If you listen to ‘Helter Skelter’ loud enough, it can rattle fillings from your head. In a blitzkrieg of pneumatic guitars, demented vocals, and teeth-baring intent, The Beatles went punk with a single so raucous its dark vigour unfortunately had disastrous consequences. The classic track from their 1968 record had a profound impact.
The world hadn’t heard anything like it, and sadly, that led to some very misguided interpretations. A deranged Charles Mason thought that this song was more than a mere musical oddball, and by his twisted reckoning, it was actually a coded prophecy of a forthcoming race war. He believed the lyrics foretold that the ‘Manson Family’ would be the last remaining white people on Earth who emerged from the underground to rule.
Of course, this was pure madness, and the track was merely conflating the classic fairground ride with a bit of atavistic sexual energy to provide Paul McCartney with a stern statement that he wasn’t just “the soppy one”. But it was the daring newness of the dramatic frenzy, consisting of a few chords played out as organised noise, that led to an array of strange views on the track, as is often the case when the world encounters something fresh.
However, the irony is that the song was borne from the fact that McCartney believed that the world had heard something like it for a while. While the Beatle was leafing through a magazine, he came across a review of the forthcoming album The Who Sell Out, in which a critic described the track ‘I Can See for Miles’ like a guttural beast from the underworld, the way Cormac McCarthy might describe a category five hurricane.
The Who had seemingly created the “heaviest” song rock had seen to date. McCartney was suitably impressed by this but also rather peeved. At the time, the counterculture movement was growing its hair out, so to speak, and he was tired of being dubbed the clean-cut kid in the band. So, he vowed to outdo his contemporaries when it came to cutting loose. Without ever having heard ‘I Can See for Miles‘, he basis for how heavy he had to go to be crowned the grimiest, so he just threw the kitchen sink at things.
As he recalled in a Radio Luxembourg interview when ‘Helter Skelter’ was being released a few months later, “I’d read a review of a record which said, ‘and this group really got us wild, there’s echo on everything, they’re screaming their heads off’. And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’d be great to do one. Pity they’ve done it. Must be great – really screaming record’.”
He would soon be disappointed that the prose had rather overhyped The Who. “I heard their record and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated,” McCartney recalled. He had already decided what it must sound like in his head, and his picture didn’t match. “It wasn’t rough and screaming and tape echo at all. So I thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll do one like that, then’. And I had this song called ‘Helter Skelter’, which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, ‘cos I like noise.” And that noise certainly rocked the world in a multitude of ways that one single carried-away review could never have known it had begotten.
