Despite its prominent use of brass bands and classical orchestration, The Beatles’ eighth studio album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band kicks off with a blistering guitar lick that immediately pricked up the ears of one Jimi Hendrix. This might be the record that invented prog rock, but the group still had the swagger of their rock and roll roots to bring to proceedings.
Amid the overdubbed sound of audience chatter, The Beatles burst into action on the album’s title track without warning, jumping immediately into a pulsing drum, bass and rhythm guitar beat in lieu of any lead-in. Within two beats, the heaviest guitar sound yet heard on a Beatles record scorches the ears for four bars before Paul McCartney’s half-shouted introduction to the fictional band from which the LP takes its name.
As the Fab Four’s resident lead guitarist, George Harrison seems like the prime candidate to have graced the track with this sizzling miniature solo. Indeed, “Harrison spent hours trying to nail the guitar solo,” the group’s studio engineer Geoff Emerick wrote in his book Here, There and Everywhere. The part belonged to Harrison, as per the established order of things in the band.
After dozens of attempts at coming up with a suitable riff and sound, the youngest Beatle gave up. It might have been his role to play the group’s lead guitar parts in general, but filling this spot in the opening bars of ‘Sgt Pepper’ just wasn’t for him.
His apparent failure to achieve the desired result might have reflected his disinterest in the project as a whole since he felt McCartney’s domination of the recording process was detrimental to his own songwriting and confidence as a musician.
So, who took over the part?
It’s hardly surprising, then, that McCartney was the band member to take over Harrison’s lead guitar duties for the song. In Emerick’s words, “Paul peremptorily replaced George’s work with a stunning solo of his own, which Harrison was clearly not very happy about.”
This cameo on the opening guitar lines was vintage McCartney, played in his signature style with bending quarter-tone note distortions of notes at the end of a line and off-beat staccato rhythms. He achieved the sound that Hendrix so admired on his 1962 Epiphone Casino, the same guitar that he’d used for the solo on the Harrison-penned ‘Taxman’, the opening track of the group’s previous album Revolver.
Back then, Harrison was more than happy to hand over lead guitar duties, even on a song he had penned, and he was impressed with the result McCartney achieved. By the time Sgt Pepper was recorded, though, tensions were growing within the band, and tempers were starting to fray.
‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ began a trend of McCartney taking lead guitar parts for himself on songs he had written for The Beatles. Harrison, meanwhile, came out of his shell as a songwriter on the group’s next, self-titled album, contributing five compositions.
It wasn’t just the alter-egos the band adopted on Sgt Pepper that signified a change in their make-up. The internal dynamics within The Beatles were shifting for good.
