The Beatles Recording Mistakes

Listen carefully and you’ll hear errors in several Beatles songs

Image by Samuel Morazan from Pixabay

I was searching everywhere for my glasses this morning. This is not an uncommon occurrence these days. It’s a problem because they are black-rimmed so are difficult to spot against my dark-coloured furniture and worktops.

If you add this to the fact I need glasses for distance and I can’t see clearly without them, my daily glasses searches are a regular activity. I’m often reduced to rubbing my hand over surfaces to see if I hit against the missing spectacles like a latter-day Mr Magoo — and you need to be ancient like me to get that reference.

So what’s this got to do with The Beatles apart from sharing eyesight problems with John Lennon? Not a lot but I’ll take any connection however tenuous.

It does, however, highlight that I am of that age, as was Mr Magoo, when you forget where you put your glasses even when they are on your head.

I am therefore old enough to have heard the Beatles songs when they first came out although I’m not as old as Mr Magoo which is something I guess.

I listened to the Beatles every week of my life for the next 60-plus years and read every decent book about them. This, plus being a Beatlemaniac means I know their songs better than anything else, especially where I put my glasses.

I may forget where my glasses are daily but I never forget a single Beatles chord or lyric and I can recognise every single one of their 213 songs from the first note. Priorities.

I don’t forget their mistakes either.

Recording Schedule Mistakes

The band had tight recording schedules and time slots in the early days. They had little time to correct mistakes and the technology didn’t allow much either so they often had to go with what they had.

Please Please Me

The Beatles hit the big time with their second single and their first UK №1. In the verses, Lennon sings the lead and McCartney the Everly Bros style harmony line.

You all know this one but if you go to the 1.25-minute mark in the video below, you’ll hear Lennon get the lyrics wrong as he starts to sing a different line to McCartney on the second line of the final verse.

Lennon starts a different line entirely to McCartney — “Why,” while McCartney sings “I know,” before Lennon stumbles into the, “know I never even try…”

I’ll Get You

A great example of the Beatles writing so many incredible songs is that this amazing track in classic Beatles style, with its beautiful Everly-style harmonies, was merely the non-album B-side to She Loves You.

For any other band, it would have been their biggest hit single back in 1963.

But the Fab Four were still on those tight recording schedules and when Lennon and McCartney get to the middle eight at the 1.08-minute mark, they sing different lyrics.

Looking at the official lyrics, it seems that Lennon was the culprit again. When McCartney sings, “Well I’m gonna change your mind,” Lennon sings, “When I’m gonna make you mine,” before also stumbling on the next line as he loses his place.

I’m guessing that like me, he couldn’t find his glasses so wasn’t able to read the lyric sheet.

If I Fell

This track from A Hard Day’s Night was possibly the first sign that The Beatles were moving on to even greater things musically. Although we hear those incredible Everly harmonies again, the musical structure of the song was their most complex to date with a modulation change and two chord substitutions in just the first few seconds.

If I Fell’s influences point to George Gershwin, Cole Porter or Irving Berlin rather than Little Richard or Chuck Berry. The introduction and lead-in, which we don’t hear again in the song, is pure Gershwin/Porter.

In this one, the intro with its modulation change to another key for the song is something Gershwin did in Rhapsody In Blue for example. McCartney has often spoken about taking musical ideas from the composers their parents listened to and played - his father was a pianist and Lennon’s a banjo player.

It was a sign the Beatles were taking their musical influences from a much wider range of music than we realised and this only increased as they developed, of course.

But their tight recording schedule meant that a fluffed high-end harmony by Paul McCartney had to be left in. If you have never noticed it, take a listen at the 1.43 mark when McCartney can’t hit the high note. You’ll never unhear it again.

This song is one of their great ballads.

Can’t Buy Me Love

This error was more about the limitations of the recording technology in 1964 but nonetheless, it’s something you can’t unhear once you realise it’s there.

The Beatles recorded Can’t Buy Me Love in Paris in January 1964. When they returned to London, McCartney recorded an overdubbed vocal to make it a double-tracked vocal.

Harrison re-recorded the lead guitar part but due to the limitations of the technology, you can still hear the original guide part he recorded in Paris in the background at a lower volume.

I used to think this was deliberate too as it sounded like two dualling guitars but it was unintended and they couldn’t correct it. It therefore went out that way as there was no time to re-do the entire song.

Take a listen from 1.10 to 1.28 to hear the lead break and the ghost guitar in the background.

I’m Looking Through You

This track from Rubber Soul was written by Paul McCartney about his deteriorating relationship with Jane Asher and is riddled with recording errors.

A superficial listen doesn’t pick much up but when you’ve been listening and studying Beatles music for six decades, you start to notice these things.

For a start, some of the guitar parts are slightly out of tune throughout and I’m sure I can hear feedback at several points in the recording. The first feedback point is around the 16-second mark and the worst is at 1.18. At around the 1-minute mark, handclaps come in but they are out of time and incomplete.

Other strange guitar parts don’t quite fit and there’s a tambourine beat that stops as if Ringo dropped it at one point. On the US version of Rubber Soul, the song has two false starts which the engineers at Capitol Records thought was deliberate and left in.

I guess their recording schedule was crazy at this time and the pressure to complete the album too strong to do yet another take.

Mistakes they used deliberately

By 1965, the Beatles had moved on and were experimenting with ideas from avant-garde musicians such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. This gave them a more open-minded approach to music and led to several new and innovative ideas in their songs.

I Feel Fine

I Feel Fine was possibly the first deliberate use of feedback in recorded popular music and once again The Beatles were breaking new musical ground and leading the pack by several light years.

But the feedback that introduced I Feel Fine was based on an accident. Lennon leant his guitar on an amplifier which led to feedback. It gave the band the idea to use it as the intro for the song.

Although it’s sometimes reported that they used the feedback sound Lennon’s guitar made at that moment, I find this unlikely. It’s more probable they produced something else based on the idea the feedback accident gave them.

When you analyse the feedback intro to I Feel Fine, you’ll see it is not random at all but a deliberate choice of note that reverberates in a harmonic one octave above the note played and in the correct key for the song.

For other music nerds out there, the intro note of I Feel Fine is an A which is the second note in the song’s key of G. This A intro leads us up to Harrison’s riff which begins in D (the 5th chord of the G scale) before landing on the G root after passing through C (the 4th chord).

However, A is also the 5th note of the D scale and therefore melds perfectly with Harrison’s D intro riff to give us a sense of anticipation as to what the actual key is before settling on the home of G. The relationship between the root note or chord and the 5th is highly imortant in music as it is the most consonant sound in a musical scale. Here we have two 5th note relationships in one short intro. Hardly random.

This is an intro feedback sound deliberately designed by a songwriter who understands music implicitly. It is not something you’d get from laying a guitar against an amp but an accidental occurrence that inspired Lennon.

Rain

Rain was the most innovative song in the Beatles repertoire up to that moment. There is so much going on, I could devote an entire article to it. I think I will so stay tuned.

However, like I’ll Get You, this piece of musical genius was merely a non-album B-side, this time to Paperback Writer. The accidental mistake in this case was again Lennon’s. This time, a stoned Lennon accidentally played some of the song’s backing track backwards on his tape machine.

He loved the sound so much, he used it for the outro with Lennon’s vocals and the guitar lead played backwards. Possibly the first-ever use of backwards tapes in rock music.

Mistakes they liked so kept in

Once the Beatles stopped touring and were the world’s biggest band, they could spend as much time as they wanted in the studios. They now had the time to correct their recording mistakes and probably did.

But some mistakes, they liked. So they kept them in.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

This was a track Lennon hated and where McCartney drove Harrison and Starr crazy with his perfectionism.

And yet, when McCartney mixed up the lyrics of the final verse which is a repetition of the previous verse, he kept them in. He decided it gave the song a new level of mystery and interest.

McCartney accidentally swapped the names Desmond and Molly for the final verse.

I used to think this was a clever switch as it shows the parents changing roles. But I found much later in a McCartney interview that it was a mistake and he’d mixed up the names in the final verse. He kept the name mix-up in as he thought it gave the song a different vibe and interest.

That last verse puts an entirely different complexion on the song and the Marmalade cover, which was a UK number one, retained McCartney’s mistake. Take a listen from the 2.30 point to hear McCartney’s lyrical mix-up and possibly the first ever transgender reference in popular music, a full two years before the Kink’s Lola which admittedly, was deliberate.

Hey Jude

Hey Jude is one of the Beatles’ greatest ballads which means it’s one of music’s greatest ballads. It started as a McCartney song to comfort Julian Lennon but he later expanded it to take on other meanings.

The song was recorded during the White Album sessions and not at Abbey Road but at Trident Studios in London’s Soho district. I visited recently purely for this reason. I couldn’t go in as it’s now an office but I stood outside to take in the Beatles/Hey Jude vibe.

Me outside the former Trident Studios in Soho, London — photo by Alejandra Markham

The song has two mistakes and they are at the 2.56 and 2.58 marks when first someone says, “Whoa,” and then drops the f-bomb. I didn’t spot what was said at first as they’re low in the mix.

It was only when I was learning the piano part much later in life and stepping through the song section by section that I made out the actual words.

McCartney says, “Whoa,” then “Fu**ing hell” and it’s quite clear when you turn the volume up. In Lyrics, McCartney explains he said it after playing a bad chord but Lennon liked it so they kept it in. Take a listen. It’s another one you can’t unhear once you know.

The Beatles Recording Mistakes

For me, the Beatles are musical perfection. They never suffered a dud album and finished on a high with Abbey Road. That didn’t mean they didn’t sometimes make mistakes but even their mistakes just add to their mystique.

What other musical mistakes do you know of? Beatles or any other artists. I’m sure there are many.

(An earlier version of this article first appeared on Medium.com.)