Comedy numbers, cancel culture, and crummy sitars: The story behind “Norwegian Wood”

Photo by Robert Freeman

Ranked 83rd on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” lit a fire in the burgeoning psychedelic music community. Part of the folk-rock album Rubber Soul, at its core “Norwegian Wood” is a lilting Irish folk tune in 3/4. On the outside, it seems an odd choice for a standout track. The song is primarily composed of a strummed acoustic guitar and a simple melody with goofy lyrics. It was not released as a single and perhaps The Beatles’ themselves were taken aback by its popularity and impact on the music world.

The song’s notability comes from the last minute inclusion of a sitar part. The sitar is a string instrument from Northern India. It is fretted similarly to a guitar but is tuned and plucked differently. Part of the sitar’s appeal is its unique twangy timbre, a result of the 13 sympathetic strings that run underneath the frets. These strings are not usually plucked on their own but are instead tuned to resonate when certain frequencies are played, resulting in a rich sound with many harmonic overtones. 

Today, the sitar is known to Western audiences primarily because of The Beatles and the larger ‘raga rock’ genre they pioneered. Prior to the release of “Norwegian Wood” on December 3rd 1965, the sitar had never been utilized in a pop music context but in the coming years it became an iconic feature of psychedelia. 

The story behind “Norwegian Wood” and The Beatles’ subsequent sitar fascination began in early 1965 while the band was filming their second film Help. One of the scenes featured several Indian musicians playing traditional instruments and after fiddling with a prop sitar, George Harrison decided to purchase one. 

“I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft,” Harrison recalls. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it for a bit.” 

It seems a pure chance that the infamous sitar riff even ended up on “Norwegian Wood.” Harrison later recalled the process: “We were at the point where we’d recorded the ‘Norwegian Wood’ backing track (twelve-string and six-string acoustic, bass and drums) and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up – it was just lying around; I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous: I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted and it worked.”

John Lennon had begun writing the song in January 1965, during a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps. He later finished the lyrics with Paul McCartney, “Norwegian Wood” becoming a tongue-in-cheek story about an extramarital affair with an arsonist twist. The lyrics are silly and somewhat nonsensical with Lennon admitting in 1970, “I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know I was writing about an affair, so it was very gobbledegook.” The day after recording finished, Paul McCartney remarked, “We’ve written some funny songs – songs with jokes in. We think that comedy numbers are the next thing after protest songs.” 

What started out as a “comedy number” quickly became much more with the addition of the sitar. The implications “Norwegian Wood” had on both Western pop culture and Hindustani classical music were big and immediate. By the following year, raga rock was in full swing, some notable releases including The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black” and The Beatles Indian sequel, “Love You To.” 

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The success of “Norwegian Wood” and sudden popularity of Indian instrumentation in rock music prompted Harrison to seek out sitar instruction. In 1966, he met Ravi Shankar for the first time. Shankar was understandably unimpressed by Harrison’s sitar work on “Norwegian Wood.” “I couldn’t believe it,” Shankar recalled, “it sounded so strange. Just imagine some Indian villager trying to play the violin when you know what it should sound like.”

Despite Shankar’s initial impression, he agreed to teach Harrison, and over the coming years, the two formed a long-lasting friendship. “Norwegian Wood” and the subsequent fascination with Indian music in pop culture served as a catalyst for Shankar’s popularity among Western audiences. In the late sixties he toured the West extensively, notably playing at both Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and Woodstock in 1969. 

Shankar, however, did have concerns about the West’s sudden interest in Indian music, what he dubbed “the great sitar explosion.” With the sociopolitical atmosphere of today, Shankar’s apprehension hits close to home. Many critiques of the use of Indian instrumentation in sixties pop music have emerged in recent years, expressing renewed concern over the trend-like countercultural experimentation with Indian culture and spirituality.

The close of the sixties effectively brought the end of the raga rock, with most pop groups moving on to explore new fads. For most, the sitar and brief stints with eastern spirituality had simply been another trend, demonstrating the relevance of cultural misappropriation in pop culture. However, for The Beatles, and especially for Harrison, what may have started out as a countercultural fad eventually turned into a lifelong commitment, perhaps saving some of their most influential works in the digital age of cancel culture. 

More than anything, “Norwegian Wood” demonstrates the challenges and complicated narratives that come with cross-cultural exchange. Harrison’s “discovery” of the sitar on the set of Help! is filled with moral ambiguity, the film containing blatantly racist characterizations of a nondescript but definitively ‘eastern’ society. Furthermore, the use of sitar on “Norwegian Wood” had little forethought and had more to do with the band’s perception of the instrument as “a new sound,” a fetishization of “the exotic.” 

However questionably the story began, “Norwegian Wood” proved fundamental to the introduction of Indian classical music to mainstream Western audiences and opened a path for Shankar and his contemporaries’ success. For The Beatles, “Norwegian Wood” served as an introduction to the larger world of Indian music and spirituality, a path they embraced in varying degrees for the rest of their careers. Harrison and Shankar maintained a close and long-lasting friendship, collaborating many times and continuing to bring Indian music to the West in new ways. 

The story behind “Norwegian Wood” is a complex narrative filled with morally ambiguous decisions and difficult to answer questions. It challenges the simplicity of the binaries established by cancel culture. Perhaps “Norwegian Wood”s reignited relevance lies not in choosing a side but in using its story to understand the complications of cross-cultural exchange in pop culture. It seems that more than 50 years later, “Norwegian Wood” is still lighting fires in the music world.

Written by Lily Ramus