The Beatles and the Art of the Tambourine - Popular/American ...

108 Steven Hamelman
stressed, whose folk-rock sensibility is attained largely through the prevalent
jingle-jangling. But “If I Needed Someone” requires a word if only
because its inconsistent tambourine previews the radical inconsistency that
will combine to make an Artistic Statement on many future Beatles tracks.
(The inconsistency cannot be detected in mono and in fact will elude casual
listeners of the stereo re-master.) The tune starts predictably enough,
backbeats on the verse (the first backbeat is missed) and a sixteenth-note
shake on the chorus—all of this favoring the left channel, with minimal
right-side bleed. But during the solo, a clumsy eighth-note roll takes hold in
the right channel. The third verse shifts tambourine back left, where tentative
backbeats repeat until the tambourine moves right again for the tune’s
final seventeen seconds (four bars) of coda. The disjunction between unpolished,
vacillating tambourine and polished vocal harmonies seems to reflect
the speaker’s ambivalence towards the loved one: back and forth he
goes, missing beats as if his feelings are not reliable.
Usually seen as the group’s genius reaching full-flood, Revolver (1966)
contains tambourine parts that echo the album’s extraordinary strides in
composition, performance, and production. So complex is the tambourine
on the opener “Taxman” that reference to several time-sequences is needed
to analyze it. In a word, extremely irregular playing fractures the pulse. The
tambourine starts at the top of the second verse (0:32) with a TWO/AND-
FOUR backbeat riff, repeated once, then lapsing immediately, refusing to
stick to the expected supporting role, but only for one bar, when once again
the TWO/AND-FOUR resumes, lapsing again after two bars and resuming
at 0:45, where it plays along until 1:08. An eighth-note run on the tambourine
breaks into a sixteenth-note shake-roll during Paul’s guitar solo,
runs through the ensuing chorus, continues until 1:32, then after defaulting
to the backbeat for seven seconds goes silent at 1:39. Another shake commences
before the last verse and chorus at 1:50—yet another arbitrary
place to resume—to end (2:39). This complicated, asymmetrical performance
may be intended to connote the speaker’s frustrations with punitive
tax codes. Tim Riley, in Tell Me Why, dances around this conclusion as he
talks about the cut’s “edge,” “acridity,” “fevered stress,” “vengeance,” and
“sour smell[s]” (183). He observes that “Taxman” starts in “two tempos
[that] not only trip up expectations as to where the beat will land; they gives
[sic] a sense of space to the recording: the tension between what’s heard in
Studies in Popular Culture