A Reason to Go On Living: That Chord


(#2 in a series)

Recently, a dear friend lent me a guitar he wasn’t using.

Not just any guitar. He lent me a Rickenbacker 360-12:

Rickenbacker 360-12

You can be forgiven if the words “Rickenbacker 360-12″ don’t send shivers up your spine. Guitar fetishes quickly grow tiresome to the uninitiated, and it’s hilarious to me that adult men (I’ve never met a truly committed gearhead of the female persuasion) can be led to believe that ownership of one ax or another will automatically confer on the owner the mojo, the swagger, of the rock star who made it famous. Two minutes spent with Musician’s Friend catalog sales-copy will show how silly gearheads can be.

But this — this is a Rickenbacker 360-12, man! It played that chord!

What chord?

That chord, man! You gotta know the one I mean!

That chord!

Rickenbacker 360-12, another viewIn our overstimulated time, our computerized, synthesized, digitized, 500-channels-and-nothing-worth-watching time, when even the word radical has been drained of its meaning, it’s impossible — we’re so burnt! — to know how brain-meltingly radical, how charged with promise, how laden with possibility, was that one overtone-soaked BLANNNNNG when it was first heard in 1964. Think about it: Was there ever a single noise, a single sonorous crashing KLANNNNG, that more totally changed everything that anyone knew? It was so…so…so… modern! But like all harbingers of change, this single electric crash, joyously, orgasmically received by its audience, was not unambiguously benign.

You could get badly lost — and many, many people did indeed get lost — in the universes that that one monstrous chord opens. Those overtones — those ululating frequencies bashing violently against each other as the chord decays — scream an unmistakable warning of twisted confusion dead ahead. When did the Sixties begin? Was it when Oswald’s bullet hit Kennedy’s cranium? When Johnson proffered the Great Society? When troop levels rose in Vietnam? I submit my own candidate for your consideration: That chord.

Like almost everything about that decade, that chord still sows dissension. The Sixties will forever be fought over; the chief, nearly defining characteristic of that decade’s history is the hellish ambiguity of the changes it wrought. I confess my own ambivalence over things that I once considered unarguably positive; I can’t help but intuit that I might have loathed the self-congratulation of the Woodstock Notion, or the gibbering stupidity of someone under the impression that an idea conceived on LSD deserves particular validity. I have, I suppose, grown up to that extent.

The iconic noise of that chord, as I say, is still fought over. Nothing that large, that explosively clangorous, can be pinned down and defined. Those attempting to do so will find themselves at odds with others in the field — as this page at Wikipedia will attest. At that page, I count five musicologists — at least three known to me as excellent scholars of the Beatles’ musical output — who cannot actually agree about the component notes or the harmonic function of that chord! In researching this post, I’ve found that even the magisterial Ian MacDonald, in my opinion the best and most sympathetic critic of the Beatles’ recorded work, gets the component notes of the chord quite wrong, as do the authors of The Beatles: The Complete Scores (and not for the first time!).

What can we say about something so huge and yet so strangely ambiguous, both in composition and in meaning? What is it even possible to say? Best just to let the thing reverberate around in your head, speaking for itself. And speak it will.

Now hand me that guitar!

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March 24th, 2007
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Viewing 12 Comments

    • ^
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    Oh yes. And the fact that the chord introduced the song instead of being somewhere in the middle, and that it was not obscured under any vocals, meant that it was highlighted in a way unusual in pop music. It also could not be lost under a D.J.'s patter, unlike most intros.
    It could be argued that the single most important element of the Beatles' success was their often-stated desire to do something different every time, and not to copy (while never denying their influences) anyone, including themselves. So that chord, as well as the reverb-less double string quartet on "Yesterday" (before then, strings in pop music were almost always violins drenched in reverb), and the sitar on "Norwegian Wood," all from 1964-65--before they became celebrated for their musical adventurousness--all exemplify their attempts to escape boundaries, to send back dispatches from the unkown.
    Hearing that chord on the radio was a kind of shock every time. Considering that George was known for his love of unusual chords (such as the E7 flat 9 in "I Want to Tell You"), I wonder if he was responsible for this one.
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    That chord might be responsible for the entire existence of XTC...

    Andy talks about it on his "How This is Pop Came to Be."

    As usual Ned. Great post.
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    Wow. This is ultra-weird.

    I'm going to say something rather heretical here, so don't jump down my throat...

    I don't believe George Harrison played the solo on "A Hard Day's Night" on a Rickenbacker 360-12.

    My first piece of evidence, entirely circumstantial, I admit, is this. The version recorded live at the BBC, which you can find on "The Beatles at the BBC," has one of the funniest edits I've ever heard: when the Fabs get to the solo, the BBC simply edits in the solo from the record. No attempt to hide it or anything -- I guess they thought it wouldn't be remarked by the unsophisticated audience listening over the radio.

    So why wouldn't they use the solo as George played it? Maybe because he clammed it so badly --repeatedly, because it wasn't a true live broadcast and George could have taken as many mulligans as he needed -- that it was unusable.

    I will say this: That solo is a beeyotch to play -- and I'm a pretty fair guitar player. The first phrase is very easy, but those triplets in the second phrase are very hard to play crisply.

    Ian MacDonald says that it was recorded at half-speed an octave lower -- but this is clearly impossible because the guitar solo is being played on its lowest strings; you can't play an octave lower.

    Wikipedia theorizes that it wasn't a guitar at all, but George Martin playing a harpsichord. I don't buy this one either, because there's a very clear slide up two frets on the sixth note of the solo -- impossible with any keyboard.

    But Wikipedia does get one thing right, and this is the most damning detail: the notes in the solo are two octaves apart, not one, as the 12-string guitar is tuned.

    This hints that the thing was played at half-speed -- by two guitars, or by one guitar and a harpsichord, or by a solo harpsichord. But not a Rick 12-string.

    Come on over to my place later this evening -- I'm going to post the solo, and the edit from the BBC session. Let's get to the bottom of this.
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    Ned - I always thought that Martin "doubled" the solo on the acoustic piano (one of the lower registers.) I never saw that documented anywhere but it sounds like that to my ears.
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    Viscount: Listen very carefully to the sixth note of the solo. I hear an upward slide of a whole note -- from a C to a D on the A string. Can't do that with a piano.
    • ^
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    Everything in music can be classified as BC (before THE chord) or AC. It was a clarion wake-up call to an entire generation of musicians.

    Neddie, man, where do you live? Can I come over and look at (maybe touch...play, even?) the axe before it goes back to your lunatic (how could let it out his possession?) friend?
    • ^
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    Fantastic piece!!! You'll find MANY axe collectors here at Newcritics. I think a couple of us have bragged, oops... I mean, posted our respective quivers at our home bases. The one you feature in this post is quite a gem. I'm drooling at the photos as we speak.

    While I would argue that Keith's opening riff in "Satisfaction" with Bill's bass lumbering underneath moved bigger mountains, hey, I can certainly relate to the zeal in which you dig into the intricacies and nuance of Fab Four music.

    Now, if I can find a way to pick up a 360-12 without my wife knowing…
    • ^
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    I don't know about the solo, but That Chord is a Rick 12 string. Owning a Rick won't make you sound like John Lennon or Roger McGuinn, but you won't sound like them, or be able to play That Chord without one.

    Ask Tom Petty......
    • ^
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    Great post. Chords are magical things. Being a rhythm guitarist, I've always had a soft spot for hollowbodies in general. Owned one in High School for a short while. I don't think any other type of electric guitar sounds as warm to me. Can you imagine Chet Atkins playing a strat?
    • ^
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    Type your comment here.

    Wait. THE CHORD for a Rickenbacker 12 string...and it isn't the sequence of "Turn, Turn, Turn" or anything of the Byrds? Not possible. Iconic? Please, Harrison isn't associated with a 12 string in general, nor could anyone hear that chord and think 12 string, rather than just sonic.
    The reference you put up isn't plausible and has been contested, the reference to the Byrds is THE 60s introduction of that instrument as a distinct sonic and visual icon, that got so many teenagers off to buy one and believe for at least a few months they would master it. Otherwise, sure, the rest is clear, there is nothing stopping me from salivating all over the Beatles legacy of chords and songs, but... the wiki page is a bit off-putting.
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    interesting
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    When George Harrison appeared in the film "A Hard Day´s Night" with a Rickenbacker 360/12, the musician started to buy 12 strings guitars, that was a fact, not Mc Guinn, not Gerry and the Peacemakers, not Brian Jones or Richard (Vox 12 strings guitars). The album A Hard Day´s Night have 12`s strings all over it, for example: A Hard Day´s Night, I Should Have Known Better, If I fell, Any Time at All, When I Get Home, You Can´t Do That, Tell me Why, if this album is not a 12 strings one and it was not an influence for that kind of instruments,I´m getting crazy !!!
 

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