Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
"Heart Full of Soul" and "See My Friends" were both influential on the emerging trend, but according to author Jon Savage, "the first truly mass exposure" was through the Beatles' 1965 film "Help!", which included incidental music played by Indian session musicians. Writing in 1997, Bellman commented that the Yardbirds and Kinks recordings were often overlooked in discussions of raga rock's origins, as history instead highlighted the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". Issued in December 1965 on the band's "Rubber Soul" album, the folk-styled "Norwegian Wood" was the first Western pop song to incorporate the sitar, which was played by lead guitarist George Harrison, and the first to feature Indian instrumentation played by a rock musician. The song's popularity inspired a wave of interest in the sitar and Indian sounds, a phenomenon that Shankar later called "the great sitar explosion". According to authors Nicholas Schaffner and Bernard Gendron, raga rock was inaugurated by the release of "Norwegian Wood".