How The Rolling Stones synced backwards guitar with live drums on 'We Love You' (1967)

The backwards guitar on “We Love You” wasn’t a studio accident — it was a deliberate trick. Keith Richards played a distorted riff, the tape was flipped end-to-end, and that reversed sound was then mixed forward over the original drums. The band essentially recorded the backwards part first, then played the live drums while listening to the reverse track through headphones, syncing their hits to the backward phrasing. The result is a psychedelic swirl where the guitar seems to un-play itself, but the drums stay locked in real time.

It helped that the drum part is fairly simple and repetitive — Charlie Watts locked into a steady pattern, and the reversed guitar mostly echoed his accents rather than fighting them. The engineer, Glyn Johns, later described it as “mucking about with tape machines” that somehow worked. The effect gave the song its woozy, disoriented feel, matching the “we love you” vibe of countercultural togetherness while technically being a clever tape-trick that predated what Hendrix and the Beatles were doing with reverse sounds that same year.