Apple Corps have dropped another taster from the upcoming Rubber Soul special edition.
We’ve already heard the early versions of Michelle and Daytripper that are included in the package. Now it’s time for the second take of Norwegian Wood
Recorded in October 1965, there were two versions of Norwegian Wood. This is the second and is closer to what eventually ended up on Side One of the album. You can hear John Lennon counting the band in, but the song opens with the double tracked sitar playing the bridge section, rather than the verse melody we all know.
This was the first time George Harrison had played a sitar on a Beatles track and in this Facebook post from the Beatles Cavern, the guitarist can be heard talking retrospectively about the track: “It felt very familiar to me to listen to that music,” Harrison says. “Around that time I’d bought a cheap sitar in a shop called Indiacraft in London.”
“It was just lying around. I hadn’t figured out what I was going to do with it. When we were working on Norwegian Wood, it just needed something and it was quite spontaneous.
"I picked the sitar up and kind of found the notes. I just kind of played it. I mic-ed it up. We put it on and it seemed to hit the spot and that was it.”
George’s words have been spliced with John Lennon talking about the track towards the end of his life: “I asked him ‘can you play this lick on the sitar? And it took him 20 minutes or half an hour to get the lick down.”
The Rubber Soul special edition comes out on 2 October, and as per usual features all sorts of alternative takes and demos from the Apple archives, as well as the band’s contemporary double A side single, Daytripper/ We Can Work It Out.
One of its main attractions is Little Girl, a John Lennon demo which up until recently no-one had any idea even existed, let alone that it was in releasable form. Perhaps Apple are holding that back until nearer the release date...
