recalled in an interview that it was the rare Beatles track where his playing wasn’t included. If this version of events is to be believed, George Harrison would have taken over and played bass on the track.

Macca Mystery

Here’s where things get dicey. Based on studio notes and other information, several Beatles scholars believe that McCartney misremembered what went down that day. They don’t deny that he left the studio early. But they contend that he did contribute his bass to the rhythm track. According to their version of events, if McCartney missed out on anything, it was the overdubs that were tacked onto the proceedings.

In any case, we can say for sure that “She Said She Said” caused a lot of stir for an album track. It seems like the drama in which the song was conceived followed it into the recording studio as well.

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