Monthly Archives: December 2018

A Hard Day’s Night

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Next order of business for the biggest band in the world (not including the US)?

Well, obviously, become the biggest band in the US as well. To achieve that, two things were needed: for the various record companies and publicists over there to get their finger out and stir up some interest, and to make a film. The former was just cranking up when the band had the most extraordinary stroke of luck. Ed Sullivan, the king of US primetime television, happened to be passing through Heathrow as the Beatles arrived from Sweden. Seeing the crowds and the screaming, he decided that he should get these four on his show. He offered a single, highly paid, headline spot. Brian Epstein negotiated a much lower fee, but – crucially – three appearances.

As Capitol Records finally got their act together and churned out some publicity, so Vee-Jay finally remembered they were sitting on some Beatles music as well. The Ed Sullivan appearances provided the catalyst for the perfect publicity storm which followed.

In the age of everything being instantly available on demand and in replay, it’s hard to grasp the impact of the Ed Sullivan shows. There was – as far as anyone knew – only going to be one opportunity to see the Beatles perform on TV, so people – an estimated one third of the entire US population – stopped what they were doing and watched. Most of them had genuinely never seen anything like it, and the band went overnight from being a curiosity to everyone’s favourite British band. They then repeated the feat the following week for all those who had missed it the first time round, then went home to make a film so that everyone living in places the band could never reach on tour could also see them. The moment appeared to have passed for the Beatles in America the previous November, but in fact everything came together in February of 1964 and the musical landscape shifted because of it.

At this point it will be apparent to anyone who has read up on this period of Beatles history that I’m simplifying quite a bit. During the first half of 1964, the band played shows in the UK, in Europe, in the US (although only a select handful), recorded radio sessions in all those places, made a film and wrote an entire album’s worth of new material for use in the film. Oh, and also kept churning out hit singles with all the attendant publicity demands that implied.

The film came about as a direct result of the Ed Sullivan shows. United Artists offered them a three movie deal partly so that their record label could have the rights to any new songs which might come from them. At this point, still very much aware that this could all go away as quickly as it had arrived, the band and their management just said yes to everything. The film was completed by the end of April, by which time the band had seemingly taken over the US charts all by themselves.

First up was ‘Introducing… The Beatles’, a collection of most of the songs on ‘Please Please Me’ which were still (sort of) licensed to Vee-Jay. Because for some reason US audiences expected 12 tracks per album, this wasn’t a straight copy of the first UK album. Ten days later came Capitol’s response (released accompanied by the threat of lawsuits aimed at Vee-Jay) ‘Meet The Beatles’, which contained 11 Beatles originals plus ‘Till There Was You’. The cover image is based on ‘With The Beatles’, although tinted blue. Oddly, although it is in many ways a butchered and incomplete version of the original releases, it stands up pretty well as a first album in its own right, perhaps even giving a clearer picture of who the Beatles were than either of the UK releases.

Capitol followed that up with “The Beatles’ Second Album” in April. Capitol had access to a couple of dozen songs as yet unreleased in the US, but chose a strange hodge-podge of covers and older material while they waited for a resolution to the Vee-Jay situation. To add to the confusion, two entirely different albums came out in Canada at the beginning of 1964 – ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’. Feel free to look those up; I think any more detail from me will only confuse matters more…

All the albums competed at the top of the album charts, but that was nothing compared to the situation in the singles charts, where in the first week of April, the Beatles occupied the top five positions, thanks to competing labels and people buying up copies of older releases. The following week, there were 14 Beatles songs in the top 100. It appeared shambolic (and it was), but it was fantastic publicity, and simply fanned the flames when it came to anticipating new material.

There are two separate albums called ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – the UK release, which I’ll come back to in a moment, and the US ‘soundtrack’ version, which was released by United Artists with only the songs which actually feature in the film, plus some George Martin orchestral arrangements from the incidental music. This was the fourth Beatles album to come out in six months; the fifth, ‘Something New’, features all the missing songs from ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ which belonged to Capitol, and was rushed out a couple of weeks later. Four whole months would go by before any more Beatles LPs were released in the US, but by then, almost anything with the Beatles name on it would sell, as we shall see….

Meanwhile, what of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’? If you haven’t seen the film and you’re intrigued by the album, or even if you’d just like a snapshot of the 1960s just as things started to change, I highly recommend seeking it out. Of the four, only Lennon appears properly at ease with acting, but the whole thing just barrels along full of irrepressible energy and dry Liverpool humour, leaving no time to reflect or pick holes in anything. It’s great fun, and the joyful spirit of it all is reflected in the album, which is the sound of a band properly hitting its stride.

You can argue all you like about the best opening track on an album, but the correct answer to ‘what’s the greatest single opening chord on an album’ is – well, I’ll let Randy Bachman try to explain just what’s going on:

More than fifty years on, that opening is still jaw-dropping. This is not your average pop album; this is not like anything you’ve ever heard before. Freed from the demands of a record label which thought it knew best, Lennon comes up not only with a tremendous melody, but a set of lyrics which give the first real insight into where he’s going to be taking us in the next few years, and the arrangement allows us to clearly hear that he’s done with skirting around with metaphorical hand-holding. Whatever ‘the things that you do’ are, they go way beyond making his tea and bringing him his pipe and slippers.

And that’s just the start. You don’t even have to listen to this album – just look at the song titles on there, especially on side 1. Of the ones which are perhaps marginally less well known, ‘If I Fell’ is simply gorgeous, ‘Tell Me Why’ rocks out without the awkwardness of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, and I think ‘Things We Said Today’ is as close to perfection as these early albums come – the constant shifting from major to minor keeping the listener off balance while whistling along.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that the album tails off, given how well-known the film tracks are, but I think it maintains its quality all the way through – the first Beatles album to be an unqualified success in my mind.

With the Beatles

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A little context:

As soon as it became clear that ‘Please Please Me’ was going to have staying power, George Martin asked the boys if they had any more songs like the ones they’d already written. As he would later remark, it turned out there was a ‘bottomless pit’ of songs. To keep the momentum going, they released ‘From Me to You’ as a single:

It’s a fascinating song, showing clear development and invention from what had gone before – from the singing of the riff to the harmonies over the chord changes, to the lack of a traditional chorus, it subverts expectations at every turn. It also scored them their first official number one single and knocked Gerry and the Pacemakers off their perch as the pre-eminent Merseybeat band. Not to be outdone, EMI/Parlophone released ‘Twist and Shout’ as an EP shortly afterward – it also went to number one, a significantly harder task for an EP.

I realise some of you may not really know what was meant by EP in the sixties – essentially, singles were, as we know, 7″ pieces of vinyl with one track on each side, played (“for higher fidelity”) at 45 RPM. LPs, or long playing records, were 12″ in diameter and played at 33 (and a third) RPM. For those who had more than pocket money to spend, but perhaps not quite a full disposable income, there were EPs – Extended Play singles. The ones I owned (which were, to be fair Pinky and Perky and selections from Disney soundtracks) were 7″ in size, but played at 33RPM, allowing for two tracks per side (I did once own something spoken word – perhaps Peter and the Wolf – which was designed to be played at the spoken word speed of 16RPM. Good luck finding that setting on your modern hipster decks, kids). Anyway, EPs allowed for further milking of the album market for those who weren’t quite able or willing to splash out on a whole long playing record. Eventually, by the end of 1963, three Beatles EPs, featuring virtually every track from ‘Please Please Me’ reached the top end of the singles chart, in spite of the significant price difference over a single. In those days, there was no separate EP chart, and even album sales (although separately recorded) were lumped in with all records in the main chart. This made little difference, as single sales far outstripped albums. Well, until The Beatles came along…

The next single release changed everything. If you can pinpoint the start of Beatlemania and the moment when they moved from being a successful pop band to a wider cultural phenomenon, it’s the 23rd of August 1963, when this happened to an unsuspecting world:

Entire books have been written on the impact of ‘She Loves You’; I think that from this distance, where we simply hear it as one of those touchstones of the 1960s, it’s almost impossible to grasp just how seismic a shift in the landscape this was. On the face of it it’s just another Beatles song – another Beatles love song, but just listen to it. Not only is it sung in the third person; not only is ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ the most astoundingly catchy motif which instantly entered the cultural lexicon; not only are all the Beatles hallmarks suddenly in place, but it gets in your head and just won’t go away. I’m not exaggerating when I say everything changed – before this, The Beatles were another British touring act; after it, few parts of the world had not heard of them.

Although, as we shall see, it took a few more months for US record companies to get on the bandwagon.

Then ‘With The Beatles’ came out, featuring neither of the preceding singles, nor the one which came out the following week, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’:

(or, as it was no doubt interpreted by millions of teenage girls all now old enough to be your granny: ‘ I Want to “Hold Your Hand” ‘)

So, what’s the plan for the second album in the light of all this going on – especially given that the first one is still sitting at the top of the charts? ‘More of the same’ seems to have been the order of the day. EMI, still a little nervous about allowing them to write all their own songs, held out for some well-known covers, leaving Lennon and McCartney happy enough to test their songwriting ability by putting out singles which became instant classics. The success of ‘With The Beatles’ marked a key turning point in their relationship with EMI – it, along with the staggering success of the singles, proved that the band knew what they were doing and while they weren’t exactly left alone to get on with it from here on, they were at least given a significant and pretty much unheard of amount of creative freedom.

As long as they kept churning out the hits, of course.

The other key feature of ‘With The Beatles’ is the iconic cover image. If you have time, take a look at this short documentary on the album cover art of Blue Note to get an idea of what other genres were doing with image, and where the idea for this came from:

Right from the start, the Beatles were image conscious – I’ll leave it to the many reference works to debate just who was driving their sense of image, but the result is a record cover entirely unlike anything their contemporaries were doing, and as striking an image of the early sixties as any. Having them in a broken line (Ringo, according to one testimony, is out front because he’s a shortarse), not smiling, half in shadow broke pretty much all of the rules of iconography as it applies to pop bands, yet it remains one of the first images you call to mind when you think about The Beatles.

Incidentally, if you’re ever poking about in a second-hand record store in Canada (something I do remarkably often), you might find the Canadian version of this, which completely misses the point of the stark beauty of the original by filling all the spaces with liner notes and other extraneous text. It’s quite jarring.

Talking of Canada, what of their North American record labels? Surely by the time this came out, they were falling over themselves to get Beatles product out?

Well, not quite yet. Canada followed the UK in Beatles matters, perhaps unsurprisingly, and they were much better known north of the border than they were in the US. The big promotional push was due to kick off on the day after ‘With The Beatles’ UK release, which was the 23rd of November 1963. For obvious reasons, things got a little overshadowed, and it seemed that the moment might have passed. Rights to the first album had not been taken up by EMI’s US arm, Capitol, and had been sold on to Vee-Jay Records, who managed to fail to release anything until it was almost too late. A butchered version of ‘Please Please Me’ was slated to come out in the summer of 1963, but corporate shenanigans involving gambling debts and the sudden resignation of a number of senior officials, pushed it back. Because Vee-Jay were doing nothing with the material, the contract was scrapped, although Vee-Jay hung on to what they already had as well as a few things they didn’t technically have the rights to. This saga was a long way from being over, but at the time of ‘With The Beatles’ coming out, there had only been three US single releases, and none of them had troubled the scorers, not even ‘She Loves You’, which was appallingly handled by Swan Records, who also appeared to have no idea what to do with these British upstarts. All this would change, but not until 1964, which was pretty exciting in the UK, but totally off the scale insane on the other side of the Atlantic…

Fun fact – ‘With The Beatles’ sold so well in its first week that it appeared at number 11 in the singles chart.

Anyway, what do I make of it now?

Well, I think it lacks something, and it’s not hard to see what – three of them are further up this post. It’s a fine collection of songs, and it shows a definite progression from the previous album all of four months ago. More time has been spent on it, and what it loses in spontaneous joy, it gains in polished musicianship. The covers are for the most part not the definitive cover versions of these songs (I’m pretty sure I can name versions I prefer for all of them), and that may be down to the band being a little more focused on their own material, and keen to put the ‘covers band’ part of their life behind them. There’s a more careful, considered dynamic to the album – the love songs are a little more mature, less about the thrill of first meetings and more about the realities of being in a relationship and a band at the same time.

Well, not all of the realities, just the ones the girls want to hear.

You can hear the songs the record company wanted on there, and with the benefit of hindsight you can hear Lennon saying ‘No, we’re not doing that again’.

Two key standout moments for me – the slightly hurried version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, worked up over a lunchtime because the Rolling Stones wanted a hit single – Lennon and McCartney still imagined themselves as heading to the Brill Building when this ‘pop star’ nonsense was over – (Brian Jones elevates the Stones version, but it stands out as a songwriter’s song; effortlessly catchy), and ‘All My Loving’ which discreetly shows off many of the tools in the Beatles’ songwriting kit – the ridiculously simple and effective descending unaccompanied opening, Lennon’s deceptively complex guitar part, Harrison’s neat and punchy solo, the staggeringly effective vocal harmonies and the fact that it does everything it has to do, says its piece and shuffles off again in just a hair over two minutes, yet is as familiar fifty plus years on as anything which was released as a single.

It’s a great album; of course it is. But it’s also a little overshadowed by its predecessor and the singles which came out around it, and it lacks that one clear defining moment which would set it apart from its peers.

Never fear, though – the very next chord released on a Beatles album would more than make up for that.

Please Please Me

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I’m going to start with a disclaimer – The Beatles are, by some distance, the most analysed and written-about band in the history of recorded music. There is literally nothing I can say which hasn’t already been said a hundred times before, and often better. If you want to know anything at all about any period in the history of The Beatles – hell, if you want to know the minute details of pretty much every single day in the band’s existence – it’s all out there for you to explore. As an illustration, the latest biography by Mark Lewisohn, All These Years, Volume One – Tune In runs just short of 1,000 pages. This album doesn’t even appear in it – the first third of the band’s biography doesn’t even reach all the way to their first full recording session: that’s how much detail we already know about them.

So, given that there’s nothing new under the sun, what can I bring to the table? I think perhaps three things: I’ll try to put each album in some kind of context for those of us not old enough to remember its release (and I’m more than happy to be corrected on my assumptions by anyone who actually is old enough); I’ll react to the album as well as I can given that I’m not really listening to any of them with what you’d call fresh ears; and as the thread grows, I’ll try to unpick the tangled mess which is their North American release schedule, and explain why the first time I looked in a Canadian record store for Beatles albums, I was met with swathes of things I didn’t recognise.

For all that we can argue about the merits of The Beatles vs The Stones, or talk up any of the other British Invasion bands of the early to mid sixties; for all that we might claim that The Beach Boys were just as innovative; for all that those born after 1970 who don’t know any of this first hand might look at what came after as more relevant to modern music, I think its undeniable that there’s something special, something ‘other’ about The Beatles. No other band is revered the way they are; no other band is pored over and dissected with such devotion; no other band’s recording studio inspires pilgrimages and traffic jams. Partly this is circumstantial – the band were working recording artists for less than eight years, and the recorded output fits neatly on to less than a dozen albums (and a couple of EPs); had they meandered on into the seventies and beyond like the Stones did, who knows what their legacy would be. Certainly, the ‘Anthology’ period singles didn’t exactly add anything to their reputation, and while all four of them (well, OK, three of them) wrote some magnificent solo songs, they never again reached the heights of their combined output. Perhaps they needed each other to spur themselves on; perhaps the fire had actually gone out. Either way, the recorded legacy is pretty much untouchable because it didn’t start before they were ready and it ended while they were still on a higher plane than pretty much everyone else. In between, they recorded a sizeable chunk of the greatest pop songs ever written, and that, in the end, is the reason why they remain so revered. The Rolling Stones albums had filler material here and there; every band’s albums did. The Beatles didn’t – not really. Even the novelty songs they got Ringo to sing, the music hall witterings McCartney loved so much, the eastern noodlings which Harrison brought to the table, and the wildest excesses of Lennon’s imagination all brought something interesting and listenable (although we’ll get to Revolution in due course…)

So, what about ‘Please Please Me’? How do I put the first Beatles album into context?

Well, how about this – it isn’t the first Beatles album.

I mean, it obviously is, but there’s a precursor. During the Hamburg days, the boys occasionally worked as backing band to Tony Sheridan, and his German album ‘My Bonnie’ features some tracks recorded with the Beatles as they were then – with Pete Best on drums, but without regular bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, a move which forced McCartney to play bass for the sessions. Most of the album features other musicians, but the title track does showcase what the band sounded like in the middle of 1961:

Debate rages over whether that actually is Pete Best on drums; let’s say it is, but feel free to pore over all the available evidence.

Some of the other ‘My Bonnie’ songs – including the delightfully-named ‘Take Out Some Insurance’ – were later released, and turn up on rarities compilations to this day. However you look at the Hamburg sessions, there’s no real argument that ‘Please Please Me’ is the first actual Beatles recording – the four of them (Starr having been poached from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to replace Best, who was struggling to keep up with the playing of the others) together in the studio with George Martin producing.

In 1963, pop groups sold singles, and put out albums for those people who wanted a little more. LP sales were not considered particularly important – LPs were the preserve of jazz musicians, crooners and soundtracks, whether to movies or West End / Broadway shows. If you were a new or established pop act, you would lump all your singles together, and pad the LP out to about 30 minutes with other songs which were not strong enough to be released on 7″. As a rule, you didn’t actually write any of this stuff, so there was no particular pressure on you to put an album together; you’d just be offered a handful of songs not deemed quite good enough for single release by other artists.

Not for the last time, the Beatles changed all that. Not with this album specifically, although there were early signs of things to come – eight of the 14 tracks on ‘Please Please Me’ were written by the band, including non-singles like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ which became standards anyway thanks to being singles in the US much later on. What changed was how record labels looked at LPs, because this album stuck around at the top of the album charts for most of 1963 – unheard of for a pop band – and was only dislodged by the Beatles’ second album. Clearly there was money to be made at 33rpm as well as 45…

This album didn’t see the light of day in North America – the USA was a distant dream when it was recorded – which led to the convoluted and intractable situation which followed for the next couple of years, as competing record labels pumped out endless more or less official Beatles albums, but we’ll get to that…

So, what does it sound like now?

To these ears, it’s wild and raw; the sound of a band who are finally getting the shot at stardom they had been working for and were not prepared to let slip. Famously, it was recorded in one day, and consists pretty much of their Cavern Club set as it was towards the end of 1962 – a mix of originals and (mostly) well-known and loved standards. There’s a Goffin and King song on there, a Burt Bacharach song, and – of course – it ends with the force of nature which is Lennon howling his way through ‘Twist and Shout’ – left to last, as Martin was concerned he might not have a voice left after it. It doesn’t outstay its welcome, clocking in at just over half an hour, but it covers the full range of Beatles material at the time – all four of them get a lead vocal (Ringo tackling the Shirelles hit ‘Boys’, which sounds odd to modern ears, but it wasn’t unusual for songs to be recorded cross-gender. More innocent times, I think is the usual explanation) and all of them get to shine instrumentally – another thing which wasn’t always the case – many bands of the time would happily wheel in session musicians to make the thing go faster, but the Beatles were the real deal, and I think you can hear even on the relatively simple arrangements that this is a tight, well-honed band in full charge of their instruments. There are a couple of overdubs, and Martin added some keyboards to two tracks about a week later, but otherwise it is exactly as it sounded on the day.

The other obvious thing for modern ears listening to this is that it’s recorded in mono. Stereo was still the preserve of the serious audiophile, and both the equipment needed to play it back and the disks themselves were prohibitively expensive, especially for fans of a pop group. Therefore, everything was reproduced as a single source. A stereo mix does exist, but it is simply the two tracks which were laid down in the studio separated to appear one in each speaker, and sounds extremely odd to modern ears, as one track was generally reserved for the vocals, and one for everything else. Mono was how it was intended to be heard, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. If anything, it adds to the rough and ready feel of the whole thing – there’s an immediacy and excitement to it all which still oozes from every track.

I maintain that every Beatles album cover is iconic, and this is where it all started. It’s a simple idea, beautifully executed, and often copied and parodied but never bettered as an expression of the sheer joy of being in a band with your mates, about to become the biggest thing in the world.

It was released in early 1963. It has never been out of print in the succeeding 55 years, which probably says everything that needs to be said about it. It lacks the sophistication and experimentation which took the Beatles from good to great to one-of-a-kind, but it more than makes up for that with its sheer infectious enthusiasm. It might not be the first Beatles album you reach for, but it should be up near the top of the pile.