The Best Beatles Albums Part 3

 Help! -  Released 8/6/1965

Not a real semaphore code

Some have argued this is their first real concept album.  Contrary to popular belief, the Beatles did not pioneer the idea of a concept album with Sgt. Pepper.  That credit usually goes to Frank Sinatra for his semi-autobiographical album Sinatra: A Man and His Music.  But even for the Beatles, you see hints of the idea in this album.  The soundtrack for their second movie Help!, it consisted of songs from the movie on Side A, and others on Side B for filler.  Though not technically a concept album, all of the songs have something negative to say about relationships.  Gone are the positive 'She Loves You' or 'From Me to You.'  The songs are about breakups, losses, and unrequited love. Even at the height of their success, it was obvious they wanted to push themselves into new territory.  By now they had crushed attendance records by playing in New York City's Shea Stadium.  It was an event that said Rock and Roll wasn't just here to stay, but it was becoming the default societal soundtrack for the foreseeable future.  It stood to reason that this new era of rock and roll would need to be more than ritualistic dance music.  

As an album, Help! is also noteworthy for two other reasons.  It was the last album by the Beatles to feature cover songs from other artists.  And it contained the song Yesterday.  The most copyrighted song in history, Yesterday shattered musical genre barriers of the day.  Even by 1966, the music industry continued along with certain well defined assumptions.  Rock was this, mainline pop was that, classical was over there, folk music and polka and country and anything else belonged where they belonged.  Recording procedures, instruments and musical styles were assumed to stay put.  But when McCartney approached George Martin with a tune he plucked out to the lyrics 'Scrambled Eggs', Martin suggested it sounded wonderful, but not the Beatles.  He said it brought to his ears a string quartet.  McCartney resisted, saying he wasn't going to do 'some Mantovani rubbish.' But Martin insisted.  Finally Martin won out, and he - along with contributions from McCartney - wrote a score for a string quartet, backing McCartney alone with vocals and an acoustic guitar.  One of their most successful songs, and one of the most barrier breaking songs of the rock era.  

And therein lies the difference.  Over the years, fans of other artists who wrote their own songs and predated the Beatles have objected to the focus on the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team as some revolutionary development in modern music.  But the point isn't only that they wrote their own songs. It's that they wrote in a way that defied contemporary standards.  They did not seek this or that sub-sound of the fad called rock and roll - bubble gum, doowop, country blues, surf and sun.  They crafted a unique blend that sought to emulate the professional songwriting output of mainline artists, while consistently merging their myriad influences and inspirations into a broad yet unique style all their own.  A bit like Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.  Welles didn't invent much in that movie, but he took everything the film world knew at that time and combined it in a unique and visionary way.  That was the Beatles.  What they didn't invent - and they did invent much - they used in ways that hadn't been seen or heard up to that point.  And they did it without ever falling into the trap of a singular, identifiable musical style.  As an article I read on the anniversary of their Abbey Road album observed, without the Beatles you don't have what followed.  Without a single group able to write and produce songs as diverse as Yesterday, And I Love Her, Helter Skelter, I Am the Walrus, When I'm Sixty-Four, Yellow Submarine, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Revolution, you don't have an genre of music that can include The Who, Led Zeppelin, Celine Dion, Elton John, Madonna, Matchbox Twenty, Michael Jackson, AC/DC and yes, Taylor Swift.  

8/15/1965: Greeting a record setting crowd of 55,600 fans

A Hard Days Night - Released 7/10/1964

As stated above, no recording artists have ever dominated the music world the way the Beatles did in 1964.  It was simply their year.  Their appearance on Ed Sullivan in February before almost half the population of America is considered one of the landmark events of the century.  They ushered in The British Invasion, and more broadly helped kick the emerging countercultural revolution into the mainstream.  In terms of the charts, they owned the charts in a way never seen before or since. The American music industry has never seen such a spectacular rise like it witnessed in 1964. At one point over 10% of the songs on the American charts were by the Beatles.  By the spring of that year, they had placed seven songs in the US Top 10 - at the same time. And the most celebrated record in the history of Billboard happened when Can't Buy Me Love jumped to the #1 spot on April 4, allowing the Beatles to clench all five of the top five spots on the American charts:  

Beyond that, they held the number one spot in the US for almost half the year, and placed three consecutive songs (I Want to Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, Can't Buy Me Love) at number one for almost four straight months in a row.  By the end of the year they had placed seven albums at the number one spot on the US album charts.* Their first world tour marked the high point of full blown Beatlemania.  In 1965, during their second world tour, stadiums and arenas became commonplace, and some of their audiences dwarfed what they experienced in 1964.  But it was 1964 that people remember when they remember Beatlemania in all its spectacle. If the audiences were smaller than the next year, it was here that thousands would show up along the road, merely to watch the band drive from the airport to their hotel or enter a restaurant. 

In the midst of this, their manager Brian Epstein secured a movie deal to produce movies for the Beatles, in a way inspired by Elvis.  Their first film, and their best, was a mocked up documentary, a sort of 'faux day in the life of the Beatles.'  Part scripted, part improv, a touch of tripped out British humor and lots of irreverence, the American Film Institute named it one of the top 100 films of all time.  Naturally it was extremely successful.  But it was the soundtrack album that marked a leap forward for the Beatles, and the music industry as a whole.  One of the early fights the band had was to write their own songs.  In those days, thick lines existed within the industry.  Unionized writers write the songs, the musicians and singers perform them.  Folk musicians and pro songwriters could do their own material.  Even rock musicians, when rock and roll was still considered a passing fad, could write their own material. But mainline A-List artists couldn't be trusted to write songs that could achieve their needed level of commercial success.  At least not trusted to write them without outside help.  But the Beatles fought and fought and fought to do so.  That is why it is considered a milestone that the soundtrack to A Hard Day's Night is filled with songs written solely by the team of Lennon-McCartney.  To begin with, you had two songs from the album reach #1 (the aforementioned Can't By Me Love and the title track A Hard Day's Night).  In addition, music critics were astonished by the maturity and sophistication of three of the group's ballads - And I Love Her, If I Fell and Things We Said Today.   Critics who withheld high praise at first began to reconsider, given not only the success of the songs and the album, but the quality and refined maturity as well.    

The movie captured the 'four buddies versus the world' image that helped propel them to superstardom

*This was possible because the Beatles typically released albums with 12 to 14 songs.  In the US, albums released by Capital often had no more than 8 or 9 songs.  This allowed Capital Records in the US to split up Beatles albums and release two from the one album released in England.  This was a practice not unique to the Beatles, but one they resented.  Part of their development of the album emphasis was meant to keep Capital from this practice.