Help!The Beatles

Now it moves onto the more colourful bit of Beatle History. You can hear it coming as they depart from the more Rock and roll kinds of songs, where the form is almost all the song, and instead there’s all those great Barbershop harmonies coming through whenever they can. I wonder how much that’s to do with four-track recording…I’m going to guess that EMI had access to better machines than that…maybe it’s to do with four people in a band then…anywhere, somewhere between tracks and bands I always think in terms of one lead voice and three backing voices…wonder if that came from here.

Anyway, the first half of the songs on this album come from the film, much sillier that A Hard Day’s Night which was more sly than silly. “You’ve got to hide your love away” is famously described as Lennon does Dylan…but it’s so much better. John Lennon can sing, and the flutes at the end that have nothing to do with the rest of the song (I love it when songs do that)(. And a George Harrison song that doesn’t drone and drear its was to its end…and I hate to say it, but most of the McCar5tney songs on this album are pretty crass…The Night Before, Another Girl…my favourite on the first side is still “You’re gonna lose that girl;”, I don’t know if it’s the backing, the bongos or the piano (probably the piano) but it kills me still. OK, Ticket to Ride. Maybe this is John Lennon’s best album…, all the best ones here are his. Knowing these songs so well from the movie you can’t (or I can’t help) seeing the “video” that goes with each song. This is the part of the film in the snow, so the song feels crisp and shiny…and I don’t know how much of that is to do with visual memories of that or the tambourine (described recently in a pub by some-one as the magical instrument that immediately makes any song brilliant).

I remember seeing a clip of the Beatles singing this on some documentary, and they sing it live, sitting in armchairs and it sounds almost exactly as it does on the record, and some important talking head saying that that’s the mark of an amazingly tight band. I’m sure I wrote some essay about that experience when I was at Sharples, and my English teacher/form teacher Mr Diamond (who I understand now was a pretty hard-core socialist and smoked cigars) disagreed with me, saying it was the mark of an amazingly boring band who couldn’t be bothered to do anything new or different. On a performance level, I disagree as I know the difference between a recording voice and a singing live voice (I used to prefer singing live, I think I prefer recording now, I’m currently interested in the little cadences and subtleties of sing/speaking into the mic…), but I sort of agree somewhere…maybe if you’re singing live you’re performing your own cover version of your own song (that’s presupposing that the record is all, and this was the decision the Beatles began to move towards…is it this album that begins to introduce session musicians that would eventually lead to a philharmonic orchestra and rendering touring impossible?) you need to do something very different. In the same way you’d do some thing very different from a cover of some-one else’s song…

The songs on the second half seem to get a little lame…that terrible “It’s only love” and a country cover to begin with. In fact there’s a strong country feel to it. I’ve never understood country. I believe some of them are supposed to be witty (alright, I quite like some Dolly Parton) but largely it leaves me cold and furious at the same time. As if there’s something desirable about being illiterate. All the lyrics seem a bit crap here. There’s a lovely one (pretty trite/universal lyrics…brilliance is local, David Byrne knew it…) called “Tell me what you see” which I like very much. Lennon and McCartney sing together in unison sometimes, sometimes in harmony the others. It’s a cliché to say that the fulcrum of the Beatles was the interplay between the two main songwriters but it’s true, and helped me develop my vertical/horizontal idea of music. Lennon being vertical (if their works were scored classically, the interest would be shown going down the staves with chord changes shifting under a static melody) and McCartney being horizontal (a travelling melody over staid chords).

I must interrupt this to shout with joy because it’s “I’ve just seen a face” – is it countrified? I have no idea but it’s wonderful. Anyway. To think of the horizontal/vertical dichotomy in terms of each composer’s main instrument (rhythm guitar and bass respectively) adds more foundation to it, in that the rhythm guitar is more concerned with changing chords and the bass more with moving the piece forward. Lots of piano on McCartney/s part too, and in quite a boogie-woogie/dance hall style too. If Lennon had a literary heritage and McCartney an Elgar/Duke Ellington one, then that also makes sense, as you always get the sense (outside of nice little parochial lyrics that are incredibly English) that McCartney’s words are kind of there to mark time between the tunes. And all of pop music history shifts back and forth between that as a guitar vogue (rock and roll) gets overtaken by a piano-led vogue (Spector-stylee girl groups/Merseybeat stuff/Procul-Harum harpsichords rule/trippy psychedelic stuff/camp 20s knock-offs /glam rock/disco/punk /electro pop/stadium rock/dance/grunge/more girl-boy groups/Britpop/R&B/fucking emo…)

Then it finishes with Dizzy Miss Lizzy. Fucking hate it.