“She Said She Said” stands as a classic example of the Beatles’ musical and lyrical experimentation.The idea for the track originates from an Aug. 24, 1965 party which occurred during the Beatles’ U.S. tour. Held at the Beatles’ rented house in Los Angeles, the party saw the group hosting such luminaries as Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Fonda. During the event everyone except Paul McCartney dropped acid; when George Harrison experienced disturbing hallucinations, Fonda attempted to soothe Harrison.Peter Fonda told Harrison about how he had almost died at 10 years old after accidentally shooting himself in the stomach. John Lennon overheard Fonda stating “I know what it’s like to be dead”; annoyed and upset by his words, Lennon replied “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born. Who put all that shit in your head?” After Lennon recovered from the trip, he remembered Fonda’s declaration and wrote a song around the phrase. In Anthology, Harrison described how he contributed to the writing of “She Said She Said”: “I was at his house one day — this is the mid-’60s — and he was struggling with some tunes. He had loads of bits, maybe three songs, that were unfinished, and I made suggestions and helped him to work them together so that they became one finished song, “She Said She Said.” The middle part of that record is a different song: ‘She said, “I know what it’s like to be dead,” and I said, “oh, no, no, you’re wrong…’” Then it goes into the other one, “When I was a boy…” That was a real weld”.Lennon continually experimented with the tune, as his home demos demonstrate. He changed the perspective from “I” to “she,” used obvious (and temporary) filler phrases like “it’s making me feel like my trousers are torn.” As the song slowly developed, he added a middle eight that varied in tempo and tone, beginning with the line ‘“When I was a boy.” As he told Rolling Stone in 1968:”Yeah, right. That was pure. That was what I meant all right. You see when I wrote that I had the “She said she said,” but it was just meaning nothing, it was just vaguely to do with someone that had said something like he knew what it was like to be dead and then it was just a sound. And then I wanted a middle eight. The beginning had been around for days and days, and so I wrote the first thing that came into my head and it was “When I was a boy,” in a different beat, but it was real because it just happened”.
