The Song That Took The Beatles From Pop Sensations to Avant-Garde Artists: “We Decided Our Audience Would Come With Us”

At the start of their career, The Beatles were little more than teen pop sensations. Their music was catchy and distinctive enough to earn them unprecedented fame, but they lacked anything that would’ve given them the legacy they eventually secured.

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To become icons, the band needed to evolve. They managed the impossible: keeping their audience while moving away from radio-friendly songs and towards avant-garde experimentalism. In the latter days of their career, the band revolutionized music recording, blended genres, and generally became more avant-garde than anyone thought they could be. There was one song that kick-started that transformation. Find out which one below.

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The Song That Took The Beatles From Pop Sensations to Avant-Garde Artists

The ’60s saw a wave of avant-garde artists. The Beatles swapped their ’50s blues references for inspiration from artists such as the experimental composer John Cage. That change in the band’s listening habits helped them develop their own experimental style.

The first song to receive this treatment was “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The song featured revolutionary recording tactics, spearheaded by McCartney, who was falling headfirst into ’60s avant-garde.

 “I set up the tape machines to create popping, whirring, and dissolving sounds all mixed together,” McCartney once said of recording “Tomorrow Never Knows.” “There could have been a guitar solo in it—straightforward or wacky—but when you put the tape loops in, they take it to another place because when they play, you get all these kind of happy accidents. They’re unpredictable, and that suited that track. We used those tricks to get the effect we wanted.”

“I Am The Walrus”

“Tomorrow Never Knows” may have gotten the band’s feet wet in the experimental realm, but it certainly wasn’t their weirdest song. A stronger contender in that category is “I Am The Walrus.”

Though John Lennon wrote this song, according to McCartney, he brought in the idea of going completely nonsensical.

“Cage had a piece that started at one end of the radio’s range,” he added. “He just turned the knob and went through to the end, scrolling randomly through all the stations. I brought that idea to ‘I Am The Walrus.’ I said, ‘It’s got to be random.’ We ended up landing on some Shakespeare—King Lear. It was lovely having that spoken word at that moment. And that came from Cage.”

Keeping Their Audience

It’s one thing to be brave enough to experiment with your sound after earning a following; it’s another feat entirely to keep that audience along for the ride. The Beatles earned a fame that had never been seen before. They took a big gamble in changing their approach to music.

“You think, ‘Oh well, our audience wants a pop song,’” McCartney continued in the same interview. “And then you might read about William Burroughs using the cut-up technique, and you think, ‘Well, he had an audience, and his audience liked what he did.’ And eventually we decided that our audiences would come along with us, rather than it being down to us to feed them a conventional diet.”

(Photo by David Redfern/Redferns)