The Beatles are a case study in how to live a creative life. The Beatles Anthology provides insight into their way of thinking through their own words. They were curious, playful, open to new ideas and new experiences, always looking for something fresh to bring to their music, unwilling to go stale. Here I will relate two anecdotes that illustrate how a creative frame of mind recognizes an accident as a breakthrough.
Paul McCartney on the cover of Rubber Soul: "You know that cover where we look stretched? That was the kind of thing that would happen then. We were all very into that kinda random, little, exciting thing that would happen. The photographer was Bob Freeman and had taken some pictures round at John's house. . . . Back in London, he was in someone's flat and . . . he had a little carousel of slides and he had a piece of cardboard stuck up on a little chair that was album-cover-sized. He was projecting the photographs exactly onto it cause you could imagine exactly how it would look then as an album cover. We had just chosen the photo and said, that one looks good, when the card just fell backwards a little bit, and it elongated the photo and it stretched. We went 'Oh, can we have that! Can you do it like that?' And he said, 'Well, yeah, I can print it like that.' 'Yeah, that's it! Rubber Soul, hey, hey!'"
George Harrison on recording backwards: "John had a tape with the rough mix of the backing track to I'm Only Sleeping. By the time he got home, he didn't realize the tape was tails out. He put it on his tape machine and threaded the tail in forward and got it backwards. That's when he came in the next day and said oh, yeah, backwards! We made him turn the tape over and play it backwards. Then John and I, or Paul and I, played guitars, just random notes, and then we reversed the tape to see what we had. That was the first time we had a backwards solo."
A fortunate accident is called serendipity. Creative people see serendipity where others see a mistake.
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