People talk a lot about The Beatles’ experimentation, especially regarding their later periods and their foray into the world of psychedelics on records like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or The White Album. But for the band, that adventurous spirit actually started a lot earlier.
The group’s sixth album, Rubber Soul, began to set their course into weirder and wider sounds. It marked a noticeable move away from the classic rock and roll sounds of their previous projects. The Fab Four were a vital force in bringing the genre to the UK, helping to translate the sounds of American rock and blues to a new audience. But it seemed that they were ready to move forward.
Instantly, the album is different. ‘Norwegian Wood’ brings in more folk sounds, while ‘Drive My Car’ is slightly heavier and bigger than their earlier tracks. For the outfit, though, it was ‘Michelle’ that signalled a new era of experimentation.
From the twinkling opening riff to the French verse, ‘Michelle’ is a sophisticated step, taking the band a long way from Merseyside or classic boyish rock songs like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. In style, sound and substance, it feels like a much more mature track.
When it came to writing the song, it demanded new things from the band as they attempted to do what had never been done by a rock act before. Paul McCartney had begun experimenting with a different style of guitar playing, looking towards jazz and country musicians for inspiration and broadening his horizons in terms of genre.
“’Michelle’ was a tune that I’d written in Chet Atkins’ finger-pickin’ style. There is a song he did called ‘Trambone’ with a repetitive top line, and he played a bass line whilst playing a melody,” McCartney explained. “Based on Atkins’ ‘Trambone’, I wanted to write something with a melody and a bass line on it, so I did. I just had it as an instrumental in C.”
The desire to try something different and broaden their musical horizons this early seemed to predict the future for the band, being an early hint that they would forever be evolving. ‘Michelle’ feels like a first step towards that as they shrug off any idea of genre or what rock should sound like, to simply do whatever they wanted. McCartney said of the track, “This was an innovation for us; even though classical guitarists had played it, no rock ‘n’ roll guitarists had.”
McCartney had always been up for trying new things when it came to his instrument. He learnt to play on a right-handed guitar despite being left-handed, so he had to learn all of his chords upside down. The fact that that didn’t stop him demonstrates his determination to get good, but his further attempts at something new on ‘Michelle’ prove his desire to be great.
The track was written on his Zenith guitar, which was the first he had ever owned and learned to play on. “All my first songs… were written on the Zenith; songs like ‘Michelle’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’,” he said of the historic instrument. “It was on this guitar that I learned ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, the song that later got me into the group The Quarrymen.” Perhaps standing as one of the most iconic guitars in history, that one instrument gave the world so many hits.
