FEATURE:
Love Me Do
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles in 1963
Ranking The Beatles’ First Five Studio Albums
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THERE are three reasons…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles in 1962
why I am revisiting The Beatles. I am a little late but, on 1st January, 1962, The Beatles’ famous audition for Decca Records took place in London on. It is amazing to think that the audition as that long ago! Although Decca did not sign The Beatles, the Liverpool band obviously did okay! This article talks about how one man made one of music’s biggest mistakes:
“Although nerves meant The Beatles didn’t perform at their best, all four members and Brian Epstein were confident that the session would inevitably lead to a contract with Decca. The label, meanwhile, was erring towards Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who had also auditioned that day. As head of A&R Dick Rowe later remembered:
I told Mike he’d have to decide between them. It was up to him – The Beatles or Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. He said, ‘They’re both good, but one’s a local group, the other comes from Liverpool.’ We decided it was better to take the local group. We could work with them more easily and stay closer in touch as they came from Dagenham.
Dick Rowe”
I wanted to mark sixty years of that legendary time when The Beatles were turned down by Decca. Another reason for writing about the band is that last year was an exciting one where we saw the documentary-film, The Beatles: Get Back, in addition to an anniversary release of Let It Be. It seemed that, at such a difficult time, The Beatles saved a lot of us! I am not sure what is planned for this year. I am hoping that there is a remaster or re-release of their debut studio album, Please Please Me. Although that was released in 1963, The Beatles began recording in September 1962. We mark sixty years of that moment later in the year. The band’s debut single, Love Me Do, was released in October 1962. Another big anniversary to mark. Because of these milestones, I have been thinking about The Beatles’ earliest albums. There was a period during Rubber Soul (1965) when the group transitioned from their early sound and adopted something more experimental. Maybe not as radical as what we heard through 1966’s Revolver, there was a distinct sonic shift. I wanted to rank the five studio albums released prior to their 1965 masterpiece. I wanted to rank The Beatles’ first five albums, as they are all fascinating and full of wonderful moments. The 1962-1965 era is…
MY favourite period from the band.
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1. Please Please Me
Release Date: 22nd March, 1963
Label: Parlophone
Length: 32:16
Standout Tracks: Please Please Me/P.S. I Love You/Twist and Shout (Phil Medley, Bert Russell)
Review:
“The Beatles’ “long play” debut, Please Please Me, came in 1963, opening with a few rudimentary remarks from Mr. McCartney: “Well, she was just 17 / If you know what I mean.” If this is supposed to indicate that the female in question was born in 1946, then yes, we know exactly what you mean, Paul. If it means something else, I remain in the dark. These young, sensitive, genteel-yet-stalkerish Beatles sure did spend a lot of time thinking about girls. Virtually every song they wrote during this period focuses on the establishment and recognition of consensual romance, often through paper and quill (“P.S. I Love You”), sometimes by means of monosyllabic nonsense (“Love Me Do”), and occasionally through oral sex (“Please Please Me”). The intensely private Mr. Harrison asks a few coquettish questions two-thirds of the way through the opus (“Do You Want To Know A Secret”) before Mr. Lennon obliterates the back door with the greatest rock voice of all time, accidentally inventing Matthew Broderick’s career. There are a few bricks hither and yon (thanks for wasting 123 seconds of my precious life, Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow) but on balance, I have to give Please Please Me an A, despite the fact that it doesn’t really have a proper single” – The A.V. Club
2. A Hard Day's Night
Release Date: 10th July, 1964
Label: Parlophone
Length: 30:10
Standout Tracks: If I Fell/Can’t Buy Me Love/Things We Said Today
Review:
“A Hard Day's Night, in other words, is a crucial inflection point in the Beatles' career. Coinciding with their leaving Liverpool and moving to London, this could easily have been their first step on a road of crowd-pleasing predictability: Instead, both film and this soundtrack album are a testament to how fabulous pop can be when you take care over doing it.
The album is most famous now for being the first all-original record the band put out-- and their only all Lennon-McCartney LP. Formidably prolific at this point, the pair had been creating songs-- and hits-- for other performers which must have given them useful insight into how to make different styles work. There's been a particular jump forward in ballad writing-- on "And I Love Her" in particular, Paul McCartney hits a note of humble, open-hearted sincerity he'd return to again and again. His "Things We Said Today" is even better, wintry and philosophical before the surprising, stirring middle eight.
But the dominant sound of the album is the Beatles in full cry as a pop band-- with no rock'n'roll covers to remind you of their roots you're free to take the group's new sound purely on its own modernist terms: The chord choices whose audacity surprised a listening Bob Dylan, the steamroller power of the harmonies, the gleaming sound of George Harrison's new Rickenbacker alongside the confident Northern blasts of harmonica, and a band and producer grown more than comfortable with each other. There's detail aplenty here-- and the remasters make it easy to hunt for-- but A Hard Day's Night is perhaps the band's most straightforward album: You notice the catchiness first, and you can wonder how they got it later.
The best example of this is the title track-- the clang of that opening chord to put everyone on notice, two burning minutes thick with percussion (including a hammering cowbell!) thanks to the new four-track machines George Martin was using, and then the song spiraling out with a guitar figure as abstractedly lovely as anything the group had recorded. John Lennon's best songs on the record-- "A Hard Day's Night", "Tell Me Why", "When I Get Home", "You Can't Do That"-- are fast, aggressive, frustrated and spiked with these moments of breathtaking prettiness” – Pitchfork
Key Cut: A Hard Day’s Night
3. Help!
Release Date: 6th August, 1965
Label: Parlophone
Length: 33:44
Standout Tracks: Help!/The Night Before/Ticket to Ride
Review:
“The group’s second movie, Help!, wasn’t nearly as good as A Hard Day’s Night, but its 1965 soundtrack is equally great, from the driving title track and chiming “Ticket to Ride” to Ringo’s twangy cover of American honky-tonk singer Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally.” Harrison surfaces here as a formidable songwriter, taking center stage on “I Need You” and “You Like Me Too Much.”
But the album’s masterpiece is McCartney’s brooding, deceptively simple chamber-pop ballad “Yesterday.” After decades of oversaturation by classic-rock radio and cheesy lounge singers, it’s tempting to dismiss this track as just another schmaltzy McCartney love song. But it’s compositionally complex, one of the first major pop
songs to draw directly from classical music, juxtaposing acoustic guitar with a string quartet, shifting from minor to major chords. It set the stage for one of the most groundbreaking and innovative periods in The Beatles’ career, not to mention pop music in general” – PASTE
4. With the Beatles
Release Date: 22nd November, 1963
Label: Parlophone
Length: 33:07
Standout Tracks: It Won't Be Long/You Really Got a Hold on Me (Smokey Robinson)/Not a Second Time
Review:
“With the Beatles is a sequel of the highest order -- one that betters the original by developing its own tone and adding depth. While it may share several similarities with its predecessor -- there is an equal ratio of covers-to-originals, a familiar blend of girl group, Motown, R&B, pop, and rock, and a show tune that interrupts the flow of the album -- With the Beatles is a better record that not only rocks harder, it's considerably more sophisticated. They could deliver rock & roll straight ("I Wanna Be Your Man") or twist it around with a little Latin lilt ("Little Child," one of their most underrated early rockers); Lennon and McCartney wrote sweet ballads (the achingly gorgeous "All I've Got to Do") and sprightly pop/rockers ("All My Loving") with equal aplomb; and the propulsive rockers ("It Won't Be Long") were as richly melodic as slower songs ("Not a Second Time"). Even George Harrison's first recorded song, "Don't Bother Me," is a standout, with its wonderfully foreboding minor-key melody. Since the Beatles covered so much ground with their originals, their covers pale slightly in comparison, particularly since they rely on familiar hits (only "Devil in Her Heart" qualifies as a forgotten gem). But for every "Roll Over Beethoven," a surprisingly stiff reading of the Chuck Berry standard, there is a sublime moment, such as Lennon's soaring interpretation of "You Really Got a Hold on Me," and the group always turns in thoroughly enjoyable performances. Still, the heart of With the Beatles lies not in the covers, but the originals, where it was clear that, even at this early stage, the Beatles were rapidly maturing and changing, turning into expert craftsmen and musical innovators” – AllMusic
Buy: https://store.hmv.com/store/music/vinyl/with-the-beatles
Key Cut: All My Loving
5. Beatles for Sale
Release Date: 4th December, 1964
Label: Parlophone
Length: 33:42
Standout Tracks: No Reply/Baby’s in Black/I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party
Review:
“It was inevitable that the constant grind of touring, writing, promoting, and recording would grate on the Beatles, but the weariness of Beatles for Sale comes as something of a shock. Only five months before, the group released the joyous A Hard Day's Night. Now, they sound beaten, worn, and, in Lennon's case, bitter and self-loathing. His opening trilogy ("No Reply," "I'm a Loser," "Baby's in Black") is the darkest sequence on any Beatles record, setting the tone for the album. Moments of joy pop up now and again, mainly in the forms of covers and the dynamic "Eight Days a Week," but the very presence of six covers after the triumphant all-original A Hard Day's Night feels like an admission of defeat or at least a regression. (It doesn't help that Lennon's cover of his beloved obscurity "Mr. Moonlight" winds up as arguably the worst thing the group ever recorded.) Beneath those surface suspicions, however, there are some important changes on Beatles for Sale, most notably Lennon's discovery of Bob Dylan and folk-rock. The opening three songs, along with "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party," are implicitly confessional and all quite bleak, which is a new development. This spirit winds up overshadowing McCartney's cheery "I'll Follow the Sun" or the thundering covers of "Rock & Roll Music," "Honey Don't," and "Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!," and the weariness creeps up in unexpected places -- "Every Little Thing," "What You're Doing," even George's cover of Carl Perkins' "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" -- leaving the impression that Beatlemania may have been fun but now the group is exhausted. That exhaustion results in the group's most uneven album, but its best moments find them moving from Merseybeat to the sophisticated pop/rock they developed in mid-career” – AllMusic
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/651143?ev=rb
Key Cut: Eight Days a Week