No one really questioned The Beatles’ talents as a live act in their early days. They were pretty boys and were probably envied by every other male in the audience who wanted to be them, but the kind of chemistry they created whenever they harmonised together could never be replicated, no matter how much aspiring singers perfected their voices. That kind of sound is something the Fab Four owned, but they readily admitted that ‘Paperback Writer’ turned into a trainwreck whenever they played it live.
Granted, that was when people actually claimed to hear them live. If we’re being honest, there’s a good chance that most people only got a small taste of what they sounded like, if at all, over the air-raid sirens of people screaming whenever the group got onstage. They were slowly becoming far too big for traditional rock venues, and they stopped trying to make music for stadiums years before.
Looking through their catalogue up until that point, there was no sense of trying to recreate a handful of their classics live. It would be easy for them to play a backing track of a song like ‘Yesterday’ on television as Paul McCartney played acoustic guitar and sang, but trying to recreate that with guitar, bass, and drums is downright laughable to think about.
That’s before you get to ‘Paperback Writer,’ complete with multiple vocal lines sung at entirely different times. If Rubber Soul was the warning that the band was going in different directions, this was them doubling down and making something that sounds like dipping rock and roll in a vat of acid.
While the song does work as a decent live staple, George Harrison remembered that it was anyone’s guess whether they would be able to recreate it, recalling in The Beatles Anthology, “What we did with it was to get to the point where it was particularly bad, and then we’d do our ‘Elvis legs’ and wave to the crowd, and they’d all scream, and it would cover that. As Paul said, the screaming did cover a lot of worrying moments.”
Then again, not being able to get a simple harmony down was just a drop in the bucket for what they would be doing. A studio creation like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was never going to be able to meet the stage because of how much overdubbing was on it, and by the time they played their final show in Candlestick Park, they knew that they had outgrown their time as a rock and roll stage act.
A lot of fans may have been disheartened to lose them from the road, but the next few years of them locking themselves away in a studio is still considered the best rock and roll ever created. Instead of having to rely on being able to keep up with touring life, spending days on end making ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was well worth it, eventually transforming what it means to be a studio-focused rock act.
In that sense, ‘Paperback Writer’ was the kind of single that transformed what The Beatles were going to be. They couldn’t reproduce the same thing live, so why not try to forget the audience altogether and do what they wanted to do?
