FEATURE:
“1,2,3,4…”
PHOTO CREDIT: Apple Corps Ltd
The Five Best Opening Tracks from The Beatles’ Studio Albums
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I have been thinking about The Beatles…
and how they always opened their studio albums with a terrific introductory track. From their 1963 debut, Please Please Me, and I Saw Her Standing There (which opens with the “1,2,3,4…” call), the band have never really let their foot off the gas in that sense. Their albums are events, so ensuring the listener is engrossed and arrested from the first bars is essential. Not many bands would be up to the task! Because of that, I wanted to write a feature where I pick the best five opening tracks. This is only for their studio albums (including soundtracks), rather than compilations, extended/double-E.P.s, or U.S. releases. I will take this chronological. Here are five tracks from Beatles albums that get off to…
A great start!
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A Hard Day’s Night
From the Album: A Hard Day’s Night
Album Release Date: 10th July, 1964
Producer: George Martin
Main Songwriter: John Lennon
Single Chart Position (U.K.): 1
Song Information:
“In the studio
‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was recorded on 16 April 1964 in Abbey Road’s Studio Two. It took The Beatles nine takes to complete, just five of which were complete, and was finished in under than three hours.
The backing track – two rhythm guitars, bass guitar and drums – was recorded onto track one of the four-track tape, and Lennon and McCartney’s lead vocals were recorded live on track two.
Track three of the four-track tape was filled with acoustic guitar, bongos played by Norman Smith, more vocals by Lennon and McCartney, and cowbell.
I only ever played on one Beatles song, and that was ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. I played the bongos. Ringo couldn’t do it. I went down to the studio and showed him what to do, but he just couldn’t get that continual rhythm. So I said, ‘Okay, forget it, I’ll do it.’ We overdubbed it, and I left my Tape Op behind upstairs to operate the equipment.
Norman Smith
Recording The Beatles
The recording was finished with a solo, played by George Martin on piano and George Harrison on guitar, on track four, plus an extra bass guitar part after the solo, underneath the line “so why on earth should I moan”.
The only reason he [Paul] sang on ‘Hard Day’s Night’ was because I couldn’t reach the notes. ‘When I’m home, everything seems to be right. When I’m home…’ – which is what we’d do sometimes. One of us couldn’t reach a note but he wanted a different sound, so he’d get the other to do the harmony.
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff” – The Beatles Bible
Help!
From the Album: Help!
Album Release Date: 6th August, 1965
Producer: George Martin
Main Songwriter: John Lennon
Single Chart Position (U.K.): 1
Song Information:
“In the studio
The Beatles recorded ‘Help!’ in a single night, on 13 April 1965. The four-hour session took place from 7pm at Abbey Road’s studio two.
Twelve takes of the song were recorded. The first eight were of the rhythm track only, with vocals appearing for the first time on take nine.
Some discussion at the beginning of take four indicates that George Harrison is having a little trouble executing the complicated, fast riffs; he’s also worried about having to play and sing at the same time, though Paul assures him that won’t be necessary, as there are two voice tracks available.
The Unreleased Beatles
Richie Unterberger
The final attempt was the best, and onto this Ringo Starr overdubbed a tambourine, and George Harrison added the series of descending Chet Atkins-style guitar notes which close each chorus” – The Beatles Bible
Drive My Car
From the Album: Rubber Soul
Album Release Date: 3rd December, 1965
Producer: George Martin
Main Songwriter: Paul McCartney
Song Information:
“Paul McCartney‘s first draft of the song featured a chorus based around the line, “You can buy me golden rings”. He and John Lennon reworked the song with some difficulty, eventually discarding the clichés and settling upon the idea of a headstrong woman.
The lyrics were disastrous and I knew it… This is one of the songs where John and I came nearest to having a dry session. The lyrics I brought in were something to do with golden rings, which is always fatal. ‘Rings’ is fatal anyway, ‘rings’ always rhymes with ‘things’ and I knew it was a bad idea. I came in and I said, ‘These aren’t good lyrics but it’s a good tune.’ The tune was nice, the tune was there, I’d done the melody. Well, we tried, and John couldn’t think of anything, and we tried and eventually it was, ‘Oh let’s leave it, let’s get off this one.’ ‘No, no. We can do it, we can do it.’ So we had a break, maybe had a cigarette or a cup of tea, then we came back to it, and somehow it became ‘drive my car’ instead of ‘gold-en rings’, and then it was wonderful because this nice tongue-in-cheek idea came and suddenly there was a girl there, the heroine of the story, and the story developed and had a little sting in the tail like ‘Norwegian Wood’ had, which was ‘I actually haven’t got a car, but when I get one you’ll be a terrific chauffeur.’
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
The song contained clear sexual overtones, from the first verse’s “You can do something in between” to the suggestive promises of “a better time”.
’Drive my car’ was an old blues euphemism for sex, so in the end all is revealed. Black humour crept in and saved the day. It wrote itself then. I find that very often, once you get the good idea, things write themselves.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now” – The Beatles Bible
Back in the U.S.S.R.
From the Album: The Beatles
Album Release Date: 22nd November, 1968
Producer: George Martin
Main Songwriter: Paul McCartney
Song Information:
“In the studio
Unusually, the drums on ‘Back In The USSR’ were recorded mainly by Paul McCartney, with contributions from John Lennon and George Harrison, after Ringo Starr had temporarily walked out of the group.
According to Barry Miles, Starr left when McCartney criticised him for messing up a tom-tom fill. With the atmosphere in the studio already often tense, the altercation was enough for the normally amenable Starr to reach his limit. He left London and spent a fortnight on Peter Sellers’ yacht in the Mediterranean.
I left because I felt two things: I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John, who had been living in my apartment in Montagu Square with Yoko since he moved out of Kenwood. I said, ‘I’m, leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.’ And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’
So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing: ‘I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.’ And Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three!’
I didn’t even bother going to George then. I said, ‘I’m going on holiday.’ I took the kids and we went to Sardinia.
Ringo Starr
Anthology
The recording of ‘Back In The USSR’ was completed in just two days. On the first takes, recorded on 22 August 1968, McCartney played guitar and Harrison was on snare drum. On later takes McCartney switched to piano, and Lennon strummed chords on a bass guitar. They taped five tracks, the last of which was the best.
Paul completely. I play the six-string bass on that. [Sings as he pretends to play bass guitar] ‘Da da da da da…’ Try writing that on your typewriter.
John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff” – The Beatles Bible
Come Together
From the Album: Abbey Road
Album Release Date: 26th September, 1969
Producer: George Martin
Main Songwriter: John Lennon
Single Chart Position (U.K.): 4
Song Information:
“In the studio
The Beatles began recording ‘Come Together’ on 21 July 1969, recording eight takes in Abbey Road’s studio three. Three of the takes – four, five, and seven – were incomplete, and take six was selected as the basis of the album version.
Take one, with slightly different lyrics and a raw vocal from John Lennon, can be heard on the Anthology 3 album, and take five can be heard on some formats of the 50th anniversary reissue of Abbey Road.
Lennon sang without his guitar, and clapped while singing the line “Shoot me”. The words allegedly referred not to a desire for martyrdom, but to a fix of heroin. They were adapted from the unreleased ‘Watching Rainbows’, a song The Beatles rehearsed on 14 January 1969 during the Get Back/Let It Be sessions.
On the finished record you can really only hear the word ‘shoot’. The bass guitar note falls where the ‘me’ is.
Geoff Emerick
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewisohn
Although ‘Come Together’ was conceived as a Chuck Berry-style rocker, The Beatles slowed it down at Paul McCartney’s suggestion.
He originally brought it over as a very perky little song, and I pointed out to him that it was very similar to Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’. John acknowledged it was rather close to it so I said, ‘Well, anything you can do to get away from that.’ I suggested that we tried it swampy – ‘swampy’ was the word I used – so we did, we took it right down. I laid that bass line down which very much makes the mood. It’s actually a bass line that people now use very often in rap records. If it’s not a sample, they use that riff. But that was my contribution to that.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
The Beatles began recording ‘Come Together’ on four-track tape. The initial takes had McCartney’s bass guitar on track one; George Harrison’s guitar on track two; Ringo Starr’s drums on track three; and Lennon’s vocals, handclaps and tambourine on track four.
‘Come Together’ changed at a session. We said, ‘Let’s slow it down. Let’s do this to it, let’s do that to it,’ and it ends up however it comes out. I just said, ‘Look, I’ve got no arrangement for you, but you know how I want it.’ I think that’s partly because we’ve played together a long time. So I said, ‘Give me something funky,’ and set up a beat, maybe, and they all just join in.
John Lennon, 1969
Anthology” – The Beatles Bible