Rolling Stone The Beatles 100 Greatest Songs

88
Rain
“Rain” is a Lennon song about nothing much—”People moaning because... they don’t like the weather,” he said. But the song, released months before Revolver as the B side to “Paperback Writer,” was the Beatles’ first public attempt to capture the LSD experience on record. They did it by infusing the track with tantalizing sounds— melting-chant harmonies, the brusque, leadlike flair of McCartney’s bass, Starr’s disorienting drum fills—and the promise of a realm beyond the usual senses. “I can show you,” Lennon sings, “can you hear me?”—as if he’s already got a head start. The most surreal effect was an accident: While stoned, Lennon threaded a rough mix the wrong way on his home tape recorder. He was thrilled with the backward vocals he heard—so thrilled he demanded the sound be used on the song’s fade-out. “From that point on,” engineer Geoff Emerick wrote, “almost every overdub we did on Revolver had to be tried backwards as well as forwards.”
Appears on Past Masters