Monday 1/15/24
Listened to A Hard Day's Night yesterday. Listening to it a lot lately on account of work on Giving You Everything: A Hard Day's Night and the Artistic Zenith of the Beatles.
A Hard Day's Night is their best album and it is the best rock and roll album of all. There was nothing remotely like it before, and there has been nothing remotely like it since.
"Can't Buy Me Love" is the Beatles' first real banger. "Twist and Shout" and "Money" were different--they were rhythm and blues ravers. "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" were different as well--highest echelon rock and roll energy-melody finesse and invention. Later they did "Helter Skelter," but first there was "Can't Buy Me Love." It was an open sonic affray, but done with style and charm. And it was almost a country and western song.
I love John Lennon's guitar playing on "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" and "When I Get Home."
"When I Get Home" is "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" before "Norwegian Wood." He backdoors an affair into it.
The record is George Harrison's finest as a guitar colorist. He produced an important array of sounds and embellishments throughout. For this alone it is also one of the best guitar records.
"I'll Be Back" is a significant achievement as a realized song for the Beatles and is rarely discussed, but that is also the case with the early work as a whole, in which the Beatles were at their most inventive.
The basso continuo of "A Hard Day's Night" is that of the locomotive. It makes perfect sense that the Beatles would board a train to sound of this song in A Hard Day's Night the film.
The first bridge of "I Should Have Known Better"--"And when I tell you that I love you," etc.--features a quintessential example of the classic Lennon voice. He's single-tracked the entire way through--including with the falsetto--which is not the case when the bridge repeats later. You might think that Lennon can't hit that falsetto note, but he does. It's similar to the first take of "A Day in the Life"--the voice, naked, no effects, hitting the falsetto parts.
"If I Fell" has more depth and humanness than anything on the White Album and much more so than anything on Abbey Road. It's not a love song, outright; it reveals a vulnerable, insecure protagonist who is attempting to manipulate someone without realizing just how much they are doing so.
I suspect they couldn't have played "Tell Me Why" on stage and this is the first Beatles song about which this could be said. Not a great song in and of itself, but a great song performance. Perhaps "feels" better than anything else they recorded, surpassing the irrepressible mood uplifter that is "Eight Days a Week." The Beatles employed a falsetto-in-the-extreme style of backing vocal on this song that they wouldn't use much elsewhere--they returned to it with "Lady Madonna" ("bah bah bah bah, bah bah bah bah"). Lennon's leans into his early "leather lung Lennon" voice in completion of the antiphon, and you're like, "Yes!"
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