The Beatles were about to enter into a whole new phase of their career during the summer of 1964. As Beatlemania reached its zenith in America, the band toured relentlessly around the world, eventually returning to North America during the summer months. It had only been less than six months since they had introduced themselves on The Ed Sullivan Show, but after the release of A Hard Day’s Night, everyone in the world seemingly knew who The Beatles were.
EMI was eager to have the band capitalise on their success by returning to the studio at every available chance. The Beatles’ record contract stipulated that they provide a seemingly endless parade of albums and singles, so it was imperative that the members wrote down and remembered new material as quickly as possible. For Paul McCartney, a walk around London’s St. John’s Wood birthed the idea for a future single, ‘She’s a Woman’.
“I have a recollection of walking round St John’s Wood with that in my mind so I might have written it at home and finished it up on the way to the studio, finally polished it in the studio, maybe just taken John aside for a second and checked with him, ‘What d’you think?’ ‘Like it.’ ‘Good. Let’s do it!’” McCartney recalled to Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now.
“John did a very good thing: instead of playing through it and putting like a watercolour wash over it all with his guitar he just stabbed on the off-beats,” McCartney added. “Ringo would play the snare and John did it with the guitar, which was good, it left a lot of space for the rest of the stuff.”
The idea for ‘She’s a Woman’ came quickly, as did the song’s arrangement and recording. Lennon’s guitar stabs were punctuated by Ringo Starr’s drums and the addition of a Portuguese percussion instrument called a chocalho. “Often one of us would come up with something that put a spark in the recording, and I think the spark on the recording of ‘She’s A Woman’ was the combination of John’s backbeat guitar and my bass,” McCartney remembered in the book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.
For his part, Lennon remembered being excited to include a reference to his and the rest of the band’s favourite new drug: cannabis. “That’s Paul with some contribution from me on lines, probably,” Lennon told David Sheff in 1980. “We put in the words ‘turns me on’. We were so excited to say ‘turn me on’ – you know, about marijuana and all that, using it as an expression.”
The Beatles had only puffed on low-grade weed a small handful of times before meeting Bob Dylan in New York during their 1964 summer tour. Dylan exposed them to more potent cannabis than any of them had tried before, and soon, The Beatles were firmly in a haze of joints and spliffs. 1965 would be the band’s biggest year for weed-related work, culminating in the folky languidness of that year’s Rubber Soul. But the roots of that fascination could be heard as early as ‘She’s a Woman’, one of the band’s first overt nods to drugs.
