Within You Without You
"Within You Without You" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Written by lead guitarist George Harrison, it was his second composition in the Indian classical style, after "Love You To", and inspired by his stay in India in late 1966 with his mentor and sitar teacher Ravi Shankar. Recorded in London without the other Beatles, it features Indian instrumentation such as sitar, tambura, dilruba and tabla, and was performed by Harrison and members of the Asian Music Circle. The recording marked a significant departure from the Beatles' previous work; musically, it evokes the Indian devotional tradition, while the overtly spiritual quality of the lyrics reflects Harrison's absorption in Hindu philosophy and the teachings of the Vedas.
The song was Harrison's only composition on Sgt. Pepper, although his endorsement of Indian culture was further reflected in the inclusion of yogis such as Paramahansa Yogananda among the crowd depicted on the album's cover. With the worldwide success of the album, "Within You Without You" presented Indian classical music to a new audience in the West and contributed to the genre's peak in international popularity. It also influenced the philosophical direction of many of Harrison's peers during an era of utopian idealism marked by the Summer of Love. The song has traditionally received a varied response from music critics, some of whom find it lacklustre and pretentious, while others admire its musical authenticity and consider its message to be the most meaningful on Sgt. Pepper. Writing for Rolling Stone, David Fricke described the track as "at once beautiful and severe, a magnetic sermon about materialism and communal responsibility in the middle of a record devoted to gentle Technicolor anarchy".
For the Beatles' 2006 remix album Love, the song was mixed with the John Lennon-written "Tomorrow Never Knows", creating what some reviewers consider to be that project's most successful mashup. Sonic Youth, Rainer Ptacek, Oasis, Patti Smith, Cheap Trick and the Flaming Lips are among the artists who have covered "Within You Without You".
Background and inspiration
began writing "Within You Without You" in early 1967 while at the house of musician and artist Klaus Voormann, in the north London suburb of Hampstead. Harrison's immediate inspiration for the song came from a conversation they had shared over dinner about the metaphysical space that prevents individuals from recognising the natural forces uniting the world. Following this discussion, Harrison worked out the song's melody on a harmonium and came up with the opening line: "We were talking about the space between us all".The song was Harrison's second composition to be explicitly influenced by Indian classical music, after "Love You To", which featured Indian instruments such as sitar, tabla and tambura. Since recording the latter track for the Beatles' Revolver in April 1966, Harrison had continued to look outside his role as the band's lead guitarist, further immersing himself in studying the sitar, partly under the tutelage of master sitarist Ravi Shankar. Harrison said that the tune for "Within You Without You" came about through his regularly performing musical exercises known as sargam, which use the same scales as those found in Indian ragas.
"Within You Without You" is the first of Harrison's many songs to include Hindu spiritual concepts in his lyrics. Having incorporated elements of Eastern philosophy in "Love You To", Harrison became fascinated by ancient Hindu teachings after he and his wife, Pattie Boyd, visited Shankar in India in September–October 1966. Intent on mastering the sitar, Harrison first joined other students of Shankar's in Bombay, until local fans and the press learned of his arrival. Harrison, Boyd, Shankar and the latter's partner, Kamala Chakravarty, then relocated to a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. There, Harrison received personal tuition from Shankar while absorbing religious texts such as Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi and Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga. This period coincided with his introduction to meditation and, during their visit to Vrindavan, he witnessed communal chanting for the first time.
Harrison and Boyd returned to England on 22 October, and continued to adhere to a Hindu-aligned lifestyle of yoga, meditation and vegetarianism at their home in Esher. The education Harrison received in India, particularly regarding the illusory nature of the material world, resonated with his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, and informed his lyrics to "Within You Without You". Having considered leaving the Beatles after the completion of their third US tour, on 29 August 1966, he instead gained a philosophical perspective on the effects of the band's international fame. He later attributed "Within You Without You" to his having "fallen under the spell of the country" after experiencing the "pure essence of India" through Shankar's guidance.
Composition
Music
The song follows the pitches of Khamaj thaat, the Indian equivalent of Mixolydian mode. Written and performed in the tonic key of C, it features what musicologist Dominic Pedler terms an "exotic" melody over a constant C-G "root-fifth" drone, which is neither major nor minor in mode. Based on a piece that Shankar had written for All India Radio, the structure of the composition adheres to the Hindustani musical tradition and demonstrates Harrison's advances in the Indian classical genre since "Love You To".Following a brief alap, which serves to introduce the song's main musical themes, "Within You Without You" comprises three distinct sections: two verses and a chorus; an extended instrumental passage; and a final verse and chorus. The alap consists of tambura drone, over which the main melody is outlined on dilruba, a bow-played string instrument that Boyd began learning in India. Throughout the vocal section of the song – the gat, in traditional Indian terms – the rhythm is a 16-beat tintal in madhya laya. The vocal line is supported throughout by dilruba, in the manner of a sarangi echoing the melody in a khyal piece. The first three words of each verse have a tritone interval, which, in Pedler's view, enhances the spiritual dissonance that Harrison expresses in his lyrics.
Over the instrumental passage, the tabla rhythm switches to a 10-beat jhaptal cycle. A musical dialogue ensues in time, first between the dilruba and sitar, then between a Western string section and sitar. The interplay between these instruments follows the call-and-response tradition of Indian classical music, known as jawab-sawal. The passage resolves in melodic unison as the instruments together state a rhythmic cadence, or tihai, to close the middle segment. After this, the drone is again prominent as the rhythm returns to 16-beat tintal for the final verse and chorus. On the finished recording, the tonal and spiritual tension is relieved by the inclusion of muted canned laughter.
In his book Indian Music and the West, Gerry Farrell writes of "Within You Without You": "The overall effect is of several disparate strands of Indian music being woven together to create a new form. It is a quintessential fusion of pop and Indian music." Peter Lavezzoli, author of The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, describes the song as "a survey of Indian classical and semiclassical styles" in which "the diverse elements ... are skillfully woven together into an interesting hybrid. If anything, the closest comparison that might be made is to the Hindu devotional song form known as bhajan."
Lyrics
According to Religion News Service writer Steve Rabey, "Within You Without You" "contrast Western individualism with Eastern monism". The lyrics convey basic tenets of Vedanta philosophy, particularly in Harrison's reference to the concept of maya, in the lines "And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion / Never glimpse the truth". Author Joshua Greene paraphrases the song-wide message as: "A wall of illusion separates us from each other... which only turns our love for one another cold. Peace will come when we learn to see past the illusion of differences and come to know that we are one ..." The solution espoused by Harrison is for individuals to see beyond the self and each seek change within, further to Vivekananda's contention in Raja Yoga that "Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest that divinity ..." According to ethnomusicologist David Reck, aside from the reference to maya, the lyrics convey Indian philosophical concepts such as advait, satya and, in the line "With our love we could save the world", universal love.At times in the song, Harrison distances himself from those who live in ignorance of these apparent truths – saying, "If they only knew" and asking the listener, "Are you one of them?" In the final verse, he quotes from the gospels of St Matthew and St Mark, lamenting those who "gain the world and lose their soul". Author Ian MacDonald defends the "accusatory finger" behind such statements, saying that, within the ideology of the emerging 1960s counterculture, "this is a token of what was then felt to be a revolution in progress: an inner revolution against materialism".
The transcendental theme of Harrison's lyrics aligned with the philosophy behind the 1967 Summer of Love – namely, the search for universality and an ego-less existence. Author Ian Inglis considers the line "With our love we could save the world" to be a "cogent reflection" of the Summer of Love ethos, anticipating the utopian message of Harrison's composition "It's All Too Much" and the John Lennon-written "All You Need Is Love". Inglis adds, with reference to the chorus: "The lyrics are given greater depth by the double meaning of without – 'in the absence of' and 'outside' – each of which is perfectly applicable to the song's sentiments."