It’s been 60 years since The Beatles released Help!, their fifth British LP. Perhaps because it was attached to a chaotic movie, or maybe because it was followed up by a series of masterpiece albums, this 1965 LP doesn’t quite get its proper due.
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The Beatles were transitioning away from the simplicity of their early stuff into much more lyrically and musically complex work. Here are some tidbits about the making of the album that you might not have known.
The Album’s Most Famous Song Embarrassed Them
“Yesterday” now stands as one of the most important songs in pop music history. It showed that a rock band need not release music reliant on the instrumentation we usually associate with the genre. And thanks to the touch of producer George Martin, it demonstrated a way for strings to be incorporated into a pop music structure without overdoing it. Still, The Beatles felt a little self-conscious about the whole thing at the time of its release. That’s why they chose not to release it as a single in England. In America, where they had less control over their catalog, it did come out as a single. And it soared to dizzying levels of success in the process.
A Flautist Made History
For the most part, The Beatles’ output from 1962 through 1964 focused on the usual rock band setup: guitars, bass, drums, and, occasionally, keyboards. But John Lennon and Paul McCartney were starting to write songs that demanded different approaches, as seen in “Yesterday”, which used a string quartet. “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” called for a flute part to embellish the folk-song strumming that served as the foundation for John Lennon’s lament. That part came from John Scott. The flautist became the first session musician outside the group’s core to play a solo on one of their songs.
Harrison’s Writing Return
Perhaps because he was a few years younger than John Lennon and Paul McCartney, George Harrison struggled to establish himself as a songwriter in The Beatles. The other two pretty much had it covered anyway. Harrison wrote “Don’t Bother Me” on With The Beatles in 1963. That was it for his songwriting output in the band’s first few years of recording. But The Beatles’ Help! found him rising to the occasion in this department. He contributed the ballad “I Need You” and the quirky midtempo song “You Like Me Too Much”. From that point forward, he would never again be absent as a writer from a Beatles album.
The Title Track Hid in Plain Sight
The Beatles always kept their eyes on the prize when it came to the singles that they released. There was a formula to which those songs needed to roughly adhere to achieve the biggest reaction from the public. “Help” by The Beatles presses all those buttons. It’s uptempo, features some killer vocal harmonies, and it includes not one, but two ridiculously catchy refrains, one of which begins the song. But buried inside that shiny mix was a rather personal set of lyrics from John Lennon. Lennon later claimed in interviews that the song that he was at a personal low point when he wrote the song. He was indeed crying for help.
A “Heavy” Reckoning
Context is everything. When you listen to “Ticket To Ride” now, it seems like a straightforward midtempo pop song, albeit one that’s expertly crafted and executed. But in interviews after the band broke up, John Lennon urged people to consider the other songs that were being released in 1965. Lennon used the word “heavy” in his descriptions for “Ticket To Ride” when comparing it to other tracks of the era. We don’t think he meant “heavy” as in “heavy metal.” But when you hear Ringo Starr’s battering drums and the anguish in the chorus, we can kind of hear what he was referencing.
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