Paul McCartney urged John Lennon to cut 'meaningless' song from Beatles album
The recording of 1968's 'The White Album' was a tumultuous time for The Beatles. The avant-garde album was the band's follow up to their incredibly successful 1967 work 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' captured the zeitgeist of the so-called summer of love and spent 27 weeks at the top of the Record Retailer chart in the United Kingdom.
'The White Album' sessions were notoriously feisty. Ringo Starr left the band for a period as they recorded 'Back in the USSR'. The drummer was fed up with the mood, as The Beatles clashed.
About that period of recording, Paul McCartney said: "There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself". John Lennon later added: "The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album."
Another song on the album which divided the band was 'Revolution 9'. The track is a sound collage and began as the extended ending to John's song 'Revolution', a song warning against violent revolutionary tactics that was released in several versions by the band in 1968.
Yoko Ono and George Harrison worked with John on 'Revolution 9', which John wanted to be a sonic representation of an uprising. About it, he said: "'Revolution 9' was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution.
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"All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects.
"One thing was an engineer’s testing voice saying, ‘This is EMI test series number nine’. I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number nine it.
Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk/Dan Haygarth
