As a first album, and one recorded in 1963, when such things were a luxury, Please Please Me is about the best album we could reasonably expect. Being a reproduction of the live show, it's filled with covers (standard procedure at the time), and while some better the originals ("Twist and Shout", "Boys", "A Taste Of Honey") some fall far short ("Anna (Go To Him)", "Chains", "Baby, It's You").
The originals are somewhat hit-and-miss too by Beatles standards: the classics ("I Saw Her Standing There", "Please Please Me", "P.S. I Love You" and "Do You Want To Know A Secret") are leavened by some of Lennon/McCartney's lamest ("Misery", "There's A Place", "Ask Me Why"). Even "Love Me Do" seems more important historically, as the "first" Beatle track, than musically; without the career that followed it, it's doubtful that the single would be remembered well at all. George Martin may have been wrong about Ringo, but he had the song pegged correctly.
Still, Please Please Me had more quality material on it than many of its contemporaries, and would be regarded as a pop classic even if the boys had faded into obscurity immdeiately afterwards. Of course, based on the material here, what was about to happen was guaranteed to be quite different indeed.
This, their second UK release, was released a mere six months after the Please Please Me album, and was recorded between a slew of appearances on radio, TV and stage, not to mention endless photo ops and official functions. That may sound like an excuse for a lack of quality, but it isn't -- in the same period, the Fabs also recorded "She Loves You", "From Me To You", "This Boy", and "I Want To Hold Your Hand". Rather, the suits seemed to have focused on the singles rather than the follow-up album, which in '63 was the absolute best thing to do, because singles were the hot property then.
Although there's one song on With The Beatles that matches those classic singles -- the goosebump-inducing "All My Loving" -- most of the album is slightly inferior to the first. There's nothing quite as accomplished as "I Saw Her Standing There" or "Please Please Me".
It comes close, though, even mirroring the first album thematically ("It Won't Be Long" = "I Saw Her Standing There", "Money" = "Twist and Shout", "Till There Was You" = "A Taste of Honey"). The most interesting thing, though, is how this album and the singles released in the same six-month period all indicate a restlessness already developing in our boys. The tempos, arrangements, and lyrics all seem standard, but perverse little avant-garde pop conceits keep threatening to break through the surface. As Beatlemania exploded around the world in the next year, they would begin to do just that.
This album was preceded by singles like "She Loves You" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", both of which led us to believe that what we'd heard before was just the tip of the iceberg. AHDN was a bold move all around -- the first movie/album tie in, done by four foreigners who'd just stepped out of a country not known for good Rock. What's more, all 13 of these songs were originals. That may not seem like much of a statement now, but in the teenybopper Rock medium of the early 60's, it was apocalyptic. AHDN broke rules in half that hadn't even been recognized yet. much less challenged.
Ultimately, though, what counts is the music, and the most satisfying thing about a musical and cultural triumph like this is how solid the songs themselves really are. This is all steak and no sizzle; even the more vanilla songs here ("When I Get Home", "I'm Happy Just To Dance With You") are miles ahead of "Love Me Do", much less "Little Child". The songs themselves weren't just playing with established structure, they were boldly announcing that it was old hat. The opening and ending of the title track alone willfully slaughters the Top-40 single format. For the first time in ages, rock fans were being challenged to keep up, with the songs as their own reward. From this point on, the Beatles were in the vanguard of the world's greatest Popular Music artists. Anyone who didn't catch on yet was likely to be left behind.
Hence the much-discussed cover of Beatles For Sale, a cover that speaks volumes. The Beatles don't look vibrant, they look worn out and unhappy, a strange fate for four lads who many thought were living king's lives. And by this time, they were. The most astonishing piece of the Beatle legend may be how they managed to fit two albums, numerous singles, tours, public appearnaces, and photo shoots into each year, and not only emerge with their talent intact, but broadened. The Fabs had the hearts of lions. They simply worked harder. (Elvis faltered somewhat under the same hectic demands, and he never had to create, only perform.)
Still, Beatles For Sale (note that title!) is probably the biggest disappointment of the Beatles career, if only because it's the one and only time they consciously backed up from a previous accomplishment. After the triumph of A Hard Day's Night, it looked like they were merely giving us another Please Please Me.
Still, there are signs of change... John's writing was becoming more Dylanesque than ever, Paul's more melodic and expansive, and all four were progressing as musicians. As always, it was the little things, like the tympani on "Every Little Thing", that signaled the way to the future. And ironically enough, it was another promotional gimmick that would put them back on track.
Help is one last great stab at Beatlemania; although the formula wouldn't change completely until Revolver, the reliance on originals and the expansion of the Beatles' sound had its first embryonic stages here. Yesterday and You've Got To Hide Your Love Away were completely unlike anything that the Fabs - or anyone else, really - had tried. Dylan was obviously the template for the latter, but John built on the style and revealed a despondent, closely guarded self. Both songs were not just meant to capitalize on the percieved emotions of the Audience; they were emotion, perfectly captured with three minutes of wax and a handful of chords.
What all this meant is that the Beatles, under a crippling promotional schedule, failing romances, and the necessity of keeping a happy facade, had still managed to rewrite the rules of what rock and roll (and popular music) could be. They were all beginning to reveal themselves; they were beginning to dare to show us what they were, not what we wanted them to be. The Beatles' middle period is a transitional one, but no less fascinating for it. By the end of 1965, the Beatles world and our cheap knockoff would both be quite changed indeed.
Once again, the cover says a lot. The boys look a little bit tired, sort of like the similar group photo on Beatles For Sale, but this time, they seem wise, as if they'd come out the other side. What other band would literally look down on you like this? Whatever they felt like, they were moving in realms that few of us ever know -- and I don't mean the size of their pocketbook, or their fan base. They'd figured something out, recently, and they were about to shed their Liverpudlian bloke status and become their real selves. They didn't even need to sell the name anymore; it's not on the cover, and in 1966, that was unheard-of for a rock band. (Let's not even mention the hair.)
The music reflects this change; it's darker, more deeply romantic, more cynical, and more hopeful all at once. Would John have ever wished you dead before, little girl? Did anyone who watched Ed Sullivan think that John would offer to "show everybody the light"? Would Paul have been so cynical about love, and would you have ever thought of him as Charles Aznavour? Why isn't George here for us, and who is us, anwyay? (Note, too, that this is the first Beatles album with 4-track overdubbing. Sgt. Pepper would've never happened without it.)
In the months immediately after the release of this album, the Beatles would see the darker side of all their adulation, and respond by growing beyond it, so much so that they became a force unstoppable by anyone but themselves. This, then, may be the most important album the Beatles ever made, because it's not the harvest that matters so much as the sowing. This was the seed.
In any event, Revolver was the first product of the "adult" Beatles. On Rubber Soul and Help! the Fabs had made a point of rethinking and restructuring the moon-june-spoon love songs they were expected to play; by contrast, less than half of Revolver is even about love. Of those love songs, only the gorgeous "Here, There, and Everywhere" qualifies as a love song. The rest deal with love as adjunct to other things: nature ("Good Day Sunshine"), materialism ("And Your Bird Can Sing"), and joyless servitude ("For No One"). And if we're to believe Paul, "Got To Get You Into My Life" is actually about marijuana and its effect of leading him to "another kind of mind".
Sonically, things were moving apace as well. Whereas the mid-period Beatles would spice up arrangements with exotic elements like foreign instruments and studio trickery; here they were building the songs around them, from the raga of "Love You To" (a real breakthrough for George) to the tape effects of "Tomorrow Never Knows". Their attempt at Motown turned into "Got To Get You Into My Life"; their attempt at classical turned into "Eleanor Rigby". They tried for even more on Sgt. Pepper, but not everything worked as well; Revolver was arguably the first recorded album to attempt so much and achieve it all.
This album references or draws inspiration from Vivaldi, The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, the British Prime Minister, Ravi Shankar, and LSD. It also comes a mere four years after "Love Me Do", which is the kind of thing that makes some fans think of the band as visionaries. They were, but in a different way: fact is, these elements and ideas were all sitting around, waiting to be picked up. It wasn't so much of a stretch, musically, for a rock group to attempt something like "Eleanor Rigby" -- all it required was a love for the music and sufficient balls to attempt it. The Beatles were smart, and talented, but they were mainly brave. If you're going to praise them, do it for that.
It was not the first concept album. It was not the first "real" rock album. It was not the first rock album with "meaningful" lyrics. It is not the greatest album of all time (as if such a thing could be determined). It is not, according to many Beatle fans and critics, even their best album.
It does deserve the reams and reams of words scholars, rockers, and theorists have attributed to it over the years. In much the same way that a child's first step is his most important, Sgt. Pepper is rock's most important album. Rock and roll -- as an art form, as folklore, as a movement, as a vehicle of expression -- would jump higher, run faster, and kick harder, but it would never recreate the feeling of possibility, the utter unity, of this beautiful piece of plastic. This album kicked off the Summer Of Love, the finest mass cultural awakening the world has ever known. And, as always, the Beatles were its vanguard, which in popular music means not the creators of styles, but their best assimilators.
That's not a backhanded compliment. The Beatles were able to take the artistic dabblings of artists across the spectrum, find their true selves in it, and broadcast it clearly enough to where we saw ourselves in the final product. That's the goal of any true artist. Had the Beatles broken up after Revolver or even Help!, they would have already achieved that goal. Sgt. Pepper was different, however. In keeping with the true spirit of self-discovery, a process which began with the Beats and climaxed with the Beatles, this album was about reflecting things in ourselves that we didn't even know we had. What's "A Day In The Life" about? I'm not sure. As a child, one without the benefit of knowing John and Paul's philosophies and the history of popular music, I was even less sure. All I knew was that the song was "scary". And it was.
I used to have a recurring nightmare as a child. It didn't involve definable things or events; it was simply a feeling. Me, alone, in the darkness, falling in a circular pattern towards the earth. The worst part was that as I got closer to the ground, my speed increased; I was careening faster and further out of control. I'm guessing it had a lot do with some repressed fear and anxiety. The important thing is that when I heard "ADITL", it sounded like the reverse of that process, as if God had picked me up off of the ground and flung me violently into the air; as if I were falling up.
I didn't have the capacity to understand it at the time, but it seemed as if that musical orgasm was seducing me into another plane of existence, a world that might have something more rewarding in it than collecting bottlecaps or trying to get to different kinds of First Bases. A place where I could finally, as Tracy Chapman later said, be someone. Be Someone. Be Someone. "Eight Days A Week" had given me some of that same feeling, but only as regards Earthly pleasures (someone to hold, someone to kiss). This song, and the album it climaxed, were about the emotions behind the pleasures, the Truth buried under the action. It was about transforming oneself, as a lot of good Rock had been, but more blatant: the Beatles, like Peter Pan, were hovering outside the window, and this time they were on a mission to teach us how to fly. I was learning how to become a God, how to transcend the mundane experience of things like dragging a comb across my head, how to go into a Dream and emerge with the capacity to tear into the raw and bloody gristle of Life Itself
Granted, the Beatles sounded better coasting than most other bands did when they strained. That's because the Fabs had already gone too far into their own minds to ever be banal again; they couldn't if they tried. And they didn't have to try, because every innovation they'd made had stood the test of time. But now ego began, for the first real time, to rear its swollen head. And the failure of Magical Mystery Tour is a direct result of that.
The Fabs, for the first time, began to believe that merely being there was entertainment enough, as witnessed by the paucity of content in the MMT film. And while the accompanying EP (the first six songs listed here) didn't quite stoop to those levels, they did sound like a band spinning its wheels. There were two types of problems here: sins of omission ("Blue Jay Way" and "Flying" are great ideas, horribly unformed and left to die), and sins of commission ("Your Mother Should Know" and "Magical Mystery Tour" are limp attempts to recapture the spirit of "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "Sgt. Pepper's" theme, respectively.) What we're left with, then, are two songs of note: Paul's evocative "Fool On The Hill" and John's stunning avant-garde opus "I Am The Walrus".
These seem more like the last shudders of "Pepper's" acid trip than anything, however; although both have qualities (cynicism and grief) that would never be seen in Pepper's grooves but which fit in the White Album perfectly. A bridge was being formed, but a psychedelic one it was not to be. Best to think of MMT as a collection of singles (especially the string of classics compiled on Side Two) and to realize that the Fabs -- growing disillusioned with the Hippie Dream after it had just begun -- were, as always, ahead of the curve. Next stop: India. And the death of a dream.
Still, for all that, there's not a single set of words that can sum up what this dazzling piece of mass-produced plastic means. It's a sprawl that encompasses every single bit of the Beatles' four personalities and telescopes them until they become a monument to creative control and inner understanding. It's also a testament to the Life Journey, one that surpasses gurus and meditation and goes straight to the heart of how people mature into something more than drunken animals. Still, lots of folks to this day point to the extremes of this album as proof that the Beatles were fragmenting, but what you're actually seeing is four corners of the same map -- this was the first and only Beatle album on which they dared to show it all. It's a crane shot of the Beatleworld.
The Beatles not a band? Preposterous. Dig the jams on "Yer Blues", "Helter Skelter" and "Birthday", the effortless complexity of the changes in "Happiness Is A Warm Gun", the raucous fluidity of "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey", and especially that final part in "Dear Prudence", when you hear the essence of everything Beatle opening up like a rare hothouse flower and climaxing like your best night of passion. (Hey, it's my favorite Beatles song. Sue me.) And Ringo personally considers this his fave Fab album, because the band was, and I'm quoting, "a band again".
Of course, there ARE lots of points where the Fabs go off alone and create things with no Beatle around. "Martha My Dear" is the most Paul song to date, and "Julia", publishing credit aside, contains not one DNA strand of Macca's influence. George was beginning to not only stand up next to the Beatles, but match and in some cases surpass them. And Ringo writes a song!
Still, these are not things to be ashamed of. It's my belief that shoehorning John into projects he wasn't fully suited for (Pepper, the Abbey Road medley) was ultimately a denial of something more important than Beatles -- the men themsleves. (John himself loved the fact that the album was expansive enough to show so many sides of the group and its members.) Working at the peak of their powers, these four giants were, on The White Album, finally stripping the artifice away and showing us who they really were, sustained for the first time over the course of an entire album. Personally, I'd rather have the sound of John baring his soul to me than reading a circus poster on a wall. But then, we slackers are just like that.
These people would be right.
However, it's not completely dismissable. As a film, Yellow Submarine is as prefectly realized a trip as Sgt. Pepper was as an album: it captures the psychedelic ethos just as well. Of course, the Fabs helped lay this template out, but in a twist of irony, the best of the post-Beatlemania films doesn't even have the Beatles in it. (No matter what some reference books tell you, those are NOT their voices you're hearing.)
Don't let anyone give you grief or call you a "completist" for owning this CD, either. If these four originals had never been released, whole web page shrines would be going up, rhapsodizing about how "Hey Bulldog" or "It's All Too Much" were the Great Lost Beatle Tracks. In a way, they are. Let's take a look, shall we?
Abbey Road is the anti-Pepper; a unified band statement (sort of) that stares down the violent ugliness that came with the Sixties Countercultural Explosion. It takes the Summer Of Love and filters it through the White Album, the soundtrack for the ensuing summer of hate. This is the sound of the Beatles coming out of the other side and realizing that the last thing three of them wanted was to remain a Beatle. Or, at the very least, that it was gonna be impossible to remain one and still be happy.
So they sacrificed it. They wrote this album as their Second Grand Gesture, but instead of celebrating cultural possibility, they were celebrating their own freedoms. Here's John professing his primal lust and admiration for Yoko ("I Want You"). Here's Paul lamenting the financial problems ("You Never Give Me Your Money"), turning to Linda amidst the turmoil and reassuring her. "Soon we'll be away from here. Step on the gas and wipe that tear away." Here's George realizing that he didn't have to be second or third fiddle anymore; that he could indeed have a musical career of his own ("Here Comes The Sun"?) And in the back, Ringo, being forced into Starr Time on "The End", wishing not for more time but just to keep together the best band he knew any of them would ever be in.
(It would've been even more honest of an album if John and George had been able to add "Cold Turkey" and "All Things Must Pass", like they wanted to. But that's neither here nor there. The die had already been cast.)
As an album, it's one of their most eclectic: It jumps from white noise to soft-rock to chamber music to guitar jams to everything in the world, nearly, and yet it all fits. It all seems to drive home the point that, musically, at least, the Beatles were meant for each other. Fate had other ideas, however. And this wasn't really the last word.
Fate always objected when The Beatles attempted to control it, as with us all. The result was Let It Be, a sloppy, wrongheaded attempt to salvage the failed Get Back project and push some good music to the fans again. Note that I said "good music", for time and time again the Beatles' astonishing talent was able to transcend the inane demands of the corporate world -- the grueling schedules, the constant pressure, even the assembly of a final statement out of music they themselves didn't much like.
So, again, the Beatles face unintentional irony: an embarrassment that was never supposed to see the light of day became a better final statement than they themselves could think of. There's much more sadness prevalent on this album, more bitterness, more of a sense of independance. And the original "Get Back" conceit -- a journey back to their rock roots, a fresh start -- only makes the whole thing that much more poignant.
And, as always, there's a higher level to the Beatles' last gasp. Does a decade that offered such promise and ended in such disaster really need "The End" as a sendoff? No. "The Long And Winding Road" provides the right tones of regret. "I Me Mine" details the real reason humans failed to reach the end of the Hippie Evolution Chain. And "Get Back" and "Two Of Us" perfectly capture a generation eager to be isolated, to go off and return to the garden. Or California grass.
When it became obvious that vinyl records were soon to go the way of the wax cylinder and the 78, Capitol decided that it would be best to finally collect all the non-album tracks in one place. Hence, Past Masters One and Two. While fans griped about the packaging, which was literally as plain as black and white, the CDs are about all one could expect from a post-Apple, pre-Apple Beatle juggernaut; it was enough for most of us to finally have these songs without having to buy ten or twelve albums. And in digital quality, yet!
So, PM 1 and 2 take their place as albums 14 and 15 in the modern age. But while it might be tempting to write them off as another collection of odds and sods, the fact is, the Beatles straddled those above-mentioned eras so completely that they have several classic singles never contained on an officially released album. These two CDs contain oddities like "Sie Liebt Dich", but they also give you "Hey Jude", "I Want To Hold Your Hand", and "She Loves You" -- not only essential parts of the Beatle legacy, but parts of the summit. For the record, and as they say on TV commercials for similar products, here's what you get!
When it became obvious that vinyl records were soon to go the way of the wax cylinder and the 78, Capitol decided that it would be best to finally collect all the non-album tracks in one place. Hence, Past Masters One and Two. While fans griped about the packaging, which was literally as plain as black and white, the CDs are about all one could expect from a post-Apple, pre-Apple Beatle juggernaut; it was enough for most of us to finally have these songs without having to buy ten or twelve albums. And in digital quality, yet!
So, PM 1 and 2 take their place as albums 14 and 15 in the modern age. But while it might be tempting to write them off as another collection of odds and sods, the fact is, the Beatles straddled those above-mentioned eras so completely that they have several classic singles never contained on an officially released album. These two CDs contain oddities like "Sie Liebt Dich", but they also give you "Hey Jude", "I Want To Hold Your Hand", and "She Loves You" -- not only essential parts of the Beatle legacy, but parts of the summit. For the record, and as they say on TV commercials for similar products, here's what you get!
Anthology 2
Disc 1:
Anthology 3
Disc 1:
