My Second Favorite Rock Band: The BEATLES!

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What am I thinking?

I should have written a post on these guys a long time ago!

My first exposure to the Beatles, at least visually, was the movie A Hard Day's Night.  We had just won second place in the inter-house drama contest, and were sent out to see any movie of our choice, and we chose A Hard Day's Night.  It was a complete shock; I was immediately a fan.  Soon I was learning to play the guitar, and was learning all the songs from the movie.  A Hard Day's Night probably won for the Beatles their most faithful fans; the album is one of the most creative and tuneful, and harmonically interesting (in a conventional way) of all the pop music available at the time.  (There were probably better albums out there, actually, but these comparisons must take into account the visibility of the albums . . .  Ok, it's meaningless; satisfied?)  The movie had no plot to speak of; it was a fictional and glamorized account of a day in the life of Our Boys From Liverpool, supported by Paul's fictional Grandfather from Ireland, and a fictional Girlfriend for George.  (Not so fictional, really.)  Supposedly, for the first and last time, this Beatles album featured mainly songs whose creative seeds came mainly from John Lennon.

The opening song, the title song of the movie, opens with a huge chord which, having been analyzed carefully recently by someone using fairly simple Fourier analysis, is revealed to have been played on two guitars, the Bass guitar, and backed with a big 13th chord (a sort of dominant seventh with extra notes) played on a piano.  You can Google it.  There are many harmonic innovations that are hardly original, but possibly new to pop music.  The Beatles --at the very least the three who wrote the songs-- were unarguably very musical people (not a requirement for being a major rock group at that time), and the body of their compositions is a very satisfying collection of music.  A Hard Day's Night features an interlude which sounds as though it was played on an Indian sitar, but is actually played on a 12-string guitar.  (Stop press: I recently read that the guitar solo was doubled on the piano.  Whoa!  That George Martin has a lot to answer for!)  Most of the songs are contemplative, musical and romantic.  The driving rock songs on the B Side were written to balance the mellow A Side of the album.

I should have known better is a fun song featuring John Lennon on a harmonica.  This is one of my favorite cool rock songs.

If I fell is a lovely ballad, a duet between John and Paul, and is harmonically interesting (even disregarding the introduction, which is simply a chromatic chord sequence with no relation to the rest of the song).  It is soft and romantic, and the words are just doggerel rhyme, but it works.

And I love her, sung by Paul mcCartney is a lovely serenade, followed by I'm Happy just to Dance sung by George Harrison.  Another big rock number which was on the album, and which dates from around that time is Can't buy me love, which really rocks.  Here's a live performance, which is noisy and unsatisfactory.  A clip from the movie is a little cleaner.

Shortly after this movie, perhaps the lives of the four Beatles developed in a direction that made sappy sentimental songs less attractive to them, who were in their late twenties and fairly well settled with their respective wives and girlfriends.

Their next album was mostly covers (re-recordings of songs written by others), With the Beatles.  An extensive description of this album is available on Wikipedia, but here are my favorite cuts: No reply, a song with a definite samba, or bossa nova beat.  There is a heavy use of seventh chords (which is common in bossa nova songs).  Rock and Roll Music (Chuck Berry) and Kansas City (Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller) are fun rhythm 'n' blues songs.  Another interesting cut is Every Little Thing, which features the kettledrums, of all things.

Next came Help, a movie, during the filming of which, it is suspected the boys were mostly high on drugs.  Despite that, there were several wonderful songs in the Help album that had little or nothing to do with the movie.  Help, the title track, is well known.  A little-known song, Night Before, is one of my favorites, and comes second in the album, followed by You've got to hide your love away, strongly influenced by Bob Dylan, if not by his poetry, at least by his singing.  A lovely song, sung in 3-part harmony is You're gonna lose that girl.  True 3-part harmony is not uncommon in Beatles songs, but this one is more traditional barbershop than most of the others.  Ticket To Ride is an edgy song with interesting accompaniment and harmony.  It's only love is a contemplative song that out-Dylans Dylan.  Actually, I take that back; the lyrics begin to show a little of the maniacal word play that marked Lennon's literary work; in this case, not punning, but alliteration.  The last two cuts are I've just seen a face, Yesterday, and Dizzy Miss Lizzy, one of the great rock performances, in my humble opinion.  Unfortunately they never played it this well live.

This brings us to the end of the so-called early years.  Already the team of Lennon and McCartney were being inspired by interesting new instruments (and old instruments, e.g. 12-string guitars), and of course they were relentless consumers of the other popular music that was in the air, and much of this found its way into their own music.

[More in the next post.]