George Harrison had set fire to an ashtray and was running around the studio with it above his head
In the summer of 1968, Paul McCartney was reading Melody Maker when he stopped on a quote from Pete Townshend.
“Pete said: ‘We’ve just made the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock’n’roll record you’ve ever heard,” McCartney recalled. “I never actually found out what track it was that The Who had made, but that got me going, just hearing him talk about it. I was always trying to write something different, trying to not write in character, and that one little paragraph was enough to make me make a move. I thought we should a do a song like that, something really wild, and I wrote Helter Skelter.”
McCartney was thinking about the fairground slides of his childhood, coupled with the sense of social unrest in the world that summer. “I was using the symbol of a helter skelter as a ride from the top to the bottom – the rise and fall of the Roman Empire – and this was the fall, the demise, the going down,” he said.
On July 18 The Beatles learned the song and recorded three extended takes at Abbey Road Studios. The first two were 10 and 12 minutes respectively, the third stretched to 27:11. A four-minute excerpt of the latter, released on Anthology 3, has the song being played at half speed, almost like a second cousin to Yer Blues. McCartney may have also been toying with an alternative title, as other bootlegs show him occasionally singing ‘Hell for leather’ instead of ‘Helter Skelter’.
Source: Bill DeMain/yahoo.com
