In 1968, the Beatles were at the absolute height of their creative output. The previous two years had seen the release of two artistic masterpieces, 1966’s Revolver and 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The former had cemented The Beatles’ transition from Pop group to experimental Rock pioneers, while the latter had taken that experimentation to its most bombastic, ambitious conclusion. Perhaps understanding that topping the monumentally ambitious, holistic brilliance of Sgt. Pepper’s to be impossible, the band in 1968 chose to pursue a stylistic 180. While no less heady and grandiose than Sgt. Pepper’s, the songs that would eventually come to form the 30-track, 90-minute self-titled album (now colloquially known as The White Album due to its plain white cover adorned only with the band’s name) would shatter apart the meticulous, deliberate feel of the previous record in favor of an open, more improvisational approach, one that was largely influenced by a trip to India in early 1968.

In February, the band traveled to traveled to Rishikesh, India to attend a Transcendental Meditation course taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, While in India, individual members of the band would work on various songs, 18 of which would eventually be present on The White Album. The time in India over the course of Rock history has come to be mythologized almost comically. The truth of the matter was that Ringo and his wife stayed only 10 days, Paul and Linda left after a month, and John and George stayed six weeks before leaving after having a vocal disagreement with the Maharishi. This isn’t to suggest that the trip wasn’t influential. George, in particular, would remain spiritually open for the rest of his life, notably becoming a follower of the Hare Kirshna traditions.

On May 30, 1968, sessions officially began at Abbey Road studios. Sessions for the album were wrought with tension, often being referred to as “fractious” or “undisciplined”. Members would often record in entirely separate studios with their own individual engineer, and that division of labor is clearly evident on the album; a song like “Blackbird” is all Paul and a song like “Yer Blues” is essentially all John, though their songs would continue to be credited as Lennon-McCartney. Only half of the album’s tracks feature all four members playing together. That lack of focus might seem like a recipe for disaster, but what’s remarkable about The White Album is how that scatter-shot approach ended up leading to some of the band’s finest moments.

Take, for instance, a song like Side Three highlight “Helter Skelter”, a song borne almost entirely out of frustration. McCartney had, for the better part of the Beatles’ career been known as the ballad-writer, and his songs were typically softer around the edges than those of Lennon’s or even Harrison’s. After reading an interview with The Who’s Pete Townsend, who claimed his band’s new single “I Can See For Miles” would be the loudest, most bombastic thing the band had yet recorded. Upon hearing the song itself, McCartney was underwhelmed, feeling he could write something even louder and rawer, pushing everything he and the band had done to its maximal level. The resulting sessions for “Helter Skelter” remain one of the most surreal tales in Beatles history. On July 18, the band recorded take after take of the song, including a version of the song that went on for nearly half an hour. According to sound engineer Chris Thomas, “While Paul was doing his vocal, George Harrison had set fire to an ashtray and was running around the studio with it above his head, doing an Arthur Brown.” On the completed track included on the Stereo Mix of the album, the song fades out in the midst of the band going full-out proto-Metal, then fades back in to continue the damage. The song finally comes crashing to a train-wreck halt, at which point Ringo, who had likely been drumming as hard as he could for hours at this point, screams in abandon, “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”

Another product of the tension within the band, though perhaps more subtle, was George Harrison’s Side One contribution, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. George had for months been dealing with the frustration of feeling his contributions to the bands repertoire were not taken seriously enough, and songs would supposedly be vetoed routinely by Lennon and McCartney. Harrison had been the member most affected by the trip to India, and his increasingly deep search for spirituality led him to the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese book of divination. Exploring the I-Ching, George remarked that his interest stemmed from “the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else… opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental.” Retreating to his parents’ home in Northern England, he decided he would write a song based on the first phrase he saw upon opening a random book. Those words were “gently weeps.” When the band recorded the song on July 25, they experimented with various arrangements. Harrison’s close friend Eric Clapton also attended the sessions, and George asked him to add a solo to the track. Clapton was originally hesitated but eventually agreed, and contributed what is now widely considered one of the greatest guitar solos in Rock history. Harrison would later remark that Clapton’s presence during the sessions affected the band far beyond simply the recording of the song, admitting “It made them all try a bit harder; they were all on their best behavior.”

In retrospect, the relative freedom that each member enjoyed in the studio helped bring out the best in each of their songs. “Dear Prudence” rings with Lennon’s secular humanism, while “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” fully embraces Paul’s love of cheesy romance. Lennon reportedly hated the song, calling it Paul’s “granny music shit.” But the sessions were such that tracks that would otherwise be swallowed up in the band’s editing process were left unscathed and included on the finished record. Even a song like the universally confounding “Revolution 9”, an eight-minute sound collage that befuddled audience and critic alike, was gleefully included. Whereas previous albums condensed the band’s various influences into the structure of Pop songs, The White Album separates these influences and gives them room to stand on their own, allowing a reggae number like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” to sit comfortably beside the discordant angst of “Green Onion” and the vaudevillian humor of “Wild Honey Pie” or the bat-shit crazy avant-garde “Revolution 9” to be followed by the stately, orchestral album closer “Good Night”, one of the gentlest songs the band ever recorded and Ringo Starr’s most inspired vocal performance. Where previous albums fit together neatly like a jigsaw puzzle, The White Album is the band giving fuck-all to any concept of structure, happily coloring outside the lines.

The lasting influence of The White Album isn’t even the songs themselves, but almost certainly the way in which is was conceived and executed. Whether it be The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street, The Clash’s Sandinista!, or Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, any time a Rock band would thereafter create a sprawling, ambitious, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of record, it would undoubtedly be referred to as “their White Album“. It’s a record that was a game-changer because it challenged the idea of editing down to a manageable, easily packaged whole. Many critics at the time argued that half of the material could have been jettisoned from The White Album to create a more consistent whole, but those who did entirely missed the point. Rock & Roll is a messy, chaotic endeavor, and no other record up to that point had showcased that as well as The White Album.