The reissue of The Beatles catalog in remastered CD sets has presented the blogosphere with a unique opportunity to write new reviews of the band’s original slate of releases. This site’s posts on The Beatles are not written from an audiophile standpoint but rather relating a more personal experience of listening to their music in rough chronology.
1965 stands out now as the pivotal year in The Beatles’ evolution. As composers, The Beatles were drawing from increasingly diverse fonts of inspiration; as performers they were pushing past the limits of what the guitar-bass-drum tandem could contain. Even at the legendary Shea Stadium show, it was already clear that the four-piece live setting provided diminishing returns, and soon the nonstop roar of Beatlemania would force the group into the studio full-time. So its a fairly idiosyncratic year for The Beatles, and occasionally filled with awkward growing pains; but it’s quite rewarding.
We might as well start with the ugly redheaded stepchild of The Beatles’ catalogue, the cover of Larry Williams’ “Bad Boy”. This song never surfaced in the U.K. until the CD issue of the essential non-album track compilation Past Masters; before then it was just a stopgap track the group gave to Capitol Records to fill out one of the illegitimate retooled American albums. I’ve listened to it maybe three times ever, and I don’t plan to ever again.
In April of 1965, The Beatles released a new single, Ticket to Ride b/w Yes It Is. It’s a dramatic choice, with neither side an obvious candidate for a chart-topping pop hit. The A-side has a resigned John lyric about his girl leaving, but what stands out most of all is the arrangement. The droning bass and guitar anticipate the creeping influence of Eastern sounds on The Beatles’ music (especially on George); the thumping off-kilter drum pattern has been cited by Lennon as the first example of “heavy metal.” Maybe a stretch too far, but the overall effect must have been noteworthy and still sounds as melancholy and disoriented as ever. Historically this is also the first Beatles record featuring the increasingly virtuosic McCartney on lead guitar – you can already hear his signature “bend every string as hard as possible” playing style.
“Yes It Is” is superficially very similar to “This Boy” – a waltzy ballad with three-part harmony. It’s not quite as thrillingly effective as the older B-side, but the added nuances in the arrangement make it stand apart nonetheless. George utilizes a new piece of equipment for his guitar work, an effect pedal that fades his volume in and out. And the harmonies, while still exquisite, are deliberately dissonant and even ugly, fully expressing the psyche of the singer who has been traumatized by a break-up. I wouldn’t make the case for “Yes It Is” as one of the all-time greats, but I admire The Beatles for giving this much care and delicacy to a B-side.
In July, the next single arrived, Help b/w I’m Down. I mentioned in my thoughts about 1964 that the other Beatles, by all accounts, did not recognize any of Lennon’s darker compositions as cries for help. Somehow, their ignorance even extended when Lennon literally titled a song, “Help!“, in which John admits a staggering degree of vulnerability to a loved one and manages to pack a fair amount of complexity into what seems like a simple confessional. This is one of the Beatles’ most sturdily constructed and dramatically arranged songs; note especially the intro and chorus, in which the descending chords are are countered by the rising vocals of Paul and George. McCartney’s “I’m Down” complements the A-side well, channeling romantic and sexual frustration into a snarling Little Richard knock-off.
In August, the film Help! and its accompanying soundtrack album were released. The film was ultimately a letdown; even as a historical document of mid-60s Beatleness it pales in comparison to the esoteric Magical Mystery Tour. But the album is loaded with gems. It doesn’t have the unified wholeness or headlong rush of A Hard Day’s Night, but where it lacks in energy it bursts with nuance and curiosity. Side one is all the new songs from the film. Besides the two singles, the standout must be John’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” which gets by on John’s tortured lyric (supposedly directed at manager Brian Epstein who was totally gay-bones for Lennon); otherwise it masks its Dylan influence just enough to not become utter homage. John’s superficially more upbeat offering “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” can still be heard often on oldies stations, but ultimately it sounds even more nasty in its treatment of women as objects to be used for settling manly scores. The bouncy bongos and backing vocals tie it sonically to Lennon’s earlier misogynist classic “You Can’t Do That;” and the lyrics make it a compelling companion piece as well.
Paul’s contributions, “The Night Before” and “Another Girl” are sophisticated melodic confections, signifying little if anything. I prefer “The Night Before” for its labyrinthine key changes and distressed vocal performance; “Another Girl” features solid lead guitar work by McCartney (bend those strings, dammit!) but has the same icky way-too-upbeat-for-a-breakup vibe as “I’ll Follow the Sun.” George’s sole composition from the film is “I Need You,” a prototypical mid-tempo Harrison lament. The lyric is a little clunky but the arrangement smartly uses the volume pedal to imbue a sense of anxiety and disorientation.
Side two is where things start to get really interesting. Things kick off with the best Ringo song yet, a cover of Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally,” and the album ends with a spirited reading of “Dizzy Miss Lizzy;” in between are the five songs that mark the beginning of The Beatles’ next career phase. “It’s Only Love” is almost too much melodrama coming from Lennon, but the arrangement is so delicate and continental-sounding, it’s hard to understand that these are the same guys who slammed out “Twist and Shout” just two years earlier. George matches Paul’s gift for melody on “You Like Me Too Much,” Paul and John reveal disarming sensitivity on “Tell Me What You See;” and both songs hinge on vintage-60′s electric piano. The latter is particularly striking in its portrayal of a blossoming relationship and the hesitation that comes with opening yourself completely to a new person.
And then there’s McCartney’s jawdropping acoustic pairing of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Yesterday.” The prime placement of “Face” on the U.S. version of Rubber Soul has always led to a far greater estimation of the song over here than in Britain. It playfully opens with a feint, a spindly guitar duet that sounds like a great classical composition; then abruptly the band does a complete 180 into straight-up American country for the remainder of the song. I could extrapolate about how it sonically expresses the feeling of falling in love or some such nonsense, but regardless its my favorite part of the song and album. There remains little to be said about “Yesterday;” it’s been considered a standard since about five minutes after its release.
Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out is The Beatles first double-sided single – that is, it is the first single of theirs to make no distinction between an A-side and B-side. It’s a signal that band members and their handlers thought so highly of both tracks that it would be unfair to impugn the quality of one or the other by relegated it to the flip side. “Day Tripper” is defined by its George Harrison riff (ably doubled by McCartney’s bass). It’s one of the most instantly recognizable pieces of lead guitar in rock history (and a requisite for the beginning guitar player). The lyrics are straightforward blues, repeating three lines that paint a picture of a teasing woman who didn’t live up to the singer’s expectations. It could have been another exercise in barely controlled Lennon anger. But the riff and the vocal performances lend the tale an air of insouciant cool – blues for aloof Sixties hipsters.
“We Can Work It Out” is a stand-out collaboration between Lennon and McCartney, dominated by McCartney’s earnest optimism. Looking to resolve an argument, McCartney’s verses call for empathy and patience and acknowledge the possibility of being wrong; Lennon’s bridge ominously warns that life is too short and precious to waste on conflict. In the broadest sense, this plea for peace and understanding is an early paean to the zeitgeist that would define the late 1960’s. A pump harmonium adds warm texture to a simple arrangement, with a recognizable tempo shift in the bridge emphasizing John’s distaste for “fussing and fighting, my friend.” All in all, this isn’t one of my favorites, despite it’s status as an apparent A-side and its perpetual popularity on oldies radio.
Released in December 1965, Rubber Soul marks the beginning of a trio of albums generally regarded as The Beatles’ finest and most groundbreaking. Rubber Soul tends to be the most underrated of the three, and its innovations are definitely the subtlest. It’s the first album since A Hard Day’s Night to be all original material by the group – no covers – and the first to feature songwriting credits from all four members of the group. In many ways, this is the end of the line on the band that The Beatles started as, the album that pushes the rock combo arrangement of guitar + bass + drums to its full creative capacity. The dominant instruments of the era are stretched like the image on the album cover, used to create as many textures and moods as possible, before turning to orchestras and sound effects and albums as conceptual art.
Paul McCartney said in Anthology that the real brilliance of The Beatles was not so much any movement they created, but instead that they were absorbing and popularizing the trends that fascinated them. The mid-Sixties saw a boom in folk music as Bob Dylan epitomized the conscientious troubadour before turning to rock and spawning the ponderous folk-rock movement in his wake. More importantly, he introduced The Beatles to marijuana and inspired a new, often wincing honesty in John Lennon’s songwriting. Many songs on the album feature the genre’s artlessly strummed acoustic guitars, but it would be reductive to simply call Rubber Soul “the folk-rock album.” At most, three, maybe four, songs on the record can be grouped with that genre in mood or style.
The one that that instantly leaps out is Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown);” but the addition of warbly sitar already takes it beyond a simply Dylanism, and the loaded story in the lyrics is more broadly goofy, befitting The Beatles. George’s “If I Needed Someone” apes the chiming 12-string sound of The Byrds (which was already aped from Harrison in A Hard Day’s Night). The variety on the rest of the album belies the “folk rock” reputation, though. George’s other songwriting contribution, “Think for Yourself,” is a funky rebuke to conformity (or is it just a girl?) complete with melodic fuzz bass. Ringo also finally gets a songwriting credit on the forlorn country number, “What Goes On.”
McCartney’s songs are virtuosic in their breadth, if not as deeply felt as Lennon’s contributions. “You Won’t See Me” and “I’m Looking Through You” are surprisingly bitter, for all their tunefulness. “Drive My Car” is the sort of upbeat R&B that McCartney excelled at, and Lennon apparently had input in the saucy pick-up narrative. “Michelle” stands apart from the rest, one of the two best songs on the album. Possibly recorded entirely by McCartney, what started as a joke song making fun of Left Bank culture morphed into a breathtaking expression of unrequited (and untranslated) love. And all still with guitars, bass, and drums.
Lennon clearly towers over his peers in the writing department, essentially writing half of the album on his own (though “Wait” should probably count as a full Lennon-McCartney collabo). The musically and spiritually groovy “The Word” is another precursor to the imminent explosion of hippie culture. “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2o99_K5Pw” is a nice dark companion piece to “Michelle” – Lennon sounds like a fly who’s trapped in a spiderweb and kind of enjoying it. “Run for Your Life” sends the album out on a genuinely chilling note, perhaps the only bum note he hits here.
“Nowhere Man” and “In My Life” seem like the last gasp of greatness for John, before he decides to check out for the next few years. The empathy and earnestness exhibited in the writing are quite moving, but it wouldn’t be the same without the stunning arrangements. The former makes great use of the Byrds folk-rock style, especially in the ringing guitar solo. “In My Life” is an even greater achievement, creating texture unimaginable even two years earlier for a rock combo, but which would be impossible for an orchestra or acoustic instruments to duplicate. The fake harpsichord solo is almost always a guaranteed tear-jerker.
And so 1965 ends much the way it started: with John Lennon in a murderous rage. But the progress The Beatles had made musically and personally meant that they had crossed the point of no return.
