Is ‘Helter Skelter’ the Heaviest Beatles Song?
The Beatles are one of the most essential classic rock bands, but they rarely made hard rock songs. This raises an interesting question: is “Helter Skelter” the heaviest Beatles song? There are a few other candidates.
The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ is 1 of several hard rock songs on ‘The White Album’
The Beatles went through eras where their dominant sound was bubblegum music, folk, psychedelia, and blues rock. However, they never opted to make an entire hard-rock record. Some of their heavier songs include “Revolution,” “Yer Blues,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” all of which came from The White Album. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” even featured contributions from Eric Clapton, one of the most iconic guitar heroes of all time.
However, one song from The White Album remains one of the most innovative songs in the band’s catalog: “Helter Skelter.” While “Revolution,” “Yer Blues,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” are all hard-rock songs, only “Helter Skelter” is routinely cited as one of the first heavy metal records, if not the first. The tune’s impact on metal music cannot be overstated.
The Beatles’ influence on some heavy meta artists is really obvious
For example, Mötley Crüe’s breakthrough album, Shout at the Devil, includes a cover of “Helter Skelter.” That record helped set the tone for their career. It also showed that a certain track from The White Album inspired a lot of 1980s music.
More recently, 1990s metal icons Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson recorded a cover of the track. They manage to make the central riff from the original song loud and abrasive in the best possible way. The duo also performs “Helter Skelter” in a modern metal scream that shows how the genre has evolved from the days when Paul McCartney could perform a metal song in his poppy Beatles cadence.
Would we have heavy metal without “Helter Skelter?” Who knows? What’s clear is that the genre wouldn’t be the same without it.
What Paul McCartney said about ‘Helter Skelter’
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul recalled writing “Helter Skelter.” He said he read a review of The Who’s “I Can See for Miles,” which described the song as dirty and loud. “I was always trying to write something different, trying to not write in character, and I read this and I was inspired, ‘Oh, wow! Yeah! Just that one little paragraph was enough to inspire me, to make me make a move.
“So I sat down and wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ to be the most raucous vocal, the loudest drums, etc. etc.,” he added. “I was using the symbol of a helter-skelter [corkscrew-shaped slide] as a ride from the top to the bottom, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and this was the fall, the demise, the going down. You could have thought of it as a rather cute title but it’s since taken on all sorts of ominous overtones because [Charles] Manson picked it up as an anthem, and since then quite a few punk bands have done it because it is a raunchy rocker.”
Whether or not “Helter Skelter” is the heaviest Beatles song, it proves the Fab Four were frequently ahead of their time.
