Matt Broad supplies the latest edition of "Beatles, Undiscovered", with a recount of George Harrision's haunting screed against the taxman--one of the earliest political Beatles songs, and Little George's first major contribution to the Beatles catalogue. Read on..
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“Taxman”
By Matt Broad
There is a sinister counting, low, guttural, unfeeling, disinterested. It sounds like the devil, maybe.
Or perhaps its your mono-toned company president testing a microphone’s volume before launching into a bored account of his fortunes, none of which you’ll see, of course. One two three four one two-
A cough, a clearing of the throat. Accidental, perhaps, but no matter what its source it does the job: your attention has been gotten.
Then the baseline, thundering, forceful, driven by immediate unstoppable force, momentum. Though powerful, it is distant, somehow hateful.
But most of all that guitar- piercing, short notes.
Like a machete racing from a spinning disc through a wire right into your ear, stopping just short of drawing blood and slinking around the rhythm sections’ steady pulse, through the snare drum and the insistent cow-bell, like a great anaconda coiling itself from the bottom of a flagpole to the very top, far into the atmosphere.
“Let me tell you how it will be!” George, as greed personified, vomits onto the record.
There must be a moment in the listeners’ life where he would protest. This sound is too sinister. The words are too finite.
It’s clear that we have no other choice.
“Taxman” is the first truly great George Harrison contribution to the Beatles already stunning oeuvre, and it is both telling and fortuitous that it opens the great album Revolver. The song is empty of pity, snarling, messianic.
And only a song devoid of emotion could possibly set the tone for the emotional roller-coaster that the listener is forced to ride for the ensuing thirteen tracks. “Taxman” cuts to the quick, but also numbs the listener. It is the prick of an anesthetic needle; it stings but leads to a lack of sensation, just what is needed for the groundbreaking collection of songs.
The Beatles are far past simple love songs that end happily. This is a world where brassy love songs are devoted to joints and French horns tell of doomed affairs. It is a world of the forgotten rotting in graveyards and the escapists surveying the depths of the ocean for pleasure.
A world of young geniuses saddled with boredom manifesting itself as paralysis and readers of the Tibetan Book of the Dead wrestling with the ever present question of mortality. It is a world where the bottom line can be overcome only with a fight, where mind expansion is tantamount and possible only through the fiery pain of self-awareness.
And this world doesn’t invite audience participation anymore, because the audience doesn’t know shit.
“Let me tell you how it will be!” George snarls as the taxman. He wouldn’t even smirk, because anything resembling a smile would imply satisfaction, and satistfaction?
Well, if Mick can’t get no, then the taxman don’t want no. Voracious, unyielding, never content. Anesthetized: numbness personified.
By the time of Revolver’s recording, the Beatles were ready to ask some of the harder question. Beaten and battered by two impossibly hard years on the road, they were back in England, swearing off touring and beginning life anew as a studio band. Their time as a touring band saw them swept up in a fury of epic proportions: Beatlemania, an endless array of number one singles and screaming girls, a constant place in the public eye.
All of this came to a violent head in March 1966, when John Lennon made the off-handed remark that the band had become “bigger than Jesus.” Amidst the bonfires of Beatle paraphernalia and death threats from churchyard Pharisees in Podunk USA, Lennon was forced into an apology. Of course they didn’t consider themselves on par with Jesus, the great teacher.
They were merely entertainers. Here to sing, not to teach.
But their next album begins quite messianically, doesn’t it?
“Let me tell you how it will be!” George hisses forcefully in this screed against greed, this flight towards what’s right.
Though he was the Quiet One, and though Lennon became the true martyr of the group and the generation, George was the first of the Beatles to use his pulpit as songwriter for the ancient art of preaching.
On the Rubber Soul album he urged the Beatlemaniacs to “Think For Yourself.” It is the earliest example of a truly political thought in a Beatles song, encapsulating the ethos of the Flower Generation two years before the runaways descended upon Haight Street with flowers, dosed fruit punch, and a ticket out of normality. But “Taxman” is the Beatles’ first great anti-establishment song, of which there would prove to be an almost infinite amount.
Leave it to the Quiet One to set the tone for the geniuses he shared a band with.
In the phenomenal Magic Circles, Devin McKinney posits that George was always the most truthful Beatle simply because he was unencumbered by the genius that forced McCartney and Lennon to at first bury their thoughts in layers and layers of allegory. Harrison was nothing but up front, always, unyielding in his critiques of social mores and unwilling (or even pathologically unable?
) to couch his beliefs in lovely phrases, preferring instead the use of irony and bitter humor. And “Taxman” is the greatest example of this facet of his personality. Just as Lennon was torn between Love and Hate, Harrison rode the line between Acceptance and Disgust, between mantras and screeds.
The taxman, no doubt, is deserving of the Quiet One’s disgust.
Upon his return to England, Harrison discovered that, due to the bands’ unprecedented success, he had been bumped up a few tax brackets and that the government had helped itself to nearly half of his fortunes. Feeling that he was being punished for absolutely nothing, he was incensed.
Thus, he embarked upon a full-fledged attack on the traditional tax system the only way he could: the result was “Taxman”, and with it George took no prisoners, going so far as to name-check Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Leader of the Opposition Edward Heath in the song.
What George could never have realized (unless he did realize it?) was that money would become a great theme in much of the latter part of the Beatles’ history.
The suite that ends Abbey Road, you’ll remember, includes “You Never Give Me Your Money,” and thanks in large part to the birth and subsequent disaster of Apple Records, the bands’ legacy became embroiled in a financial purgatory that exists to this very day (thank you, Michael Jackson). George, ironically, had secured the rights to his own songs from the beginning. The self-proclaimed (and totally misnamed) “King of Pop” wasn’t able to license the rights of “Taxman” for an H R Block commercial in order to pay for his numerous court cases.
No sir, that girl is mine. And I’m sure George, God bless him, made a pretty penny off of it, thank you very much.
It is strange that the most Eastern (read: non-materialistic) of all the Beatles would devote an entire song to the subject of his wallet, but to Harrison, no doubt, it stretched farther than that.
The point of the song rests in the taxman’s anesthetized voice. It is a voice that is numbed to all of the problems that Revolver showcases. He is not interested in all of the lonely people.
He is loveless enough to not want anyone in his life. There is no need for sunshine and there are no LSD-driven fireside chats about death. The taxman doesn’t know what it’s like to be dead, and he doesn’t care- but if you don’t “declare those pennies on you eyes” he’ll hunt you down in Hades and collect.
Perhaps George had so much success as a human being because he was able to lose himself in another’s voice, even a voice as alien as the taxman’s. What’s the old adage? Only by knowing your enemy can you truly beat him.
George Harrison died as he lived: free, defiant, and, no thanks to Mr. Heath, financially secure.
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