With The Beatles (2)

A comment on the previous post on With The Beatles (from Jonny Morris again) suggests that it suffers because the group’s best original compositions at this point were being diverted into their singles. It’s not something that had ever occurred to me, which is surprising because I am... I wouldn’t say obsessed, but maybe... preoccupied with album sequencing, and I sometimes amuse myself by shuffling the line-ups of albums and switching tracks for others recorded during the same sessions. I’ll probably take you through my resequenced Help! when that album gets its turn. So, something to look forward to. For me, if not for you.

I suppose I’d never considered it with With The Beatles because I can’t quite imagine the singles that preceded and followed it – ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ – being album tracks. They’re both so important in The Beatles’ development that they deserve to stand alone. But in America, Capitol didn’t give the slightest toss about aesthetics and, when it finally deigned to release The Beatles’ records, it began a proud tradition of bastardising their albums: inserting A- and B-sides which most fans already owned and putting fewer tracks on the running order. Interestingly, for some reason – possibly financial – the five tracks they decided to pull from With The Beatles in order to construct the more cheesily-titled Meet The Beatles! were all cover versions, then three other tracks were added which were all Lennon/McCartney originals – meaning this was very nearly the group’s first all-original album.

The three tracks added were ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, its British B-side ‘This Boy’ and its American B-side ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. As it happens, I already have all The Beatles’ American albums lined up as playlists in iTunes – I’m not especially proud of it, I’m just saying – so I gave Meet The Beatles! a spin, to hear what an album with the benefit of three of the group’s best tracks of 1963 sounded like.



I found it hard to hear it as an album, partly because I’m so used to the proper version. (I almost put inverted commas around ‘proper’ there, but then I thought why should I? The other one IS the proper version.) I can’t hear ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ or ‘It Won’t Be Long’ as anything other than opening tracks, which means Meet The Beatles! has two opening tracks, neither of which is the actual opening track. It’s also because, like every Capitol Beatles album, it’s simply not as well sequenced as its British equivalent (Americans: I am willing to argue this at length). This is because George Martin actually thought about sequencing and did a blinding job of it, whereas Capitol really did seem to sling the tracks on there however they fell. Just look at the example in hand: it’s just the tracks taken from the British album, in the same order, with the extra ones bolted on the front.

But I really think the added tracks just don’t fit. You might have expected that of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which wasn’t from the same sessions and certainly, after a month of listening to With The Beatles, it sounds like it belongs to an earlier stage. It’s a club track, designed for an audience to dance to. The Beatles had already moved on. Compare it to a more recent mostly-by-McCartney track, ‘All My Loving’, and the latter sounds more like a song written for record. With The Beatles was written in a quite different way to Please Please Me: before their debut they’d been cheekily cajoling Parlophone to release their own compositions, afterwards the label was cajoling them to come up with more, and – as noted earlier – their live set was starting to select itself. For the first time, they were writing songs that they’d never play live – the first step down a road that would lead to ‘Revolution #9’. Eventually.

Anyway, back to ‘All My Loving’. It uses a similar pause to that in the earlier ‘There’s A Place’, but whereas that was a pause for breath in a frantic number, this is cooler, more poised. Pauses are a much-underrated tool in pop music, and this is one of the best: it would’ve been easy to do the song by just strumming through those bits, but the pauses make the song. It’s a constructed pop record, the first example of McCartney’s breezy facility for knocking out such songs.



The glue that holds the ‘club’ Beatles to the group’s evolving sound on With The Beatles comes from the covers – which are absent from Meet The Beatles! (I’m getting really sick of the auto-correct function putting capital letters after that title) except the atypical ‘Til There Was You’. With them gone, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ doesn’t fit – and nor, for that matter, does ‘Hold Me Tight’ (recorded for Please Please Me but held over because they messed it up). Whilst McCartney’s songs become more polished, Lennon’s songs start to aim for a greater depth of feeling and more atmosphere – not necessarily the sort of thing you’d blast out onstage. ‘All I’ve Got To Do’ and ‘Not A Second Time’ are possibly the first Beatles songs you could call subtle. (I dunno, I might make a case for ‘P.S. I Love You’, which I think is awesome.)

But to return to the original point, how does ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ – recorded a month after the final With The Beatles session, and released a week later – fit on the album? I don’t think it does, because it’s a Beatles song in a category of its own. It’s got an odd mid-paced rhythm, a vocal line that totally depends on its harmonies (as Ian McDonald pointed out, you can’t sing it a capella AT ALL) and a bright, insistent tone. I don’t think it’s like anything else The Beatles ever recorded: put a comment below if you think I’m wrong. The Beatles were running through writing styles and techniques so fast that in this case, it only lasted one track. That can partly be accounted for by the fact that it was the last time Lennon and McCartney would write so closely together, taking it in turns to write lines, meshing their styles to the point where only a very keen musical ear could distinguish them. Their diverging writing partnership would hugely influence A Hard Day’s Night.

Sounds of ’63

M’colleague Jonny Morris has been throwing me helpful suggestions regarding this blog since it started, one of which was to listen to other music from the same period to get an appreciation of context. This seemed an excellent idea, and I was particularly interested to hear what The Beatles’ commercial rivals were doing amidst their growing success. Never mind the stuff which is still considered credible today – what were people actually buying?

So I tracked down all the UK number one singles from 1963 on Spotify (except those by The Beatles, which aren’t on there) and stuck them in this playlist. There’s rather a lot of dull balladry, and it’s easy to see why The Beatles considered The Shadows the only British group worth being influenced by at this point. Again, it’s interesting to try to listen to this with a fresh ear because, if you take The Beatles out of the equation as I’ve been forced to do here, suddenly this doesn’t look much like the 1960s of the popular imagination – yet at the time it must have been an exciting new wave of which The Beatles were the biggest, but not the only, part.

The Beatles were joined in the charts by more Liverpool groups, including Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas with their Lennon/McCartney offcuts and Gerry and the Pacemakers with their debut song which The Beatles turned down for fear that everyone back home would think they were soppy wankers (evidently Gerry and co decided they were willing to live it down for the sake of a hit). However, as Jonathan Gould notes in his excellent book Can’t Buy Me Love, the Liverpool scene – which had been so exciting in the early 1960s, supporting hundreds of beat groups – didn’t produce a single other band who came close to The Beatles’ standard. By the end of the next year, the other Liverpool acts – along with almost everyone else on this playlist – would be surpassed.

The first genuine representatives of post-Beatles pop to score a number one were, ironically, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and I know the word ‘ironically’ is over-used and for some reason often employed to mean ‘exactly as you would expect’ but I think it is appropriate here. Essex group The Tremeloes were signed by Decca in preference to The Beatles following the latter’s flop audition on New Year’s Day 1962, thereby demonstrating that the oft-quoted line that Decca’s Dick Rowe is supposed to have said to Brian Epstein – ‘Guitar music is on the way out’ – was either erroneous, or just an attempt by Rowe to get Epstein out of his office. (Additionally, anyone who has actually listened to the Decca session tapes will know that Rowe’s decision was based on pretty sound evidence.) Yet in the end, The Tremeloes had their first hit by shamelessly copying The Beatles, covering ‘Twist and Shout’ in the wake of The Beatles’ version and then following it up with another soul cover (and a very smart choice, too).



I couldn’t be bothered to wade further down the charts than number one, but I’d be very interested to hear any other records from ’63 that are particularly good/bad/interesting in a Beatles context. If you have any suggestions, do leave a comment.

With The Beatles (1)

Do you like The Beatles? Are you a MASSIVE PONCE? Well, then you’ll be wanting a needlessly obscure Beatles track for your All-Time Top Ten Beatles Tracks Of All Time, won’t you? It’s tricky because The Beatles don’t really have obscure tracks – in the last couple of months, I’ve heard ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ (which isn’t even in the Top Ten Tracks On Revolver) and ‘Hey Bulldog’ on the radio (which works slightly counter to my intentions for this blog, but I’m not prepared to dive across the room towards my stereo’s off-switch shouting ‘NOOOOOO’ in slow motion every time they play a Beatles song I haven’t got to yet). REM’s Peter Buck set new standards in poncey Beatles one-upmanship when Uncut asked him for his three favourite Beatles songs and he named a B-side (‘The Inner Light’), an out-take (‘That Means A Lot’) and a demo only available on bootlegs (‘Bad To Me’). Top poncing, Peter! However, may I humbly suggest:



All right, I wouldn’t REALLY put it in my top ten, because I like to think I’m not a ponce, but I do think ‘Soldier of Love’ is the highlight of Live At The BBC, an album which is often more historically interesting than musically outstanding. That the material there largely doesn’t compare with their best is understandable considering it was recorded on an even tighter timescale than Please Please Me (on one occasion, they laid down 17 session performances in a day) and on the BBC’s equipment, which tends to give a rather weedy sound. However, ‘Soldier of Love’ stands out for the force of its performance, which comes drenched in melodrama and features great interplay between Lennon on lead vocals and McCartney and Harrison backing him.

After a few plays, I was wondering why this had never been recorded for a proper Beatles album. Like ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ from Please Please Me, on which Lennon demonstrated that it’s harder to get ‘sure’ to rhyme with ‘more’ if you’re from Liverpool rather than Alabama, it was originally recorded by soul singer Arthur Alexander. However, Lennon seems to have had a better grasp on ‘Soldier of Love’ and with beefed-up production, it could’ve become known as one of their best covers. So why didn’t it?

I consulted Ian McDonald and he explained why. With his ever-keen technical ear for music, he points out in Revolution in the Head that Lennon clearly liked ‘Soldier of Love’ very much indeed, so much that he nicked various aspects of it for no less than three songs on With The Beatles – ‘It Won’t Be Long’, ‘All I’ve Got To Do’ and ‘Not A Second Time’. I must admit that I struggle to hear the resemblance between ‘Soldier of Love’ and the first of those, but ‘All I’ve Got To Do’ clearly carries over its shuffling rhythm whilst ‘Not A Second Time’ uses a very similar ‘pushed’ phrase at the start of each verse and its tone is generally alike. So obviously ‘Soldier of Love’ couldn’t go on the album, because it would’ve made the album more samey and exposed where Lennon had been cribbing from.

It’s interesting to look at With The Beatles in the light of the stuff on Live At The BBC. The initial sessions in the summer of 1963 coincided with the Beatles’ busiest spell recording for BBC Radio, since at this stage Brian Epstein was still saying yes to any opportunity to promote the group. Soon it became clear that he could afford to be more choosy – in fact, the group were in such huge demand that they were in danger of becoming overexposed – but for a spell they were recording BBC sessions constantly. This included fifteen editions of their own series, Pop Go The Beatles, for which they performed five or six songs per show. Flogging their recorded repertoire of sixteen songs over and over again wasn’t an option, so they delved deep into their repertoire and performed dozens of cover songs that hadn’t yet made it to record (most of which never would). The first day’s recording for With The Beatles, which took place in the middle of the Pop Go The Beatles sessions, shows them capitalising on this extensive warm-up by laying down four cover versions, all old numbers from their act which they’d lately exhumed for BBC sessions. At the second album session twelve days later, they added two more such covers.

I’ve always believed that one of the areas where With The Beatles scores over its predecessor is in the choice of cover material, and we probably have those BBC sessions to thank. By the summer of 1963, The Beatles’ live set was more restricted than in their club days. They were playing clipped sets and were obliged to wheel out the hits (although it’s surprising to note that singles tended to only stay in the set for a year or so – most bands with a hit like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ would have ended up playing it every show for the rest of their careers, but it was dropped from the set after the 1964 American tour). Cover versions had once formed the core of the Beatles’ set and the addition of their own compositions might have seemed quite presumptuous. Now the situation was reversed – people went to Beatles concerts to hear Beatles songs, not stuff by other people. There was very little space for the group to road-test their old covers in front of their new audiences.



However, a pressured group still needed to pad out their album with some covers and Pop Goes The Beatles would have been hugely valuable, allowing them to refresh their memories of a large stack of songs and select the very best. That’s reflected on the album, which has only one puzzling duffer in the form of ‘Devil In Her Heart’ (quite why they thought this was needed isn’t clear, as Harrison already had two lead vocals). ‘Til There Was You’ became a very useful pace-changer, often wheeled out on TV to great effect, whilst ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ and ‘Money’ really are plausible candidates for a Beatles Top Ten. Moreso than ‘The Inner Light’, anyway.

Please Please Me (2)

It’s often been said of Please Please Me that it was essentially a recording of The Beatles’ live set. Indeed, this has been said by at least one member of the band – Harrison says as much in the Anthology interviews. However, it’s worth considering that, although The Beatles should still be considered the primary sources of information about The Beatles, they have been known to misremember which tracks were on their own albums. I suspect the line-up of Please Please Me didn’t quite select itself by default.

There’s probably no great mystery about the original songs which made the cut for the album. Although Lennon and McCartney had written many, many songs over the years, they didn’t consider most of them to be up to scratch. McCartney would later unearth a couple of his early efforts – ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ and ‘When I’m 64’ – but in the main, the nine originals which were recorded for Please Please Me (they failed to record Hold Me Tight to their satisfaction, and it was put in mothballs until With The Beatles) were the best they had.

Having got themselves signed, and made the decision to push their own songwriting to George Martin, they were improving fast – Misery, which is a good effort, had been written only a couple of weeks earlier – but they didn’t have a stock of material to fall back on. Pick up Live At The BBC and you can hear ‘I’ll Be On My Way’ for an example of an original song they never bothered to properly record – in fact, by 1963 it had dropped out of their live set, and the BBC recording is probably the last time they played (or indeed thought about) it. Most bands would probably have considered it OK as something to pad out an LP, and indeed the song was recorded by Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas. (That the same group managed to have hits with a couple of sub-par Lennon/McCartney songs, ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ and ‘Bad To Me’, says a lot about the state of the British charts in those days.) However, either The Beatles set their standards higher or George Martin did. Possibly both. But clearly someone was operating with a level of quality control creditable for 1963.

What’s more interesting is the selection of covers. The standard version of events was that, having pissed away an hour of the evening session on ‘Hold Me Tight’, The Beatles kicked up a gear by recording songs they knew well. This is where the idea comes in that the album was essentially just their live set. However, thanks to the frankly mental depth of information that exists regarding The Beatles, we can easily demonstrate that it wasn’t as straightforward as that.

Mark Lewisohn’s Beatles Chronicle furnishes us with a then-recent Beatles set-list, from the first night of their first national tour (supporting Helen Shapiro), and it includes ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Baby’, a track which The Beatles never put on an album and which only exists as an off-air tape of a BBC session. (This is on Live At The BBC and when I first heard it I was taken aback to hear a crunchy, distorted drum sound of the sort you might expect on a Boards of Canada record, not played live for The Light Programme’s Saturday Club by Ringo Starr in 1963. However, I then realised that it was simply a very old, very dodgy recording.) On this tour they also played ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, recorded by Bing Crosby and soon to be taken up by Roy Orbison.



In addition, given the time constraints, you might have expected The Beatles to knock out one of the long-standing staples of their act, like ‘Long Tall Sally’ or ‘Rock And Roll Music’ – but given their rock’n’roll roots, it’s surprising to note that none of the covers are rock’n’roll tunes. Another obvious choice might have been ‘Some Other Guy’, which they evidently liked enough to keep in the set even after Please Please Me was released. By contrast, one of the songs they did record for the album – ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ – was, as Ian MacDonald notes in Revolution In The Head (the best book on The Beatles, bar none), quite a recent release and a relative newcomer to their act. The result is a performance that’s not as sure-footed as they probably would have liked. Why didn’t they play something more familiar?

One reason is probably that The Beatles’ own material was clearly influenced by the covers they played. Indeed, one reason they originally developed their own songs was because other groups on the Liverpool circuit were playing the same material they were, and if you had to follow a group who’d just played four or five of the songs on your own setlist, you were a bit screwed. ‘Some Other Guy’ was a prime example, an obscure R’n’B track released in 1962 which immediately became a Merseybeat standard, so ubiquitous that Ringo didn’t need to learn it upon joining The Beatles because his old group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, had played a version.



MacDonald speculates that The Beatles may have written ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ as an attempt at emulating ‘Some Other Guy’; putting two and two together, it’s not unreasonable to surmise that they wrote it precisely because they wanted a song which was like it, but which wasn’t being played by every other band in Liverpool. If that was the case, it’s no surprise that they opted against putting the two songs together on an album, as that might expose the roots of their own composition.

However, a greater consideration was probably The Beatles’ desire to appear distinctive. Decca was preparing to release a version of ‘Some Other Guy’ performed by fellow Merseybeat group The Big Three, and theirs was locally reckoned to be definitive – which is probably why The Beatles never recorded it. Perhaps they rejected their copious rock’n’roll repertoire because the songs were too famous, or they felt they couldn’t add much to the originals, or maybe they just seemed slightly passé. This is another thing which emerges if you consider Please Please Me in isolation from the rest of The Beatles’ career: it doesn’t really root itself in rock’n’roll at all. I’d often thought of it as a record that sits in the transitional space between 1950s and 1960s pop, but in spite of wearing its influences on its sleeve, Please Please Me is eager to establish its own identity.

The tunes they ultimately recorded were more esoteric and seem designed to showcase The Beatles’ versatility (more successfully than with the grating variety-act fare with which they had failed their audition for Decca the year before), establish their credentials and provide material they could make their own. Three of them are girl-group numbers, one of which – ‘Boys’ – had been their standard ‘drummer’s number’ since the days of Pete Best. (Although I’ve sometimes wondered whether that was some kind of cruel initiation prank played on Ringo. I can just imagine the others telling him: ‘Yeah, it’s a song about boys, that’s the one you’ll be singing. No, really, it’s fine – Pete used to sing it all the time,’ they said, sniggering behind their hands.) ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ was a soul ballad by Arthur Alexander which had only been a very minor chart hit in America, ‘A Taste of Honey’ was best known via an Acker Bilk version, and the celebrated ‘Twist and Shout’ had been recorded by The Isley Brothers as a bit of a cash-in (the Twist was the craze of the moment, and ‘Shout’ was the name of their biggest hit to date; it seems likely these were the main considerations in the Isleys recording it). If not obscure, this stuff certainly wasn’t obvious.



Now, compare this to how The Rolling Stones opted to introduce themselves to the world; with a Chuck Berry cover. Two singles later, their first big hit came with a Buddy Holly cover. The Kinks debuted with a Little Richard cover. Those three artists were practically The Beatles’ holy trinity, and the group’s repertoire included more than ten songs by each of them – but all three were eschewed on their debut album. From the beginning there was something a bit more savvy about The Beatles. They became the biggest and best band of their generation partly by luck, but mostly by good judgement.

Please Please Me (1)

Somewhere in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by devout Beatles fan Douglas Adams, there’s a neat line that goes ‘it is a well-known and popular fact that...’ and it is certainly true that there are facts which, for whatever reason, do become not just well-known but also popular. People like to repeat them to each other, to the point where they become sufficiently well-known that there’s no longer any point repeating them because everyone knows them already. They may once have been remarkable or interesting, but have long since become banal. Did you know that they only made twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers? That was big for a while, for some reason. Did you know that Santa Claus is red because Coca-Cola decided to depict him that way?

For a time, the all-time #1 banal fact about popular music was that The Beatles recorded their first album in a day. Like a number of banal facts – the Santa/Coke one, for example – this manages the double whammy of being not only banal, but also untrue. Yes, The Beatles were permitted a single day of recording sessions to record Please Please Me – but this was after their second single had started to shift copies, and the A and B-sides of the first two singles were slated for inclusion on the LP. Therefore, more than a quarter of the album was already in the can before that day’s recording started, and the album was in fact made over three sessions, several months apart.

OK, so cutting ten tracks in a day is still no mean feat. But what particularly annoys me about the popularity of the ‘recorded in a day’ myth is that it’s used as a stick with which to beat anybody who takes their time over making an album. Don’t get me wrong – one of my main bugbears with modern music is the rise of the ‘three-year album cycle’ where the artist and label flog one album to death before working on the next one (Nick Cave, bless him, believes that ‘musicians are the laziest bastards in the world, writing 12 songs every two years, and they haven’t got a clue what real work is like’). And yes, I find myself constantly wishing my favourite artists would pull their fingers out and be a little bit more prolific. But The Beatles made better albums than Please Please Me, and they partly did that by spending more time on them.

That’s one reason why, for many years, I didn’t rate the album that much. In some ways Please Please Me is a great demonstration of why recording your album in a day isn’t a great idea – most glaringly, in the fact that Lennon had a heavy cold and this is hilariously obvious on the record. (It also exposes the all-on-one-day myth – on the already-recorded Love Me Do and Please Please Me he’s clear, on Anna (Go To Him), Baby It’s You and particularly There’s A Place he’s audibly impaired.) It’s unthinkable today that any major label would release a record in this state, without calling the vocalist back in to re-do his performances – but this tells us a lot about the state of pop music in 1963. Trends were there to be cashed in on. There’s something to be said for not being too precious, but there’s also something to be said for actually doing things fucking properly.

That said, part of the point of this blog is to avoid the perspective that views The Beatles’ career as a natural progression towards Sgt Pepper. It seems absurd to point it out, but there was a time when The Beatles’ first album was the only Beatles album there was, and it’s worth thinking about it that way when you listen to it. Considering its hacked-out nature, what’s really striking is that it’s not a one-note effort like a lot of quick cash-ins are; it’s not a series of variations on their two hits. One of The Beatles’ strengths, in my view, is their electicism – but I’ve always regarded that as something that they developed as their career went on. Listen to Please Please Me in isolation and you can hear that they were already pretty eclectic, already far more than the tight little rock’n’roll band of Cavern myth. It seems this paid off, as over the summer of 1963 the record proved to have a better shelf life than any British pop album that had come before it.

Introduction

First of all, I should probably explain the ‘concept’ behind this blog, such as it is.

Last September, I bought all the Beatles albums all over again, in a shiny black box. Like a lot of people, I’d been waiting for them to be remastered for years; I eventually realised that I could make it happen. How? Why, by simply by completing my collection of Beatles albums on CD. I’d held off on filling in those final gaps for years, figuring that remasters had to be on the way, but sod’s law dictated that it wouldn’t happen until it would cause me the greatest personal inconvenience. So I finally bought Beatles For Sale, and sure enough the announcement of the remasters duly appeared in Mojo.

Anyway, I bought the box and gave my old CDs to my parents, who did own some Beatles albums in the 1960s but have somehow lost them all over the years, which is frankly bloody typical of them. Since then, I’ve listened to all the group’s material through in order, twice. Once, immediately after buying the box, in a couple of days; and again, in a way that turned out to be more interesting. To indoctrinate my two-year-old son into The Beatles, I played him the lot, three or four tracks at a time, on the short car journeys to nursery and the supermarket. This took about two or three months, and I found that by slowing it down, I could hear the group’s progression much better. I’d listen to one album, get my head around The Beatles being like that, then move onto the next.

So what I’ve decided to do is this. I’m going to listen through the Beatles at the rate of one album per month. In January, I’ll only listen to Please Please Me (and I’ll let myself have the From Me To You single as well). Next month, I’ll add With The Beatles – listening to Please Please Me will still be allowed, although I’ll probably be a bit sick of it by then. And so on and so on (in September I’ll do Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine together). The idea is to get a small taste of what it was like to listen to the albums at the time, able to look back on what the group had done but not skip forward and see what they’d do. Yeah, it’s artificial – I’m compressing it, and obviously I’ve heard everything already, scores of times – but it’s not like I can wipe the tracks from my brain like in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, is it? (If I could, I might actually be tempted. That’d be really interesting.)

Anyway, I’ll be posting scribbles and thoughts about the albums here as I go along. Some stuff about Please Please Me will appear here once I get it into shape.