The Beatles, The #1 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Six

 

(Continued from Part Five)

In 1966, the Beatles released the album Yesterday and Today only to American audiences.  Although the song is also included on their next album, their parody of "Dr. Robert" first appears here.

 

"Dr. Robert" is Robert Freymann, a 60-year-old physician from Germany who had a New York City clinic on East 78th Street.  Freymann gave amphetamine-laced shots of vitamin B-12 regularly to celebrity patients.  

Lennon and McCartney wrote it between the end of their British tour on December 12, 1965 and before their first recording session for their next album on April 6, 1966.  Harrison played maracas on the track, recorded on April 17, and vocals were added on the 19th, with Lennon delivering the biting sarcastic lead.

Another song first introduced on the album Yesterday and Today is "And Your Bird Can Sing"; "bird" being a British slang term for "girl".  Harrison and McCartney played the signature dual-harmony lead guitar parts live without overdubbing.

 

"If I Needed Someone" also appeared on Yesterday and Today and also later on the European release of Rubber Soul.

The group learned something about culture on their travels.  When they toured the Philippines after the release of Yesterday and Today, they had an unintentional incident when due to their naivete and that of Epstein, they declined an invitation to have breakfast with Imelda Marcos, first lady of the country.  Epstein's policy was never to accept such official invitations, but in this case, it was considered a slight to the Marcos regime.  The riots that followed the offense put the group in danger and they were able to escape but not without much stress.  

The group encountered more difficulty as the result of comments made by Lennon in a March interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave.  "We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity," Lennon was reported to have said.

Lennon's comments caused an uproar among conservatives in the U.S., The Vatican protested, and the group's records were banned by Spain, Holland and South Africa.  Lennon said at a press conference that he was referring to how other people view their success and apologized for his comments.

The Beatles released the album Revolver, another album that advanced Rock in both songwriting complexity and experimentation in the studio but also its diversity of material, featuring everything from groundbreaking string arrangements to psychedelia. 

As they had first done on "Drive My Car", the Beatles worked past midnight on 25 of the 33 recording sessions for Revolver. Lennon and McCartney knew they needed a song for Ringo.  Remember the scene in A Hard Day's Night where John, Paul, and George each got a bundle of fan letters while Ringo got an entire pile?  That was based on real life.  In America, especially, Ringo was the most popular Beatle, the affable everyday Beatle.  So Ringo needed a song.

"Yellow Submarine" combined two separate pieces from both John and Paul.  McCartney thought up the idea, a children's song for Ringo about a yellow submarine with a catchy chorus in which the other vocalists could prop up Starr's lead, as he explained in the book Anthology:

           I remember lying in bed one night.  In that

           moment before you're falling asleep - that

           little twilight moment when a silly idea 

           comes into your head - and thinking of

           "Yellow Submarine":  "We all live in a

           yellow submarine..."  I quite like children's

           things; I like children's minds and

           imagination.  So it didn't seem uncool to

           me to have a pretty surreal idea that was

           also a children's idea.  I thought also,

           with Ringo being so good with children -

           a knockabout uncle type - it might not be

           a bad idea for him to have a children's

           song, rather than a very serious song.  He

           wasn't that keen on singing."

This wasn't a song that demanded perfection; it's theme was fun!  It also played into Martin's previous career as a comedy record producer.  Martin suggested raiding the EMI closet of trinkets to create sound effects, including whistles, chains, tin cans, and even garbage bins.  Roadie Mal Evans famously strapped a marching band bass drum to his chest and led a line of EMI staffers as well as Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithful, and Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd around the space for the final refrain.

"Yellow Submarine" was a #1 song in every major country except the United States, where it was #2, and sold over one million copies.  

If Rubber Soul was a giant leap forward for the group, Revolver was a daring sonic adventure.  The Beatles covered an ever-expanding list of subjects on the album.  

One of the Beatles' most-loved songs is this one.  "My mum's favorite cold cream was Nivea, and I love it to this day.  That's the cold cream I was thinking of in the description of the face Eleanor keeps "in a jar by the door".   

As Paul wrote in an article in the New Yorker magazine last month:

           Growing up, I knew a lot of old lades--partly

           through was was called Bob-a-Job Week,

           when Scouts did shores for a shilling.  You'd

           get a schilling for cleaning out a shed or

           mowing a lawn.  I wanted to write a song

           that would sum them up.  

           "Eleanor Rigby" is based on an old lady

            that I got on with very well.  I found out

            that she lived on her own, so I would go

            around there and just chat, which is sort of

            crazy if you think about me being some

            young Liverpool guy.  

            Later, I would offer to go and get her

            shopping.  She'd give me a list and I'd

            bring the stuff back, and we'd sit in her

            kitchen.  I still vividly remember the

            kitchen, because she had a little crystal-

            radio set.  Crystal radios were quite 

            popular in the 1920's and '30's.  So I

            would visit, and just hearing her stories

            enriched my soul and influenced the

            songs I would later write.

            

The Beatles employed a string octet for "Eleanor Rigby", which Jonathan Gould calls "a true hybrid, conforming to no recognizable style or genre of music" in his book Can't Buy Me Love:  The Beatles, Britain and America.  Although "Eleanor Rigby" reached #1 in Canada and New Zealand, it shockingly stalled at #11 in the United States, making it the cream of the crop in our listing of The Top Unknown/Underrated Songs of the Rock Era*.

 

An example of the transformative studio techniques the group began to employ is "Tomorrow Never Knows".  Lennon got inspiration for his lyrics from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience:  A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Recording of the track involved staffing by engineers or band members at eight tape decks at various locations in the studio.  Each deck randomly varied the movement of a tape loop the band had recorded and Martin created the master recording by sampling the incoming data fed by each tape deck.  In 2021, this may seem like no big deal, although few artists are able to do it; it was revolutionary at the time.

McCartney wrote this song while was sitting around Lennon's pool.  Both he and Lennon mention this as one of the most underrated Beatles songs.  Paul, John and George recorded the amazing harmony vocals over three days--"Here There And Everywhere".

Harrison was beginning to emerge as a prominent songwriter in his own right.  Frustrated to this point in getting his compositions on Beatles albums due to the quality of Lennon & McCarty songs, Harrison landed three on Revolver, including "Taxman", the first political song to be included by the group.  But George didn't write it alone.

 

"I remember the day he (George) called to ask for help on 'Taxman', one of his first songs," Lennon said in 1980.  "I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along because that's what he asked for," John continued.  "It had been John and Paul for so long; he'd been left out because he hadn't been a songwriter up until then."

 

The Beatles' songwriting had progressed to where they were either singing to themselves, as in a mirror, or to a good friend.  John Robertson, in his book The Complete Guide to the Music of the Beatles called "For No One" "another remarkable McCartney ballad, melodically sophisticated and lyrically mature."

 

John wrote "I'm Only Sleeping" as a tribute to staying in bed, which he often did even when he wasn't sleeping.  The yawning effect in the song is actually a guitar recorded backward.  You can hear a few seconds before the yawn comes in, John said, "Yawn Paul."

One night when the Beatles were staying at a house in Benedict Canyon from August 23-28, 1965, the group had a few friends over.  All at once, actor Peter Fonda came over and sat next to John--no one knows how he got there.  Peter leaned over to John and said, "I know what it's like to be dead."  

Fonda was referring to an accident when he was a boy and accidentally shot himself in the stomach, but Lennon had no idea what Peter was talking about and didn't like the experience.

John remembered the event and later recorded himself experimenting with lyrics while playing acoustic guitar, as such:  "He said, I know what it's like to be dead, I said...I said, I must be out of my head, he said..."  He didn't have much and so put the song aside.  

Lennon then changed the "he" to "she" and wrote the middle eight.  "The beginning had been around for days and days and so I wrote the first thing that came into my head," Lennon said later, "and it was 'When I was a boy', in a different beat but it was real because it just happened.  A lot of childhood was coming out, anyway...that was pure."

Geoff Emerick, in his book Here, There And Everywhere, said at the very end, when most of Revolver was mixed and ready to be mastered, "someone realized that the album was a song short...if they were too short, there would be complaints - or worse yet, returns - from consumers.  Not only was there a release date set, and a hungry public clamoring to hear the finished album, but the Beatles were booked to begin a European tour just days after the sessions ended, so there was no time to spare.

 

John said he had an as let untitled song that hadn't been fully worked out yet, but with the band set to be in Munich, Germany two days later, they had no choice but to finish it in the studio.  He tried to whip up the rest of his bandmates to work hard to finish it and evidently irritated Paul to the point where he walked out of the studio.  "She Said She Said" features a backwards guitar solo.

We want to hear the other contributions from Harrison with two more.  "All I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good," he said at the time.  

This song from George is "about the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit."  It is believed that Harrison wrote in in the middle months of the year at Kinfauns, his home in Surrey, England pictured above.

 

In the book Revolver:  How the Beatles Reimagined Rock 'n' Roll, author Robert Rodriguez says this song reflects Harrison's search for increased awareness, and "the faster and more wide-reaching his thoughts came, the greater the struggle to find the words to express them."  Here is  "I Want To Tell You".

Harrison intended for this next song to be a love ballad for his new wife Pattie.  But his new faith kept tugging at him, about how life was short and the importance of living life prudently.  "Love You To" features North Indian classical instrumentation, consisting of a tabla, a pair of hand drums, his sitar and a tambura.

Two months after this song was recorded, Harrison met sitar guru Ravi Shankar, who agreed to train George on the instrument.  “It is strange to see pop musicians with sitars. I was confused at first. It had so little to do with our classical music. When George Harrison came to me, I didn’t know what to think," Shankar said in a 1971 documentary.  But I found he really wanted to learn. I never thought our meeting would cause such an explosion, that Indian music would suddenly appear on the pop scene."

Revolver's tone was far more dark than anything the Beatles had released previously; half of the 14 songs have some form of "die" or "dead" in their lyrics.  So this happy song, which leads off side two, is a positive, welcome change.  "It was really very much a nod to the Lovin Spoonful's "Daydream", the same traditional, almost trad-jazz feel," Mc Cartney said in the Barry Miles biography Many Years From Now.  "That was our favorite record of theirs," Paul said.  Here is "Good Day Sunshine".

We are halfway through our tribute to The #1 Artist of the Rock Era*, the Beatles.  Join us for Part Seven!

Inside The Rock Era Sets New Monthly Record!

Thanks so much to all of you who have checked out The Top 100 Artists* special this month as well as our numerous other pages. The previous monthly record for page views on Inside The Rock Era was 68,872 set in February of 2018. With 12 days to go in November, we have shattered that record with 105,756. The last five days have all set all-time daily records, yesterday's being 12,884. We are glad you are enjoying the special and the site--tell your friends!

The Beatles, The #1 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Five

 

(Continued from Part Four)

The band promoted the album with another U.S. tour, highlighted by a famous concert before a world record crowd of 55,600 in New York City's Shea Stadium on August 15.  Along the way, they met Elvis Presley, who invited him into his home in Beverly Hills, California.  

The Beatles broke new ground when they became the first Rock group to be nominated for a Grammy Award when they were recognized as a nominee for Album of the Year.

In September, the group began a Saturday morning cartoon series, The Beatles, which aired for two years.  It was the first weekly television series to feature animated versions of real people.

Although love songs dominated this next classic album, the steps forward, not only on the thoughtful and mature lyrics but bringing forth musical innovations,  completely changed the way popular music sounded. 

The creative process of the group continued to grow, and the Beatles had a profound influence on their contemporaries in both the complexity of their songwriting as well as their increasingly innovative production techniques.  "We had been making albums rather like a collection of singles," producer George Martin said to author Mark Hertsgaard for his books A Day in the Life:  The Music and Artistry of the Beatles.  "Now we were really beginning to think about albums as a bit of art on their own."

Rubber Soul in 1965 was by far the best album the group had released to date.  Even the casual listener not living at the time can easily detect the difference in Popular music before the Beatles, and specifically before Rubber Soul, and that which evolved afterward.  There are nuances and complexities in the music that simply did not exist before.  

The lyrics went much deeper; previous songs by the group that had just scratched the surface of emotion and romance now explored the human experience much more fully.  Lennon and McCartney were entering their peak songwriting abilities at the time this album was recorded.  It was now evident that their talents were much, much greater than anyone to this point in the Rock Era, and as we would see, greater than any songwriter since.  

The Beatles are one of just three acts who consistently enjoyed hits with both sides of a single (Elvis Presley and Creedence Clearwater Revival are the others).  As true as that may be, few other A & B side in history can top these, The #4 Double-Sided Hits of the Rock Era*.

Paul and John both contributed to this next song, but the hallmark personalities of each came through.  Paul wrote the upbeat and hopeful verses and chorus, reportedly after a disagreement with Asher, while John wrote the pessimistic "Life is very short" counterpoint in the bridge.

"In 'We Can Work It Out', Paul did the first half, I did the middle eight," Lennon said for the 1980 book All We Are Saying.  "But you've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out, we can work it out' - real optimistic, y'know, and me impatient:  'Life is very short and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.'"

Paul wrote his part with an acoustic guitar in one of the bedrooms at Rembrandt, the house in Cheshire he had bought for his father in July, 1964.  "Then it was George Harrison's idea to put the middle into waltz time, like a German waltz," McCartney said in the Barry Miles biography, Many Years From Now.

 

The Beatles needed just two takes to rehearse and record the song on October 20.  They then spent nearly five hours overdubbing, including the distinctive sound of Lennon's harmonium the group found hidden away in the studio.  Vocals for the song took up much of the evening session and were finished in a two-hour session on October 29.

"We Can Work It Out" reached the Top 10 in virtually every major country, going to #1 in the United States, the U.K. and Australia.  It was the Beatles' 12th million-seller in just two calendar years, topping the previous record set by Elvis Presley with 11.

 

The group recorded "Day Tripper" in three takes on October 16 and  released their two-sided smash the same day as Rubber Soul (December 3, 1965), though neither song appeared on the album.  The Beatles were popular enough to support the output of material.  "Day Tripper" was a bigger hit in the U.K. than "We Can Work It Out", reaching #1 there as well as in the Netherlands, while it peaked at #5 in the U.S.

The band performed "Day Tripper" at nearly all their shows until their final one in San Francisco's Candlestick Park in 1966.

Rubber Soul showcases the Beatles' new direction in music at a time when they were less interested in playing live and more interested in utilizing the recording studio as in fact its own instrument, which completely changed the perception of what a recording artist is.  

 

This is one of the first original Beatles songs to be not at all about love or romance and marks the beginning of Lennon's philosophical songwriting.  John had the uncanny knack to draw the listener into his world by presenting the song in the first person.  As great as it sounds here, John struggled with it.  Inspired to come up with a personal song as his contribution, he gave up after five hours and laid down when suddenly the entire song came to him in a flash.  Lennon later said that writing music was like being possessed.  "It has to go down or else it won't let you sleep, so you have to get up and make something of it and then you're allowed to sleep," he said.

Listening to a Lennon song can make you change your perspective on life.  He did this here with lyrics like "Doesn’t have a point of view, Knows not where he’s going to, Isn’t he a bit like you and me?”.

By getting away from the love song, John opened the door for his bandmates and other songwriters to write social songs about the turbulent times of the '60's.  It single-handedly changed the face of the music industry and paved the way for the experimental music that followed in the next decade.

McCartney feels that "Nowhere Man" was one of Lennon's best songs.  John's vocals, too, are extraordinary, intimately that gives voice to the voiceless.  Who at some point doesn't doubt their existence yet continue doing what they do best to keep their confidence up?

For this song, Harrison switched to a Fender Stratocaster Sonic Blues.  Lennon requested Lewisohn to make the guitars in this song as high-pitched as possible, and although the studio engineers were reluctant, Mark later agreed.  "Nowhere Man" reached #1 in Australia and Canada and #3 in the U.S. and sold over one million copies.

 

This next song is one of the group's best, but you won't find it in any list of top songs because it was never released as a single.  We call such songs Top Tracks* and in this case, near the top of The Top Unknown/Underrated Songs of the Rock Era*.  

"A lot of people said 'Michelle' would have made a good single," Paul McCartney said in an interview.  "There are songs which we like but we wouldn't like to have out as singles," he continued.  'Cause it's a very funny thing about putting a single out.  We always used to think for a single we'd have to have something pretty fast.  I don't know why.  They always sounded like the singles.  So when we did 'Michelle', we all thought it was okay, but we just didn't want it out as representative of us at the time."  

Enjoy "Michelle".

"This [next song] was about a dream girl," Lennon said.  When Paul and I wrote lyrics in the old days we used to laugh about it like the Tin Pan Alley people would," John continued.  "And it was only later on that we tried to match the lyrics to the tune.  I like this one.  It was one of my best."

Jackson Browne agreed in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine for their "100 Greatest Singers of All-Time" issue:

             There was a tremendous intimacy in 

             everything John Lennon did, combined

             with a formidable intellect.  That is what 

             makes him a great singer.  In "Girl", he

             starts in this steely, high voice:  "Is there

             anybody going to listen to my story?"  It's

             so impassioned, like somebody stepping

             from the shadows in a room.  But when 

             he comes to the chorus, you suddenly

             realize:  He's talking directly to her. 

            When I heard this, as a young teenager,

            it hit the nail on the head.  It embodied 

            the feelings I was living with every day -

            completely burning with sexual desire,

            with almost a regret at being so

            overpowered.

The music too was much more developed and this inspired each of the members of the group to play different and play better.  The Beatles were all good at their instruments in 1965; they began to further develop their talent on Rubber Soul.  

Harrison added to the development of the band's sound by introducing the sitar on his piece, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)".  This one song alone added greatly to the development of Rock as a genre, a song much deeper than nearly all of the basic singalong songs before 1965.  

This gem certainly has its humor--"She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere and I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair."  This is another example of some of John's best lyrics, and it is the unconventional lyrics that drive the song.  What was the real purpose of John's visit with this woman?  What kind of "fire" did he light?  And what the heck is "Norwegian wood" anyway?  You probably have your own interpretation.  

Besides these curious lyrics, "Norwegian Wood" is also known for Harrison's use of the sitar.  David Crosby had introduced George to the music and sitar playing of Ravi Shankar, whom Harrison later met.  After the U.S. tour promoting Help!, George bought a sitar from a shop on Oxford Street in London in September and it may be this instrument that we hear him playing on "Norwegian Wood".  As the song was recorded in October, it didn't give Harrison much time to practice it.  

After George featured it on this song, other copycats followed, with everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Box Tops to even B.J. Thomas releasing songs featuring a similar-sounding instrument.  Harrison loved the sound so much that he kept playing it on Beatles songs for the next two-and-a-half years.  Yet another example of this group paving the way for the entire industry.

This exciting level of innovation and a huge stride forward in the quality of lyrics and music led fans to play the album in its entirety and to think and explore the themes on the album.  With Rubber Soul, the album as an art form was born.  Listeners now needed to think about they lyrics and their meaning, as the Beatles intentionally challenged listeners to become more involved in listening to their music.

New students of music history are invited to listen to any album before this album, then listen to Rubber Soul to see if they can tell the difference.  They should be able to, even if they are not musically trained.  It is as different as night and day, but it was far from the last time the Beatles would come out with a groundbreaking album.

The album also marked a turning point in other ways.  For the first time, Lennon and McCartney began to separately have more influence on the songs, and listeners would from this point forward be able to detect the unique songwriting styles of each.  Friends since they met, a rivalry between the two geniuses began to emerge.  "The clash between John and Paul was becoming obvious," wrote engineer Norman Smith for Bill Harry's 2000 book The John Lennon Encyclopedia.

Although John and Paul were writing songs individually, they collaborated on this one at John's home in Kenwood, probably sometime in September or early October.  Paul had the melody in mind but they lyrics had much to be improved upon.  The two geniuses took a break and then suddenly:

             Wait a minute:  "Drive My Car!"  Then we 

             got into the fun of that scenario:  Oh, you

             can drive my car.  What is it?  What's he

             doing?  Is he offering a job as a 

             chauffeur, or what?  And then it became

             much more ambiguous, which we liked,

             instead of golden rings, which was a bit

             poofy.  "Golden rings" became "beep 

             beep, yeah".  We both came up with 

             that.  Suddenly we were in L.A.:  cars,

             chauffeurs, open-top Cadillacs, and it

             was a whole other thing.

And the lyrics meant something else besides chauffeurs:

             It was wonderful because this nice tongue- 

            -in-cheek idea came and suddenly there 

            was a girl there, the heroine of the story,

            and the story developed and had a little

            sting in the tail, which was "I actually

            haven't got a car, but when I get one

            you'll be a terrific chauffeur."  So to me it

            was L.A. chicks...and it also meant "you

            can be my lover."  "Drive my car" was an

            old Blues euphemism for sex, so in the

            end all is revealed.

The Beatles burned the midnight oil in a five-hour recording session on October 13, 1965, all spent working on this song.  These marathon sessions would soon be the norm and included numerous overdubs.  Ringo played two tambourines on the song, one playing the accents in the verses and the other playing a rhythm pattern as you hear in the chorus. 

In late 1965, while the group was recording the album, Jane Asher (Paul's girlfriend) accepted an offer to appear in a stage production.  There was an intense argument and the couple broke up.  Paul phoned Jane but she would not return his calls.

 

McCartney later said to Hunter Davies in the book The Beatles that it was "shattering to be without her."  "You Won't See Me" is one of the songs Paul wrote about their relationship.

The album's title comes from "plastic soul", a derogatory phrase McCartney had overheard black musicians using about Mick Jagger.  Harrison finally broke through with one of his songs, another which shows the tremendous growth of the group.  They were innovative in their early years, but now now they took on an unconventional image.  

McCartney played the fuzz bass on "Think For Yourself".

Add to that growth the fact that producer George Martin was himself developing, aiming to achieve a solid sound whether the album was played on a stereo or a mono record player.  Thus, Harrison's lead vocals are double-tracked and split between the right and left channels.

 

"I'm Looking Through You" is another song about the difficulties Paul had with Jane.  The Beatles first recorded it on October 24 in nine hours, a version first released on the compilation album Anthology 2 in 1996.  The group reworked the song on November 6, playing a faster version, but were still not satisfied.  Finally, on November 10, the band found the right arrangement that made it onto the album.  The Beatles recorded the rhythm track in one take and then overdubbed vocals and an organ played by Ringo.  That percussive sound you hear in the song is Ringo tapping a box of matches with his fingers.

 

"In My Life" is an autobiographical song John wrote after being asked why his book, In His Own Write, revealed more about him than his songs did.  Lennon's lyrics refer to Stu Sutcliffe, the early Beatle and a friend of John's who died in 1962, and another friend by the name of Pete Shotton.  

The group left a space for an instrumental break, which Martin filled the next morning by playing a piano and then speeding up the tape to make it sound like a harpsichord.

Early in the sessions for a new album, Paul and John realized they needed to get a single released.  

 

Paul wrote most of this one, which takes the form of a letter from an ambitious songwriter to a book publisher.  McCartney was intrigued by the rhythmic possibilities of the phrase "paperback writer", according to author Steve Turner in the 2016 book Beatles '66:  The Revolutionary Year, and Paul came up with the basic framework for the song during an hour-long drive from London to Lennon's house in Surrey.  On May 30, the Beatles released the single "Paperback Writer", which topped charts in the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia, West Germany, New Zealand, Ireland and Norway and sold over one million copies.  It is The #159 Song of the Rock Era*.

This next song is a great example of how lyrics can be amplified by the music that goes with them.  When the Beatles arrived in Sidney for a concert, they stepped off the plane to pouring rain, and thousands of fans thought nothing of getting soaking wet if they could greet the group.  Lennon remembered the moment in the book The Beatles Anthology:

                We were having hysterics, laughing.  It 

                was so funny, coming to Australia and

                getting on a big van, all soaking wet; we

                thought it was going to be sunny.  We 

                only got wet for about fifteen minutes, 

                but the kids got wet for hours.  How

                could we be disappointed when they

                came out to see us and stood in all the

                rotten wind and rain to wave to us?  

                They were great, really great.  I've

                never seen rain as hard as that, except

                in Tahiti.

"Rain" can be interpreted to be about people complaining about the weather.  There are only 44 words used in the song, but since they are stretched out over several beats, there is an added emphasis on them.  As a result, there is a tendency to give the lyrics more meaning, almost as if a secret is being disclosed.  

The music, too, suggests that the weather is a symbol, accomplished by the Beatles making the music sound like the condition they are describing.  Paul said that the group had trouble with the rhythm track so they played it fast and then slowed it down.

What this means is that they played the backing guitar at a fast speed, recorded it on tape and then played the tape back at a slower speed.  John also stumbled onto an idea of recording a guitar and voices backwards.  He sang and played his guitar to the backing track while it was being played backwards, then reversed the direction of the voice and guitar and combined them with the backing track while being played forward.  

Ringo's stop and go drumming also helps to accentuate the "rain or shine" aspect of the music.  Taken together, the Beatles are giving the message not only that they don't mind if it is sunny or rainy but also "fast or slow", "backwards or forwards", "stop or go", or "high or low".  John sings the lines, "I can show you", and he does.  Later when he sings "Can you hear me?", Lennon is talking about more than the words he is singing.  Notice that John's voice is altered on these two lines.  

Remember that "Rain" is paired with "Paperback Writer" on the single, and it could be quite possible that both sides are about the expression of art.  Reflecting on this, the polar musical effects contained in the song convey a deeper message.  The hidden meaning of the song is that, like rainy or sunny, fast or slow, it doesn't matter where you are in life, or what you experience in it, but how you react to those experiences and what you do with them.

"I can show you" and "Can you hear me?", then, are used to invite the listener to explore more, and by summoning the listener into a world where the music itself tells a story, Lennon's "Rain" is groundbreaking.

Short promotional films of both "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" were released, which cultural historian Saul Austerlitz said were "among the first true music videos."

The unique fact about the Beatles is they never had a slump, a bad album, a time in which they struggled to write and record high-quality songs.  It is just one great album after another for their entire career.  Join us for Part Six!

Four Artists Now Over 2,000 Views Each!

 We began our special in February, and already four featured artists are over 2,000 page views!  The ones which have been out the longest are expected to accumulate the most views, then as people catch up (there are over 3,500 songs featured), the top artists will have the most page views.

Thus far, Dan Fogelberg (our #102 artist but one we feel deserves to be in The Top 100*), Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Garth Brooks are all over 2,000 views.  Thanks for your support!

The Beatles, The #1 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Four

 

(Continued from Part Three)

To this point, the group's music was being marketed differently to those in America from those in England, and, because of the plethora of singles and intermingling of songs on difference album, it got very confusing for the record-buying public.  Thankfully, this practice changed to the point where in most instances, a new Beatles album was exactly the same, whether you were playing it on a record player in Europe or one in the U.S.

"Yes It Is" is a Top Track* on Beatles VI, released later as the B-side to "Ticket To Ride".  Although the lyrics don't directly refer to it, they seem to suggest that a former lover has died and the desire to move on with one's life.  It was one of the toughest songs to record that year, with the rhythm section requiring 14 takes.

Alan W. Pollack notes, "The roster of chords appearing in the song is relatively standard but both the ordering of their progressions, as well as the voice leading transitions between some of them, is extraordinary."

Beatles VI became the group's seventh #1 album and sold over one million copies.  In August, the Beatles released the movie Help!  The studio album of the same name featured songs from the movie on side one and other songs they recorded in the same sessions on the other side.  This groundbreaking song represented the first time that rhythm tracks were recorded and overdubs added in later.

Writer Ian MacDonald, in his 2005 book Revolution in the Head:  The Beatles' Records and the Sixties called the song "psychologically deeper than anything the Beatles had recorded before" and "extraordinary for its time".   "I think the interesting thing was the crazy endings; instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo," McCartney said to Barry Miles for the book Many Years From Now.  "We picked up one of the lines, 'My baby don't care,' but completely altered the melody.  It was quite radical at the time."  

  "Ticket To Ride" thus pioneered the idea that a song could have a completely different ending to it, an outro.  The Beatles promoted the song on television shows such as Top of the Pops and Thank our Lucky Stars. 

"Ticket To Ride" made it seven straight #1's in the U.K. and also hit #1 in the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Norway.

The album Help also reached #1 in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and Germany and went Triple Platinum.  

Although no one, his bandmates, the critics, and certainly not the public, realized it at the time, this next song is John's cry for help. Beatlemania had radically changed life for the members, and John especially took it hard. Cynthia Lennon, John's wife at the time, described the song as a "cry for help" from John (a subject we will hear more about later).  "It reflects the frustration he felt at the time," Cynthia explained.  "He was the idol of millions, but the freedom and fun of the early days had gone." 

"The greater the Beatles' popularity, the more threatened and anxious John had become," said Beatles biographer Bob Spitz (in the book Beatles:  The Biography), "not only from his part in the band's snowballing commercialism but over his appearance and his songwriting as well. Weight, too had become a nagging problem--John had gotten 'plump', according to a friend -- and he was demoralized and depressed by worsening vision." 

 

The Beatles released "Help" in July, two weeks before the album of the same name.  It was a top 5 song around the world and #1 in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Norway and attained Gold status.

Next, we've arrived at one of the all-time classics, not only by the Beatles but in history.  McCartney wrote it, like many songs of the period, at 57 Wimpole Street in London, where a then 22-year-old Paul lived in an attic room at the top of the family home of girlfriend Jane Asher.  However God works, many feel the inspiration for the few geniuses in our musical midst must come from God, and Paul has an interesting story about the writing of this all-time gem:

              I woke up with a lovely tune in my head.

              I thought, "That's great, I wonder what

              that is?"  There was an upright piano 

              next to me, to the right of the bed by the

              window.  I got out of bed, sat at the

              piano, found G, found F sharp minor 

              seventh - and that leads you through 

              then to B to E minor, and finally back to

             G.

George Martin remembers the song existing in some form or another for at least a year:  "I first heard 'Yesterday' when it was known as 'Scrambled Egg' - Paul's working title - at the George V Hotel in Paris in January, 1964."

Paul had played "Scrambled Egg" so many times that those in the Beatles' entourage no doubt grew tired of it.  Richard Lester (director of the film Help!) said "If you play that bloody song any longer I’ll have the piano taken off stage. Either finish it or give it up!’”

As we know, Paul did finish it.  After filming the movie, Paul and Jane went on vacation at a Portuguese villa of friend Bruce Welch of the Shadows.  Paul finally finished the song while driving the 180 miles from the airport to the villa.  "It was a long hot, dusty drive," McCartney recalled.  "Jane was sleeping but I couldn't.  I remember mulling over the tune and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse."

"I started to develop the idea:  'Scram-ble-d eggs, da-da da.'  I knew the syllables had to match the melody, obviously:  'da-da da' 'yes-ter-day', 'sud-den-ly', 'fun-il-ly', 'mer-il-ly', and 'yes-ter-day', that's good.  'All my troubles seemed so far away.'  It's easy to rhyme those 'a's:  say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there's a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey.  'Sud-den-ly', and 'b' again, another easy rhyme:  me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it."

Welch confirmed that the song was essentially finished on this trip--"I was packing to leave and Paul asked me if I had a guitar," Bruce said.  "He'd apparently been working on the lyrics as he drove to Albufeira from the airport at Lisbon.  He borrowed my guitar and started playing the song we all now know as 'Yesterday'."

Now that he had finished it, Paul was not sure if he had stolen the idea or the inspiration had come only to him.  He played it for everyone he met, asking if they recognized it.  Of course, nobody did.

The recording of it is also unique in the Beatles' history:

            I brought the song into the studio for the first 

            time and played it on the guitar.  But soon

            Ringo said, "I can't really put any drums on 

            it - it wouldn't make sense.  And John and

           George said, "There's no point in having

           another guitar."  So George Martin

           suggested, "Why don't you just try it by

           yourself and see how it works?"  I looked at

           all the others:  "Oops.  You mean a solo

           record?"  They said, "Yeah, it doesn't

           matter, there's nothing we can add to it - do

           it."    

"Yesterday" exploded to #1 in the U.S. (the group's 10th career #1), Australia, the Netherlands and Norway and was a huge hit across the world.  It sold well over one million copies in the United States alone, and ranks as The #8 Songs of the Rock Era*--enjoy!

 

For many of their early shows, the Beatles closed with the Little Richard hit "Long Tall Sally".  Desiring to end with one of their own songs, McCartney wrote this song, and the Beatles closed their shows with it with few exceptions through their final performance on August 29, 1966.

Paul wrote it at the family home of girlfriend Jane Asher where he was staying.  Lennon played the Hammond organ, and the Beatles performed it in their final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 12, 1965.  The screamer "I'm Down" is the B-side of "Help.             

Ringo got to do a rare lead vocal on "Act Naturally", written by Johnny Russell.  "I found it on a Buck Owens record," Starr told the others, "and I said, 'This is the one I am going to be doing,' and they said 'OK'.  

Here is one of the highlights on the Help! album, written by Lennon.  The Beatles recorded three songs on February 18 at EMI (Abbey Road).  Beginning at 10 a.m. in Studio Two, they worked for three hours on "Ticket To Ride", "Another Girl", "I Need You" and "Yes It Is".  

After a break, the band returned from 3:30-5:15 and recorded nine takes of this song.  "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" is one of the only Beatles songs to include an outside musician, flautist Johnnie Scott.  

"They told me roughly that they wanted 3/4 time," Scott told Mark Lewishohn for the book The Complete Beatles:  Recording Sessions, "and the best way of fulfilling their needs was to play both tenor flute and alto flute, the second as an overdub.  As I recall, all four of them were there and Ringo was full of marital joys; he'd just come back from his honeymoon."

This is all about a man-to-man conversation with the message that if the one man didn't treat his woman right, the other man would steal her.  Combined with the melody line and major key, this message comes through as unremorseful, which is exactly what makes the song work so well.  

It doesn't appear that John and Paul wrote "You're Going To Lose That Girl" long before recording it.  They wrote it at John's home, meaning it was composed either during their January time in London performing Another Beatles Christmas Show or after they came back from their February vacations.

The Beatles undoubtedly rehearsed the song on tape, which must have led to the confusion of calling the first take "take two" by mistake.   In any case, that take was a false start while the second attempt ("take three") was the one they kept.

All that needed to be done then was the overdubs.  John double-tracked his lead vocals, George made a few attempts at his guitar solo (as heard in the bootleg recordings) before he had the one he wanted, Paul added a piano part, and Ringo thumped the bongos.  

"I've Just Seen A Face" is another song Paul wrote while staying at the family home of Jane Asher.  The group recorded it in six takes on June 14, 1965, with a maraca part overdubbed on the last one.  It contains no bass guitar part.

For new music fans (and for those who perhaps don't understand the brilliance), the Beatles, in a breathtaking display of versatility, also recorded the screamer "I'm Down" and the classic ballad "Yesterday" on the same day as "I've Just Seen A Face". 

When the group began, they were solid musicians, but as time went on, they began to excel on their own instruments while also jumping to other ones.  Lennon displays his electric keyboard work on "The Night Before", one of the key components of the song.

George used a tone pedal on this song to provide the unusual guitar sound--"It's Only Love".

You've already heard some examples of the group beginning to expand the boundaries of what recording artists could do.  That experimentation and innovation had only begun--learn more in Part Five, exclusively on Inside The Rock Era!