Rock and roll was still a relatively new genre when The Beatles first started. Although the first wave of acts like Chuck Berry may have excited audiences worldwide, it took the ingenuity of the Fab Four to take the genre into unexplored areas, working with George Martin to turn their albums into sonic works of art. While the band would eventually make the studio their home in the back half of the 1960s, a specific group of musicians were horrified working with the group.
Looking back on how much effort the band put into their later material, it would make sense why any musician would feel insecure. Even when Eric Clapton was heralded as the next guitar god, he felt uncomfortable when called in to play the guitar solo for George Harrison’s ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
Compared to the sonic leaps the band took in a post-Sgt Pepper world, they were still working out the bugs of their studio-driven sound on albums like Rubber Soul. Utilising the studio as an instrument for the first time, the band’s folk-tinged offering gave the world various musical departures, from sitar in ‘Norwegian Wood’ to the fuzz bass on ‘Think For Yourself’.
Although the creative ingenuity knocked out anyone who heard it, the band decided to go further on their following album, Revolver. Informed by the acidic visions they had at the time, both John Lennon and George Harrison rose to the occasion to create far more psychedelic music than before, including the massive psych-rock freakout ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
