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Originally posted by eyeronic
Nice job, warrrreagl. I think the backwards cymbal at the beginning of one of the tunes on Sgt. Pepper's was the first backwards recording in popular music.
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Thanks. Actually, there were a couple of songs on "Revolver" which featured some backwards instrumentation ("Tomorrow Never Knows" and "I'm Only Sleeping"). I think these were recorded at the same time as "Rain," but "Rain" featured backwards vocals, yet was not placed on the "Revolver" album with the rest of them. And "Revolver" was released the year before "Sgt. Pepper."
Quote:
Originally posted by eyeronic
Here's my next question for you:
What exactly is it that makes "A Day in the Life" the best song
ever?
Serious question: What's the backwards sounding stuff at the end of that tune? Forwards it sounds like they're saying something about Annie Oakley.
B/T/W This thread is GREAT! I love threads that really share someone's knowledge on an interesting topic. Thanks warrrreagl.
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I remember reading that some publication had ranked "A Day In the Life" as the Best Song Ever, but I've never seen their justification. Although I agree it is an incredible work, I think it's too subjective and futile to pick one song over all the others as the best.
It has true collaboration between John and Paul with the incredible orchestra crescendo between the sections. The orchestra was overdubbed 4 times, giving the impression of hundreds of musicians. The harmonic structure of the two pieces are G major (John's parts) and E major (Paul's parts). Normally, it would be difficult to modulate smoothly and functionally from G major to E major, but the orchestra crescendo takes care of it both times. Of course, it's the second orchestral run that leads to the marvelous E major chord that's slammed down and held forever at the end.
The "Paul Is Dead" freaks refer to the lyrics of this song as hard proof that Paul died in a car crash, although John always said it described the death of a friend of theirs who was the heir to the Guiness fortune.
The gibberish at the end was a small snippet of random tape loops that were spliced together and inserted after the dog whistle for Martha. I don't know how old you are, but on old record players, the tone arm would hit the end of an album and quickly slide along the grooves toward the center, causing the tone arm to "reject" and release another album onto the stack. The Beatles altered the pressing of "Sgt. Pepper" so that the last groove was "locked" and the tone arm would never advance toward the center and would never reject. The resulting effect is that the small taped gibberish at the end of "A Day In the Life" would repeat over and over and play indefinitely until you got up and manually rejected the album. The CD release of "Sgt. Pepper" recreated this effect by looping the gibberish together and repeating it several times.
The random and repeating gibberish is almost like an audio Rorschach test, because everybody hears something different. I hear something about a pussy every time I listen to it.
