All the Songs Read online

  All the Songs

  THE STORY BEHIND EVERY BEATLES RELEASE

  PREFACE BY Patti Smith

  JEAN-MICHEL GUESDON & PHILIPPE MARGOTIN

  Scott Freiman, CONSULTING EDITOR

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PREFACE BY PATTI SMITH

  FOREWORD

  HAMBURG: THE FORMATIVE YEARS

  Please Please Me

  From Me To You / Thank You Girl

  She Loves You / I’ll Get You

  I Want to Hold Your Hand / This Boy

  With the Beatles

  A Hard Day’s Night

  Beatles for Sale

  I Feel Fine / She’s a Woman

  Long Tall Sally / I Call Your Name / Slow Down / Matchbox

  Help!

  Yes It Is

  I’m Down

  Rubber Soul

  Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out

  Revolver

  Paperback Writer / Rain

  Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane

  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

  All You Need Is Love / Baby You’re A Rich Man

  Magical Mystery Tour

  Hello, Goodbye

  Lady Madonna / The Inner Light

  The Beatles

  Hey Jude / Revolution

  Yellow Submarine

  The Ballad of John and Yoko / Old Brown Shoe

  Abbey Road

  Don’t Let Me Down

  Let It Be

  You Know My Name

  GLOSSARY

  INDEX OF ALBUMS AND SONGS

  INDEX

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  NEWSLETTERS

  PREFACE

  On the eve of June 1, 1967, my friend Janet Hamill and I were camped in the family laundry room with a transistor radio, feverishly awaiting midnight. At that moment the Beatles new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was to be premiered across America over local FM radio stations. It was a unifying moment for our generation, and joining the collective mind, we listened transfixed. The moods swung madly from cut to cut—Ringo’s inclusive “With A Little Help from My Friends,” Paul’s look into the future with “When I’m 64,” George’s trance-like “Within You Without You,” the calliope of John’s “Mr. Kite.” By the time “A Day In The Life” unfolded and the final chord stretched out into forever, we were ecstatic. For two aspiring young poets, that midnight journey offered possibilities that spun off in all directions.

  I had come late to the Beatles. In the great divide of the new groups from England, I preferred the darker, more visceral Animals and Rolling Stones. But as the Beatles grew musically and conceptually, I was drawn in. By Rubber Soul I felt myself along for their ride, and with Revolver I was sold, acknowledging their influence and their enduring effect on our cultural voice.

  I joined the legions seduced by the words of their world—all four worlds, that is. The mystic paths lit by the lantern of George. The human and melancholic joy of Ringo. The cinematic visions of Paul. John’s heightened, Joycean wordplay. They were so different from one another, like the four points on a compass, and yet contributed so much as a band. They combined the spiritual and the romantic, the absurd and political, and as they evolved, we evolved with them.

  They aspired to literacy, which makes this book all the more revelatory. Even their earliest work, “She Loves You” or “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” has the simplicity of a Hank Williams song, poetry reduced to its essential phrase. By the time they reach the emotionally surreal landscape of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which heralded the coming of Sgt. Pepper in that sacred spring, their abstract imagery had become dreamlike, hallucinatory. Somehow it all made sense.

  Their songs got into your head, heard from passing cars, storefronts and jukeboxes. We sang along wholeheartedly. We sang lyrics knowing and yet not knowing their multi-leveled meanings. These songs offered a sometimes-undecipherable and poetic language made familiar with melodies and harmonies that fit hand-in-glove. We did not need to break them down. We felt them. They embraced the small in the humble and exquisite “Blackbird” and expanded humankind with the universal phrase “All you need is love.” In between lies an arc only few are gifted-to embody the generational shift from adolescence into maturity. To grow and serve within one’s words, one’s music, one’s art.

  Patti Smith

  FOREWORD

  Between June 6, 1962, the date of the first audition of the Beatles at Abbey Road Studios, and May 8, 1970, the date of the release of their last album, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr wrote an exceptional page in the history of popular music and changed the musical panorama of the sixties. However, the four young men from Liverpool, the future Fab Four, could not have predicted anything so phenomenal in their early days. No one could imagine that a “group of guitarists” (three guitarists and a drummer) would become a strong influence on their contemporaries and future generations. When they landed on the tarmac at JFK Airport in 1964, Elvis did not even feel threatened.

  How could have we guessed that the Beatles would open the doors to the New World to other British music groups such as the Stones, the Kinks, and the Who, and would attain such worldwide popularity?

  Those who love and are interested in the Beatles are probably wondering why we would dedicate another book to the group. However, today, fifty years after the release of their first album, we have new and relevant documentation that allows us to understand more fully the creation of their songs.

  In the following pages, we focus on words from the Beatles themselves and their immediate entourage to get closer to the truth and, above all, to keep us away from legends and myth. Our approach is based on verifiable content. To this end, we have cross-checked most of the existing sources and provided a footnote.

  In this book, we analyze only the singles and the original English albums (omitting anthologies and collections of all kinds) planned and released by the Beatles themselves, in order to respect and have a better understanding of their artistic process. The content in the book is arranged by release date. However, without doing a comprehensive study on the Beatles discography, it seemed necessary to mention American single and album releases and their rankings (different from the British ones due to a track listing often at variance from the original) because the United States played a crucial role in their careers.

  Finally, we attach an importance to technique, addressing methods, instruments, and studio practices at the time. Specialist readers will find useful information; a broader public will discover an exciting world that the Beatles themselves helped to develop, notably starting in 1966 when the Beatles decided to stop touring and focus on recording.

  For readers of this book, some keys are needed. First of all, when some information is still unverifiable and when the Beatles and their immediate entourage contradict each other, directly or indirectly, we mention the lack of certainty with a question mark (?), especially in the credits. In these same credits, when we speak of one musician’s singing, that means he takes all the vocal parts (chorus and harmony).

  Hamburg: The Formative Years

  It was August 1960. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Pete Best, five unknown musicians from Liverpool, who were then between seventeen and twenty years old, landed in the harbor of Hamburg, Germany. They had been hired by Bruno Koschmider, the manager of the Indra, a club located in the hottest neighborhood of the city. For their first concert, on August 17, he simply asked them to “supply a show.” During the next two years, the group came back four times and performed nearly three hundred concerts in Germany, including at the Top Ten Club and the legendary Star Club. “We played what ple
ased us the most and, as long as we played loud, the Germans liked it,” John remembered. The Beatles often emphasized the musical training they gained during their years in Hamburg, and John Lennon admitted, “I was perhaps born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg.”

  It was in Hamburg that the group played for the first time with Ringo Starr, who was then the drummer for another Liverpool band, Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, and met musician Tony Sheridan, who arranged for their first recording. A British guitar player and singer from Norwich, Sheridan was the featured artist of the Top Ten Club and was regularly accompanied by different bands, including the Beatles. In the spring of 1961, he was approached by Bert Kaempfert, a German composer, arranger, and orchestra leader whose claim to fame was having written “Strangers in the Night” (Frank Sinatra) and “L.O.V.E.” (Nat King Cole). Kaempfert was also a record producer for Polydor, a prestigious label of Deutsche Grammophon, and he often hung around the club, searching for new talent. He offered Sheridan a recording contract and selected the Beatles to back him up. He wasn’t very impressed by the group, but he liked an instrumental they played, “Cry for a Shadow.”

  Therefore, on Sunday, June 22 (this date differs according to various documents), the young musicians gathered at what they believed was a real recording studio but was actually a concert hall set up for this date. Under the name of Tony Sheridan & the Beat Brothers, they recorded five or six songs, including a rock version of the traditional “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” renamed “My Bonnie,” as well as two other songs they performed without Sheridan, “Ain’t She Sweet” and “Cry for a Shadow.”

  When the group returned to Hamburg for the second time on April 1, Stu Sutcliffe made the decision to return to his first love, painting. So Paul replaced him on bass.

  When Raymond Met Brian

  On October 28, 1961, a young eighteen-year-old entered NEMS, the largest record store in Liverpool and asked the manager if he had “My Bonnie” by the Beatles in stock. Without realizing it, this young man, Raymond Jones, had just changed the life of Brian Epstein! Epstein, the owner of NEMS, inquired about the identity of the group, the origins of the record, and finally discovered that it had been recorded in Germany by a band native to Liverpool. Intrigued, he decided to go hear them play at the Cavern Club, where they performed on a regular basis. On November 9, he went and discovered the ones with whom he later found fame and fortune. After meeting with the band on December 3, Epstein decided to become their manager.

  The Very First Recording

  Only three songs from this record involved the Beatles. “My Bonnie,” with singer Tony Sheridan, began with a soft, very “Elvis” intro before taking off with a rock tempo. The Beatles had no problem providing the backup and proved they were already accomplished musicians.

  “Ain’t She Sweet,” a song composed by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen in 1927, had become a standard of American pop music. The Beatles’ version was nervous and rock ’n’ roll, with John singing; it was rather distant from the Gene Vincent interpretation that inspired John to cover the song. John explained himself in 1974: “Gene Vincent’s recording of ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ is very mellow and high-pitched and I used to do it like that, but the Germans said, ‘Harder, harder’—they all wanted it a bit more like a march—so we ended up doing a harder version.”

  “Cry for a Shadow” (with the initial title “Beatle Bop”) was the only Beatles song that was written by Harrison-Lennon. Inspired by the Shadows, this instrumental was rather well done, and George’s guitar sounded good. Were they aiming for the radio, which at that time was the domain of the Shadows? No one knows for sure.

  The other songs, such as “The Saints” (“When the Saints Go Marching In”) or “Why” were not very interesting in the recording history of the Beatles, except that they appeared in numerous album releases of Tony Sheridan & the Beatles. The original single came out in Germany under the name of Tony Sheridan & the Beat Brothers. Why not the Beatles? Apparently to avoid confusion with the word Piddle, which means “penis” in the regional dialect of northern Germany. Paul McCartney claimed: “They didn’t like our name and said, ‘Change to the Beat Brothers; this is more understandable for the German audience.’ We went along with it—it was a record.” But the name the Beat Brothers was soon forgotten.

  MUSICIANS

  Tony Sheridan: vocal, lead guitar

  John: rhythm guitar

  Paul: bass, backing vocals

  George: intro guitar, 2nd lead guitar, backing vocals

  Pete Best: drums

  RECORDED

  Friedrich-Ebert-Halle (Hamburg), June 22, 1961

  TECHNICAL TEAM

  Producer: Bert Kaempfert

  Sound Engineer: Karl Hinze

  RELEASED AS A SINGLE

  “My Bonnie” / “The Saints”

  Germany: August 1961

  Great Britain: January 5, 1962

  Uncertainty

  The date of June 22 is still debated to this day. Conflicting documents call its validity into question.

  June 6: The Decisive Audition

  June 6, 1962: On this exact date, the fate of the Beatles shifted. And so did the history of pop music. Around 6:00 P.M., John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best entered EMI Studios in London for the first time—they would return for the following seven years. The studios, located at 3 Abbey Road, in the quiet residential neighborhood of St. John’s Wood, were renamed Abbey Road in 1970, which is also the title of the Beatles’ last album.

  In June 1962, the Beatles were still artists on a quest for a record company. Their manager, Brian Epstein, had been desperately searching for a recording contract since December 1961, but was rejected by all London companies. All companies, except for one: in April 1962, he made one last-ditch phone call and landed an appointment with George Martin, who was in charge of the moderately small Parlophone label (which was under EMI). Interested in the track he heard, the latter agreed to let them try a test in the Abbey Road Studios. An appointment was made for June 6.

  On June 6, a session of two hours was set aside for their audition: from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M., in Studio Three, according to George Martin, but in Studio Two, according to the rest of the team. The group’s equipment left much to be desired. Norman Smith and Ken Townsend had to weld a jack for Paul’s amplifier, which they connected to a Tannoy speaker cabinet they borrowed from an unused echo chamber. Rope had to be tied around John’s amplifier to keep it from rattling. Then the session began with Ron Richards, George Martin’s assistant, producing. The Beatles, including Pete Best, who had been their drummer since August 1960, had planned to perform four songs: “Besame Mucho” and three originals: “Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” and “Ask Me Why.” When Norman Smith, the sound engineer, heard “Love Me Do,” his ears perked up. Chris Neal, the assistant engineer, went to fetch George Martin. Once Martin arrived, he ran the session from that point on.

  The Beatles appeared nervous in the studio. Pete Best’s drumming was inconsistent, especially in the bridge (listen to the version of “Love Me Do” on Anthology 1, which features Best’s drumming from this session). Just prior to recording, Martin had instructed Paul to sing the phrase Love Me Do at the end of each verse so that John could play his harmonica part. You can hear the shakiness in Paul’s voice. Finally, at the end of the recording session, Martin spoke to the group to find out their impression of the session. He could see they were not happy, so he insisted, “Is there anything you don’t like?” After a pause, George Harrison said, “Yeah, I don’t like your tie!”1 Everyone cracked up!

  This broke the ice, including for George Martin. A connection was made.

  At the end of the two-hour session, Martin was impressed enough to offer them a one-year contract with four further options of a year each. Although only moderately impressed by their performance, he guessed they had extraordinary charisma and told himself that he had nothing to lose. Furthermore, Norman Smith was also sold on their potent
ial. But there are always winners and losers: Pete Best was fired from the group and replaced by Ringo Starr. This was the first and last time that Best ever recorded at Abbey Road. A date was set for the group’s first official recording session: Tuesday, September 4, 1962. The Beatles finally had a recording contract.

  FOR BEATLES FANATICS

  There is no trace of the recordings from June 6, except for “Besame Mucho,” which reappeared in early 1980, and “Love Me Do,” which was found in the nineties and appears on Anthology 1, which was published in 1995.

  Please Please Me:

  The Beginning of the Legend

  1962–1963

  ALBUM

  I Saw Her Standing There

  Misery

  Anna (Go to Him)

  Chains

  Boys

  Ask Me Why

  Please Please Me

  Love Me Do

  P.S. I Love You

  Baby It’s You

  Do You Want to Know a Secret

  A Taste of Honey

  There’s a Place

  Twist and Shout

  RELEASED

  Great Britain: March 22, 1963 / No. 1 for 30 weeks

  The First Two Singles

  Very soon after the Beatles signed their first contract, it became critical for George Martin to produce a record. The Beatles’ recording career began with two singles, songs that later appeared on their first album. On Tuesday, September 4, 1962, the four musicians once again entered the Abbey Road Studios for their first real recording session. Pete Best was no longer part of the group, having been replaced in August by Ringo. On the agenda, they were supposed to record “How Do You Do It?” by Mitch Murray, which George Martin believed would become a hit. The Beatles, who were reluctant to play this song, let him know they did not want to perform this kind of “schlock” but rather their own compositions. Martin’s answer was, “When you can write material as good as this, then I’ll record it, but, right now we’re going to record this.”1 They finally did it, but demanded they also rerecord “Love Me Do.” At the end of the day, George Martin did not seem satisfied with Ringo’s drumming. He decided to book another date to redo the song.