Zappa was just hippie-baiting, but as stoned-age wanderers caught on to the trick, The Beatles became victims of their own innovation. “Shut your f_king mouth about the length of my hair/How would you survive/If you were alive/Sh_ty little person?” “Better look around before you say you don’t care,” the line goes. Not one to let a trend go by un-molested, Frank Zappa’s all-round psychedelic send-up We’re Only In It For The Money included the track ‘Hot Poop’, on which he took a lyric originally recorded for non-album B-side ‘Mother People’ and inserted it, backwards, into the album cut. It might not have been a “message” as such, but it certainly opened the floodgates. A compromise was made: the end of ‘Rain’ features a snatch of the chorus refrain played in reverse. Later telling Rolling Stone that he was “stoned out of my head”, Lennon was also blown away by what he heard – and wanted to release the entire song as a backwards recording. It was, however, all down to happenstance.Īfter taking the master tape home, John Lennon accidentally played it backwards. Recorded during the April 1966 sessions for Revolver, The Beatles’ ‘Rain’ single marks the first documented instance of a band including a backwards lyric on a song. Like all good innovations from the psychedelic era, backwards-messaging (or “backmasking”) was discovered at that creative intersection between technological progression and what might be politely termed as “mind-expanding ingestion”.
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June 2023
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