The Beatles are closely tied to certain times, and certain places. The streets of Liverpool, for example, or the clubs of Hamburg. A trip to India in 1968, or the walls of Abbey Road studios. Yet Paul McCartney believes one place eluded them – and some songs weren’t taken their fullest extent as a result.
The band’s ‘Rubber Soul’ saw The Beatles begin to experiment, introducing folk-rock aspects, George Harrison’s growing Eastern fascination, and a penchant for the slow strut of Southern soul.
1966 album ‘Revolver’ could have taken this latter path, with the Fab Four initially thinking about recording the album in America, potentially even Stax studios itself. The idea didn’t come to fruition, but the finished LP does contain the sax-laden stomper ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ – a record that screams out for Southern grit.
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In an interview closely after the album’s release, Paul McCartney recalled: “We’d been thinking about going to record there for some time. It would have been for a certain sound — an American sound. The Stones have it now on their records and they get better all the time. Then when we finished ‘Revolver’ we realised that we’d found a new British sound almost by accident”.
“l think there were only two tracks on that LP that would have sounded better if we’d cut them in America, ‘Taxman’ and ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ because they need that raw quality that you just can’t get in this country for some reason. But ‘Eleanor Rigby’ would have been worse because the string players in America aren’t so good”.
Chatting to biographer Barry Miles in 1997, Paul McCartney revealed that the knockabout love song was in fact an ode to pot, his tipple at the time. “‘Got to Get You into My Life’ was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot … So [it’s] really a song about that, it’s not to a person.”
“It’s actually an ode to pot,” McCartney explained, “like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret.”
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