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Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy \/ Apple Corps<\/p>\n
Sun 6 September 2026 21:01, UK <\/p>\n
Every artist is going to want to try something that no one has ever done before. <\/p>\n
While it\u2019s easy to just come up with a handful of chords and get by playing the bare minimum, the true innovators take the basis of their songs and throw in as many left turns as they can to keep listeners on their toes. Though The Beatles could never be considered \u201cboring\u201d throughout their time together, George Harrison<\/a> believed that the beginning of \u2018I Feel Fine\u2019 signalled the psychedelic sounds of Jimi Hendrix years before he arrived.<\/p>\n Considering the Fab Four\u2019s knack for pop songs<\/a> at this stage in their career, though, \u2018I Feel Fine\u2019 feels like just one more love song from them. The entire verse uses the same three chords everyone starts with, and despite the guitar lick being a little bit tricky to play, it wouldn\u2019t feel that out of place if it were thrown onto A Hard Day\u2019s Night a few months before.<\/p>\n No, the real innovation actually comes within the first five seconds of the song. Instead of trying to make some massive chord like on \u2018A Hard Day\u2019s Night\u2019, there\u2019s a strange loop of feedback that kicks everything off, with John Lennon leaning his guitar against one of the amplifiers to get that strange buzzing sound.<\/p>\n Of course, feedback is about as commonplace today as the skank rhythm is in ska music, but no one had ever heard this kind of thing before. There had been bands like The Rolling Stones bringing a dangerous edge to music with fuzz boxes, but who needs artificial distortion when you can get the real thing at the top of the record?<\/p>\n That little burst of noise matters because it feels so out of place on a Beatles single from 1964<\/a>. This was still a band expected to provide pristine pop songs for screaming teenagers, and suddenly they were allowing what was essentially a studio accident to announce their arrival. It only lasts a moment, but there\u2019s something wonderfully cheeky about leaving it there, especially when countless guitarists would spend the next decade making an art form out of exactly the sort of noise engineers had previously tried to eliminate.<\/p>\n While Jimi Hendrix would use feedback as a main part of his sound, Harrison thought that The Beatles got there first, saying<\/a>, \u201cWe used to do it onstage then live, so John figured out, you know, you just hit the A string and buzz it by the amp\u2026he invented Jimi Hendrix.\u201d For a group that was known as a teenybopper act compared to Hendrix, though, The Beatles always had that edgier side.<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/strong><\/p>\n Regardless of how much Brian Epstein tried to tidy them up, the Fabs were always at their best working as a garage-type act, usually going for broke every time they played shows in Hamburg in their early years. Even looking back at footage from them playing The Cavern, hearing them work their way through \u2018Some Other Guy\u2019 is a lot more ramshackle than what comes across on Please Please Me<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Beatles may have started the idea of feedback, but Hendrix was going to take it to places no one had thought of. Guitarists like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were already breaking down doors for the electric guitar, but Hendrix\u2019s debut in England was enough to make the entire Earth move, bringing together soul, rock, jazz and blues all under one roof through each one of his songs.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a fairly enormous difference between stumbling across a sound and building a musical vocabulary out of it, mind you. With Hendrix, feedback wasn\u2019t some bit of muck accidentally left on the tape. He could bend it, sustain it and seemingly argue with it, turning something inherently uncontrollable into another extension of the guitar. So Harrison\u2019s claim works better as a cracking bit of Beatles mythology than a literal invention story, but \u2018I Feel Fine\u2019 does show just how early they had started poking around at the possibilities of noise.<\/p>\n He even used some of the Fabs\u2019 tunes, no less, opening one of his first gigs with a cover of \u2018Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band\u2019 with a far more searing guitar tone than Paul McCartney could have ever hoped<\/a> to have played. Harrison may have had a point about inventing Hendrix\u2019s sound, but compared to what \u2018Purple Haze\u2019 sounded like a few years later, \u2018I Feel Fine\u2019 is almost quaint.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Beatles Newsletter<\/p>\n