The True Story Behind “Norwegian Wood”
Cummings Archives/Getty ImagesCynthia Lennon and John Lennon in 1964.
“Norwegian Wood” has an edge. The romantic, sexually charged ballad ends with the singer burning down a girl’s house. Included on The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul, it showed that the Fab Four were capable of much more than boppy love songs.
The song also showed — upon examination — that John Lennon had started to step out on his wife, Cynthia.
“It was about an affair I was having,” Lennon later confirmed. “I was very careful and paranoid because I didn’t want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside of the household.
“I’d always had some kind of affairs going, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair, but in such a smoke-screen way that you couldn’t tell.”
To conceal the truth, Lennon twisted facts with fiction. He wrote about an encounter with a girl who brought him home but made him sleep in the bathtub — so he burned her house down.
“I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was writing about an affair,” Lennon elaborated. “So it was very gobbledegook.”
But “Norwegian Wood” doesn’t only stand out for its surprising content. The song is also the first Beatles song to use the sitar, an instrument that had recently enchanted George Harrison.
Harrison first encountered the sitar on the set of The Beatles movie Help!. Although the instrument was just part of the set, Harrison picked it up and liked how it sounded. He later developed a relationship with sitar player Ravi Shankar, who taught him how to play the instrument.
YouTubeRavi Shankar and George Harrison playing the sitar in 1968.
And when it came to “Norwegian Wood,” Harrison had an inspired idea that would change The Beatles’ sound forever.
“We’d recorded the Norwegian Wood backing track and it needed something,” Harrison later recalled.
“We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up – it was just lying around; I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it.”
Indeed, Harrison would later admit that he barely knew how to play the sitar. (And Shankar would call “Norwegian Wood” “so strange.”) But the inclusion of the sitar added new dimensions to The Beatles’ music and frequently appeared on their albums over the years.
How A Bad Acid Trip Inspired “She Said She Said”
Express/Archive Photos/Getty ImagesThe Beatles at their Hollywood Hills house on August 28, 1964.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trippy, otherworldly sounding “She Said She Said” was inspired by LSD.
In August 1965, The Beatles had flown to Los Angeles to play a number of concerts in California. They had a few days off, which they spent at a rented house in Beverly Hills.
There, John Lennon and George Harrison — who had taken LSD before — convinced Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney to join.
“John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid,” Harrison later recalled, “because we couldn’t relate to them anymore. Not just on the one level – we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much.”
But at the last minute, McCartney decided to abstain. The other three went on without him, and before long, the party was in full swing.
By the time actor Peter Fonda showed up, “It was a thoroughly tripped-out atmosphere.”
Fonda recalled being approached by David Crosby, of The Byrds, who told him: “Fonda, you gotta go talk to George; he thinks he’s dying.”
So Fonda wandered to the back of the house, where he found Harrison in the throes of LSD-induced paranoia. For whatever reason, the actor thought that talking about his own near-death experience might calm the Beatle down.
“I said that I knew what it was like to be dead because when I was 10 years old I accidentally shot myself in the stomach and my heart stopped beating three times while I was on the operating table because I’d lost so much blood,” Fonda explained.
This rankled Lennon, who glanced up and snapped: “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born. Who put all that shit in your head?”
As Lennon later described the moment, “We didn’t want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn’t know; he hadn’t made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.'”
The incident with Fonda stuck with Lennon. As he sat down to start writing tunes for The Beatles album Revolver, he tried to put his encounter with Fonda to music.
With Harrison’s help, Lennon came up with “She Said She Said,” which the band recorded in June 1966.
But although the song — and the new album — showed The Beatles’ growth as musicians, it also masked new divisions in the group.
McCartney had not shared in the L.A. acid trip — although he and Lennon would trip together in December 1965. And during the recording of “She Said She Said,” McCartney walked out of the studio, something he almost never did.
“I’m not sure but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on,” McCartney later recalled. “I think we’d had a barney or something and I said, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it.’ I think George played bass.”
