But back in 1963, The Beatles came to their second LP. Between the release of the first in the same year and the Christmas market end, they had become famous enough for the term Beatlemania to need coining. The singles were coming fast: Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand were all number ones and a frenzied live schedule would have made the spectre of doing an album yet another climb. But they did it and managed to take the game forward.
Before the Beatles, pop artists didn't have to wow anyone with twelve inch discs. Please Please Me itself is a polished extension of the band's live set. Just under half of it is cover versions. It was meant to be a kind of placeholder ahead of the next megahit or close-by live gig. The next album only had to do that: fun cover versions and, if lucky, a few shiny new ones that, if not tight enough for singles would make good singalongs. In other words an album was a job of work, not a delivery device for a concept. So, does it sound like work?
It Won't Be Long kicks off with Lennon shouting the title in the first chorus and trading yeahs with Paul. The stage clears for the verse which doesn't behave conventionally at all. The E to C progression is jarring if it weren't for the vocal melody that makes sense of it and the rich descending guitar run between lines. The middle eight descends chromatically with some busy counterpoint between lead and backing vocals. Hell, even the chorus outro goes from A to A diminished to E. The whole thing finishes with what feels a touch corny with a slowed final line of the chorus but there's been so much on the plate to begin with that it works.
All I've Got to Do starts with a strummed augmented chord before Lennon's vocal comes in in Smokey Robinson mode. "When-ever I-i-i-i-iyiyi, want you around, yeah." A thin soul shuffle starts beneath him. He's telling his girl that he controls her. All he has to do is call her on the phone or whisper the words she wants to hear. But the chorus equalises that. The same goes for him. Considering the late night feel of the verse and Lennon's rasp-edged delivery, the case for the reverse never quite convinces. The song ends on a hummed verse vocal to the fade which has always sounded to me like the first verse was the point of the song and the turnabout chorus the ruse. It's nevertheless, far from the I love you love everything is true love image of the singles. Even a b-side would have been too naked a spot for it. Effectively it's Lennon after groupies, Lennon beyond his own marriage, sketching some of the dark between moments of public charm and domestic presence. I've always found it a sinister song.
All My Loving is a McCartney pacey rocker that starts in top gear with a melody that expresses his characteristic classical symmetry - this much up, so this much down. The harmonies are silvery. George Harrison's country solo is perky and perfect. Paul's bass is propulsive power walk. However, the feature that really makes this one pop is Lennon's uncharacteristic triplet chords. He's the one playing the bright, clean diddly diddly diddly guitar all the way through. It's not Chet Atkins but the sheer force and consistency of it that testifies to those thousands of hours from Hamburg to Liverpool to London is a humble kind of hubris. Look, Ma, both hands, and it's perfect for the song.
Lifer Beatle fans are down on Don't Bother Me but I think that's just conformity to the George as latecomer narrative. The song starts at speed with the guitar figure from the middle eight but quickly gets into the soaring verse. The progression has a folky minor mode feel to it but done as a beat band number it moves along with a stop start at every dour chorus where the Vox amp tremolo growls beneath the warning of the words. The middle eight goes even higher and finishes the point: my true love has dumped me but that doesn't mean I want you hanging around my door. He's singing the pain of his breakup (which he admits is his fault) to another girl who's making herself available. It's not unheard of for a teen rocker, there were plenty of pretty boy one hit wonders in the US who took songs like this to the big screen but none so dark and moody as this.
Little Child is an original that sounds like a cover. The harmonica blasts and bright chorus sound like they come from the spares and unfinished folder. The line about being so sad and lonely sounds, for all its campy pathos, taunting. I live through this one rather than listen to it.
Till There Was You begins like an elevated wedding reception band when the bass player steps up and does his spotlight ballad. Yeah, I know, the bass player is Paul McCartney but the sense of the moment they do the standard is palpable. It's a show tune from The Music Man. Paul over enunciates every line in the fruitbasket setting, in case you were in danger of missing how special the moment is. George Harrison's acoustic solo, however, is a highlight, sprightly dancing around the busy progression. This is a great shower song. I still occassionally croon out my pale imitation of Macca's vocal as the mighty warm jet nourishes my back but I'll deliver the last line of each verse like a defeated cartoon villain: "Till there was YOU!" It's a leftover from the live set that they were still doing (and did at the Royal Command Performance in front of the crowned heads of Soho). If you gave it too much thought you might wonder if they'd be still doing this one if fame had never happened and they were an old wedding reception band.
Please Mister Postman bangs out of the gate in high stride with shouts and drive. Another cover and done with great energy. I first knew this as a Carpenters song. They were going off this version rather than the Marvelettes' big production with the bold and creamy vocals. For the Beatles, it's just something else from the set to fill out the LP side. It's fine.
Side two starts with George's Chuck Berry showcase and his charmingly flubbed lead intro takes us into a classic rock shuffle. It's ok but George's immovably English vocal has none of the original's archness. Then again, his unaffected voice yet carries more authenticity (if none of the force) that a Mick Jagger or Eric Burdon would bring to British Berry covers. He sounds, especially when he's reproducing the original solo with its deft upward bends, like a fan which has more to do with what the song is about than the more purist takes happening around him. If the whole thing feels too laboratory fresh it's on George Martin who was still new to all this rock 'n' roll nonsense and didn't get the sweat of it. This is another live set number brought into the studio and taken into stadiums where it regained the beads of effort. Here it sounds like a perfectly constructed Ikea rock classic.
Hold Me Tight is much maligned. It comes in like a proto Glitter Band with a big chunka chunka guitar grind. The sweet close harmonies trade time with Paul's ballad voice but things start going wrong from the off. As it never was outside of this instance, Paul's vocal is just off pitch. It recovers every time but falls out again and again. The middle eight in intentionally out of key for dramatics. It's a good switch but McCartney can't leap down to it without stumbling as he lands and delivers some of the unintentionally quirky singing of his decades long career. This goes right up to the clean finish where he's trying for a jazzy finish but just sounds like he can't hear the backing track. For me, I love the energy and the floppy vocal. It's the closest thing on the record to a live recording, especially the chunging guitar attack.
You really Got a Hold on Me is another cover from the live show and, while arranged to add more texture (particularly piano) and featuring a gymnastic Lennon vocal, it crawls along the floor like the last song of the last set when the waiters are clearing the tables and staff are showing up with brooms. Smokey Robinson, it's not.
I Wanna Be Your Man is fun for its energy and bitchiness. It's the song Lennon and McCartney gave to The Rolling Stones to serve as their first hit. The Stones took it into their own territory and acquitted themselves of the charge of accepting charity. The Beatles gave it to Ringo to sing and stormed through it in not a second over two minutes. Ringo shouts a good vocal and the wobble wobble guitar rock underneath lifts it up and keeps it over shoulder height. I never skip it. But what a fucking joke.
Devil in Her Heart is George giving us another song from the set. The gender of the title was changed from the Donays' original but the arrangement was all early Beatles. George cannot come close to Yvonne Vemee's power or yearning, sounding more like a blazer-school prefect on speech night. Look, I don't want to be so mean but this is The Beatles. I know it was just their second album and might have been their last for all they knew but listen to the strength of the originals on this LP and how far they've come from those on Please Please Me. To mire themselves in a soggy intermission between powerful music makers and their cover band beginnings feels like such a waste. No, they weren't going to wait another month to fill both sides with new originals, the business demanded outstanding songs for the sides of singles and the albums could feature this kind of tokenism with sharing lead vocals but this goofy treading on a recent classic to use up space feels wasteful.
Not a Second Time is a Lennon led assembly line early Beatles outing, heavily influenced by the Motown and girl group hits the band was so enamoured of. It's fine. This is the song that the critic William Mann compared to Mahler and spoke of Aeolian cadences, drawing public mirth from the band themselves for the bombast of it. It's an ok song written and performed in emulation of other musicians that the band admired.
The album closes with Money (That's What I Want). This bluesy screamer was offered as the Twist and Shout of the record. While its subject matter and sleaze prohibit it from the horny glory of that one, it's still an impressive performance with grimacing piano riffs and lashing vocals. When it comes to its clean finish and John's final insistent, "that's what I want," we feel as though we've been through something. The valleys of near goodness or teetering failure are forgiven. Actually, there is a flaw in this track and it's worth a listen. At the 1:29 mark as the piano riff is playing out one of the guitars starts playing the fifth of the twelve bar finish but the rest of them keep on the tonic chord. Someone was off with the fairies. It's quickly rectified and the song doesn't come close to collapse but it's a fun moment of vulnerability.
Again, it's crucial to remember that this record was made at a time when albums weren't the kind of statements they would become. It was a kind of substitute live set with lacquered edges that could be played over and over without the risk of saturation the way singles got. But even so the band's minders and stylists were also at work. Where the first album's cover shot gave the sense that the band lived in a council estate, leaning over the rail of the somethingth floor of a tower block, the cover of With the Beatles was all minimalist pop art.
A moody band portrait in high contrast black and white, strange figure arrangement with Ringo being a knight's move away from John against a solid black background. No one, not even Paul, is smiling. Whatever this was, it wasn't the usual showbiz commodifying. It did make them commodities but snipped the marionette strings that would normally have been allowed free display. The band looked like they owned themselves. The lads had, of course, had plenty of involvement with the Exi art students of Hamburg like Astrid Kircher and Klaus Voormann. (Actually - sidebar - try to imagine The Beatles without this encounter that would have smashed artsy experimentation with fun. Google some publicity shots of bands like The Searchers or The Honeycombs for suggestions.) While the photo was not of their design (it's Robert Freeman's) it's not something that would have been out of sorts with their experience. It was pop art for pop music. Admittedly, modernist cover art was already a staple of jazz and even exotica artists but this was yet another of The Beatles' baby steps toward the status as high avant garde conventionalists. It's a corker of a cover. The Australian one that I had in the seventies still hadn't caught up, being a reproduction of the local version with the big goopy heads floating around in the dark and a Gilligan's Island font in purple for the title. Ah well, my mini LP from the Mono box set puts it right.
However much I've dismissed some of the content of this record I cannot deny its importance to pop music history. At the time to the band and their fans it was the latest long player and if things held out they could do another. But other plans were afoot that made With the Beatles particularly significant. It was the last of their albums before they conquered the Earth as the biggest band in the world. Months after its release, The Beatles visited the USA, a vision on tv that rang a million cash register bells. They returned and kept returning to ever greater success and wealth generation, touring, releasing a movie and eclipsing any pop star before them.
While we might listen to this and raise our eyebrows at the quaintness of the pub rock cover versions among the self penned marvels, it's worth putting some perspective in there. After this, America got hold of them and, however much they retained what Englishness they might claim they would be adopted across the Atlantic as honorary sons, but on American terms. After a few small labels had mishandled their releases, Capitol took charge and Americanised the records. Until Pepper, the US versions were remarkably different and more numerous to cash in (more albums with fewer tracks). All that. But one of these worked a treat. Meet the Beatles took the essence of the cover art and packed the sides with upbeat numbers, favouring singles and rockers. It's constant energy (even Till There Was You sounds up). I can't help feel that the strength and blazing success of that rejig was a major influence on the solidity of the next album A Hard Day's Night. It wasn't just packed with upbeat numbers it was the first to be wholly written by the band themselves and has them in the most consistently exciting form until Rubber Soul. Weirdly, the US release of the album only featured side one of the UK one, side two in America was godawful instrumental versions of the songs played by session musicians (not even based on the Beatles' own backing tracks).
Until then, this set of songs with the band staring into the future as sexy young explorers was the new offering. Without declaring it, the set does have a kind of theme but one only really visible in context: make it and you get more originals, go bust and go back to the pub repertoire and maybe settle with a house, family and plumbing business, gathering on the weekends to relive those old Chuck Berry sizzlers. Well, even without America, that wouldn't have been overnight but, with it, this would look like the distant Earth in the rear window of the rocket.
