"Helter Skelter" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1968 album The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). It was written by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney. The song was McCartney's attempt to create a sound as loud and dirty as possible. It is regarded as a key influence in the early development of heavy metal. In 1976, the song was released as the B-side of "Got to Get You into My Life" in the United States, to promote the Capitol Records compilation Rock 'n' Roll Music.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked "Helter Skelter" 52nd on its list of "The 100 Greatest Beatles Songs". Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith, U2, Oasis and Pat Benatar are among the artists who have covered the track, and McCartney has frequently performed it in concert.
Background and inspiration
According to the 1997 biography Many Years from Now, Paul McCartney was inspired to write "Helter Skelter" after reading an interview with the Who's Pete Townshend in which he described their September 1967 single, "I Can See for Miles", as the loudest, rawest, dirtiest song the Who had ever recorded. McCartney said he then wrote "Helter Skelter" to have "the most raucous vocal, the loudest drums". On 20 November 1968, two days before the release of The Beatles (also known as "the White Album"), McCartney gave Radio Luxembourg an exclusive interview, in which he commented on several of the album's songs. Speaking of "Helter Skelter", he said:
In British English, a helter skelter is a fairground attraction consisting of a tall spiral slide winding around a tower. McCartney said that he was "using the symbol of a helter skelter as a ride from the top to the bottom; the rise and fall of the Roman Empire – and this was the fall, the demise." He later said that the song was a response to critics who accused him of writing only sentimental ballads and being "the soppy one" of the band. Although the song is credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership, it was written by McCartney alone. John Lennon acknowledged in a 1980 interview: "That's Paul completely."
Composition
The song is in the key of E major and in a time signature. On the recording issued on The Beatles, its structure comprises two combinations of verse and chorus, followed by an instrumental passage and a third verse–chorus combination. This is followed by a prolonged ending during which the performance stops, picks up again, fades out, fades back in, and then fades out one final time amidst a cacophony of sounds. The stereo mix features one more section that fades in and concludes the song.
The only chords used in the song are E, E7, G and A, with the first of these being played throughout the extended ending. Musicologist Walter Everett comments on the musical form: "There is no dominant and little tonal function; organized noise is the brief." The lyrics initially follow the title's fairground theme, from the opening line "When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide". McCartney completes the first half-verse with a hollered "and then I see you again!" The lyrics then become more suggestive and provocative, with the singer asking, "But do you, don't you, want me to love you?" In author Jonathan Gould's description, "The song turns the colloquialism for a fairground ride into a metaphor for the sort of frenzied, operatic sex that adolescent boys of all ages like to fantasize about."
Recording "Helter Skelter" was recorded several times during the sessions for the album. During the 18 July 1968 session, the Beatles recorded take 3 of the song, lasting 27 minutes and 11 seconds. However, this version differs greatly from, and is slower than, the album version. Chris Thomas produced the 9 September session in George Martin's absence. He recalled the session was especially spirited: "While Paul was doing his vocal, George Harrison had set fire to an ashtray and was running around the studio with it above his head, doing an Arthur Brown." Ringo Starr recalled: Helter Skelter' was a track we did in total madness and hysterics in the studio. Sometimes you just had to shake out the jams." In Mark Lewisohn's book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Abbey Road engineer Brian Gibson was quoted saying that the Beatles were "jamming away, completely oblivious to the world" that night, and that management ignored what went on in the studio.
On 9 September, 18 takes lasting approximately five minutes each were recorded, with the last one featured on the original LP. At around 3:40, the song completely fades out, then gradually fades back in, fades back out partially, and finally fades back in quickly with three cymbal crashes and shouting from Starr. During the end of the 18th take, he lost his temper, threw his drum sticks across the studio and screamed, "I got blisters on my fingers!" Starr's shout was only included on the stereo mix of the song; the mono version (originally on LP only) ends on the first fadeout without Starr's outburst. On 10 September, the band added overdubs which included a lead guitar part by Harrison, trumpet played by Mal Evans, piano, further drums, and "mouth sax" created by Lennon blowing through a saxophone mouthpiece.
According to music critic Tim Riley, although McCartney and Lennon had diverged markedly as songwriters during this period, the completed track can be seen as a "competitive apposition" to Lennon's "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey". He says that whereas Lennon "submerges in scatalogical contradictions" in his song, "Helter Skelter" "ignites a scathing, almost violent disorder". In Everett's view, rather than the Who's contemporaneous music, the song "sounds more like an answer to [Yoko Ono]", the Japanese performance artist who, as Lennon's new romantic partner, was a constant presence at the album sessions and a source of tension within the band.
Musicologists Kenny Jenkins (of Leeds Beckett University) and Richard Perks (of University of Kent) have expressed the opinion that a Bartell fretless guitar belonging to Harrison was used on this track.
Release and reception "Helter Skelter" was sequenced as the penultimate track on side three of The Beatles, between "Sexy Sadie" and "Long, Long, Long". The segue from "Sexy Sadie" was a rare example of a gap (or "rill") being used to separate the album's tracks, and the brief silence served to heighten the song's abrupt arrival. In Riley's description, the opening guitar figure "demolishes the silence[...] from a high, piercing vantage point" while, at the end of "Helter Skelter", the meditative "Long, Long, Long" begins as "the smoke and ash are still settling". The double LP was released by Apple Records on 22 November 1968.
In his contemporary review for International Times, Barry Miles described "Helter Skelter" as "probably the heaviest rocker on plastic today", while the NMEs Alan Smith found it "low on melody but high on atmosphere" and "frenetically sexual", adding that its pace was "so fast they all only just about keep up with themselves". Record Mirrors reviewer said the track contained "screaming pained vocals, ear splitting buzz guitar and general instrumental confusion, but [a] rather typical pattern", and concluded: "Ends sounding like five thousand large electric flies out for a good time. Ringo then blurts out with excruciating torment: 'I got blisters on my fingers!'"
In his review for Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner wrote that the Beatles had been unfairly overlooked as hard rock stylists, and he grouped the song with "Birthday" and "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" as White Album tracks that captured "the very best traditional and contemporary elements in rock and roll". He described "Helter Skelter" as "excellent", highlighting its "guitar lines behind the title words, the rhythm guitar track layering the whole song with that precisely used fuzztone, and Paul's gorgeous vocal". Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian praised it as one of McCartney's "perfect, professional songs, packed with exact quotes and characterisation", and recommended the stereo version for the way it "transforms" the song "from a nifty fast number to one of my best 30 tracks of all time". Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required). Although he misidentified it as a Lennon song, William Mann of The Times said "Helter Skelter" was "exhaustingly marvellous, a revival that is willed by creativity[...] into resurrection, a physical but essentially musical thrust into the loins".
In June 1976, Capitol Records included the track on its themed double album compilation Rock 'n' Roll Music. In the United States, the song was also issued on the single promoting the album, as the B-side to "Got to Get You into My Life". In 2012, "Helter Skelter" appeared on the iTunes compilation album Tomorrow Never Knows, which the band's website described as a collection of "the Beatles' most influential rock songs".
On the Beatles' 2006 remix album Love, the song was remixed in mashup along with "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!", and snippets of that song and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" are mixed in with the repeated guitar riff. The mix also included the organ solo and the guitar solo from the Trident studio outtake.
Charles Manson interpretation
According to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who led the prosecution of Manson and four of his followers who acted on Manson's instruction in the Tate–LaBianca murders, Charles Manson told his followers that several White Album songs, particularly "Helter Skelter", were part of the Beatles' coded prophecy of an apocalyptic war in which racist and non-racist whites would be manoeuvred into virtually exterminating each other over the treatment of blacks. Upon the war's conclusion, after black militants had killed off the few whites that had survived, Manson and his "Family" of followers would emerge from an underground city in which they would have escaped the conflict. As the only remaining whites, they would rule blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the United States. Manson employed "Helter Skelter" as the term for this sequence of events. In his interpretation, the lyrics of the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" described the moment when he and the Family would emerge from their hiding place – a disused mine shaft in the desert outside Los Angeles.
Bugliosi named his best-selling book about the murders Helter Skelter. At the scene of the LaBianca murders in August 1969, the phrase (misspelt as "HEALTER SKELTER") was found written in the victims' blood on the refrigerator door. In October 1970, Manson's defence team announced that they would call on Lennon for his testimony. Lennon responded that his comments would be of no use, since he had no hand in writing "Helter Skelter".
Bugliosi's book was the basis for the 1976 television film Helter Skelter. The film's popularity in the US ensured that the song, and the White Album generally, received a new wave of attention. As a result, Capitol planned to issue "Helter Skelter" as the A-side of the single from Rock 'n' Roll Music but relented, realising that to exploit its association with Manson would be in poor taste. In the final interview he gave before his murder in December 1980, Lennon dismissed Manson as "just an extreme version" of the type of listener who read false messages in the Beatles' lyrics, such as those behind the 1969 "Paul is dead" rumour. Lennon also said: "All that Manson stuff was built around George's song about pigs ['Piggies'] and this one, Paul's song about an English fairground. It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me."