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The Beatles 40 best songs: at 19 Helter Skelter

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“I was in Scotland and I read in Melody Maker that Pete Townshend had said: ‘We’ve just made the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock ‘n’ roll record you’ve ever heard.’ I never actually found out what track it was that The Who had made, but that got me going,  just hearing him talk about it. So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that,  something really wild.’ And I wrote Helter Skelter.

You can hear the voices cracking, and we played it so long and so often that by the end of it you can hear Ringo saying,’I’ve got blisters on my fingers’. We just tried to get it louder: ‘Can’t we make the drums sound louder?’ That was really all I wanted to do – to make a very loud, raunchy rock ‘n’ roll record with The Beatles. And I think it’s a pretty good one.”
– Paul McCartney (Anthology)

“Umm, that came about just ’cause I’d read a review of a record which said, ‘and this group really got us wild, there’s echo on everything, they’re screaming their heads off.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’d be great to do one. Pity they’ve done it. Must be great — really screaming record.’ And then I heard their record and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated. It wasn’t rough and screaming and tape echo at all. So I thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll do one like that, then.’ And I had this song called “Helter Skelter,” which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, ‘cuz I like noise.”
– Paul McCartney (Radio Luxembourg)

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“Helter Skelter” is written by Paul McCartney, and recorded by the Beatles on their eponymous LP The Beatles, better known as The White Album. A product of McCartney’s deliberate effort to create a sound as loud and dirty as possible, the song has been noted for both its “proto-metal roar” and “unique textures” and is considered by music historians as a key influence in the early development of heavy metal.

The first version was a 27 minute jam that was never released. During the July 18, 1968 sessions, The Beatles recordedthe long version, which was much slower and less intense than the album version. Another recording from the same day was edited down to 4:37 for The Beatles Anthology, Volume III.

“…the first time the Beatles recorded the song at Abbey Road, they got so caught up in its heavy, screeching fury that they jammed on for more than ten minutes on one version, over twelve minutes on a second, and an epic, yet still tightly played, twenty-seven minutes on a third. On September 9, the night they taped the version of ‘Helter Skelter’ heard on the record, they held the length down to four and a half minutes but went just as wild, both on tape and off. Ringo’s impassioned scream, ‘I’ve got blisters on my fingers,’ was caught on tape, but had the Beatles also been filming a video that night, it would have shown George setting fire to an ashtray and running around the studio, wearing it on his head like a crown of fire.”
-Mark Hertsgaard (A Day In The Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles)

The Beatles – Helter Skelter:

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50 years ago today: A Hard Days Night by The Beatles was released


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“We were different. We were older. We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers. The early stuff – the Hard Day’s Night period, I call it – was the sexual equivalent of the beginning hysteria of a relationship. And the Sgt Pepper-Abbey Road period was the mature part of the relationship.”
– John Lennon (1980)

A Hard Day’s Night is the third album by The Beatles; it was released on July 10, 1964. The album is a soundtrack to the A Hard Day’s Night film, starring the Beatles. The American version of the album was released two weeks earlier, on 26 June 1964 by United Artists Records, with a different track listing. This is the first Beatles album to be recorded entirely on four-track tape, allowing for good stereo mixes.

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In 2000, Q placed A Hard Day’s Night at number 5 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2003, the album was ranked number 388 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The soundtrack songs were recorded in late February, and the non-soundtrack songs were recorded in June. The title song itself was recorded on April 16.

“…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.”

– Tom Ewing, Pitchfork

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The Beatles 40 best songs: At 21 A Hard Day’s Night


A Hard Days Night

“The title came from a throwaway crack from Starr. “We were working all day and then into the night,” he recalled, “[and] I came out thinking it was still day and said, ‘It’s been a hard day,’ and noticing it was dark, ‘ . . . ‘s night!’” When Lennon passed the remark on to director Richard Lester, it instantly became the film’s title. All they had to do was write a song to go with it. “John and I were always looking for titles,” said McCartney. “Once you’ve got a good title, you are halfway there. With ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ you’ve almost captured them.”” 
– Rolling Stone

“A Hard Day’s Night” is a song written by John Lennon (on the night of 13 April 1964), and credited to Lennon–McCartney, it was released on the movie soundtrack of the same name in 1964. It was later released as a single, with “Things We Said Today” as its B-side.

 “…the next morning I brought in the song… ‘cuz there was a little competition between Paul and I as to who got the A-side — who got the hits. If you notice, in the early days the majority of singles, in the movies and everything, were mine… in the early period I’m dominating the group…. The reason Paul sang on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (in the bridge) is 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, Playboy interview)

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The song featured prominently on the soundtrack to the Beatles’ first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, and was on their album of the same name. The song topped the charts in both the United Kingdom and United States when it was released as a single. The American and British singles of “A Hard Day’s Night” as well as both the American and British albums of the same title all held the top position in their respective charts for a couple of weeks in August 1964, the first time any artist had accomplished this feat.

Some will say this is a sentimental selection. That’s okay. It is, I love the song, the album and especially the movie. That strange but brilliant opening chord, a chord that is the theme for many discussions and that started the song, the album, a movie of the same name, and really a pop era, we saw the film over and over at our local cinema in the 70s. The cementation of our love for The Beatles started with this chord/song/record/film.

“We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning. The strident guitar chord was the perfect launch.”
– George Martin to Mark Lewisohn (The Complete Beatles recording sessions)

 

Continue reading The Beatles 40 best songs: At 21 A Hard Day’s Night

The Beatles 40 best songs: at 22 “Dear Prudence”

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“Dear Prudence” is a song written by John Lennon, and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was released by the Beatles as the second track on their 1968 double-disc album entitled The Beatles, commonly known as The White Album. The subject of the song is Prudence Farrow, actress Mia Farrow’s sister, who was present when the Beatles went to India to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

John Lennon was asked to “contact her and make sure she came out more often to socialize”. As a result, Lennon wrote the song “Dear Prudence”. In the song Lennon asks Farrow to “open up your eyes” and “see the sunny skies” reminding her that she is “part of everything”. The song was said to be “a simple plea to a friend to ‘snap out of it'”. Lennon said later that “She’d been locked in for three weeks and was trying to reach God quicker than anyone else”.

Dear Prudence is me. Written in India. A song about Mia Farrow’s sister, who seemed to go slightly barmy, meditating too long, and couldn’t come out of the little hut that we were livin’ in. They selected me and George to try and bring her out because she would trust us. If she’d been in the West, they would have put her away.
– John Lennon

Continue reading The Beatles 40 best songs: at 22 “Dear Prudence”

The Beatles 40 best songs: at 23 “Love Me Do”


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Love Me Do” is the Beatles‘ first single, backed by “P.S. I Love You“. When the single was originally released in the United Kingdom on 5 October 1962, it peaked at No. 17; in 1982 it was re-promoted (not re-issued, retaining the same catalogue number) and reached No. 4. In the United States the single was a No. 1 hit in 1964. In 2012, the song entered the public domain in Europe. This was my first encounter with The Beatles, I got the single from an aunt (still have it!). Love Me Do was the best song in the world for me for many years and I still love it!

It was written as early as 1958:

Paul wrote the main structure of this when he was 16, or even earlier. I think I had something to do with the middle.”

“Love Me Do is Paul’s song. He wrote it when he was a teenager. Let me think. I might have helped on the middle eight, but I couldn’t swear to it. I do know he had the song around, in Hamburg, even, way, way before we were songwriters.”
– John Lennon

But Paul remembers it a bit different:

“Love Me Do’ was completely co-written. It might have been my original idea but some of them really were 50-50s, and I think that one was. It was just Lennon and McCartney sitting down without either of us having a particularly original idea. We loved doing it, it was a very interesting thing to try and learn to do, to become songwriters. I think why we eventually got so strong was we wrote so much through our formative period.

Love Me Do was our first hit, which ironically is one of the two songs that we control, because when we first signed to EMI they had a publishing company called Ardmore and Beechwood which took the two songs, ‘Love Me Do’ and P.S. I Love You, and in doing a deal somewhere along the way we were able to get them back”
– Paul McCartney

Continue reading The Beatles 40 best songs: at 23 “Love Me Do”