Every artist is going to want to try something that no one has ever done before. While it’s easy to just come up with a handful of chords and get by playing the bare minimum, the true innovators take the basis of their songs and throw in as many left turns as they can to keep listeners on their toes. Though The Beatles could never be considered “boring” throughout their time together, George Harrison believed that the beginning of ‘I Feel Fine’ signalled the psychedelic sounds of Jimi Hendrix years before he arrived.
Considering the Fab Four’s knack for pop songs at this stage in their career, though, ‘I Feel Fine’ feels like just one more love song from them. The entire verse uses the same three chords everyone starts with, and despite the guitar lick being a little bit tricky to play, it wouldn’t feel that out of place if it was thrown onto A Hard Day’s Night a few months before.
No, the real innovation actually comes within the first five seconds of the song. Instead of trying to make some massive chord like on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, there’s a strange loop of feedback that kicks everything off, with John Lennon leaning his guitar against one of the amplifiers to get that strange buzzing sound.
Of course, feedback is about as commonplace today as the skank rhythm is the ska music, but no one had ever heard this kind of thing before. There had been bands like The Rolling Stones bringing a dangerous edge to music with fuzz boxes, but who needs artificial distortion when you can get the real thing at the top of the record?
While Jimi Hendrix would use feedback as a main part of his sound, Harrison thought that The Beatles got there first, saying, “We used to do it onstage then live, so John figured out, you know, you just hit the A string and buzz it by the amp…he invented Jimi Hendrix.” For a group that was known as a teenybopper act compared to Hendrix, though, The Beatles always had that edgier side.
Regardless of how much Brian Epstein tried to tidy them up, the Fabs were always at their best working as a garage-type act, usually going for broke every time they played shows in Hamburg in their early years. Even looking back at footage from them playing The Cavern, hearing them work their way through ‘Some Other Guy’ is a lot more ramshackle than what comes across on Please Please Me.
The Beatles may have started the idea of feedback, but Hendrix was going to take it to places no one had thought. Guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were already breaking down doors for the electric guitar, but Hendrix’s debut in England was enough to make the entire Earth move, bringing together soul, rock, jazz and blues all under one roof through each one of his songs.
He even used some of the Fabs’ tunes, no less, opening one of his first gigs with a cover of ‘Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’ with a far more searing guitar tone than Paul McCartney could have ever hoped to have played. Harrison may have had a point about inventing Hendrix’s sound, but compared to what ‘Purple Haze’ sounded like a few years later, ‘I Feel Fine’ is almost quaint.
