THE BEATLES
|
Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
|
1962–1970 |
Classic pop-rock |
I Am The Walrus (1967) |
Page
contents:
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: March 22, 1963 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) I Saw
Her Standing There; 2) Misery; 3) Anna (Go
To Him); 4) Chains; 5) Boys; 6) Ask Me Why;
7) Please Please Me; 8) Love Me Do; 9) P.S. I Love You; 10) Baby Itʼs
You; 11) Do You Want To Know A Secret; 12) A Taste Of Honey; 13) Thereʼs
A Place; 14) Twist And Shout. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
In short, there
is no need to prove to anyone that Please
Please Me represents the tender infancy of the Beatles. For most bands,
such «tender infancy» is, at best, giggly-cute, at worst, confusing and ugly,
but in both cases, normally, there is no good reason to listen to this music
for a second time other than research purposes. And yet Please Please Me still stands up — despite all the flaws, the
silliness, the rampant naïveness, and ʽAsk Me Whyʼ, which might
just be the worst Beatles original ever composed (and is definitely the worst original Beatles song composed by John
Lennon). It all begins
with "love, love me do / you know I love you". When the Ramones
wrote lyrics like that twelve years later, they were taken as smart, ironic,
streetwise minimalism. When the Beatles wrote them, they were sternly
serious, or, more accurately, they did not give a damn — the words never
mattered at the time, except for the stipulated convention that it had to be
something about «love». As an artistic statement, ʽLove Me Doʼ has even fewer credentials than a Sesame Street composition (the
latter ones have educational value at least). Big question, then: why does it
stick so sorely in the head, much more so than the average Dave Clark Five or
Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas song? Melodically, it has very little going
for it other than the main harmonica part, and the repetitive vocal melody
that partially replicates it. But there is
this little matter of the Beatle-specific hook: the resolution of that melody
during the extended "so plea-ee-ee-eeese..." bit — Iʼd bet my head on it that a hypothetical Billy J.
Kramer would have been able to come up with everything in this melody but that particular resolution, which
so admirably breaks up the monotonousness of the main part of the verse. In
other words, we start out «simple, stupid», then add a tense «longing» effect
with the "please", then bring it all to a natural conclusion with
an accappella moment of half-comic «spookiness». It might seem stupid, but
there is a touch of suspense, maybe even some primitive mystique, in the song
— which makes it stand out among dozens of technically similar compositions
of 1962, and explains its rapid chart success (No. 17 on the UK charts at
the time), achieved, by the way, without any serious marketing / promotional
campaign. There is no
such element of mystique in the follow-up single, ʽPlease Please Meʼ, which, instead, concentrates on overwhelming joy, conveying it with
as much effect as a standard four-piece band in 1963 could be capable of.
Lennonʼs harmonica is
triumphant rather than menacing this time, the joint vocal harmonies sound as
if George Martin was pushing them in a «Beethoven for teens» direction, and,
again, the Beatle-specific hook: the "come on come on..." crescendo
that nobody else could think of delivering at the time. The Dave Clark Five
would later shamelessly steal that technique for ʽAny Way You Want Itʼ — but even if they had enough talent to more or less convincingly
replicate the mood, they still did not come up with the better song. It is
interesting that, for all of the bandʼs Hamburg- and Cavern Club-acquired reputation as rough and tough
onstage performers of genuine rockʼnʼroll, Please
Please Me features only one genuine self-penned «rocker». I have always
thought that, perhaps, had the Beatles started their recording career one or
two years later, when mainstream fears towards «aggressive music» had already
slightly diminished, they may not have had to endure the reputation of
«softies» compared to the Stonesʼ tough guy
image; on the other hand, had they started out later, they would not be so
much in the lead — let alone the fact that there is no use in all these ifs
and buts. In any case —
the one rocker in question is a stupendous rocker. Paulʼs "one, two, three, FOUR!" countdown that
opens the song was specially glued on to the final master tape from another
take — a genius decision, giving the album an energetic blast-off start,
again, sounding like nothing before it. The idea behind the LP was to give
the audiences a slight approximation of a Beatles live show; clearly, this
was incompatible with George Martinʼs perennial quest for sonic perfection, but the few «live» elements
that they did incorporate still gave the record a huge advantage. To me, the
main hero of ʽI Saw Her
Standing Thereʼ, however, is
the other George: it is his lead
work, both in between the verse lines and on the solo, that gives the song
its genuine tough edge. The vocals, harmonies, lyrics may all be «teen fluff»
(although the "she was just seventeen" bit was slightly
risqué at the time), but Georgeʼs echo-laden licks, some of which seem to be imitating 1950s guitar
gods such as Scottie Moore, are the true grit of the song. The transition
into the instrumental section is one of the ass-kickingest moments in Beatle
history. As for the
other originals, I have always thought of ʽMiseryʼ as
tremendously underrated — not only does it have a fabulously catchy melody,
but there is something deeply disturbing as well about how the bitter-tragic
lyrics of the song clash with its overall merry mood: how is it possible to
sing lines like "without her I will be in misery" when the singer
is clearly having a hard time preventing himself from toppling over in
spasms of laughter? (The truly
disturbing realization about it is that the song might easily have reflected
Johnʼs genuine
feelings about his affairs). The rest is fluff indeed, ranging from passable
(ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ — Paul in his
songwriting infancy stage) to quite awkward (the already mentioned ʽAsk Me Whyʼ: the most fake song John
ever wrote, trying to convey an atmosphere of care and tenderness of which he
barely knew anything at the time — the whole song is a mess of poorly strung
together clichés that are really grating). ʽThereʼs A Placeʼ is frequently found in comparisons with the Beach
Boysʼ ʽIn My Roomʼ due to both of them exploring the topic of «loneliness» in the
lyrics, but if we dig from there, there is no question that the Brian Wilson
song is the better of the two — its slow, melancholic musical backing fully
matches the word, whereas the Lennon song is upbeat and optimistic (but not
devoid of subtlety: its harmonica blasts are notably sterner and sadder than
the ones on ʽPlease Please
Meʼ). Still, the
vocal harmonies are beyond reproach. Of the six
covers, Arthur Alexanderʼs ʽAnnaʼ is a fantastic
achievement — on the instrumental plane, the band extracts and amplifies its
main melodic hook in the form of a finely shaped, mysteriously resonating
guitar riff; and in the vocal department, John finds a good way to let go of
the self-restraining mannerisms of traditional black R&B and actually
convey a believable tragic atmosphere in the bridge section. Goffin and Kingʼs ʽChainsʼ is given to George, who does a fine job of
transposing his natural slight tongue-tiedness onto the songʼs message of love confusion; and the Shirellesʼ ʽBaby Itʼs Youʼ, like so many
other songs the Beatles did, simply converts the originalʼs excessive «roundedness» into sharper angles. One
might argue that at this particular juncture, John was actually a better
singer than songwriter: his sandpaperish approach to sentimental R&B
gives the material a sharper, more street-wise edge than any other white interpreter’s
at the time, with a unique combination of scream, roar, and nasal twang on
the high notes ("can’t help myself!...") that has an air of instant
believability to it. He would never get better as a singer than he already is
on this album — but he would never get worse, either, all the way up to his
dying day. It is useless
to speculate on whether Please Please
Me already sows the seeds of the grand successes to come. The Beatles
certainly do not come across as enthusiastic revolutionaries when you listen
to Paul telling us how he is coming home again to you love, or even when John
is screaming his head off throughout ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, trying to
beat the Isley Brothers at their own game (I think he did beat them — except, of course, the Isley Brothers probably
did not need to go home and nurse their voices with cough drops after the
recording session). But it also never really seems as if they just went into the studio to record
some songs, knock off an LP and be done with it. All of the little things I
have mentioned show ambition, and lots of it: a strong desire, right from the
start, to be the very best at what they are doing, otherwise there is no
point in doing it in the first place. And there is a clear understanding of
the long-playing record as the proper medium to do it — a realization that it
is a bit humiliating when your fourteen song-long collection consists of two
well-written hit singles surrounded by a sea of useless filler. Which is why Please Please Me, after all these
years, holds together quite fine as an album, unlike 99% of pop-oriented LPs
from 1963 (too bad for the Wilson brothers, who did not start properly
understanding the LPʼs potential
until All Summer Long). It is
slight, occasionally clumsy, lyrically trivial, not devoid of very strange
decisions (such as saddling Ringo with ʽBoysʼ, a tune that
was perfectly fine when the Shirelles did it, but predictably earned him a
gay image with certain audiences), yet it is unmistakably Beatles, and
everything that is unmistakably Beatles deserves an endorsement without any
need for meditation on the subject. And anyone who tries to slight it too much should just try to remember
the names of at least ten other pop LPs from 1963 without calling on the
Internet for help. Might be a chore even for some of those who had already
struck their teens back in the day. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: November 22, 1963 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
4 |
4 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) It Wonʼt
Be Long; 2) All Iʼve
Got To Do; 3) All My Loving; 4) Donʼt Bother Me; 5) Little
Child; 6) Till There Was You; 7) Please Mister Postman; 8) Roll Over
Beethoven; 9) Hold Me Tight; 10) You
Really Got A Hold On Me; 11) I Wanna Be Your Man; 12) Devil In Her Heart; 13)
Not A Second Time; 14) Money (Thatʼs
What I Want). |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
Reviews of the album often (almost
always, in fact) start with expressing admiration for the front sleeve. Ooh,
black and white! wow, standing in the shadows! dark! disturbing! what a far
cry from the silly smiling faces on Please
Please Me! progressive and intelligent! look at what Gerry and the
Pacemakers, or Freddie and The Dreamers were putting on their album covers at the time. No comparison whatsoever. Frankly,
I am not all that sure that the album cover (although it does look cool) is
really such a tremendous achievement. What is much more interesting is that With The Beatles manages to sound
fairly «dark» without any actual
help from the blackness of the album sleeve. Well, maybe not «dark» as such,
if by «darkness» we mean Jim Morrison or Black Sabbath — but I have always
felt that there was a very significant line separating With The Beatles from Please
Please Me, perhaps even one of the
most underrated lines in Beatle history (and Beatle history knew plenty of
those lines). It is the line that separates lightweight from heavyweight; and
it is no coincidence that it was only With
The Beatles that the first «serious» musical critics started suspecting
there might be something of use for them in that air. One thing that need not confuse us
are the lyrics. At this point, neither John nor Paul (nor George, who makes
his songwriting debut on here) showed any care for the words; the epitome of
«wordy cleverness» to them was finding a line like "it wonʼt be long ʼtil I belong to you" ("be-long — belong", get it?), and
the rest generally just rearranges all the love song clichés extracted
from wherever they happened to hear them first. (Thatʼs what you get for sticking to crude rockʼnʼroll values and
ignoring The Songbook — at least the Tin Pan Alley people knew their
Merriam-Webster). But it is not likely that, before Bob Dylan got the Fab
Four interested in the magic powers of language, either John or Paul invested
a lot of time and work into the words, or had any high thoughts of those
words. Later on, John would make it a personal hobby to look upon the Beatlesʼ legacy with a critical laser-eye, and demolish the
stupidity of the lyrics in particular (Paulʼs, preferably, but his own were not exempt from self-criticism
either). In 1963, however, none of them were teenagers any more, and they
must have understood how silly it all sounded to the average «grown-up»
person — yet, apparently, they did not give a damn about it. Nor should we. The lyrics merely
followed the conventions of the times, which certainly does not apply to the
music. Take ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ, for instance.
On the surface, it is just an upbeat tune about... well, find the quote in
the previous paragraph. But, for some reason, I have never thought of that
song as «happy». The main melody rather shows a clear Shadows influence, and
Shadows mostly wrote «shadowy» music — that British variant of surf-rock with
a spy movie atmosphere. Now there is no spy movie atmosphere in ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ, but its meat and bones are tough, and its colors
disturbingly grayish. And then there are the vocals. Any
other vocalist would probably sing the lines "since you left me, Iʼm so alone, now youʼre coming, youʼre coming on
home" with all the proper tenderness and sympathy that they require. Not
John, who never in his life stooped to simulating emotions on his songs. But
instead of just being all out wooden about it, he sings it... probably in the
same way he would be greeting his wife Cynthia after a hard dayʼs night: pretending to care, but in reality not
giving much of a damn. As a result, both ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ and the immediate followup, ʽAll Iʼve Got To Doʼ, have a surprisingly emotionally hollow sound — but
they still work. (A good way to sense this would be to play ʽAll Iʼve Got To Doʼ back-to-back with any of those Yoko-period Lennon
ballads on which he really cared, like ʽJuliaʼ). So genuine sugary sentimentality
is left in the care of Paul, right? Not quite. It certainly rears its head on
the recordʼs only
old-fashioned sappy number, a cover of ʽTill There Was Youʼ from The Music Man, but nowhere else. Even
there, the sentimentality is tempered with class: Paul learned the tune from
Peggy Lee, who already performed it in a poppier, more rhythmic, slightly
Latinized arrangement when compared to the orchestral sludge of the original
— and still the Beatles almost completely reinvented the music, coming up
with a complex melody played on twin nylon-stringed acoustic guitars (and
featuring one of Georgeʼs first
brilliant solos). But a song like ʽAll My Lovingʼ is anything but
sentimental; or, rather, sentimentality is merely one of its side effects
rather than the main attraction. It started out as a country-western tune,
actually (traces of that history can still be found in Georgeʼs Nashville-style solo), but ended up becoming a
fast pop-rocker; and any lesser band would have simply settled for placing
the emphasis on the catchy vocal melody, but what really pushes ʽAll My Lovingʼ over the threshold is the rhythm guitar work from John: the rapidly
strummed triplets that drive the verses are technically unnecessary, but,
being there, they give the illusion that the song is played thrice as fast as
it would be otherwise, and shift the focus away from Paulʼs vocalization, closer to what almost looks like a
bit of subconscious paranoia. Finally, in comes George with his
first original offering, and while ʽDonʼt Bother Meʼ is simply a preliminary stage in his songwriting
maturation, it is decidedly dark,
not to mention how much the title really reflects Georgeʼs persona: "please go away, leave me alone, donʼt bother me", I believe, should have eventually
been etched on his tombstone. A big hooray to whoever had the idea to
double-track the vocals: the trick magically transformed the stuttering,
insecure delivery on ʽChainsʼ and ʽDo You Want To
Know A Secretʼ into a thick,
threatening rumble-grumble. Careful: one step further in that direction, and
no more teen pussy for George! (Or, rather, he would have to start borrowing
from the special Mick Jagger/Keith Richards brand). Part of why With The Beatles has this darker aura around it lies in it being
almost totally dominated by John, which was not the case on Please Please Me: he is the main
composer and/or «spiritual presence» on more than half of the songs, whereas
Paul bears primary responsibility for only three of the tracks — the third
one, still unmentioned, is ʽHold Me Tightʼ which I have always perceived as one of his weakest
ever tunes, if only because the vocal melody resolution (the "itʼs you — you, you,
you-ooo-ooo" bit) comes across as excessively silly. John, on the other hand, further
extends his reputation by throwing in three excellent interpretations of
Motown material, turning the Marvelettesʼ cutesy-flimsy ʽPlease Mister
Postmanʼ into a
rip-roaring personal tragedy, the Miraclesʼ soulful ʽYou Really Got
A Hold On Meʼ into the same
tongue-in-cheek, slightly sarcastic stab as ʽIt Wonʼt Be Longʼ, and delivering Barrett Strongʼs ʽMoneyʼ with enough evil glee to make us all believe that
that is what he wants indeed — not that hard to do once he has already
established his lack of a proper tender heart on the previous tracks. Real
nasty guy, Mr. Lennon, without any attempts to mask it. From a sheerly musical point of
view, it would take too much time to list all the new tricks that the band
introduces here (besides, it has all been written about a million times
already), so I will just mention one obvious thing — the complexity and
creativity of vocal harmonies on With
The Beatles completely dwarfs Please
Please Me. That this is going to be a seriously voice-oriented record is
obvious from the very start: in the place of the energetic, but not
particularly surprising "one two three four" of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ we have the multi-flanked assault of "it wonʼt be long yeah – YEAH – yeah – YEAH" which, to the best of my knowledge,
comes from nowhere at all. There is no «beauty» as such in these harmonies that get ever more trickier as the album
progresses (no comparison with The Beach Boys, who had a strictly
Heaven-oriented approach), but there is a wonderful dynamics, warranting your
undivided attention. In effect, With The Beatles might be said to introduce the unspoken motto of
«leave no spot unfilled». Not only is there supposed to be no filler, the
idea is that there should be no «filler within non-filler», that is, the
songs are not supposed to have any wasted moments. Gaps between verse lines?
Fill them in with counterpoint backing vocals. Instrumental passages? Make
them either reproduce the verse melody or construct an economic solo that
makes perfect sense and is easily memorable, rather than merely respects the
convention that there be an obligatory instrumental passage. And so on. Admittedly, it does not always
work. The curse of pop repetitiveness strikes hard on the overlong chorus to ʽHold Me Tightʼ, and even harder on ʽI Wanna Be Your
Manʼ, a song that
John and Paul originally wrote for the Rolling Stones, and, honestly, I think
they should have left it at that: the Stones arranged and performed it as an
eerie sexual menace, with a supertight, take-no-prisoners attitude, next to
which the Beatlesʼ comparatively
«relaxed» performance and, especially, Ringoʼs near-comical vocals (as opposed to Jaggerʼs evil predator gloating) lose hands down. (It did
give Ringo a more assured and natural live solo spot than ʽBoysʼ, though).
Personally, I have never been a big fan of Johnʼs ʽLittle Childʼ, either, a somewhat sub-par R&B composition,
only lifted out of mediocrity by an over-pumped tour-de-force on harmonica,
which John must have been trying to literally «blow to bits» during the
session — even Sonny Boy Williamson II could have appreciated that. But none of this really matters,
because the major goal of With The
Beatles was to stabilize the bandʼs position as accomplished artists, and that goal is clearly
fulfilled. In addition, the record just might feature the best ever balance
in Beatle history between covers and originals: the covers, although ranging
from Motown to Chuck Berry to musicals, are all strong, inventively rearranged,
and sit fairly well next to the originals. (On Beatles For Sale, the band would be falling back on covers for
lack of free time to come up with more originals rather than out of free
will, and that had its negative effect on the final results). With The Beatles often gets a little
bit overlooked next to the great big breakthrough of A Hard Dayʼs
Night and its all-original cast, but in the story of the Beatlesʼ evolution it may actually have played an even more
important role. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: July 10, 1964 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
5 |
5 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks: 1) A Hard Dayʼs
Night; 2) I Should Have Known Better; 3) If I Fell; 4) Iʼm
Happy Just To Dance With You; 5) And I Love Her; 6) Tell Me Why; 7) Canʼt
Buy Me Love; 8) Any Time At All; 9) Iʼll Cry Instead; 10) Things We Said Today; 11) When I Get Home; 12) You
Canʼt
Do That; 13) Iʼll
Be Back. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
It is true that, in the UK at
least, A Hard Dayʼs Night sort of turned the whole idea of a movie soundtrack
on its head. In the US, which the Beatles had only just finished conquering
in early ʼ64 with the
success of ʽI Want To Hold
Your Handʼ, it was
released as a proper soundtrack — seven songs on
Side A and a bunch of movie-related instrumental versions of Side B
(including, among others, a very stylish Duane Eddy-style reworking of ʽThis Boyʼ as ʽRingoʼs Themeʼ — this is the track played in the movie when Ringo
takes his solitary stroll upon «leaving» the band). But at home, the second
side was completely unrelated to the first: six more songs, all of them
originals, that had nothing to do with the movie. Yet formally the album
remained a «soundtrack», perhaps intentionally and subtly provoking the
casual fan into thinking that, from now on, every recording even a collection
of toothpaste commercials with the Beatlesʼ name on it might still be worth buying for some great pop music. As for artistic growth, the true
strength of A Hard Dayʼs Night lies in the small details rather than in any
conceptual framing. At this point, experimentation was not yet an integral
part of the bandʼs career: as
much as they did try out new ideas and approaches, it did not seem as if
anybody was too obsessed about «pushing the limits» at the time. John and
Paul were bursting with melodies, not innovative concepts, and the only
global thing that A Hard Dayʼs Night proved to us was that Lennon and McCartney no
longer really needed all those covers from other people — in other words,
their self-confidence as songwriters had reached peak levels. For one thing, up until that
moment, the Beatles had a hard time coming up with original gritty rockers:
other than ʽI Saw Her
Standing Thereʼ and, to a
lesser extent, ʽShe Loves Youʼ (really more of a «loud pop song» than a genuine
«rocker»), they preferred to rock out on their cover versions (ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, ʽRoll Over
Beethovenʼ, ʽMoneyʼ etc.). Now,
with ʽCanʼt Buy Me Loveʼ they showed the world that they could just as easily craft a fast,
kick-ass pop-rocker along with the best of them; and on the other end of the
spectrum — with ʽYou Canʼt Do Thatʼ, that they could
leisurely rock out in a mean and nasty manner, holding their own on the same
field with contemporary R&B heroes and blues-rockers (I suspect that ʽYou Canʼt Do Thatʼ was John intentionally pulling a Mick, or at least
intentionally trying to be mean and lean in order to scrub away some of that
good-boy reputation and finally start playing on the ultra-cool side of the
scruffy rhythm-and-blues people — it did not really help, but at least he got
it out in the open). At the opposite end of the pop
scale, ʽAnd I Love Herʼ establishes Paul as the epitome of an independent,
fully self-confident lyrical balladeer for his generation — placed at
approximately the same strategic juncture on the LP as ʽTill There Was Youʼ was on the previous album, and showing that the band no longer
requires the services of Meredith Willson to feed its fans with wonderful
roses and sweet, fragrant meadows. Granted, we have not yet entered the Age
of Seriousness, and Paul still cannot write a decent non-clichéd lyric
to save his life, but here, the clichés work as a sort of minimalistic
device: there is a solid charm in "I give her all my love / Thatʼs all I do / And if you saw my love / Youʼd love her too" which sits perfectly at home
with the equally minimalistic four-note acoustic «Spanish» riff driving the
song. And to conclude with a bit of self-confident teasing, at the end of the
song that minimalistic riff is forcefully rammed home with four more
definitive bars («yes, this song is simple and naive, but you will never
forget this coda anyway»). That said, at this time John still
represents the dominant presence in the band. To be sure, most songs were
still written collectively, yet Paulʼs stamp is strongly felt only on ʽAnd I Love Herʼ, ʽCanʼt Buy Me Loveʼ, and ʽThings We Said
Todayʼ — an almost pitiable
three out of thirteen! (This might actually explain some of the extra-ordinary
old school fan worship towards the album, although now that in the era of
«poptimism» Paul has largely replaced John in terms of significance in the
public eye, the explanation no longer holds water). And by this time, Johnʼs songwriting had reached a level of perfection
from which it would never fall back again (except for those short periods
when he would be derailed by avantgarde temptations or politics). Of course, not all of his songs
here are equally deserving. On Side B, the rather unfortunate ʽWhen I Get Homeʼ frequently gets the flack for being cruder and less coherent in its
melody than the rest (although the chief culprit is usually the lyrics:
word-wise, it is like the little imbecile brother of ʽA Hard Dayʼs Nightʼ — in my case,
for some reason, the line "Iʼm gonna love
you till the cows come home" and especially
its almost solemn, triumphant vocal delivery have always been a particular
irritant). To throw in another nitpick, ʽIʼll Cry Insteadʼ suffers notably from the lack of a guitar solo: it
is quite a respectable little pseudo-rockabilly number as such, but way too
repetitive as a result. Most importantly, these two tunes just do not look particularly
imposing against the background of everything else. But although John is
overrepresented on the album and Paul is underrepresented, now that I think
of it, the starkest contrast on the record is between the best songs of each
one of them — and that contrast, funny enough, is just the opposite of the
publicʼs general
opinion on their artistic and personal natures, since it is John who is
primarily responsible for the brightest song on the album and Paul who is
behind the creation of the darkest one. Coincidence, or one of those
«stereotypes suck» kind of moments?.. The brightest song is, of course, ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ. Its glorified anthemic nature feels utterly
artificial against John’s personality as we know it (even as we see it in the
movie in which he sings it), and yet it is probably the most successful
attempt they ever made at capturing the mood of «first love feeling», swaying
innocent teenagers all over the world. Three ingredients combine to make it
into this kind of mind-blower: Johnʼs massive harmonica runs, triumphantly overwhelming all the other
instruments for miles around; Georgeʼs brilliantly minimalistic solo which, once again, makes the right
choice in mimicking Johnʼs already
perfect vocal melody rather than trying to invent something different; and
the singing, of course — all the prolonged notes that bookmark the verses
from both ends, all the "whoah-whoahs", all the sexy
"oh-oh"s and dips into falsetto in the bridge section, so many
individual snares within so short a track, and not a single ounce of croony sentimentality
in sight. Anybody who is incapable of reflecting and radiating pure joy at
the sound of this song is probably in very deep psychological trouble. The darkest song is, of course, ʽThings We Said Todayʼ. The lyrics are actually stronger here than on ʽAnd I Love Youʼ, but whether they really fit the doom and gloom of the tune is
questionable. There is a little bit of irony in the words, but, overall, the
theme of separation is much better indicated by the music: although the
tempo is relatively fast and the rhythm is quite toe-tap-provoking, the minor
mode of the song provokes an entirely different reaction. And as the whole
thing eventually fades away on the same melody that opened it, it becomes the first in a relatively short line
of «wholesale tragic» Beatle songs. Actually, I would say that in
general, there is a certain drift in A
Hard Dayʼs
Night from Side A to Side B: the movie-related songs are, perhaps
predictably, lighter, brighter, and fluffier, whereas as we get to the
second side, the mood becomes darker and denser. John allows himself to be a
nasty jealous guy on ʽYou Canʼt Do Thatʼ, Paul goes all
melancholic on ʽThings You Said
Todayʼ, and even the
opening drum crack on ʽAnytime At Allʼ would probably seem a bit out of place, had they
wanted to put that song in the movie as well. Then it all ends with ʽIʼll Be Backʼ, a song that vies with ʽThingsʼ for the title
of «saddest» — only barely losing out
because the vocals do not quite manage to outshine the ominous tingle of
"you say you will love me...". Itʼs just these little things, really, that elevate A Hard Dayʼs Night above the general «good pop album» status. It may
be all about trivial sentiments dressed in simple musical forms, but never in
simple musical clichés. The slamming chord that opens the title track;
the falsetto peaks on ʽI Should Have
Known Betterʼ; the deletion
of the verse/chorus opposition on ʽIf I Fellʼ; and so on and on and on, from the bright lights of
Side A to the relative darkness of Side B. There is nothing genuinely
«revolutionary» about the album, because the songwriting and the artistic
personae of John and Paul had already become fully formed on With The Beatles. There is simply a
sense of a sort of completeness: it is the ultimate «light-pop» experience of
its epoch, and an experience that could not even theoretically be reproduced
once pop-rock had gotten out of its infancy stage. It is, at the same time,
utterly naïve / formulaic and
hunting for genius musical decisions. Genius musical decisions would, of
course, be quite plentiful in years to come, but the virginity would be lost
forever. Look at all the «twee-pop» bands of today — many of them are quite
fine, but nobody in their right mind strives to close up that hymen, understanding
well enough that it is impossible. As of the 2010s, naïveness and
innocence in attitude is reserved for the likes of Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran
— mainstream puppets that are almost always the laughing stock of «advanced»
music listeners. The miracle of A Hard
Dayʼs Night is in that,
even today, «advanced» music listeners may easily listen to it without
laughing it off, and cherish it as one of the greatest pure pop albums ever
made. P.S. A few words about the movie
are probably in order as well. Time has been a little less kind to the movie
than the accompanying album, I think. In 1964, it was seen as an even more
colossal breakthrough: Richard Lester showed the world that a «pop artist
movie» could actually be seen as an individual work of art, not just a dumb vehicle
for the current teen idol to show off his charisma. That alone was a
staggering discovery, rendering insignificant the fact that most of the
Beatles could barely act (fortunately, Lester had the good sense not to ask
them to act, so most of the time they were just being themselves — good news
for John, worse for the rest of them), or that most of the jokes, puns, and
gags, now that you look at them with a fresh eye, arenʼt really all that
funny. (One exception is the cut-in scene between George and the advertising
executive — some truly wicked dialog out there, as relevant for us today as
it was fifty years ago, if not more so). Nevertheless, even if the movie is
not as hot on its own as it is sometimes proclaimed to be, it is still one of
the most fascinating — and, in a way, «authentic» — documents of its era. For
best effect, watch it on a double bill with Viva Las Vegas and savor the difference. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Dec. 4, 1964 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
4 |
5 |
2 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks:
1) No Reply; 2) Iʼm A Loser; 3) Babyʼs In Black; 4) Rock
And Roll Music; 5) Iʼll Follow The Sun; 6) Mr.
Moonlight; 7) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey; 8) Eight Days A Week; 9)
Words Of Love; 10) Honey Donʼt; 11) Every Little Thing; 12) I Donʼt
Want To Spoil The Party; 13) What Youʼre Doing; 14)
Everybodyʼs
Trying To Be My Baby. |
||||||||
|
REVIEW
|
||||||||
|
Critical tradition may be square
and boring for us iconoclasts, but, admittedly, it does not arise out of
nothing at all (other than coordinated whimsy of shady individuals, as
certain conspiracy theories would have us believe). It is certainly well
documented that the boys were getting tired, particularly of having too many
other people make the decisions for them, and it does seem to be true that, with
their constant international touring (recording sessions took place in
between the band’s major US and UK tours in the fall of ’64), they simply did
not have the time to come up with enough original material to fill a complete
LP. It is unquestionably true that, on the whole, the sound of Beatles For Sale is less happy than
that of Hard Dayʼs Night — the album does, after all, begin with three
«downers» in a row, and John is no longer contributing even a single teenage
ode to joy à la ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ. Speaking of the covers, after decades
of listening I still stand by the opinion that ʽMr. Moonlightʼ is one of the
unluckiest choices in covers that the band ever made. The Dr. Feelgood version,
which they copied with unusually little imagination, had it registered as a
soul ballad with an almost crooning atmosphere, barely compatible with Johnʼs usual singing voice; where his frenzied and
desperate screaming worked so well on something like ʽAnnaʼ, since the song
had a tragic heart from the very beginning, it feels rather wasted on the
bridge sections of this particular tune. The only clever touch was to
replace the original rudimentary guitar solo with an eerie Hammond organ
passage, which gives the recording a proto-psychedelic vibe; but certainly no
Beatles song in which the instrumental, rather than vocal, part is the best part
of the song could really count as successful. However, apart from that minor
misstep, Beatles For Sale is
anything but a «step backwards» in
the ongoing story of the Beatlesʼ artistic
development. Any detailed song-by-song analysis, such as performed by Alan
Pollack, for instance, would immediately reveal just how many new
itty-bitty-beatly «trifles» make their first appearance here: whenever the
guys were locked in the studio with George the Fifth at the helm, be they
exhausted or well-rested, they were never content, like so many of their
peers, to simply repeat the same old formula. «Beatle-quality» had to mean
«creative», even if, for the time being, this meant being «creative» on an
old piece of Carl Perkins boogie. So, just a few things off the top
of my head. Buddy Holly wrote ʽWords Of Loveʼ in 1957, and he must have been so proud to have
come up with that melody that he did not bother properly polishing it with all
the studio care it required (admittedly, in 1957 the studio itself may not
have been ready for this, both from the technological and the sociological
points of view). Play the original and the cover back to back, and the first
thing you notice is how much juicier the main guitar line is sounding. Where Buddy
is satisfied with just occasionally letting out that high-pitched piercing
tone, George uses it on every note, getting a warm, jangly effect — tender
and cordial, yet still without a trace of cheap sentimentality. With John out
there behind him, partially doubling his work on a second, barely audible
guitar, the effect is otherworldly, and even if the solo break, faithfully
following Hollyʼs original, is
no more than two different phrases played over and over again, I would not
mind an infinite loop. Yes, Buddy wrote the song, but the Beatles completed
it, bringing the song to such perfection that I could not imagine anybody
ever doing an even better job on it. (Here’s Jeff Lynne’s tribute
version for you, for comparison — big-ass whooping drums with Jeff, as
always, and guitars which honestly sound like sanitized compressed trash next
to George and John’s succulent tones). Laying on echo effects was one of
the bandʼs favorite
tricks ever since With The Beatles
at least, but they took it one step further when they applied them to ʽRock And Roll Musicʼ and ʽEverybodyʼs Trying To Be My Babyʼ, giving those old rockʼnʼroll chestnuts a proto-arena-rock feel instead of
the more subdued, chamber-like feel of the originals. As a result, the effect
of ʽRock And Roll
Musicʼ has completely
shifted: Chuck did this song just like he did all the rest — with his
friendly (and just a tad creepy) smile, inviting all the young ladies and
gentlemen out there to try out this brand new hot dance like they would try
out a new brand of ice cream. This
rendition notably demands that you yell your head off, instead of dancing
your legs off: because of the echo effects, Johnʼs all-out-there screamfest, and Paulʼs somber bass, it is far more aggressive and
anthemic than Chuck ever intended it to be. Ditto with Carl Perkins, when
they start laying that thick reverb on Harrisonʼs vocals (on the other hand, this approach did not seem to work so
well with ʽHoney Donʼtʼ, so they just
ended up giving it to Ringo, driving up the comedy effect instead); and note
also how all of George Harrison’s solos go at least one octave higher than
Carl’s in the original version, raising the bar on tension and recklessness. Now, about the originals. First,
we are all taught by biographers that it is here, and nowhere else, where
John started to fall under the Dylan spell and take a healthier attitude
towards the lyrics — hence, ʽIʼm A Loserʼ, a somewhat
tentative, but determined, first attempt to climb out of the mire of teen-pop
clichés. The famous "although I laugh and I act like a clown /
beneath this mask I am fearing a frown" would hardly count as a significant
lyrical breakthrough today, but for the Beatles in 1964, it was a milestone.
It is debatable if we can really point to ʽIʼm A Loserʼ as the true beginning of Johnʼs «no bullshit allowed» phase, where everything had
to be either strictly tongue-in-cheek or strictly heart-on-the-sleeve, but,
in any case, there is increased «character complexity» here, and that be
good: deep psychologism is not gained overnight, after all. Also, behind all
that lyrical debate what often gets lost is that melodically, ‘I’m A Loser’
is a big step on the road toward folk-rock and country-rock as their own
genres: those little licks George throws in between each of John’s lines
predict both the Byrds and the
Beatles’ own subsequent mastery of the style on Rubber Soul. (‘I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party’ is another good
example of the same style, though the song itself is less often remembered
than ‘I’m A Loser’). Second, McCartney is quickly
learning how to put genius and corn in the same package, coming up with his
first genuinely great softie. Curiously, ʽIʼll Follow The
Sunʼ is usually
said to have been written around 1960, which might explain the man dragging
it out of the storeroom for lack of time to write something new; but maybe it
is a good thing that it was given four years of fermentation. Now it sounds a
bit Searchers-style, what with the folksy melody and the harmonic layering
and all, but more homely and sincere, due to the production and the clever
alternation between group singing and Paulʼs solo lines. Just a year and a half separate this from the
thematically similar ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ, but that song screamed NAÏVE all over the place, and this one spells WISENED — big reason why Paul still performs ʽIʼll Follow The
Sunʼ in concert, on
occasion, but hardly ever the other one (not that anyone would mind). Third, shortly after discovering
feedback on the single ʽI Feel Fineʼ, they also discover the potential of the fade-in — on ʽEight Days A
Weekʼ. Much of the
bandʼs
experimentation was done randomly, «just for fun» etc., but one big
difference of the Beatlesʼ approach to
experimentation is that they rarely kept
their experimental results if they werenʼt sure that they had come out somewhat meaningful and were appropriate
for the song in question. So, before we go «a fade-in on ʽEight Days A Weekʼ? big deal! who the heck cares?», let us listen to the fade-in and,
perhaps, understand that it works here as the teen-pop equivalent of a
crescendo, which the band had no special means of producing at that time
(they would need an orchestra at least). ʽEight Days A Weekʼ is another one
of those ode-to-joy songs, cruder and simpler than ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ, and never one of my favorites in that genre (for
one thing, too repetitive — a solo break couldnʼt have hurt, and the "hold me, love me, hold me, love me"
refrain also seems too roughly hewn), but the fade-in suits it perfectly —
it is really the opening ten seconds of the song, from the first faraway
notes to the breakout of "ooh I need your love babe..." that clinch
it for me. Fourth, the Beatles discover the
value of... silence. While the more famous songs of Side B have always been ʽEight Days A Weekʼ and ʽEvery Little
Thingʼ, I have always
held a soft spot for ʽWhat Youʼre Doingʼ, because of
the important role with which they entrusted Ringo — hold the melody for the first few bars on his little old drummerʼs own, before introducing the looped electric riff
(very similar in texture, by the way, to the one that would soon make the
Byrds famous with ʽMr. Tambourine
Manʼ). Then, once
the song is done, they repeat the same trick once again before fading out —
as if saying, «hey, it was quite cool in the beginning, surely you want us to
do it one more time? heavier on the bass this time, right?»... and it works. Fifth, ‘No Reply’. You know what
is probably the single most gripping thing about ‘No Reply’? The odd beat.
The song is formally in 4/4, but only the bridge, actually, is in standard 4/4; on the main part of the
song, Ringo plays something trickier, shifting the location of the strong
beat from bar to bar, which is probably why Chris Hillman of the Byrds
described the song as «funky». That might have been the reason the Beatles
never played the song live — the tricky pattern might have been too much for
Ringo to keep up properly during actual show time. Listen to the early demo
bits on Anthology 1 and see how
much less interesting the song is at the beginning of its life journey;
listen to the completed version and hear just how much the stuttering
confusion of its rhythm agrees with the perturbed state of mind of its
protagonist. Had the song been written by the likes of, say, the Dave Clark
Five, they would never have taken the time to embellish it in this particular
manner, and it would have forever remained just a normal, average,
run-of-the-mill pop song from 1964. In the end, itʼs just all those little things that make Beatles For Sale as essential a
Beatles album in your catalog as everything that surrounds it. It takes its
cue from the second half of Hard Dayʼs Night, not the first one, and overcomes it in terms of
diversity, jangliness, and, in a way, «darkness». Artistically, it is still
dominated by John, which is a good thing, because Paul as dominant
personality would only be acceptable once the band had fully embraced its
wild-experimental-frenzy phase (otherwise, they might have drowned in excess
sentimentality); but overall, it is still very much a group effort, and,
ultimately, another success, if not necessarily another «triumph». Skipping
the album in your exploration of the Beatlesʼ legacy is possible, but only if you are really seriously pressed for time. |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Album
released: Aug. 6, 1965 |
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
More info:
|
||
|
3 |
4 |
5 |
3 |
4 |
||||
|
Tracks:
1) Help!; 2) The
Night Before; 3) You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away; 4) I Need You; 5) Another
Girl; 6) You’re Going To Lose That Girl; 7) Ticket To Ride; 8) Act Naturally;
9) It’s Only Love; 10) You Like Me Too Much; 11) Tell Me What You See; 12) I’ve
Just Seen A Face; 13) Yesterday; 14) Dizzy Miss Lizzy. |
||||||||
|
Although the overall critical
reputation of Help! traditionally
holds it in more esteem than Beatles
For Sale — no doubt, due to the presence of such titanic breakthroughs as
the title track and ‘Yesterday’ — I do believe that if we place it in its
proper context, it may safely be concluded that it is here, really, that the band allowed themselves a bit of a
creative sag. In fact, relatively little was heard of The Beatles throughout
the first half of 1965, as they’d spent a large chunk of that period
«undercover», shooting for their second movie in various locations around the
world and taking a rather extended break from touring; their only new record
releases from January to June were the «teaser» singles — ‘Ticket To Ride’
and ‘Help!’ itself — which certainly whetted public appetite but could hardly
satisfy the hunger for another Beatles LP. Meanwhile, this (somewhat
illusive) «procrastination» was giving other artists plenty of time to catch
up. Thus, the Stones came up with ‘The
Last Time’ and ‘Satisfaction’, finally proving their worth as original
songwriters and creators of a whole new type of rock’n’roll sound; the Kinks
pumped out single after single in a continuous journey of putting the
«British» back into the British Invasion; The Beach Boys Today! tremendously raised the stakes in the
pop-rock business on the other side of the Atlantic; The Byrds were pressing
from behind the lines with their ability to fuse folk and rock into a single
whole; and, of course, Bob Dylan himself was going electric. Things were
really happening — and this time around, the Fab Four would find themselves
surrounded with mighty impressive competitors, both on the UK and the US
scenes. Suddenly, the idea of «progress» — the understanding that the popular
music field was the perfect space for honing one’s creativity and using it to
transform the world — was up in the air in a way it hadn’t been since at
least the Jazz Revolution; and having helped, to a far greater extent that
they may have realized themselves, to open those floodgates, The Beatles were
now founding themselves challenged to defend their royalty status against the
rising tide. |
||||||||
|
In all fairness, Help! — the movie — was hardly a great
defensive move in this situation. Where Richard Lesterʼs first experience with the boys bordered on the
biographical and, at least in some places, read like a smart jab on the relation
crisis between the older and younger generations, Help!, with its absurdist and lightly parodic plot, was clearly
just a comic excuse for a bunch of Beatle-acted gags and a handful of
Beatle-mimed songs. For sure, quality-wise it was still miles ahead of the
average contemporary Elvis movie, but only because the gags were seriously funnier
and the songs, written by the Beatles themselves rather than commissioned
from a bunch of disinterested (and probably underpaid) court songwriters,
were incomparable. In retrospect, this helps a lot: amusingly, every time I
rewatch it, Hard Dayʼs Night seems to shrink a little bit in stature, while Help!, on the other hand, seems to
grow — not because it is the better movie of the two, but simply because A Hard Day’s Night, with its
sociological pretense, has far more potential to be overrated from the start,
while Help!, with its
«look-at-me-I’m-so-unabashedly-shallow» lack of ambition, may be too much of
an initial disappointment for the viewer to notice the finer qualities of its
humor. ("He’s out to rule the
world!... if he can get a government grant.") But even if time helps correct a
bit of balance, there is still hardly any doubt that of the two «proper»
Beatle movies, A Hard Day’s Night
is bound to forever hold the status of critical darling — and it doesn’t help
matters, either, that PC pundits these days would be more than happy to
bounce upon Help!’s dated racial
stereotypes ("look what you have
done with your filthy Eastern ways!") and casting choices (e.g. Jewish
actress Eleanor Bron playing an Indian woman). More importantly, The Beatles
themselves simply have much less agency in their second movie: for one of the
very few times in their entire career, they look here as if they’re playing
second fiddle to the system. (In fact, the movie actually works better if you
decide to view it as a subtle metaphor
of the system itself — the fanatical Indian cult striving to get Ringo
sacrificed to their gods should be seen as the record industry trying to
subjugate the band’s independence and bend them to their will... and, of
course, you can never hide from the sharks of capitalism, who’ll get you both
in the Alps and in the Bahamas). I
wouldn’t be surprised to learn that quite a few people may have temporarily
lost faith in the Fab Four upon returning from the movie theater on a late
summer night in 1965, feeling that a certain barrier that separated them from
the laughable movie career of Elvis had just been pushed to the side. The good news was that, unlike in
Elvis movies, the soundtrack of Help!
continued to be completely and utterly unrelated to the movie itself, with
none of the songs specifically written for or adapted to the purposes of its
plot and atmosphere; like A Hard Day’s
Night, the resulting album — at least, in its proper UK form, not the US
release that intersperses the movie songs with Ken Thorne-arranged
instrumentals — could not even be suspected of being a «soundtrack» if heard
outside of the proper information context. Nor could it be accused of not
containing plenty of «tactical», if not necessarily «strategic»,
breakthroughs. But on the whole, it wasn’t jaw-droppingly amazing, either, especially at a time when things like
‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Satisfaction’, ‘See My Friends’, and ‘My Generation’
were beginning to snatch the musical crown away from Jazz and place it on the
head of Rock as music’s chief cutting-edge creative force. To be fair, most of the album was
recorded rather hurriedly, over a week-long session in mid-February 1965
right before the Beatles flew over to the Bahamas to begin shooting for the
movie — and if we are drawing strict chronological lines between the
«adolescence» and «maturity» of rock music, I’d still place those winter
months in the first category, which gives the Fab Four a good excuse if you
feel like they need an excuse. Some might feel they don’t, though, because
even the most lightweight numbers recorded during that session are still
excellent pop songs in their own right, and what’s wrong with that? Each of
them continues to nurture some special vibe, dissolving the «feel-of-formula»
— the secret Beatles trick that places their «filler» on a whole other level
compared to, say, The Dave Clark 5. Thus, it is easy to dismiss
something like Paul’s ʽAnother Girlʼ — whose swinging rhythm, at first, would seem to
denounce it as just an attempt to capitalize on the formula of ʽCanʼt Buy Me Loveʼ, that is, something decidedly beyond the Beatles’
dignity. But then ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was an exhilarated, drunkenly-delirious
explosion; ‘Another Girl’, in comparison, is a pretty gloomy song with a
subtle context. Paul expressly sings the verses in a tired, morose, and a tad
threatening manner: the way he intones "you’re making me say that I’ve got nobody but you / but as from
today, well, I’ve got somebody that’s new" has always made me
suspect that the protagonist is really bluffing his way out of a conflict
situation here — the ‘Another Girl’ in question is just a phantom invented to
trick his partner into backing down and submitting, and throughout the song,
the singer is feeling quite nervous about whether the bluff is going to be
successful. With the addition of some rather weird bluesy lead lines, alternating
between high-pitched aggressive stings and rambling, paranoid licks (all of
it played by Paul himself because George apparently had problems working out
the perfect mood), ‘Another Girl’ is more than just self-derivative filler —
it’s a cute little psychological maneuver. (It’s also possible that the song
might have been subtly referring to some tensions in Paul’s relations with
Jane Asher at the time — and it is slightly symbolic that in the movie, it is
the song that the Beatles play upon their arrival to the Bahamas, while
frolicking around on the beach with some local beauties... infidelity
check!). Interestingly, the exact same
topic of friction between the two lovers dominates ‘The Night Before’, the
second out of three «pure McCartney» creations at the February sessions. ‘The
Night Before’ is, in fact, a thematic prelude to ‘Another Girl’ — the guy
sees diminished passion in the girl’s behavior, so then he tries to salvage
the relationship by calling on the remedy of jealousy. The song, too, may be
treated as filler, but it is also a cool example of how the Beatles smoothly
merge blues and pop — the instrumental introduction consists of several bars
of «tough» guitar-driven rock’n’roll in the vein of ‘Some Other Guy’ or
‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, and then wham!,
ten seconds into the song we forget all about the instruments as our
attention is completely switched over to the gorgeous vocal trade-offs
between solo Paul "we said our
goodbyes..." and the rest of the band ("ah, the night before...") who conflate their group harmonies
with Paul’s in what has sometimes been described as their adoption of the
«hocket» technique. Again, there are subtle mood
swings here that find no immediate analogies in contemporary pop: the first
two lines, with John and George picking up Paul’s line and footballing it
high up in the stars, symbolize the atmosphere of lovers’ bliss, then in the
third line those harmonies return crashing back to Earth while Paul’s lead
vocal changes to bitter and sardonic ("now today I found you have changed your mind..."), and then
to gently pleading ("treat me like
you did the night before"). I’m a little disappointed by the
exceedingly simplistic double-tracked guitar solo (which, honestly, feels
more like a temporary placeholder where they forgot to fill in the real thing), and the "last night is a night I will remember you
by" bridge carries relatively little emotional weight, but the main
body of the song still remains a thing that only the Beatles were capable of
back in 1965, filler or no filler. The third of the «pure McCartney»
tracks was ‘Tell Me What You See’, though in this case, the «purity» was a
bit disturbed by Paul using as inspiration a religious motto that used to
hang on the wall of John’s Aunt Mimi’s house ("however black the clouds may be, in time they’ll pass away; have faith
and trust and you will see, God’s light make bright your day"). In
contrast with the other two, this one might seem to be completely devoid of
any psychologism — just an optimistic little piece, relatively relaxed and
nonchalant, good to play on a lazy warm summer day or something. Alan
Pollack, in his description of the song, keeps referring to it as
«Latin-flavored», but the only justification for this is the use of
semi-exotic percussion instruments (like the güiro, which is apparently
manned by Harrison here — since the song has no use for the lead guitar, he
had to leave his mark in some special way). I don’t really hear a lot of
«Latin» influences here; instead, to me the song feels more like something in
an early folk-pop, Sonny & Cher-like style, thus incidentally presaging
the stylistic twists on Rubber Soul.
The most interesting part of the
song, though, in this case is its bridge section — the Beatles’
unpredictability strikes again as the languid flow of the song is suddenly
interrupted by the louder-than-expected chanting of the title, followed by
Paul’s bluesy mini-solo on the electric piano. Are these interruptions
supposed to be the «big black clouds» in person, breaking up the overall
serenity, only to be promptly whisked away by the friendly arpeggios from
John’s rhythm guitar? And what’s up with Ringo’s drumming here, as he briefly
lays it all on the big bass drum, while the rest of the song only relies on
very light percussion in comparison? However you interpret it, the bridge
section does remain unusual and enigmatic. Remove it, and you are left with a
smooth, well-behaved, pleasant and ultimately quite forgettable composition.
Put it back, and you learn an important lesson about creativity — there’s
always room for it even in the most generic of environments, as long as you
do not forget that surprise is one
of the most essential components of good art. Meanwhile, John, too, brought
three new songs to the same session, and, from a certain angle at least, we
see him largely being on the same page with Paul: insecure and dissatisfied,
though, naturally, with a bit more of a snarl about it. ‘You’re Going To Lose
That Girl’, perhaps not incidentally placed right after ‘Another Girl’, gives
us another triangle — except this time it’s not one guy and two girls, but
rather two guys and one girl, with John «punishing» his rival for his
inefficient (insufficiently alpha?) behavior. (Might this be a hint that in
real life, Paul always had two girls where John had just one?) Whether this
is just a conniving strategy or a true knight-in-shining-armor moment,
though, remains largely irrelevant because nobody (apart from picky critics)
ever listens to ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ for the lyrics — we all love
the song for its unique vocal harmony arrangements, clearly influenced by the
Beach Boys but adapted to the Beatles’ own abilities. The call-and-response
mechanics between John’s lead and Paul and George’s backing are arguably
their most complex on a song chorus up to that date, and the falsetto note
sustained for two whole seconds is John’s proudest achievement in that range
so far, as well. (There’s some great instrumental stuff happening here, too,
like the unpredictable shift from E Major to G Major in the bridge, but I’ll
just refer you to Alan
Pollack for such matters). There’s still a bit of atmospheric
mystery about that song for me: it’s clearly meant to be «triumphant» in
tone, and on their previous records, the Beatles had no problems coming
across as beaming victors on the field of battle, but there seems to be a
shadow of regret and self-doubt on ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’: the
protagonist almost feels forced to
make his move on the lady out of pure compassion ("if you don’t take her out tonight... I’m gonna treat her kind"),
and the melody, albeit lively and upbeat, also feels compassionate rather
than aggressive — even the brief guitar solo seems to sting you with notes of
pity rather than violence. (In fact, thinking about this situation gets me to
realize that the song would be perfect
for the soundtrack to a docudrama about the relationship between Brian Jones,
Keith Richards, and Anita Pallenberg — the three of whom pretty much
re-enacted this whole story in 1967). Regardless of any concrete judgements,
it can hardly be denied that ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’, behind the
still rather simplistic wordcraft, shows a ton of psychological maturity next
to John’s output circa 1964 — here, he is beginning to use the simple form of
the commercial pop song to express fairly complex human feelings, rather than
a cartoonish approximation thereof. And this, mind you, is one out of
three Lennon songs from February ’65 that is usually the least commented upon, with most of the critical attention
diverted toward ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ and ‘Ticket To Ride’,
both of which feel unusual and attractive from the outset. The former, as is
well acknowledged by John himself and everybody else who ever mentions the
song, continues his fascination with Dylan, and, indeed, if you only play the
first two seconds, you might suspect that you are going to be treated to a
Beatle cover of ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’. But the funny thing is that the
vocal melody — "here I stand, head
in hand..." — has nothing whatsoever to do with Dylan. Hum it in
your head and you shall rather feel the atmosphere of an old-fashioned
lullaby — "hush-a-bye, don’t you
cry", something to that effect. Bob himself would never have sung anything
like this (and not because the song
is too vulnerable for the size of his ego — Bob could be very vulnerable on record, but only on his own terms of what
defines vulnerability); instead, amusingly, the song would catch the eyes and
ears of the Beach Boys that same year, and be included on their Party! record with Dennis Wilson
singing lead vocal — the first time, ironically, that the «wild» Beach Boy
would reveal his bleeding heart, albeit in a comic, vaudevillian setting. Anyway, while I have always found
this early excursion into folk-pop territory a bit tentative and repetitive,
and its chorus hook seriously undercooked (couldn’t he have at least thought
of a second rhyming line, rather than chant the title twice in a row?),
there’s no denying that, once again, here we have a big step forward in terms
of emotional content. Most of John’s love songs on previous albums were
either of the knight-in-shining-armor kind ("anytime at all, all you gotta do is call" blah blah blah),
or of the jealous and/or angry kind ("I’ve got every reason on earth to be mad" and so on) —
typical teenage stuff when the thing that matters most is asserting your
masculinity rather than honing your empathy. With lines like "if she’s gone I can’t go on, feeling
two-foot small", he takes a giant leap forward — farther along than
Dylan himself, in fact. The funny thing is that the inspiration behind this
imagery could hardly have been Cynthia; there are speculations that the song
is a reflection of John’s married status which he had to downplay or conceal
for reasons of public image (hence the "everywhere people stare" line), but they hardly hold water.
Instead, I do believe that ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ is the very
first one (and the next one would follow in just a few months — see below) of
John’s many songs about... Yoko Ono, yes, a year and a half before the two even met for the first
time. It’s an imaginary, premonitory vision of that particular type of love
that this «big, strong man» was craving for — blind, submissive, perhaps even
with a slight whiff of some sort of emotional masochism. (For what it’s
worth, Dennis Wilson spent a lot of his life also looking for that kind of
love, though his self-destructive nature made it much more difficult for
him). Thus it is probably not an
accident that ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ uses a flute part, played
by guest musician John Scott, in the outro — formally, this just serves to
reinforce the folksy, «pastoral» vibe of the song, and they probably settled
on flute instead of the more usual harmonica just so as to avoid accusations
of copying Dylan’s style way too blindly; but the flute is a more tender and
«vulnerable» instrument than harmonica (unless you’re playing it Ian
Anderson-style), and the switch from harmonica (one of John’s most common
self-expressing instruments in the past) to flute is perfectly symbolic of
the switch from a «dominant» to a «submissive» attitude. (It’s amusing that
in the movie the song is played by the band in their home while entertaining
their newest guest, the beautiful Eleanor Bron — except that John isn’t even
looking in her direction, instead it’s George who keeps making eyes at her,
as in «hey there, see what a beautiful song my friend John wrote about no-one
in particular? how ’bout we make it about you and me, gorgeous?» Meanwhile,
John is just blankly staring into space — maybe there’s a ghost of Yoko
already floating somewhere out there). But now let us rewind just a
little bit to February 15 for the very first song recorded during those
sessions, most of the credit for which also goes to Lennon. On a purely
personal level, ‘Ticket To Ride’ has never been a favorite of mine. It’s
slow, it’s very repetitive, there’s
no solo section, and the revved-up "my
baby don’t care" bit cuts out way
too fast. But this gut impression is only there if you think of ‘Ticket To
Ride’ as what it is — a
verse-chorus-bridge pop song — and not as what it could aspire to be, namely,
an early psychedelic drone that might, perhaps, best be enjoyed under the
influence. Because there is no denying that, in sheer technical terms of
melody, arrangement, and production, ‘Ticket To Ride’ marks the band’s
greatest leap forward on the album (‘Yesterday’ comes close, but from a
completely different perspective). Unlike the average Beatles song that gets
better and better for me the more I listen
to it, ‘Ticket To Ride’ has the distinction of getting better and better for
me the more I think about it — not
coincidental, perhaps, for a song that is sometimes described as being the
Beatles’ first properly experimental creation, taking full advantage of the
studio as its own instrument. Sometime around 1970, John
boastfully called ‘Ticket To Ride’ «the earliest heavy-metal record ever
made» or something to that effect — probably being jealous of the rise of the
new generation of heavy music around him, though even hyperbolic remarks like
that one have their use in that they get you to notice things you might have
otherwise missed. The main riff of the song — the jangly, shrill ostinato figure that traverses the
entire tune — is far more The Byrds than The Kinks or The Who (in fact, it
bears an uncanny resemblance to the opening riff of The Byrds’ cover of ‘Mr.
Tambourine Man’, though this is almost certainly a coincidence, as both bands
were working on these songs around the same time); but its arrogant
insistence on the A chord does also give it a bit of a raga feel, which means
it’s «folk-pop going psychedelic» — an early precursor of what the Byrds and
all those other West Coast bands would start doing in about a year’s time.
What does make the song heavy,
though, is McCartney’s bass which, for most of the verses, he does not so
much «play» as «manipulate», using just a few notes to generate a constant
deep, monotonous hum (if you look at his playing in the accompanying video, he
seems to be barely moving his fingers — just a leisurely twitch of the thumb
here and there). In between that sort of loose-wiring bass and Ringo’s unusually
complex and loud-as-heck drumming pattern, ‘Ticket To Ride’ does sound...
well, I still wouldn’t describe it as heavy,
but monumental would probably be a
good term. Monumental and high: having ingested quite a bit of weed since being
officially introduced to it by Dylan in August 1964, the band had definitely
opened their minds to new vibes and sensations such as this one — up until
now, I haven’t ever used the word «trippy» to describe any Beatle song, but
‘Ticket To Ride’ is a pretty good start, I believe. Before ‘Ticket To Ride’,
most of the band’s loud numbers were party anthems, sonic firecrackers to get
the girls thrashing and screaming and wetting their seats; ‘Ticket To Ride’,
even if, through the inevitable pull of momentum, it did get the girls to do
the same things when played live, is still their first «loud» song that would
rather put you in a trance instead, slow and repetitive as it is, while
Doctor McCartney’s hypnotizing bass pendulum subjugates your brainwaves. In
this respect, I’d rather put ‘Ticket To Ride’ into the same category as the
(still upcoming at the time) Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’ than any of the
hard-’n’-heavy songs on the mid-1965 circuit. One semi-observation,
semi-complaint here could be that the musical vibe of the song feels rather
detached from the lyrics, which, in themselves, also mark an important
development. Both in ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide
Your Love Away’, the male protagonist steadily remains in focus, whether he’s
being competitive, chivalrous, or masochistic. In ‘Ticket To Ride’, however,
it is the girl who’s shown to go all these-boots-are-made-for-walkin’ over
our hero: "She said that living
with me was bringing her down / She would never be free when I was around"
— now that’s definitely not about
Cynthia, is it? People are still debating, after all these years, what ticket to ride really means, but to me
it’s never been about anything other than an abstract declaration of personal
freedom, so, kind of, welcome to the first proper feminist anthem out of the
ever-unpredictable mind of John Lennon, professional wife-beater. The only
question is: what the hell does that particular message got to do with the
proto-psych folk drone and the deep proto-metal bass rumble of the musical
arrangement? I’m still having a bit of trouble connecting the dots here — the
same sort of thing would work much better next year with ‘She Said She Said’,
but in this case, it’s two different dimensions of the conscience sitting
next to each other like two accidental passengers in adjoining airplane
seats. Regardless, ‘Ticket To Ride’ was
very important in that, as the only officially released piece of new Beatle
output over the entire first half of 1965 (backed with ‘Yes It Is’ on the
B-side), it gave the world a proper reassurance that the Fab Four were involved in the great big race to
finally make rock’n’roll into serious art — clearly, of all the songs
recorded at that February session this was the most stereotypically
«mind-blowing» candidate, topping UK and US charts as usual. But as important
as the song is, I think that the truly outstanding moment of the February
sessions was the emergence of George Harrison as an accomplished songwriter
in his own right. After the acceptable, but forgettable ‘Don’t Bother Me’ on With The Beatles, and a frustratingly
bungled effort to turn ‘You Know What To Do’ into something accomplished
during the Hard Day’s Night
sessions, George finally hits the jackpot, proving that mediocre talent can mutate into something grander,
given a conveniently beneficial environment, so to speak. Of the two songs he contributed
for the sessions, only ‘I Need You’ made it into the movie, but ‘You Like Me
Too Much’ was still deemed good enough to make it onto Side B of the LP —
although as a proper «Harrisong», it feels rather conventional, and the
greatest attraction here comes from some ingenious keyboard work, where John,
Paul, and even George Martin are all involved in combining acoustic and
electric piano parts. Lyrics-wise, George has not yet progressed beyond
standard boy-girl thematics (then again, neither have his superiors), but the
words to ‘You Like Me Too Much’ aren’t too bad; as both John and Paul are
upping their game in this department a little, progressing beyond simplistic
stock clichés to thinking up slightly more realistic and emotionally
complex situations, so does George, giving us a more nuanced tale than the
trivial "I’m so happy" or "I’m so gloomy" message.
("Though you’ve gone away this
morning, you’ll be back again tonight" kind of gives us both at the
same time already, doesn’t it?). Ironically, though, it is the
lyrically and emotionally simpler ‘I Need You’ that ends up being the best of
the two — arguably, George’s very first serious emotional punch captured on
record. It’s possible to treat it as a direct sequel to ‘Don’t Bother Me’,
except this time the atmosphere of doomed melancholy, permeating the
imaginary conversation between the dumped protagonist and his friends, shifts
to one of subtly hopeful melancholy, reflected in what might be an imaginary
letter from the dumped protagonist to the love of his life (the song is said
to have been inspired by George’s feelings for Pattie Boyd, but if so, it
comes about a decade too early). One thing both have in common is George’s
love for long-winded verse lines: 12 syllables in ‘Don’t Bother Me’, 10 in ‘I
Need You’ — this skill would later come in handy for all of George’s
religious-philosophical needs — but where ‘Don’t Bother Me’ does not expand
much beyond the angry grumble, ‘I Need You’ makes a terrific shift between
depressed exposition ("you don’t
realize how much I need you...") and desperate pleading ("please come on back to me..."),
where John and Paul also seriously enhance the effects with extra harmonies
that reinforce the feeling of hope-beyond-despair. For all of its superficial
simplicity, George has no other song like ‘I Need You’ in his entire
Beatle-era catalog, and maybe even beyond that, too, though it is hard for me
to quickly rewind all of it in the back of my mind; already on Rubber Soul, his seriousness and
preachiness would start to get the better of him, and his desperate pleading
in the future would rather be addressed to the Lord above than any of his
blonde-haired creations below, which is a whole different story already. But
if you’re looking for a proper starting point to that famous «George heart
tug» which affects some of us so deeply, look no further than the chord
change from "love you all the time
and never leave you" to "please
come on back to me". Forty years later, the first man to properly
play tribute to that moment would be Tom Petty, whose performance of ‘I Need You’ during the
memorial Concert For George is one
of the show’s major highlights — and, of course, that chord change, along
with the words, took on a whole different meaning back then. Whoever implied
that George Harrison only began to compete with the level of Lennon-McCartney
around 1968–69, with songs like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ or ‘Something’
(I think Paul, rather condescendingly, said something to that effect), is
willingly ignoring the fact that it is George Harrison who is responsible for
one of the strongest, most painful flashes of genuine feeling on this whole
album, and it would take a pretty thick-skinned non-believer not to notice
that. With the work on those eight songs
mostly completed, the Beatles headed off to the Bahamas and to Austria in
order to film Help!, and, ironically
enough, ‘Help!’ — the actual song — was not written or recorded until early
April, after most of the shooting was over; in fact, Lennon actually wrote it
to match the agreed upon title of the movie, not the other way around. The
really interesting thing here is that, later on, John would always talk about
the song as representing a true
«call for help», reflecting his feelings of being trapped, exploited, and
miserable at the time ("I WAS
crying out for help!"); yet if you look more closely, the lyrics
here actually continue the motif already initiated in ‘You’ve Got To Hide
Your Love Away’, with a perfectly logical transition from "if she’s gone I can’t go on" to
"I know that I just need you like
I’ve never done before". In other words, this is not just a vague,
abstract call for help — it’s more like an explicit advertisement for a
soulmate. On the other hand, there is no serious contradiction here: John did
feel trapped, and it did take his falling in love with Yoko to free him from
the trap eventually — regardless of any of our own perspectives on the breakup of the Beatles. Years later, John would also
regret the decision to record the song as a speedy pop-rocker instead of a
slow ballad, in the context of which the words might gain more emotional
resonance (as it is, I’m sure most people barely pay them any attention
indeed, other than just the chanted title). No evidence exists, as far as I
can tell, of the Beatles themselves trying it out slow and mellow — but, of
course, you can always go to later cover versions by Deep Purple or the Carpenters to see
how it would work out, and I’m pretty sure you’ll agree with me that it wouldn’t
work out nearly as well as the original (although I have my share of respect
for both attempts). The «breakneck» tempo is not there merely for commercial
purposes; it is there to underline the urgency and seriousness of the
situation. The hero is not just sitting, all gloomy and depressed, finding
masochistic pleasure in his own wounds in some hotel room; he’s panicking,
running through the streets in his underwear after having just set the hotel
room on fire, or something like that. At a slower tempo, John’s voice would
never have sounded as urgently desperate as it does on "but-now-these-days-are-gone-I’m-not-so-self-assured"
(note how on the slower Carpenters version, the tempo allows Karen to throw
on a little flowery melismatic hop on self-assured
— it’s totally adorable, but it also kiddifies the song, downplaying the pain
and upping the playfulness). The most inventive trick
associated with ‘Help!’ are its vocal harmony arrangements, particularly the
idea of George and Paul’s lines «previewing» the lead vocal, creating the
effect of an echo that comes before the main part — "[and now] and now these days are gone...".
I always like to imagine that the boys came up with this solution to help
John better memorize his own lyrics: what with the long-winded nature of the
verse lines and the high speed of delivery, it would have been hard for him
not to flub the words — in fact, several live recordings of the song do exist
where he still messes up — and thus it’s quite helpful to have yourself an
official prompter in such dire straits. According to Mark Hertsgaard, the
author of The Music And Artistry Of The
Beatles, this strategy is "underlining
the importance of the words even as it softens their sorrow with wistful
nostalgia", but I don’t know where the nostalgia bit is coming from, other than an association with the
song’s single line of "when I was
younger, so much younger than today...". To me, it’s more about a
realistic symbiosis of the internal voices disrupting the protagonist’s peace
of mind — his inner demons, if you like — and his own inevitable reaction.
Paul and George are playing out the role of John’s nerve impulses, driving
him to act in crazy ways, and he is their obedient slave like most of us are
obedient slaves to our own impulses. Make sense? Anyway, regardless of the actual
interpretation, the vocal harmonies on ‘Help!’ are just another awesome
example of how the Beatles, whose singing and harmonizing techniques could
never hope to match those of the Beach Boys (well, maybe if John and Paul and
George had all been blood brothers and living under the same roof with their
dictatorial and abusive father... ah well, never mind), could compensate for
that by relying on their sheer creativity and coming up with inventive and
meaningful arrangements that might not require all that much training and
practice but could still earn them a place at the same table with all the
great masters of vocal harmony, past and present. And not that this should in
any way downplay the importance of the instrumental parts — the doom-laden
three-chord mini-stairway-to-hell guitar line between each of the chorus
lines, the sympathetic arpeggiated jangle backing up John’s "won’t you please please help me?"
falsetto, or that panicky Ringo fill connecting the verse to the chorus. If there’s anything seriously
critical to be said about any of those songs, it is probably that they feel
totally disconnected from the movie for which, allegedly, they should have
been written. Granted, so was most of the material used for A Hard Day’s Night, but there at least
the band had the excuse of the pseudo-documentary approach, being free to
perform just about anything as long as it was in a relatively realistic
setting. By contrast, within Help!
all the songs play out like early examples of music videos where the visual
content has practically nothing to do with the musical, which seriously
detracts from the songs’ power — it’s hard to take John singing ‘Help!’
seriously when he is having darts thrown at his onscreen image by infuriated
cult members, or to notice the actual pain within ‘I Need You’ when it’s all
about tanks and artillery setting up positions to safeguard the Beatles
against the cult during their recording process. And what exactly does
‘Ticket To Ride’ have to do with skiing up in the Alps? Is the cable car
supposed to be a metaphor for "riding
so high"? Clearly, this problem is no longer
relevant in the 21st century, but back in 1965, it was relevant: the music written for the movie was so far ahead of
the movie that the very existence of the movie was a bit insulting next to
it. These days, it’s just harmless nostalgic fun and adorable old-school
silliness, but back then it could reinforce some pretty harmful stereotypes
about the band, and indeed it is quite telling that the conservative Daily Express praised the movie while
the liberal Daily Mirror condemned
it, or that the movie is often listed as a chief source of inspiration for
the Monkees’ TV show — not that there was anything wrong with the Monkees’ TV
show, mind you, but it was
good-natured fluffy light entertainment, and most of the songs written for Help! go way beyond good-natured
fluffy light entertainment. The «proper» soundtrack version of
the album was, just as it was with A
Hard Day’s Night, only released in the US, where the seven songs used in
the movie were padded out with additional instrumentals from the score,
composed and conducted by Ken Thorne; it’s mostly rubbish, but due to the
film’s «Indian» motifs, a few of the compositions featured Eastern
instruments such as sitar — thus officially marking the first presence of a
sitar on a Beatles album, several months prior to ‘Norwegian Wood’. (Joking
aside, George’s introduction to the sitar did
occur during the shooting of the movie, so there was at least one
long-lasting positive effect from those almost-wasted months). For the UK
release, however, it was artistically necessary to come up with a whole other
side of new songs, given that fans had been impatiently waiting for a proper
new Beatles LP for more than half a year already. Two of the songs for that Side B
came from the same February ’65 sessions — ‘You Like Me Too Much’ and ‘Tell
Me What You See’, which did not make it into the movie — but five more had to
be rounded up to complete the picture, and this was a bit of a patch-job:
spread over two or three different sessions in May and June ’65, including
two covers of outside artists (the last ever time the Beatles would include
somebody else’s songwriting) and at least one song that John would later come
to despise with a vengeance (‘It’s Only Love’). However, even if on an
objective level Side B of Help!
clearly loses the game to Side A, even the weakest of its songs still have
their moments and aspects of redemption. Perhaps opening things up with
Ringo singing Buck Owens might feel like a corny move when taken outside of
context; but inside of context,
‘Act Naturally’ is the perfect opener, especially if you listen to it in its
proper place. The monumentality of ‘Ticket To Ride’ has just faded away, the
curtain has fallen, you have turned the record over — and now, as if breaking
the fourth wall, the principal star of the movie (by then, it was a general
consensus that Ringo had the best acting abilities of all four Beatles) walks
out on stage and delivers a boastful-but-humble closing reflection on how
"they’re gonna put me in the
movies, they’re gonna make a big star out of me", which, I dare say,
hits even harder home with Ringo than it did with Owens (although I would
think that "they’ll make a scene
about a man that’s sad and lonely" better describes his part in A Hard Day’s Night than Help!). If you think of it that way,
it’s the first theatrical-conceptual move on the part of the band to ever
appear on an LP, and you can even draw a straight line from here to Sgt. Pepper if you so desire. Additionally, if you compare the
performance to the original
Buck Owens recording, you’ll see just how much the band brings to the
table — the original is pretty barebones, while the Beatles version features
some excellent lead guitar licks from George throughout, starting from the
opening descending «guffawing» riff and shadowing Ringo’s vocal for most of
the song. A very similar style would soon be adopted for Rubber Soul’s original ‘What Goes On’, also with Ringo on vocals
and with even more intricate country-style guitar arrangements, so ‘Act
Naturally’ also happens to be a small step forward in the Beatles embracing
the «folk-rock revolution» of 1965. See how much food for thought is provided
even by the tiniest of trifles at the time! Meanwhile, John took things easy
and went on a brief Larry Williams kick: the Beatles definitely knew of Larry
from their earliest days, as ‘Bony Moronie’ had allegedly featured already in
the Quarrymen’ live setlist as early as 1957, and with a couple new tracks
required a.s.a.p. for their upcoming American LP Beatles VI, they went into the studio on May 10, 1965 (Larry’s
birthday!) and knocked off ‘Bad Boy’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, with John taking
lead vocal on both. Unfortunately, ‘Bad Boy’ ended up half-lost (apart from Beatles VI, it would only surface on
various compilations, from Golden
Oldies to Rarities to Past Masters etc.), even if it’s the
better song of the two — less repetitive, featuring a tremendous George solo,
and one of the «nastiest» ever Lennon vocals from his Beatle days. But there is something to be said
about the minimalism of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, too, even if the band quite
intentionally limits George to replaying the same lead line over and over for
eternity. Like with ‘Rock And Roll Music’ and other early rock’n’roll songs,
the aim here is to toughen up a song whose original vibe was relatively
toothless and friendly. Larry recorded ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ — like every other
hit of his — as a bit of a joke number; the Beatles, particularly George with
his alarm siren-like guitar tone and John with his «hungry» vocal delivery,
take it far more seriously, turning the song into a modernized headbanger
that would also be perfect for their live show (and even long after they
ceased doing live shows, ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ would be one of the few songs
John would perform at Live Peace Toronto in 1969 with the Plastic Ono Band,
though, admittedly, they might have settled on it back then mostly because
they had no time to rehearse anything more complex). In any case, it’s one of
his finest «all-out shouting» performances since the days of ‘Twist And
Shout’... and I do admire George’s tenacity in holding down that riff
non-stop for three minutes (while also chuckling at the occasional mistake
here and there, like at 1:46 when he drops an extra note out of the blue and
they decide to keep it in — just so, you know, sixty years later unsuspecting
people would not assume the whole track had been AI-generated or something). John’s last and only fully
original contribution to Side B was ‘It’s Only Love’, a song he would later
single out as one of his favorite targets for self-criticism, and perhaps the
self-criticism is justified when it comes to the lyrics: after the impressive
verbal progress seen on ‘Help!’, ‘Ticket To Ride’, and ‘You’ve Got To Hide
Your Love Away’, something like "when
you sigh, my inside just flies, butterflies" and "just the sight of you makes night time
bright" feels like a conscious nod to the young and innocent days of
1963 — back then, John could have been given plenty of slack for the likes of
‘Ask Me Why’, but this here is the equivalent of a full-grown man walking
around in his school uniform (and not
in an Angus Young manner of doing it). In his defense, though, the song does
begin with "I get high when I see
you go by", which may have been a conscious or subconscious
reference to the famous conversation with Dylan who, allegedly, was surprised
by the Beatles having never smoked pot before despite singing "it’s such a feeling I get high"
on ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. Now we have tricky John actually slipping that
bit into the beginning of a sugary love ballad and nobody paying attention —
and to think of all the fuss around Jim Morrison and his "girl we couldn’t get much higher"
bit two years later... What is really surprising is that
by this time, John had all but stopped writing simple, sentimental love
songs, and when he later returned to that practice, he would always make sure
the simple feeling would be transferred directly from the heart; ‘It’s Only
Love’ does feel somewhat hollow and fake as a «Lennon song», though, in its
defense, it fares pretty well as a «Beatles song». We can criticize the words
all we like, but there’s no denying the beauty of the tremolo-laden lead
guitar figure, or the prettiness of the interplay between John’s 12-string
rhythm and George’s little syncopated «pecks» in the other channel, or, most
importantly, the power of the final melismatic falsetto vocal coda — that
last note genuinely gives me the proverbial butterflies in the same manner that only a few other people are
capable of, like, say, Ray Davies on ‘Waterloo Sunset’. In the end, ‘It’s
Only Love’ may be «regressive» in attitude, but in terms of writing and
arrangement it is still miles ahead of the level of Please Please Me and, ultimately, nothing to be ashamed of. Finally, we are left with two more
McCartney songs, and these really couldn’t have come sooner, given Paul’s
relatively «auxiliary» involvement with the proper soundtrack of Help! (as good as ‘The Night Before’
and ‘Another Girl’ turned out to be, they do feel humble and insignificant
next to Lennon’s tracks on Side A). Although nothing shall ever take away the
champion crown from ‘Scrambled Eggs’, it could be argued that ‘I’ve Just Seen
A Face’ does not really drag too far behind its ten-times-more-famous
neighbor — even if it could be formally classified as a «bluegrass ballad»,
it’s the kind of song that could only be written by a compositional genius
working outside of any strict genre conventions or formalities. The contrast
alone between the slow, almost meditative introduction, gallantly picked by
three different Beatles on three different acoustic guitars, and the
breakneck speed of the main melody is something we’d never previously heard
on a Beatles song, or, for that matter, on any song on the pop market — and the twisted shape of the verse,
which feels as if it’s propelling you forward through a narrow corridor with
no clear indication of when and how it’s going to stop, is another innovative
feature that may, perhaps, have been inspired by the «rappy» likes of Dylan’s
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ but is realized in full-on Paul McCartney style:
no aggression or cynicism, just pure charm. My personal moment of mystery with
the song has always been with the chorus: "Falling, yes I am falling / And she keeps calling / Me back again".
It turns out a bit clumsy, with the words clipped and overpressed to fit into
the musical structure, but this is also what gives the whole thing a bit of
an extra dimension. Falling
naturally supposes falling in love,
but it is rare that the complement in
love is omitted in such situations, and a simple I am falling could just as equally mean going to Hell or the like — and in this context, "she keeps calling me back again"
would have an almost Gothic flair. I mean, if you see a vision of someone at
night who "keeps calling you back
again", it’s gotta be some Edgar Allan Poe shit, right? To me, it
was as if, quite inadvertently, Paul was penning a love song to a ghost here,
and if you add this perspective to the song, it actually becomes... something
completely different, as if all the melodic tricks alone didn’t already make it so completely
different. If it were up to me, I’d add a bit of haunting graveyard laughter
to the outro to complete the picture. As for ‘Scrambled Eggs’ (I find
that calling the song by its original working title helps it feel a little
less clichéd in the back of your mind), anything I say on the subject
shall most likely repeat something already written a dozen times before even if
I spend an eternity trying to come up with something original. I can’t help
noticing, though, that the theme of ‘Yesterday’ is precisely the same as that of ‘The Night Before’ — it’s like the
same subject relived in the mind of the protagonist after he’d mellowed out a
little — and also that the song marks McCartney’s initiation into the ranks
of the greatest «nostalgic» songwriters of all time, along with Ray Davies
and maybe, to a lesser extent, Brian Wilson. For some reason, while one of Paul’s
biggest weaknesses in songwriting is the all-too-common lack of psychological
depth, he has few equals when it comes to writing about (a) loneliness and (b)
looking back into the past (sometimes even imagining looking back into the past from the future, e.g. ‘Things
We Said Today’), and ‘Yesterday’ is the first massive and unassailable
argument for that. As is well known, even John regularly expressed respect
and admiration for the song ("thank you Ringo, that was
wonderful!" is a classic moment in Beatle history), and that’s,
like, the highest praise Paul McCartney of Liverpool could ever aspire to. But
it’s also much to Paul’s honor that the success of ‘Yesterday’ as,
essentially, his solo creation never went to his head enough to opt out for a
solo career — the time had certainly not yet come to loosen the Beatle bonds. Yet speaking of Beatle bonds, we
can already see here that they are beginning to loosen up. As the Beatles
mature as artists, their individualities begin to overshadow their collective
influences, and the sharp contrast between a song like ‘Help!’ (pure John)
and ‘Yesterday’ (pure Paul) is felt much more intensely than any John-Paul
contrast on the previous four albums; not coincidentally, it is on Help! that George comes into his own
right as a third, and equally distinctive, creative force. At the very same
time, the Jagger/Richards songwriting team was coming into its own with great
original compositions like ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Satisfaction’, yet there was
hardly any sign of a «this is a Jagger song» and «this is a Richards song»
dichotomy, which is basically your obvious answer to the question of why the Beatles
broke up and the Rolling Stones survived. Naturally, at this time the band
was still working as a whole, with John and Paul adding beneficial touches to
each other’s material; but even though they continued to spend a lot of time
together, including touring and stuff, the days of their working out ideas
between them in hotel rooms were already more or less a thing of the past. Which is telling, if you ask me —
great art is rarely, if ever, produced collectively on a 50-50 basis, and it
is quite telling that the closer the Beatles got to their peak, the more
fleshed out their individual styles would become. From that point of view, Help! might indeed represent a bit of
a stutter in the band’s relentless journey to the top of the pantheon, but it
is the record that almost officially
gave us «John Lennon, of Liverpool», «Paul McCartney, of Liverpool», and «George
Harrison, of Liverpool», for all three of whom «opportunity knocked», and without
the satisfaction of that particular condition prior to everything else, the quality
and impact of Rubber Soul and Revolver would have been far less
than they are seen today. Thus, Help!
might still have one of its feet dragging behind in the soil of 1963-64, while
the other one is faintly beginning to grope for the big musical innovations
of 1965-66; but it is important to remember that all those innovations, no
matter how many gushing pages of text have been produced about them by fans,
critics, and musicologists alike, would have signified very little if they
were purely a matter of form, not substance — and that the substance could
only be provided by the individual natures, feelings, and reflections of each
of the band members, rather than by getting together under some sort of «okay,
let’s write something like Roy Orbison does!» pretext. The best songs on Help! all satisfy that requirement,
and the worst seem to at least acknowledge it. That’s a pretty good ticket to
ride if there ever was one. |
||||||||
