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ISBN: 978-0-85712-361-9
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Picture credits:
Text pages: all images LFI, except page 72 – Rex Features and page 173 – Getty Images
Colour section: all images LFI, except: page 2: Cavern Club, page 3: group picture including Stuart Sutcliffe, page 4: New York arrival, page 5: Shea Stadium, Washington Coliseum, page 7: John & Yoko and page 8 portrait of Paul Mccartney – Getty Images. Page 7: Paul & Linda – Rex Features.
INFORMATION PAGE
INTRODUCTION
PART I
THE ORIGINAL ALBUMS
PART II
COMPILATION ALBUMS
PART III
NON-EMI SESSIONS
PART IV
THE NINETIES AND BEYOND
Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) born in Liverpool, the birthplace of all four Beatles.
George starts at the Liverpool Institute.
Paul enters the Liverpool Institute.
John Winston Lennon born.
James Paul McCartney born.
John starts at Quarry Bank High School, having left Dovedale Primary School in July.
George Harrison born.
John buys his first single, Lonnie Donegan’s skiffle hit, ‘Rock Island Line’.
George’s mother buys him a guitar from a boy at school for £3.
For his 14th birthday, Paul’s father buys him a trumpet which he swaps for a Zenith acoustic guitar, priced £15.
Inspired by Lonnie Donegan and fired up by Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, John and his school friend Pete Shotton start a skiffle group which they call The Blackjacks, soon to become The Quarrymen.
Paul’s mother dies of breast cancer. Within a few weeks of his mother’s death, Paul has written his first song, ‘I Lost My Little Girl’.
John and Paul meet for the first time, at the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete, held at St. Peter’s Church where The Quarrymen are performing.
Paul plays his first gig with The Quarrymen.
George joins the Quarrymen.
John’s mother, Julia, is killed in a road accident.
The Beatles leave Liverpool for their first season in Hamburg.
The group change their name to Johnny & The Moondogs.
John’s friend Stuart Sutcliffe is persuaded by John to buy a bass guitar and join Johnny & The Moondogs.
The Beatles invite Pete Best to be their drummer.
Stuart suggests The Beetles as a new name for the group. John decides on Beatles.
Paul takes over on bass.
They play their The Cavern under the name of The Beatles. The club would become forever associated with the group.
The Beatles, with Paul on bass and Stuart Sutcliffe watching but not playing, back Tony Sheridan on a recording session for German producer and orchestra leader Bert Kaempfert.
The Beatles’ accept Brian Epstein as their manager.
The start of a three-month,
13-week season at the Top Ten Club, Hamburg.
The Beatles audition for Decca Records but are turned down.
At a show at Litherland Town Hall, The Beatles play their Hamburg set which has an electrifying effect on the young audience.
Brian Epstein see The Beatles for the first time at the Cavern.
Stuart Sutcliffe, who had remained in Hamburg, is rushed to hospital with a brain haemorrhage, but dies in the ambulance. He was 22.
George Martin meets with Brian Epstein at Abbey Road.
Pete Best plays his last shown with the group.
The Beatles play a seven-week season at the Star-Club.
John marries Cynthia Powell.
The Beatles recorded four numbers in Abbey Road studios but George Martin does not like Pete Best’s drumming.
The Beatles record ‘Love Me Do’.
Ringo joins The Beatles.
The Star-Club, Grosse Freiheit, Hamburg. The Beatles’ fifth and final residency in Germany.
Abbey Road. All ten new tracks needed to make the Please, Please Me album are recorded in one ten-hour session
‘Love Me Do’ reaches number 17 in the Record Retailer’s Top 50 charts, its highest position.
The album Please, Please Me is released in the UK
‘From Me To You’ is released in the UK.
‘Love Me Do’ is released.
‘Please, Please Me’ is released in the UK. The Beatles appeared on ABC TV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars, performing ‘Please Please Me’.
The Beatles’ first UK tour opens at the Gaumont Cinema, Bradford. They are effectively bottom of the bill.
‘She Loves You’ is released in the UK and reaches number one where it stays for seven weeks.
The Beatles fly to Stockholm, arriving to a scene of screaming fans and uncharacteristic Swedish chaos.
The Beatles’ last performance at the Cavern club.
The Beatles record ‘She Loves You’.
The Beatles return to London where hundreds of screaming teenage girls gather on the roof of the Queen’s Building at Heathrow to welcome them back. Scenes like this occur at airports worldwide for the next three years.
The Beatles top the bill at ATV’s Val Parnell’s Sunday Night At The London Palladium, transmitted live from the theatre to an audience of 15 million viewers. Outside the Palladium fans stop traffic. It is the birth of ‘Beatlemania’.
The Beatles record ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’.
The first night of The Beatles’
Autumn Tour, their first series of concerts as unchallenged headliners. Box-office chaos erupts everywhere.
‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ is released.
The Beatles begin filming A Hard Day’s Night.
The album With The Beatles is released.
The Beatles fly to New York City on Pan Am flight 101, where 3,000 fans are waiting at JFK airport.
They make their US live debut at the Washington Coliseum, protected by 362 police officers.
In Paris The Beatles learn that ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ has reached number one in America.
It had taken only three weeks to reach the top position.
The Beatles appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. The Nielsen ratings show that 73,700,000 people had watched The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, not just the largest audience that Sullivan had ever had, but the largest audience in the history of television.
The Beatles arrive back in London at 8:10 am to a tumultuous welcome.
‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and the album of the same name are released in the UK.
The album Beatles For Sale is released.
In the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the week of April 4, The Beatles occupy no fewer than 12 places, including the top five, an unprecedented achievement that is unlikely ever to be equalled.
‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is released in the UK.
The US tour closes with a charity concert at the Paramount Theater, Broadway, New York City.
The Beatles set off on their 25-date American tour.
Drummer Jimmy Nicol is recruited to stand in for ill Ringo during the first week of a tour to Denmark, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. In Adelaide police estimate that 200,000 people line the ten-mile route of their motorcade from the airport to the city centre.
Ringo marries Maureen Cox in London.
After a show at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Bob Dylan visits The Beatles at their New York hotel where they smoke grass together.
John takes LSD for the first time.
Paul writes the lyrics to ‘Yesterday’ in the car on the way from the airport.
The album Help! is released.
The Beatles fly to the Bahamas from Heathrow to begin filming Help!;
The Beatles arrive at JFK Airport to begin their third US tour.
The Beatles film an Indian restaurant sequence at Twickenham, and George is introduced to Indian music for the first time.
The Beatles play Shea Stadium, the biggest rock in history at that time.
‘Ticket To Ride’ is released.
The Beatles are invested with their MBEs.
The Beatles arrive back in London. George: “We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans.”
George marries Pattie Boyd at the Leatherhead & Esher Register Office, Surrey.
The Beatles begin their final world tour in Germany.
The London Evening Standard publishes an interview with John Lennon in which he says: “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” His words upset no-one in Great Britain but when they were reprinted in the US, Christian fundamentalists react with hate and outrage.
The Beatles last stage appearance in the UK at the NME Poll Winners concert at Wembley.
The single ‘Day Tripper’ and album Rubber Soul are released.
The tour continues in Japan.
The Beatles fly to the Philippines where they inadvertently offend Imelda Marcos, the wife of the President, by failing to attend a party. The next day they are spat at, insulted and jostled as they run the gauntlet to get to their plane.
The Beatles fly to the US, fort their final tour. In Chicago John is forced to apologise for something which the Americans had taken out of context. The tour proceeds amidst assassination threats.
‘Penny Lane’ backed with ’Strawberry Fields Forever’ is released.
The album Revolver reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, where it remains for six weeks.
Japanese artist Yoko Ono makes her first public appearance in Britain, during an art symposium in Covent Garden, London.
For the first four months of the year the Beatles are at Abbey Road recording Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The last ever Beatles concert, at Candlestick Park, San Francisco.
The American magazine Datebook publishes John interview in which he said, “We’re bigger than Jesus now.” A DJ in Birmingham, Alabama, organises an immediate boycott of The Beatles’ music, and broadcast his intention to conduct a ‘Beatle-burning’ bonfire of the group’s records.
John meets Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery, Mason’s Yard, London.
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is released.
John and Cynthia, Paul and Jane, and George and Patti attend a lecture by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the London Hilton on Park Lane.
Brian Epstein is found dead in his London house.
The Beatles perform ‘All You Need Is Love’ on the BBC Our World live worldwide TV link-up watched by 200 million viewers.
The EP Magical Mystery Tour is released in the UK.
The Beatles inform the national press, who were besieging the Maharishi’s meditation centre in Bangor, that they have renounced the use of hallucinogenic drugs.
Filming for Magical Mystery Tour begins.
Magical Mystery Tour is given its world premiere on BBC Television and is panned by the critics, The Beatles first public ‘failure’.
The ‘White Album’ is released.
John and Paul give a press conference at the Americana Hotel on Central Park West to announce the formation of Apple.
John begins his relationship with Yoko Ono.
John pleads guilty possession of cannabis at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court. This conviction was to haunt John for years as it was used by the Nixon administration in repeated attempts to deny him a Green Card for residence in the US.
George, Patti, John and Cynthia fly from London Airport to India, followed a few days later by Paul, Jane, Ringo and Maureen. In India, at the Maharishi’s retreat, they write a number of songs.
Abbey Road. Work began on what will to become the double album The Beatles, usually known as the ‘White Album’.
Officers from the drugs squad raid John and Yoko’s London flat and find cannabis. They are charged with possession and obstructing the police.
John and Yoko are married in Gibraltar.
The Beatles, with Billy Preston, perform live on the flat roof of the Apple offices on Savile Row in central London. Traffic is brought to a halt as the lunchtime crowds gather on the pavement below. John ends the set, and The Beatles’ live career, with the words “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.”
‘Get Back’ is released.
Under pressure from Paul to return to live performance, The Beatles begin rehearsals for a proposed film, which will become Let It Be, at Twickenham Film Studios.
John and Yoko meet with Allen Klein, and John decides on the spot to make him his personal adviser.
Paul and Linda are married at Marylebone Register Office.
Allen Klein is appointed business manager of Apple.
Abbey Road sessions begin.
The Beatles pose together for a photo session in the grounds of John’s mansion Tittenhurst Park, the last ever Beatles photo shoot, and their last appearance together at any Beatles event.
Let It Be is released.
Abbey Road is released.
The now famous photograph of The Beatles walking across the zebra crossing near the Abbey Road recording studio is taken.
Paul finishes off the master tapes of his solo album McCartney.
Ringo becomes the last Beatle to play at a Beatles recording session, adding a drum part to ‘I Me Mine’.
During a meeting at Apple, John informs Allen Klein that he is quitting The Beatles.
Phil Spector is invited to complete the Let It Be project.
Paul effectively quits The Beatles by stating, in a press release that he does not foresee a time when he and John will become an active songwriting partnership again.
The Beatles revolutionised pop music in the Sixties. A cliché? Yes, of course. But it’s become a cliché simply because it’s true, and because a cliché is the only possible response to something as overwhelming and staggering as The Beatles’ career. In the artificially-hyped multinational media world of the twenty-first century, The Beatles’ sales figures will be, and are being, outclassed by entertainers with barely a fraction of their talent and artistry. But those achievements wouldn’t have been possible in the first place without The Beatles, who rescued a brand of popular music that was in danger of fading into oblivion, and turned it into a medium that produced million-dollar returns - and art. That, finally, is The Beatles’ greatest claim to fame. Working under immense pressure, to schedules that would baffle the sedentary superstars of the modern era, ‘ they produced thirteen great I albums, and more than 20 singles, in a little over seven years.
Not only that, they never ceased to stretch and broaden the palette of pop and rock –incorporating the lyrical poetry of folk singers like Bob Dylan, the psychedelia of the American West Coast, the jangle of folk-rock and the gutsiness of roots genres like blues and country, without sounding for a second like anyone but themselves. Masters of pastiche, they were also the most original and experimental artists in rock history – eager always to push at boundaries, to find out what might happen if you played that instrument in that room with the tape running backwards and all pre-conceptions left outside the door.
Incorporating influences from every branch of popular music, and even beyond to the classical world, they returned the compliment in full, inspiring musicians in rock, pop, folk, jazz, R&B, country and blues in a way that will never be possible in the future. Their fashions, argot and habits were imitated by millions. They set the social agenda for the West’s most playful and adventurous decade of the last century. They provided the soundtrack for a generation. And they also taped about 200 of the greatest pop records of all time, examined in the following pages, CD album-by-album.
Few artists in any field affect a generation beyond their own. To survive more than 20 or 30 years after your death requires a combination of genius and luck. After that, it’s in the lap of the gods. But alone of the pop performers of the 20th Century, it’s safe to predict that The Beatles’ music will live forever.
It requires a leap of the imagination to return to the innocent days of 1963, when The Beatles recorded and released their first two long-playing albums. The common currency of teenage pop was the three-minute single, or at a stretch the two-for-the-price-of-two 45rpm extended player (EP). Albums, or LPs as they were universally known in the early Sixties, were regarded as being beyond the financial reach of most teenagers; and with the oldest of The Beatles themselves no more than 22 when their first album was recorded, the teen audience was definitely EMI’s target.
Only adult performers like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were allowed to use the 30- or 40-minute expanse of the LP as a personal artistic statement. For the rest, the LP was unashamedly a cash-in – either for a film, or else for die-hard supporters entranced by a hit single or two. Hence the full title of The Beatles’ début album, which defined its selling points precisely: Please Please Me, Love Me Do and 12 Other Songs.
Much has been made of the fact that 10 of the record’s 14 tracks were recorded during one day; but that was the way the pop business operated in 1963. This haste was proof of The Beatles’ junior status at EMI, and also of the company’s desire to rush an LP onto the market before teenage Britain found a new set of heroes. Remember that the band had yet to score their first No. 1 when the album was recorded: the extended session represented a commendable act of faith on the behalf of producer George Martin.
Four of the album’s titles were already in the can, via their first two singles, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’. The rest – a mix of originals and covers – was a cross-section of their typical concert fare, with one exception: the group’s penchant for covers of Chuck Berry and Little Richard rock’n’rollers was ignored, presumably because George Martin believed the era of rock’n’roll was past.
Recorded on two-track at Abbey Road, the album was mixed into mono and very rudimentary stereo – the latter format claiming only a tiny proportion of the market in 1963. Until 1968, The Beatles regarded the mono versions of their albums as the authentic representation of their work; and if they’d been asked, they would no doubt have agreed with George Martin’s decision to prepare the CD mix of Please Please Me in mono. But stereo-philes, particularly in America, regarded this decision as barbarism in disguise, and continue to lobby for the release of the CD in stereo.
With a simple count-in, Paul McCartney captured all The Beatles’ youthful exuberance in the opening seconds of their début album. Lyrically naïve, melodically unpolished, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was still classic Beatles’ rock’n’roll – Lennon and McCartney trading vocals as if they were chewing gum between syllables, the falsetto ‘ooos’ that soon became a Beatles trademark, the rising chords of the middle eight that promised some kind of sexual climax, and the tight-but-loose vigour of the playing. And the record ended with a triumphant clang of a guitar chord matched by a whoop from McCartney. No doubt about it, The Beatles had arrived.
Right from the start of their recording career, The Beatles were encouraged by manager Brian Epstein to work as a songwriting factory, turning out hits to order for other artists. By February 1963, their reputation had yet to acquire its later power, and fellow performers more often than not turned them down. Helen Shapiro was offered this Lennon composition the week before The Beatles recorded it themselves, but her management declined. Unabashed, Lennon and McCartney romped through what was supposed to be a declaration of lovelorn anguish like two schoolboys on half-day holiday. Never has a song about misery sounded so damn cheerful.
Trivia note: the sheet music for this song, as copied by Kenny Lynch’s early cover version, gives the first line as: “You’ve been treating me bad, misery.” Lennon and McCartney sang something much more universal: “The world’s been treating me bad”.
If The Beatles had been allowed more than a day to make this album, they would no doubt have re-recorded the instrumental backing for this rather laboured cover of an Arthur Alexander R&B hit. But there was no faulting Lennon’s vocal, which had already hit upon the mixture of romantic disillusionment and supreme self-interest that became his trademark when tackling a love song. It was almost sabotaged, though, by the pedestrian nature of McCartney and Harrison’s backing vocals.
At The Beatles’ Decca audition in January 1962, George Harrison threatened to surface as their prime lead vocalist. A year later, he’d already been relegated to cameo appearances, as on this charmingly cheerful cover of The Cookies’ New York girl-group hit, which The Beatles had only recently added to their repertoire.
If George was restricted to cameos, Ringo Starr’s vocal contributions to The Beatles’ recording career were purely tokens, to keep his fans from causing a fuss. He bawled his way through The Shirelles’ 1960 US hit with enthusiasm if not subtlety, nailing the song in just one take. Presumably nobody in 1963 stopped to wonder why Ringo was singing a lyric that lauded the joys of boys, rather than the opposite sex. The song, a raucous 12-bar rock’n’roller, had been a Beatles standard for a couple of years, Ringo having inherited the number from former drummer Pete Best.
Unlike Paul McCartney, John Lennon took time to slide into the conventions of pop songwriting. ‘Ask Me Why’ illustrated what happened before he acquired the knack. From the difficult rhythm of the opening lines to the cut-and-paste structure of the middle section, it was a song that seemed to have been constructed painfully, bar-by-bar, rather than flowing naturally like McCartney’s early efforts. Careful study of his role models, like Smokey Robinson and Arthur Alexander, soon rewarded Lennon with a keen grasp of the essentials of composing, though not in time to prevent this number being consigned to the flipside of ‘Please Please Me’.
Though no evidence remains on tape, The Beatles’ original arrangement of ‘Please Please Me’ was apparently closer to a Roy Orbison ballad than a beat group number. It was attempted during the group’s second EMI session in September 1962, George Martin remembering it as “a very dreary song”. He suggested that the group soup up the arrangement – something that was done to such effect that it became their first No. 1 at the end of February 1963.
In up tempo form, it became an overt sexual invitation on Lennon’s part, and a clear sign that The Beatles were more than just another pop group. Their harmonies, the opening harmonica riff, and Ringo’s accomplished drumming testified to a remarkable surge in confidence since their first EMI sessions.
As with ‘Love Me Do’, there are two different versions of this song on EMI releases. The stereo mix, unavailable on CD, utilised an alternate take on which Lennon and McCartney messed up their vocals. Quite how that blatant a mistake escaped the notice of George Martin remains to be answered.
Despite the claim on the album cover, this track wasn’t the one issued on the first Beatles single. It was the same song, true enough, but not the same recording. At the group’s début session, on 4 September 1962, they had struggled through more than 15 takes of ‘Love Me Do’ before George Martin was remotely satisfied. A week later, they returned to London, to find session drummer Andy White ready to take Ringo Starr’s place. Having only recently replaced Pete Best in the band, Ringo must have wondered whether his own days were numbered. White duly handled the sticks on a remake of the song, with Ringo dejectedly banging a tambourine on the sidelines. For reasons that remain unclear, it was the initial version of ‘Love Me Do’ which appeared as the group’s first 45. But when their album was assembled, George Martin elected to use the Andy White recording instead – presumably because the tape of the single had been sent overseas to an EMI subsidiary. Later in 1963, the decision was made to use the White take on all future pressings of the single, as well; and from then until 1982, Ringo’s recording début with The Beatles remained officially unavailable.
The song itself was a genuine
Lennon/McCartney collaboration, its plodding beat enlivened by Lennon’s harmonica solo. That was a gimmick he picked up from Bruce Channel’s spring 1962 hit, ‘Hey Baby’, and proceeded to use many times over the next two years. Without the gimmick, ‘Love Me Do’ hadn’t previously been regarded as one of the highlights of the group’s original repertoire.
There’s a clear division in The Beatles’ early work between the songs they wrote before ‘Please Please Me’, and the ones that came immediately after. McCartney’s ‘P.S. I Love You’ dated from the early months of 1962, and had the slightly forced feel of ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Ask Me Why’ – with only Paul’s swoop into the upper register for the last middle section to suggest that any great genius was on display. Like ‘Ask Me Why’, it qualified for the album solely because it had appeared on the flipside of a single.
Lennon may have sounded slightly ill-at-ease on his own songs, but with covers, he already had the confidence of a born interpreter. The group’s boyish harmonies didn’t distract him from giving another Shirelles hit a commanding vocal performance that marked him out as The Beatles’ most distinctive voice.
Given away simultaneously to fellow Brian Epstein protégé Billy J. Kramer (for a hit single), and to George Harrison (for this LP), ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ was a Lennon composition - inspired by a line he remembered from a Disney song that his mother used to sing. “I thought it would be a good vehicle for George because it only had three notes and he wasn’t the best singer in the world,” Lennon explained charitably in later years.
In Hamburg and Liverpool, The Beatles were required to work up a sheaf of ballads and standards, which would melt the hearts of even the most anti-rock audience they would be forced to entertain. McCartney was the Beatle with the heritage in pre-Elvis pop, and it fell to him to perform the group’s token demonstration of ‘sophistication’ – an American song recorded most notably by Lenny Welch, but fast becoming a favourite among sedate jazzmen and big bands around the world.
In retrospect, the inclusion of this song seems laughable – the Stones would never have made such a blatant cop-out – but in McCartney’s capable hands, ‘A Taste Of Honey’ became another slice of Beatle music. The group didn’t much care for the song, though: when they performed it live, Lennon invariably changed the chorus to ‘A Waste Of Money’.
Forget the theory that John Lennon only started singing about himself when he starting taking drugs. Listen to the words of this cheery beat tune, and you’ll find his first piece of self-analysis: “There’s a place where I can go, when I feel low, when I feel blue. And it’s my mind, and there’s no time, when I’m alone.” No-one – not even Bob Dylan – was writing songs like that in 1963. But nobody told John Lennon that. The result: the first self-conscious rock song, beating The Beach Boys’ equally self-obsessed ‘In My Room’ by several months.
“I couldn’t sing the damn thing, I was just screaming.” So said John Lennon, about the first take of the final song recorded during The Beatles’ marathon 11 February session. His voice shot by the rigours of the day’s schedule, and unable to fall upon the twin crutches of pills and booze which had fuelled The Beatles on their night-long gigs in Hamburg, Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock’n’roll.
Until McCartney matched it with ‘Long Tall Sally’ a year later, this was the supreme Beatles rocker – a cover, ironically enough, of a tune that the Isley Brothers had rescued from an abysmal original recording by Phil Spector’s charges, The Top Notes. In that one take, Lennon cut Britain’s best rock’n’roll record to date, and the band kept pace with him, right down to Ringo’s exultant flourish on the drums as The Beatles reached home.
Four months after they released their début album, The Beatles began work on their follow-up. By the time it was released, in November 1963, the group were the hottest product in British show-business. Second time around, there was no need to sell the album on the reputation of a recent hit single: with Christmas on the horizon, EMI knew the fans would buy anything The Beatles released. What they didn’t realise, though, was that With The Beatles would prove to be such a giant step beyond their hastily assembled début.
The cover artwork immediately revealed that more thought had gone into this album than its predecessor. Whereas Please Please Me used the standard smiling pop pose as its cover design, With The Beatles boasted a much artier Robert Freeman photo, with the group’s heads arranged in careful line, shot in half-light. It emerged later that this trick was simply borrowed from much earlier pictures of the group, taken by the German photographer Astrid Kirchherr. But as far as the public was concerned, the artwork was startlingly new.
Musically, too, With The Beatles announced that the revolution had arrived. The Beatles kept faithfully to the same mix of originals and outside songs that had filled their first long-player, but they were already beginning to play the studio as an instrument. On Please Please Me, they’d briefly discovered the potential joys of overdubbing. Now, with more time on their hands, they went to town. “The first set of tricks was double-tracking on the second album,” John Lennon admitted many years later. “We were told we could do it, and that really set the ball rolling. We double-tracked ourselves off the second album.” And they did it without sacrificing an ounce of the freshness and exuberance that had become The Beatles’ hallmark – audible most clearly on the mono mix of the record, which was again favoured by George Martin for the CD release.
Throughout their career, The Beatles never lost sight of the importance of having hit singles. Certainly in 1963, their continued production of hits was their passport to the future, and they blatantly concocted potential chartbusters as and when required.
Lennon and McCartney competed for the honour of winning an A-side, with only pride and prestige at stake – the songwriting royalties for all their songs were split equally between them, after all.
Like ‘She Loves You’, the single they recorded a month earlier, Lennon’s ‘It Won’t Be Long’ was built around a ‘yeah, yeah’ chorus. Two singles with the same gimmick would have become a straitjacket, so ‘It Won’t Be Long’ was ‘relegated’ to the position of lead track on the album, where it was every bit as effective a hook as ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ had been on Please Please Me.
Compare this song to ‘Ask Me Why’, written around a year earlier, and the rapid maturity in Lennon’s songwriting is immediately apparent. John singled out Arthur Alexander (the man who’d written ‘Anna’, plus several other Beatles stage favourites) as his prime inspiration for this soulful ballad. He stretched the word ‘I’ over seven syllables in the opening line, using all the melismatic flair of Sam Cooke or Jackie Wilson, and proved how well he understood the power of melody by shifting into a higher register for the final chorus as a cry of passion. It was a remarkably assured performance, which would have been beyond anyone else in the group at this early stage of their career.
While Lennon was converting emotion into music, McCartney was writing unforgettable melodies. Classical students claim there’s a tune of Tchaikovsky’s buried in ‘All My Loving’, but it’s an irrelevant point, as the finished song is pure Beatles – the most commercial song they recorded in 1963 that wasn’t issued as a single. Often maligned as musicians, The Beatles prove their worth on this song: Harrison’s lead break is beautifully tidy and restrained, while Lennon’s lightning rhythm guitar playing is the powerhouse of the arrangement.
“That was the first song that I wrote, as an exercise to see if I could write a song,” George Harrison confessed in his autobiography, I Me Mine. “I don’t think it’s particularly good.” Faced by two prolific bandmates, Harrison was envious of their ability and their royalty cheques. Liverpool friend Bill Harry nagged George on the subject while he was ill in bed during a Beatles tour, and Harrison responded by turning his reaction into a slightly clumsy but reasonably accomplished song. Interestingly, it didn’t sound anything like his own musical heroes, Carl Perkins or Goffin & King, but came out as a facsimile of what Lennon & McCartney were writing – just as beat groups across the country were doing in their bedrooms.
Even The Beatles occasionally sounded like tired hacks, though this early in their career, they could always summon the enthusiasm to hide their lack of inspiration. Five years later, this contrived but chirpy pop tune would have been classed as bubblegum. But on With The Beatles, Lennon and McCartney’s dynamic vocals and Lennon’s chest-expanding harmonica solo turned a piece of hackwork into 106 seconds of pure energy.
Standards time again, as Paul filled the ‘A Taste Of Honey’ slot with the hit song from the Broadway musical, The Music Man. He sang the song as if he meant every word, and George Harrison contributed an accomplished acoustic guitar solo – so accomplished, in fact, that some cynics have questioned whether he actually played it. But the solo on the rendition they recorded onstage in Hamburg was equally dextrous, so unless they’d smuggled a session man into the Star-Club, George was the man.
During 1963, the American stable of Motown labels, owned by Berry Gordy, began to enjoy regular distribution for their youthful soul records in Britain. The Beatles were instant fans, to the extent that three of the tracks on With The Beatles were covers of recent Motown hits.
On their first album, ‘Chains’ and ‘Anna’ had been enthusiastic renditions of outside songs, without threatening to become definitive. On ‘Twist And Shout’, however, and again with The Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr. Postman’, Lennon’s performance was so magical that it made the original sound like an imitation. The Beatles tightened up The Marvelettes’ vocal arrangement, while Lennon’s lead dripped with authority and self-confidence. It was a thrilling conclusion to the first side of the album, which had already seen the group tackling everything from soul to rock to balladry with ease.
Even before there was a Beatles, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison had been performing this Chuck Berry rock’n’roll standard from 1956. During 1961, the song passed from John’s hands to George, who also had to double as lead guitarist – fine in the studio, when he could overdub the solo, but prone to being more erratic onstage. Despite their heritage as a rock’n’roll band, The Beatles sounded strangely uncomfortable the first time they cut an authentic American rock song in the studio, hurrying the pace to the point that George had problems fitting all the words into each line.
During the sessions for their first album, The Beatles had taped and then abandoned a version of this self-composed beat number – and the tape was subsequently destroyed. If the take that was considered good enough for release is anything to go by, the original must have been disastrous, as this remake has a McCartney vocal that strays distressingly off key, to the point that neighbouring dogs are likely to howl with distress. Only a handful of Beatles recordings can be said to be below par, but this is one of them.
Not so ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’, Lennon’s second brilliant hijacking of a Motown song. Sublime though The Miracles’ original is, it’s easily outclassed by The Beatles’ effortless interpretation. John’s vocal could be used as a dictionary definition of reluctant infatuation, while the decision to dramatise the phrase ‘tied up’ with a repeated break in the rhythm was a stroke of genius. The response vocals challenged George’s limited range to the hilt, but sheer enthusiasm won the day, as The Beatles stole another American song for their own.
By the time The Beatles finished work on this song, they knew that The Rolling Stones were issuing it as their second single. As the story goes, Stones manager Andrew Oldham spotted Lennon and McCartney in a London street, bundled them into his car, and requested a song for his new band. The Beatles played the Stones the chorus of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, then went into another office to finish the bridge – emerging an hour or so later to display the completed effort to their visibly impressed juniors. The Stones played the song as an R&B tune; The Beatles gave it to Ringo, whereupon it became his usual concert showcase for the next three years. Amusingly, on the road Ringo usually managed to forget that the song had all of two verses, and ended up repeating the first one over and over again.
Aficionados of the American girl-group sound, The Beatles borrowed this tune from The Donays – probably the most obscure song they ever covered in the studio. It was George Harrison’s choice, and he responded with an energetic if not always convincing lead vocal, backed by the superb chorus harmonies of Lennon and McCartney.
‘Not A Second Time’ reinforced John Lennon’s status as the most adventurous of The Beatles when it came to composing. The rhythm of this piano-based song seemed to be on the verge of imminent collapse, but whereas this was a flaw on ‘Ask Me Why’, it suited the emotional disruption of the lyric this time around. Usually, John sounded completely in control of every romantic situation, even when the lyrics asserted otherwise, but everything about ‘Not A Second Time’ announced that Lennon was simply a pawn in her game – predating the more blatant emotional masochism of ‘Norwegian Wood’ by two years.
The third and last of the Motown classics moulded into pure John Lennon songs, Barrett Strong’s hit ‘Money’ took on a new life in this interpretation. The tentative delivery of the original was knocked off the pavement by Lennon’s steamroller vocal, every bit as tonsil-shredding as ‘Twist And Shout’ had been. As on ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, George Martin came into his own on keyboards: on the earlier track, he’d played Hammond organ, while this time he supplied the piano which was the root of the song.
But the piano wasn’t the only difference between this performance, and the far less convincing version of the same tune at The Beatles’ January 1962 audition. At Decca, Lennon had simply been singing Barrett Strong’s song. At EMI nearly two years later, he was living it, howling the lyrics as a piece of psychotherapy. And as many critics have noticed, he widened the context of the song by adding a single, throwaway phrase to the final choruses: “I wanna be free,” he cried, a prisoner to the passion that the rest of the song denied.
Trivial note: mono and stereo mixes of this song once again have slightly different Lennon vocals. And once again, the definitive version is included on the mono-only CD.
The transition from pop stars to film actors was already a well-trodden route by 1964. The pop business hadn’t yet cottoned on to the potential riches of international merchandising, but a hasty and cheap black-and-white movie was the next best thing. It also enabled The Beatles to be seen in towns and countries that they had no intention of visiting in person. It’s probably not a coincidence that The Beatles staged only one further lengthy UK tour after the A Hard Day’s Night film was released.
Although the film grossed millions of dollars in America, it was originally conceived as an entirely British phenomenon. The Beatles had been approached in the autumn of 1963, at which stage their fame had scarcely spread beyond their native land. Hence the low budget and black-and-white film: if United Artists had realised the movie would ever be shown in America, they would almost certainly have ensured it was made in colour.