Podcasts about Beatles for Sale

This week on Classic Vinyl Podcast, Justin and Tyler continue our Meet The Beatles Series and Side 2 of their 4th studio album Beatles For Sale. Give it a listen and let us know what you think. 

This week on Classic Vinyl Podcast, Justin and Tyler return with our Meet The Beatles series and side of one of the band's 4th UK studio album, Beatles For Sale. A departure for the band from their first three studio albums, it shows the band's maturation process. Give it a listen and let us know what you think. And don't miss our side 2 episode on the album next week. 

The fab four's fourth fab album, Beatles for Sale, isn't just absolutely freaking underrated. It offers perhaps the last of their comparatively-less-ubiquitous knockout tunes. Side 2 illustrates this point perfectly, where just about Every Little Thing is magical*. (*May not include cover songs!) And yet, the UBP's very own Tony “Dave Dexter Junior, Junior” Mendoza wants to make this album even better. How will he do this you may ask? That's why you literally have to listen! (No, really this time we're not f**king around.) Spoiler alert: just when the “lawyers” said Rush and The Beatles was too legally sick of a collab, The Spirit of Hard Rock Radio on WFUK - Your Home for Appleton Foxes Baseball - proves that in Tony's world, the timeless wavelengths remain, well, timeless. And also, wavelengths. You can't spoil a UBP “Beatles For Sale” party, because a UBP “Beatles For Sale” party don't spoil! Oy, unless it's too hot at this meshugana picnic! Which one of you shcmucks brought egg salad, it's a thousand degrees out here!? And also:

It's one of the more unique and perhaps under-appreciated albums in the Beatles otherworldly catalog: “Beatles For Sale”. Recorded in the eye of the Beatlemania storm, with the making of  what would become “Help” right around the corner, this is one of the few Beatles albums that, to quote TLC's tribute to Zach Braff (NBC's “No Scrubs”), “Beatles For Sale”, sadly gets no love. It's occasionally dismissed as a creative and energy step down from the album which preceded it, “A Hard Days Night”. BY MORONS, AM I RIGHT? Because this is a damn fine album, however exhausted and transitional the boys may have been, and it's long past time it gets an authentic, patented UBP deep dish. Hold the sausage, it's almost Meat Free Monday, you jagbag! In addition to dishing Dylan, The Beatles, and the age old political battle of mono vs. stereo, the Now On Sale Two also ponder:

This episode explores Beatles '65 and Beatles for Sale, two albums that captured a pivotal moment in The Beatles' journey. These recordings showcase their creative growth, the challenges of Beatlemania, and the ways record companies shaped the music people heard. https://beatles60.group/ We reflect on how Capitol Records reworked Beatles for Sale for the U.S. market, creating Beatles '65. Six tracks were cut, new ones like “I Feel Fine” were added, and the sound was altered with added reverb. These changes weren't just technical decisions—they shaped the album's reception and reveal the industry's influence on how music was marketed. Beyond the industry's impact, the albums themselves mark The Beatles' evolution as artists. From the raw honesty of “I'm a Loser” to the bittersweet harmonies of “Baby's in Black,” these tracks delve into introspective themes that contrast with earlier love songs. The use of African drums, organ, and other unconventional instruments adds a rich depth to the music. Looking back, these albums aren't just relics of the 1960s—they continue to resonate. Songs like “I'll Follow the Sun” and “No Reply” evoke both nostalgia and fresh appreciation, serving as a soundtrack for moments of reflection and rediscovery. This episode combines historical context, personal memories, and thoughtful analysis to celebrate the enduring legacy of Beatles '65 and Beatles for Sale. Join us as we explore the music, the stories behind it, and what it means to us today.

The Anfield Wrap's free podcast to look back on Liverpool's 2-1 victory over Chelsea at Anfield.Neil Atkinson is joined by Rob Gutmann, Josh Williams and John Gibbons. Also in the show, John Gibbons chats to David John Jaggs and Roxanne De Bastion about '60 Years of A Hard Days Night and Beatles For Sale', a show being held at LEAF in Liverpool on Wednesday 4th December which celebrates the 60th anniversary of both seminal albums. ⁠Download the Peloton app and check out the 6 LFC themed classes, including one with Trent Alexander-Arnold⁠ Connect with Neil & John & other LFC fans by joining the LiverpoolFC tag on Peloton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We get back after a hiatus and rap about the universally accepted worst Beatles song ever.  Do we agree?  You'll find out after you sort through The Beatles Halloween Fan Club records, starting fires, the plight of professional podcasters, several Ranking the Beatles related messages, the role of youth coaching, Tommy inventing ice beers (again),Beatles soccer chants, kidney transplants, the official ranking of "Mr." songs, and the organ solo jam, "Mr. Moonlight."We bring it up in the episode - if you haven't heard Tom Scharpling's "Mr. Moonlight" story, you need to listen to it here.  If you like that, you'll love Scharpling's The Best Show.  As always, you can find Team Blotto Beatles on Instagram (@blottobeatles) and Twitter / X (@blottobeatles), by emailing us (blottobeatles@gmail.com), or on the web (blottobeatles.com).  We want to hear from you!Please also take the time to rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.We have a shop!  Grab some merch.  You can always drunk dial us at 1.857.233.9793 to share your thoughts, feedback, confessions, and concerns to be featured in an upcoming episode. Enjoying the show? Buy us a beer via the tip jar (don't forget to include a message telling us what we should drink with the money).You know we're making a list of it, see the canonical, argument-ending list of Beatles songs we are assembling here: http://www.blottobeatles.com & listen to it on Spotify here.Please remember to always enjoy Blotto Beatles responsibly.Peace and Love.Hosts: Becker and TommyExecutive Producer: Scotty C.Musical Supervisor: RB (@ryanobrooks)Associate Musical Supervision: Tim Clark (@nodisassemble)

Though the Lennon & McCartney songwriting team found it harder and harder to truly write songs together from scratch as they got busier and busier, with "Baby's In Black," they were able to get "nose-to-nose" and write something truly different from what was expected at the time. A 3/4 time waltz with a melancholy lyric (possibly inspired by Astrid Kirchherr's mourning for Stu Sutcliffe), the first song they recorded for the Beatles For Sale album was a far cry from the uptempo Beatlemania rave ups of A Hard Day's Night or the Cavern-era screamers on their first two LPs. The song shows tremendous growth and bravery for daring to do the unexpected, and gives a brilliant example of John and Paul's best Everly Brothers-esque harmonies. It's a song they were very proud of, as evidenced by the fact that that once it was out, it stayed in their live show until the end of their touring days. Even in the jaded-slugging-it-out-un-enthusiastically shows of 1966, John and Paul seem to genuinely delight in being so close on one mic and singing in harmony for the entire song. It's a real gem that likely doesn't get it's due since it's a waltz in the 3rd song slot on what some consider their "worst" album. This week, we close the circle on the RTB X 2Legs meet up by welcoming Andy Nicholes to the show! After having his co-host Tom Hunyady on the last episode, it only seemed appropriate to have Andy on as well. We love 2 Legs, and Andy was great on the panels we saw him on at the Fest for Beatles Fans, so we're big fans. He joins us to talk about bootlegs, solo fandom, growing up as fans in the 90s, and so much more! Be sure to check out 2Legs anywhere you get podcasts and follow them on Facebook! For you Julia stans, she's not with us this week unfortunately. She'll be back we promise. To make it up to you, be sure to listen through to the end of the episode for a little bonus treat. What do you think about "Baby's In Black" at #86? Too high? Too low? Or just right? Let us know in the comments on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Be sure to check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.rankingthebeatles.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and grab a Rank Your Own Beatles poster, a shirt, a jumper, whatever you like! And if you're digging what we do, don't forget to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buy Us A Coffee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/support

We asked for your riddles, and you failed to deliver. Now, our intrepid heroes (Rocky, Sam, and Leon) find themselves at their lowest point, playing skiffle for scraps on the Universal Studios backlot. That won't stop them in their quest to solve the Beatles' riddle once and for all as they look at the band's 4th studio album, Beatles for Sale. Persons of interest include Berry Gordy and his beam attack.Send riddles to pulpfrictioncast@gmail.com.Pulp Friction is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pulpfriction.substack.com/subscribe

Avec les Beach Boys, Xavier Rudd, Arctic Monkeys et les Beatles "The Warmth of The Sun" est un titre des Beach Boys sorti en 1964, enregistré peu après le 22 novembre 1963, date de l'assassinat de JFK, le groupe était encore sous le choc. "Follow The Sun" en 2012, signé Xavier Rudd, surfeur, musicien et activiste australien nous invite à prendre la route du soleil. En 1964, sur "Beatles For Sale", leur 4e album, les Beatles publient "I'll Follow The Sun", Paul McCartney l'a écrit bien avant de devenir un des 4 garçons dans le vent, en 1959. En 2006, sur son premier album, le groupe britannique, Arctic Monkeys propose "When The Sun Goes Down", qui est le second single à se hisser à la première place des charts en Grande-Bretagne. MARDI 180624 Avec Muse, Neil Diamond, Norah Jones et Police. Sur son premier album, Muse dévoile "Sunburn", cette brûlure du soleil qui imprègne l'atmosphère de leur première production intitulée "Showbiz", sortie en 1999. En 1968, Neil Diamond nous convie à savourer le soleil dominical avec "Sunday Sun". En 2004 sur son deuxième album "Feels Like Home", Norah Jones publie "Sunrise" hymne au lever du soleil. C'est un soleil bien moins doux et beaucoup plus menaçant qu'on retrouve avec Police et "Invisible Sun" en 1981, climat de violence et de tourmente qui règne en Irlande du Nord. Frances Tomelty, une des épouses de Sting, est originaire de Belfast et on sent cette influence sur le groupe. MERCREDI 190624 Avec George Harrison, les Beatles, The Animals et Paul McCartney. On peut dire que George Harrison, le plus mystique des Beatles, avait un rapport particulier avec le soleil, sur son album "Brainwashed" sorti après sa disparition, en 2002, on retrouve "Rising Sun" le soleil levant. Et puis, un des plus grands titres qu'il a écrit pour les Beatles est "Here Comes The Sun"écrit dans le jardin du guitariste Eric Clapton. En 1964, The Animals cartonnent avec la reprise d'un traditionnel : “The House of The Rising Sun”, la maison du soleil levant, ils vont conquérir le monde et mettre en avant le talent du claviériste Alan Price et la voix d'Eric Burdon. En bonus sur la version CD (et K7) de l'album "Flowers in the Dirt" de Paul McCartney de 1989, "Où est le soleil ?" est une bizarrerie de sa carrière produite par Trevor Horn, un des "Buggles". JEUDI 200624 Avec Sheryl Crow, The Rivieras, Bill Withers et Katrina and the Waves. En 2002, Shery Crow nous propose "Soak Up The Sun", ce qui veut dire "profiter du soleil", l'artiste pointe du doigt notre réaction attentiste par rapport aux changements climatiques. 1964 avec ce titre du groupe américain The Rivieras "California Sun", formation à l'existence assez courte, de 62 à 66 mais qui se reformera en 2000 jusqu'à 2010. "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone" de Bill Withers en 1971, titre mélancolique a pour origine un film qui a particulièrement touché Bill Withers : "Le jour du vin et des roses" de 1962. Composé par le guitariste Kimberly Rew, fondateur de Katrina and The Waves, ce "Walking On Sunshine" sort en 1985. VENDREDI 210624 Avec Bob Marley and The Wailers, Blondie et Soundgarden. "Sun Is Shining" est un classique de Bob Marley enregistré à deux reprises par l'artiste, tout d'abord en 1971 produite par un autre grand nom du Reggae, Lee Perry. 7 ans plus tard, pour l'album "Kaya" Bob Marley et ses Wailers, en enregistrent une version "modernisée". En 1971, le groupe de rock progressif Yes est au sommet de son art avec l'album "Fragile" et "Heart of the Sunrise" qui nous emmène au cœur d'un rayon de soleil avec des rythmes complexes et des influences musicales très variées allant du jazz-rock fusion à Stravinsky. En 76, c'est la chanteuse Debbie Harry et son groupe Blondie qui nous transporte au soleil sur “In The Sun ", extrait du tout premier album intitulé “Blondie”. Seattle avec un soleil inquiétant "Black Hole Sun" de Soundgarden, trou noir/ce soleil noir évoque des pensées moroses qui n'empêcheront pas ce titre de devenir le plus grand tube du groupe en 1994. --- Du lundi au vendredi, Fanny Gillard et Laurent Rieppi vous dévoilent l'univers rock, au travers de thèmes comme ceux de l'éducation, des rockers en prison, les objets de la culture rock, les groupes familiaux et leurs déboires, et bien d'autres, chaque matin dans Coffee on the Rocks à 6h30 et rediffusion à 13h30 dans Lunch Around The Clock. Merci pour votre écoute Pour écouter Classic 21 à tout moment : www.rtbf.be/classic21 Retrouvez tous les contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Ready for some time travel? This week sort of had Beatles For Sale in 1976, in 1990, the guitar Jimi Hendrix  played at Woodstock earned a few quid and   no matter who sings Happy Birthday, it can still sound ropey! Looking at you Bruuuuuce!  

SUBSCRIBE TO IMPOSSIBLE WAY OF LIFE ON PATREON TO ACCESS FULL EPISODEhttps://www.patreon.com/animpossiblewayoflifeWe test out Johnny's claim that Beatles for Sale is a better record than Sgt Peppers. We also dive back into the Lord Of The Rings / Beatles Universe.

It's time to put individual tracks behind us and tackle The Whole Of The Thing as this week we deal with the album Beatles For Sale. Does it continue the upward trajectory of the albums so far? How many times will the word "nascent" appear? And does the album deserve its knackered reputation? Rankings: Track-by-track Ranking eMail: beatlesstuffology@gmail.com Woe Woe and Thrice Woe / Twitter: @beatles_ology Instagram: beatlesstuffology JG's Blog: Judgementally Reviews… Andrew's Blog: Stuffology   Eventually Produced By: JG McQuarrie

We continue playing catch-up on Stuffologgy this week as we plug the remaining hole in Beatles For Sale with What You're Doing. Does the song manage to point to the future of what the Beatles will do? How inevitable are discussions about the Byrds? And is this the most shambolic episode yet?   Rankings: Track-by-track Ranking eMail: beatlesstuffology@gmail.com Just. Make. It. Stop. / Twitter: @beatles_ology Instagram: beatlesstuffology JG's Blog: Judgementally Reviews… Andrew's Blog: Stuffology   Produced And Eventually Posted By: JG McQuarrie

Continuamos con nuestros especiales dedicados a los discos de los Beatles con la ayuda de Felipe Couselo. Dedicado a Vicky, Lucía y Erik + info - https://linktr.ee/b90podcast Espacio patrocinado por: Javi Portas - Belén - Ana FM - tueresgeorge - boldano - Eduardo Mayordomo Muñoz - kharhan - Barrax de Pump - PDR - Fernando - QUIROGEA - Jorge - J. Gutiérrez - dacou - Gabriel Vicente - Carlos Conseglieri - Miguel - faeminoandtired - Isabel Luengo - Franc Puerto - screaming - HugoBR - angelmedano - Vicente DC - VICTORGB - Alvaro Gomez Marin - Achtungivoox - PabloArabia - Alvaro Perez - Naïa - Sergio Serrano - Antuan Clamarán - Mario Sosa - Isranet - Paco Gandia - ok_pablopg - braulio - Eduardo Vaquerizo - Crisele - David Reig - Wasabi Segovia - Dani RM - Fernando Masero - María Garrido - RafaGP - Macu Chaleka - laura - Infestos - Öki Þeodoroson - davidgonsan - Juan Carlos Mazas - 61garage - JJM - Rosa Rivas - Bassman Mugre - SrLara - Próxima Estación Okinawa - Barullo - Megamazinger - Francisco Javier Indignado Hin - Unai Elordui - carmenlimbostar - Piri - Miguel Ángel Tinte - Miquel CH - Jon Perez Nubla - agui102 - Raul Sánchez - Nuria Sonabé - Spinda Records - Pere Pasqual - Juanmi - JulMorGon - blinddogs - JM MORENTE - Alfonso Moya - Rubio Carbón - LaRubiaProducciones - cesmunsal - Mr.Kaffe - Marcos - jocio - Norberto Blanquer Solar - Tolo Sent - LIP -Carmen Ventura - Jordi y varias personas anónimas.

It's mea culpa time on Stuffology this week. The more eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed two tracks absent from our Beatles For Sale coverage - Every Little Thing and What You're Doing. This is because - and there's no delicate way of putting this - JG is an idiot and mis-posted. So Every Little Thing will post this week, What You're Doing next week and then after that we'll have our coverage of the album. Aaaaaanyway.... How good is Every Little Thing anyway? How awesome is the timpani (answer: very awesome!)? And what cover version makes JG swear the air blue?  Rankings: Track-by-track Ranking eMail: beatlesstuffology@gmail.com SiXth Circle Of Hell / Twitter: @beatles_ology Instagram: beatlesstuffology JG's Blog: Judgementally Reviews… Andrew's Blog: Stuffology   Produced, if that's the word this week, By: JG McQuarrie

We draw a veil over Beatles For Sale with the final song on the album, George's take on Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby. How does the song stack up against the other cover versions? Who actually wrote it? And are the live versions better than the studio recording?   Rankings: Track-by-track Ranking eMail: beatlesstuffology@gmail.com Twitter: @beatles_ology Instagram: beatlesstuffology JG's Blog: Judgementally Reviews… Andrew's Blog: Stuffology   Produced By: JG McQuarrie

We've re-arrived, and to prove it we're here - it's finally time for a new episode of Fans On The Run!   Joining me for the first episode of the new run, is a New Orleans musician, and the co-host of the popular pod "Ranking The Beatles", Jonathan Pretus!   We talk about the "Tomorrow Never Knows" segment of The Compleat Beatles, the curation of vault of Beatle outtakes, the brief coexistence of the UK and US configurations of the catalog on different formats, the good and bad sides of AI generated "new Beatles songs", the eternal wisdom of Mike Love and Donovan, and how John Lennon "blew the load too early" with a track from Beatles For Sale.   All this and more, this is an episode not to be missed!   This episode is available to stream wherever good podcasts can be heard!   Keep up with Jonathan and Ranking The Beatles: https://linktr.ee/rankingthebeatles   Follow us elsewhere: https://linktr.ee/fansontherun   Contact: fansontherunpodcast@gmail.com

We ask you to bear with us as we begin this episode with our bylaw approved quarterly staff meeting.  From there we remind everyone that we were early on the Mal train, dig into our single album White Album tracks and titles, differentiate between Pee Wee Herman and the Marx Brothers, question the Outbreak Monkey of Beatles for Sale, question an instrumental verse several times, explicate bays of hale, marvel at RB's Bowie connection to this song, invent snants (TM), and discuss the rose colored glasses of "Words of Love."As always, you can find Team Blotto Beatles on Instagram (@blottobeatles) and Twitter (@blottobeatles), by emailing us (blottobeatles@gmail.com), or on the web (blottobeatles.com).  We want to hear from you!Please also take the time to rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.We have a shop!  Grab some merch.  You can always drunk dial us at 1.857.233.9793 to share your thoughts, feedback, confessions, and concerns and to be featured in an upcoming episode. Enjoying the show? Buy us a beer via the tip jar (don't forget to include a message telling us what we should drink with the money).You know we're making a list of it, see the canonical, argument-ending list of Beatles songs we are assembling here: https://www.blottobeatles.com/list & listen to it on Spotify here.Please remember to always enjoy Blotto Beatles responsibly.Peace and Love.Hosts: Becker and TommyExecutive Producer: Scotty C.Musical Supervisor: RB (@ryanobrooks)Associate Musical Supervision: Tim Clark (@nodisassemble)#PeteBestGetThatCheck

While the exact time and place of this song seems to have been lost to the fog of 80+ years of memories, Paul does remember that he wrote this song with the thought it might end up as the Beatles next single in 1964. It seemed to lack that certain Beatle magic singles required, but it found a home on the back half of Beatles For Sale, albeit a home that maybe doesn't do it the justice it deserves. It's sneaky in a few different ways. It's got melodies and hooks for days, from the verse melody to the soaring chorus, to that chorus' emphatic tympani hits. And that's before we even get to John's 12 string electric guitar part, which comes across as a totally different take on the 12 string electric from what George would have played. Speaking of John, he turns in a fantastic vocal, and it's one of the rare times in the catalogue a song is sung by a Beatle who wasn't also the composer of the song. Joining us this week is Joe Adragna, the brains behind power-pop force The Junior League. He's been putting out critically acclaimed music under this moniker since the early aughts, as well as playing in a variety of other groups. We chat with Joe about DIY recording and Jonathan's lazy musical output, power pop blueprints, childhood Beatles obsessions, and the Beatles' impact on kids today. Be sure to check out Joe's music at The Junior League's bandcamp page, or wherever you buy or stream music! And give em a follow on Facebook! What do you think about "Every Little Thing" at #101? Too high? Too low? Or just right? Let us know in the comments on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Be sure to check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.rankingthebeatles.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and grab a Rank Your Own Beatles poster, a shirt, a jumper, whatever you like! And if you're digging what we do, don't forget to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buy Us A Coffee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/support

Beatles For Sale is a relatively obscure album, to the extent that any Beatles album could be called obscure. This album was recorded at a time when the Beatles were creatively exhausted and almost half of it is covers, which is why it's often dismissed as one of their weaker efforts. But we don't think that's fair. It's not world-changing, that's true enough, but it doesn't have to be. They were still writing interesting, exciting originals, and the covers are (mostly) very well chosen and excellently performed. Once you've listened closely, you'll realize that tracks like “Rock and Roll Music,” “Eight Days a Week,” and “Every Little Thing” are absolutely essential to understanding the Beatles, and even the tracks that aren't as important are still tons of fun. Cohosts: Amanda Rodgers, John McFerrin, Ben Marlin, Dan WatkinsComplete show notes: https://discordpod.com/listen/127-the-beatles-beatles-for-sale-1964Discord & Rhyme's merch store: http://tee.pub/lic/discordpodSupport the podcast! https://www.patreon.com/discordpod

Sara and Robert discuss the Beatles fourth studio album, Beatles for Sale, from 1964.

We're joined by our good friend and fellow Beatle fanatic Charles Traynor to discuss one of the Fab Four's lowest selling albums: Beatles For Sale. In addition to a track by track review, we answer the following questions: Does the album deserve to be a dark horse in the Beatles catalogue? Are the Beatles' early albums on a whole neglected by modern fans? Is “Mr. Moonlight” truly the worst Beatles' song ever? Is Beatles For Sale proto gothabilly? Was John a stalker? Was Paul brokenhearted by John? Was Ringo a good country singer? Was George a coldblooded gangsta with the ladies? Who was the best musician in the Beatles? Who was the weakest musician? What do we think about John Lennon's solo career and Yoko Ono? What do we think about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love? What do we think about Buddy Holly? And finally what do we think about — trigger warning — Ted Nugent! OMG! This episode is better than whatever lame party you're currently at, so we're happy to spoil it…!! 

It's time for a new album as Beatles For Sale falls under the spotlight and it's opening track, No Reply. Does this different way of starting an album on a more melancholy note work? Do the Anthology versions shed any light on the situation? And does this really signify Lennon's increasing maturity as a songwriter? Rankings: Track-by-track Ranking eMail: beatlesstuffology@gmail.com Twitter: @beatles_ology Instagram: beatlesstuffology JG's Blog: Judgementally Reviews… Andrew's Blog: Stuffology   Produced By: JG McQuarrie

Newfoundland based, Canadian, singer/songwriter Chris Picco talks with host Paul Romanuk about 1964's Beatles For Sale album. This is the second part of a two-part episode.SHOW NOTES:-Chris has a really good new record out called Split Down The Middle, and you can find out more about Chris and the record at his website.-we talk about a song Chris wrote and put out on his first EP (2004's The Passenger). The song is called Wood 'N Steel. Good luck finding the EP. Here's the link to it on Discogs-we talk about the creative group Perfect Day, who have done almost all of Chris' album artwork as well as that of The Long Distance Runners. Here's a link to their website, where you can see some examples of their great work. Here's the artwork for The Long Distance Runners album Elements (it was nominated for a Juno Award in 2016). Here's the artwork for Chris' EP The Beach, which I thought was pretty cool as well.

Newfoundland singer/songwriter Chris Picco talks with host Paul Romanuk about 1964's Beatles For Sale album.SHOW NOTES:-Chris has a great new record out, Split Down The Middle, and you can find out more about it and Chris' other work at his website.-we talk about what a manic year 1964 - the year they recorded this album - was for The Beatles. Here's a month-by-month, day-by-day list of what they were up to in 1964 (from The Beatles Bible)-Chris refers to Newfoundland musical giant Ron Hynes. Here's a link to his Wikipedia page

Hello Friends! It's time for a trip out with The Beatles again here on the show, finally tackling their second LP of 1964, Beatles for Sale. Released just in time for the Christmas season, this LP is one famous for having a top class sounding stereo mix, in just about any release of said mix, with the mono often knocked, ignored, or just seen as inconsequential. Thus, my goal today was to take both mixes on an equal footing (as I always do), and make each one shine as best it can, and in doing so I've found some wonderful differences that make the mono unique, and in some cases, the superior mix (at least, in your host's opinion). So, with one mono LP and one stereo LP in hand, plus a brief 2015 remix for one song, let's see if it's really worth owning both copies, or if you should put one up.... for sale.   Happy Listening, Frederick   Patreon   Email   Instagram   Back to Mono

Though George was still a budding songwriter in 1964, deadlines and heavy workloads meant he didn't have anything ready for the band's 4th album. John and Paul didn't seem to have the time to write him something new either, so when the clock was ticking, the band reached back into their bag of beloved covers to find a spotlight for their lead guitarist. Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby, a song by one of their heroes Carl Perkins (or was it?) proved a formidable track to give George a chance to flex his well honed country guitar muscles, and give the band a fun rocking moment to end their most mellow record to date, Beatles For Sale. It may be a cover, but it's a great band performance. George is really confident in his singing and playing, and really seems to be going for it vocally. It's a really fun track on a more serious album, and though the track is a good time, live, it's an absolute stomper. At Shea Stadium, they sound like the world's best garage band. I maybe wonder if I associate that smoking like track more with the song and that may bump the ranking up a bit more in my subconscious, but maybe not. I just love this song. We're in week two of the Three Weeks of Walrus here on Ranking the Beatles, and who better to talk George with than our own quiet one, Felix Wohlleben? Our lead guitarist joins us to talk about the origins of The Walrus and his own journey as a guitarist, the influence Jazz has on the Beatles (and their influence in Jazz), Carl Perkins: Song Thief, Beatles Vs. Stones, and more! Though we have no Walrus album for you to check out (I mean, the Beatles did it first), check out the record Felix just made with Jenn Howard! Get yours here! What do you think? Too high? Too low? Or just right? Let us know in the comments on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@rankingthebeatles⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@rankingbeatles⁠! Be sure to visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠rankingthebeatles.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Wanna show your support? ⁠Buy us a coffee⁠! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/support

Its a contest between the two Beatles album releasesof 1964. The all Lennon / McCartney penned A HardDays Night vs the Christmas release Beatles For Sale.I go through both albums track by track.

We kick into episode with a review of both Tommy's vacation and the rumors of the new Beatles Town coming to Disney World, and then we dive right into a reintroduction of our dear pod pals Ranking the Beatles and discussion of Jonathan's Mick Jagger face, our very best Beatles XM host impressions, Paul and Ringo in the Rolling Stones, why Sam Whiles is the best guest RTB has ever had, evergreen mystery words, new mystery words, the Beatles not doing waltzes even though the Beatles do waltzes, janky guitars, and the beautifully harmonized John and Paul collaboration, "Baby's in Black."Oh, we also had several visits from the Ghost of Dr. John. As always, you can find Team Blotto Beatles on Instagram (@blottobeatles) and Twitter (@blottobeatles), by emailing us (blottobeatles@gmail.com), or on the web (blottobeatles.com).  We want to hear from you!Please also take the time to rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.We have a shop!  Grab some merch.  You can always drunk dial us at 1.857.233.9793 to share your thoughts, feedback, confessions, and concerns and to be featured in an upcoming episode. Enjoying the show? Buy us a beer via the tip jar (don't forget to include a message telling us what we should drink with the money).You know we're making a list of it, see the canonical, argument-ending list of Beatles songs we are assembling here: https://www.blottobeatles.com/list & listen to it on Spotify here.Please remember to always enjoy Blotto Beatles responsibly.Peace and Love.Hosts: Becker and TommyGuests: Jonathan and Julia from Ranking the Beatles (rankingthebeatles.com)Executive Producer: Scotty C.Additional Musical Supervision: RB (@ryanobrooks)Associate Musical Supervision: Tim Clark (@nodisassemble)#PeteBestGetThatCheck

It's time for episode 10 and the second era of Paul McCartney's Beatles career! Mark and Marnix cover Macca's contributions to the albums, Beatles For Sale, Help!, Rubber Soul and all the singles and b-sides in between.

1:44:54 – A message from Shambles!! Rob, from the Paunch Stevenson Show!! Chad Bowers of the Chadcast and The Incredible True Facts of Space!! Frank Edward Nora of the Overnightscape!! Another Beatles extravaganza, hosted by PQ Ribber!! You are invited to join in the show!! Next week we will move forward to the Beatles fifth […]

1:25:04 – Rob, from the Paunch Stevenson Show!! Shambles Constant!! Frank Edward Nora!! A multi-faceted look at the Beatle’s third lp!! You’re invited to join in the festivities, next time, when we discuss Beatles For Sale!! Details at the end of this transmission!! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. […]

1:25:04 – Rob, from the Paunch Stevenson Show!! Shambles Constant!! Frank Edward Nora!! A multi-faceted look at the Beatle’s third lp!! You’re invited to join in the festivities, next time, when we discuss Beatles For Sale!! Details at the end of this transmission!! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. […]

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Hello, and welcome to this week's second Patreon bonus episode. I'm recording this on December the twenty-third, so whether you hear this before Christmas is largely down to how quickly we can get the main episode edited and uploaded. Hopefully, this is going up on Christmas Eve and you're all feeling appropriately festive. Normally for the Patreon bonuses in the last week of December I choose a particularly Christmassy record from the time period we're covering in the main podcast -- usually a perennial Christmas hit like something off the Phil Spector Christmas album or the Elvis Christmas album. However, this year we're in the mid sixties, a period when none of the big hits of US or UK Christmas music were released, because it's after the peak of US Christmas music and before the peak of UK Christmas music. There were Christmas albums by people like James Brown, but they weren't major parts of the discography. So today, we're going to have a brief run-through of the Beatles' Christmas records. These were flexi-discs -- which for those of you who are too young to remember them were records pressed on very, very, thin, cheap plastic, which used to be attached to things like kids' comics or cereal boxes as promotional gimmicks -- sent out to members of the group's fan club. In a way, these were the Beatles' very own Patreon bonuses, sent out to fans and supporters, and not essential works, but hopefully interesting and fun. They very rarely had anything like a full song, being mostly made up of sketches and recorded messages, and other than a limited-edition vinyl reissue a few years back they've never been put on general release -- though one song from the discs, "Christmas Time is Here Again", *was* released as a B-side of the CD single of "Free as A Bird" in 1995: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Other than that, the Christmas records remain one of those parts of the Beatles catalogue which have never seen a proper widespread release. The first record was made on October the 17th 1963, at the same recording session as "I Want to Hold Your Hand", at the instigation of Tony Barrow, the group's publicist, who also came up with a script for the group to depart from: [Excerpt, the Beatles' first Christmas record] Barrow apparently edited the recording himself, using scissors and tape, and much of that was just taking out the swearing. Incidentally, I've seen some American sources talking about the word "Crimble" being a word that the Beatles made up themselves, but it's actually a fairly standard bit of Scouse slang. The second Christmas record was recorded at the end of the sessions for Beatles For Sale and was much the same kind of thing, though this time they incorporated sound effects: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Second Christmas Record] That was never sent to American fans. Instead, they got a cardboard copy of an edited version of the first record (it's possible to make records out of cardboard, but they can only be played a handful of times). They wouldn't get another Christmas record until 1968, though British fans kept receiving them. The third record sees the group parodying other people's hits, including a brief rendition of "It's the Same Old Song" interrupted by George Harrison saying they can't sing it because of copyright, and an attempt to sing Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" and "Auld Lang Syne" at the same time: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Third Christmas Record] The fourth record, from 1966, was recorded during the early sessions for "Strawberry Fields Forever", and titled "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas". For those outside the UK and its sphere of cultural influence, pantomime is a British Xmas stage tradition which is very hard to explain if you've not experienced it, involving performances that are ostensibly of fairy stories like Cinderella or Snow White, but also usually involving drag performances -- the male lead is usually played by a young woman, while there's usually an old woman character played by a man in drag -- with audience participation, songs, and old jokes of the "I do declare, the Prince's balls get bigger every year!" type. As the title suggests, then, the 1966 Christmas record is an attempt at an actual narrative of sorts, though a surreal, incoherent one. It comes across very much like the Goon show -- though like one of the later episodes where Milligan has lost all sense of narrative coherence: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas"] it's probably the best of the group's Christmas efforts, and certainly the most fully realised to this point. The 1967 Christmas record, "Christmas Time is Here Again", is even more ambitious. It's another narrative, which sees the group playing a fictitious group called the Ravellers, auditioning for the BBC: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] It also features parodies of broadcasting formats, which I've seen a few people suggest were inspired by the Bonzo Dog Band's then-recent Craig Torso Show radio performances, but which seem to me more indicative just of a general shared sense of humour: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] But that record has become most famous for having one of the closest things on any of these records to a full song, the title track "Christmas Time is Here Again": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] As well as later being issued as the B-side of a CD single, that was also remade by Ringo as a solo record: [Excerpt: Ringo Starr, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Although my favourite use of the song is actually as an interpolation, with slightly altered lyrics, in "Xmas Again" by Stew of the Negro Problem, one of my favourite current songwriters: [Excerpt: Stew, "Xmas Again"] "Christmas Time is Here Again" would be the last Christmas record the group would make together. For their final two Christmas releases, they recorded their parts separately and got their friend, the DJ Kenny Everett, who was known at this point for his tricks with tape editing, and who shared their sense of humour (he later went on to become a successful TV comedian) to collage them together into something listenable. The highlight of the 1968 record comes from George's contribution. George, a lover of the ukulele, got Tiny Tim to record his version of "Nowhere Man" for the record: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Nowhere Man"] And for the seventh and final Christmas single, recorded after the group had split up but before the split was announced, Everett once again cobbled it together from separate recordings, this time a chat between John and Yoko, Ringo improvising a song and plugging his new film, and Paul singing an original Christmas song: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Merry, Merry, Year"] George's contribution was a single sentence. In 1970, the fan club members got one final record -- an actual vinyl album, compiling all the previous Christmas records in one place. All the Beatles would in future record solo Christmas singles, some of which became perennial classics, but there would never be another Beatles Christmas record [Excerpt, the end of the third Beatles Christmas record]

Feijóo tilda de “humillaciones” los pactos del Gobierno con Bildu. Por otro lado, Eva Granados pide al presidente del PP abandonar la actitud “antisistema” en referencia a la renovación del Consejo General del Poder Judicial.  El PP pide al Gobierno que rectifique y modifique la ley del solo sí es sí y el Ejecutivo descarta la modificación. Además, desde Podemos, Isa Serra defiende esta legislación para cambiar la cultura de la violación por la del consentimiento. Reyes Maroto asegura que la reforma del delito de sedición estaba en la agenda legislativa del Gobierno y niega que el voto favorable de Esquerra haya sido importante para sacar adelante las cuentas para el año que viene. Almeida confirma que será candidato del PP a la Alcaldía de Madrid, la DGT inicia este lunes una nueva campaña de control y vigilancia del consumo de alcohol y drogas al volante, el precio de la luz sigue subiendo, Rusia no podrá vender petróleo a Europa trasportado por mar a partir mañana y terminamos recordando el “Beatles for Sale”, cuarto álbum de la formación de Liverpool que hoy cumple 58 años. Edición · Jorge Quiroga Realización · Antonio Alfonso HernándezSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Feijóo tilda de “humillaciones” los pactos del Gobierno con Bildu. Por otro lado, Eva Granados pide al presidente del PP abandonar la actitud “antisistema” en referencia a la renovación del Consejo General del Poder Judicial.  El PP pide al Gobierno que rectifique y modifique la ley del solo sí es sí y el Ejecutivo descarta la modificación. Además, desde Podemos, Isa Serra defiende esta legislación para cambiar la cultura de la violación por la del consentimiento. Reyes Maroto asegura que la reforma del delito de sedición estaba en la agenda legislativa del Gobierno y niega que el voto favorable de Esquerra haya sido importante para sacar adelante las cuentas para el año que viene. Almeida confirma que será candidato del PP a la Alcaldía de Madrid, la DGT inicia este lunes una nueva campaña de control y vigilancia del consumo de alcohol y drogas al volante, el precio de la luz sigue subiendo, Rusia no podrá vender petróleo a Europa trasportado por mar a partir mañana y terminamos recordando el “Beatles for Sale”, cuarto álbum de la formación de Liverpool que hoy cumple 58 años. Edición · Jorge Quiroga Realización · Antonio Alfonso HernándezSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

By the time of Beatles for Sale at the end of '64, the band were exhausted, overworked, and for good reason. They'd been working nonstop for YEARS with a schedule that most artists would shudder at. While their previous album had been their first of all originals, this time, the tank was a bit lower than before, and the band had to revert back to covers they'd been doing since the Cavern and Hamburg days. Even though they may have been tired, they pulled out a fiery cover of Little Richard's version of "Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey", which was in fact a medley of "Kansas City" and a song of his own. In 1959, at one point there were 5 different covers of "Kansas City" on the Billboard charts. The fabs manage to turn in one of the more energetic moments on Beatles For Sale here. Paul's Little Richard vocal tribute is always on point, Ringo gives a swinging backbeat. The gang vocals are 100% pure energy and fun, you can't not want to singalong. To me, this is a real highlight and a killer cover from the band. That said, I have a real sweet spot for Beatle covers. This isn't their best Little Richard cover though, and we won't get to that one for quite a while. Joining us this week is yet another member of the 5 timers club, our buddy and bandmate Kyle Melancon. Recorded on Toss Day 2020 (thanks, Ringo) we cast a wide net on Beatlechat, ranging from poorly-made Beatle albums, what makes their covers successful or unsuccessful), the long strange version of "Kansas City," that ol' N'awlins classic Jazzbolaya, and we introduce a new element to our show! What do you think? Too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know in the comments on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/rankingthebeatles, Instagram @rankingthebeatles, or Twitter @rankingbeatles! Be sure to check out RTB's official website, www.rankingthebeatles.com and our brand new webstore!! RANK YOUR OWN BEATLES with our new RTB poster! Pick up a tshirt, coffee cup, tote bag, and more! Enjoying the show, and wanna show your support? Buy Us A Coffee! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/support

Episode one hundred and fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks, and the self-inflicted damage the group did to their career between 1965 and 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a nineteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Excerpt From a Teenage Opera" by Keith West. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many Kinks songs. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. And this is the interview with Rasa I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode has some mentions of racism and homophobia, several discussions of physical violence, one mention of domestic violence, and some discussion of mental illness. I've tried to discuss these things with a reasonable amount of sensitivity, but there's a tabloid element to some of my sources which inevitably percolates through, so be warned if you find those things upsetting. One of the promises I made right at the start of this project was that I would not be doing the thing that almost all podcasts do of making huge chunks of the episodes be about myself -- if I've had to update people about something in my life that affects the podcast, I've done it in separate admin episodes, so the episodes themselves will not be taken up with stuff about me. The podcast is not about me. I am making a very slight exception in this episode, for reasons that will become clear -- there's no way for me to tell this particular story the way I need to without bringing myself into it at least a little. So I wanted to state upfront that this is a one-off thing. The podcast is not suddenly going to change. But one question that I get asked a lot -- far more than I'd expect -- is "do the people you talk about in the podcast ever get in touch with you about what you've said?" Now that has actually happened twice, both times involving people leaving comments on relatively early episodes. The first time is probably the single thing I'm proudest of achieving with this series, and it was a comment left on the episode on "Goodnight My Love" a couple of years back: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] That comment was from Debra Frazier and read “Jesse Belvin is my Beloved Uncle, my mother's brother. I've been waiting all my life for him to be recognized in this manner. I must say the content in this podcast is 100% correct!Joann and Jesse practically raised me. Can't express how grateful I am. Just so glad someone got it right. I still miss them dearly to this day. My world was forever changed Feb. 6th 1960. I can remember him writing most of those songs right there in my grandmother's living room. I think I'm his last living closest relative, that knows everything in this podcast is true." That comment by itself would have justified me doing this whole podcast. The other such comment actually came a couple of weeks ago, and was on the episode on "Only You": [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You"] That was a longer comment, from Gayle Schrieber, an associate of Buck Ram, and started "Well, you got some of it right. Your smart-assed sarcasm and know-it-all attitude is irritating since I Do know it all from the business side but what the heck. You did better than most people – with the exception of Marv Goldberg." Given that Marv Goldberg is the single biggest expert on 1950s vocal groups in the world, I'll take that as at least a backhanded compliment. So those are the only two people who I've talked about in the podcast who've commented, but before the podcast I had a blog, and at various times people whose work I wrote about would comment -- John Cowsill of the Cowsills still remembers a blog post where I said nice things about him fourteen years ago, for example. And there was one comment on a blog post I made four or five years ago which confirmed something I'd suspected for a while… When we left the Kinks, at the end of 1964, they had just recorded their first album. That album was not very good, but did go to number three in the UK album charts, which is a much better result than it sounds. Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon got to number one in 1960, but otherwise the only rock acts to make number one on the album charts from the start of the sixties through the end of 1967 were Elvis, Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Monkees. In the first few years of the sixties they were interspersed with the 101 Strings, trad jazz, the soundtrack to West Side Story, and a blackface minstrel group, The George Mitchell Singers. From mid-1963 through to the end of 1967, though, literally the only things to get to number one on the album charts were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Monkees, and the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. That tiny cabal was eventually broken at the end of 1967 by Val Doonican Rocks… But Gently, and from 1968 on the top of the album charts becomes something like what we would expect today, with a whole variety of different acts, I make this point to point out two things The first is that number three on the album charts is an extremely good position for the Kinks to be in -- when they reached that point the Rolling Stones' second album had just entered at number one, and Beatles For Sale had dropped to number two after eight weeks at the top -- and the second is that for most rock artists and record labels, the album market was simply not big enough or competitive enough until 1968 for it to really matter. What did matter was the singles chart. And "You Really Got Me" had been a genuinely revolutionary hit record. According to Ray Davies it had caused particular consternation to both the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, both of whom had thought they would be the first to get to number one with a dirty, distorted, R&B-influenced guitar-riff song. And so three weeks after the release of the album came the group's second single. Originally, the plan had been to release a track Ray had been working on called "Tired of Waiting", but that was a slower track, and it was decided that the best thing to do would be to try to replicate the sound of their first hit. So instead, they released "All Day And All Of The Night": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day And All Of The Night"] That track was recorded by the same team as had recorded "You Really Got Me", except with Perry Ford replacing Arthur Greenslade on piano. Once again, Bobby Graham was on drums rather than Mick Avory, and when Ray Davies suggested that he might want to play a different drum pattern, Graham just asked him witheringly "Who do you think you are?" "All Day and All of the Night" went to number two -- a very impressive result for a soundalike follow-up -- and was kept off the number one spot first by "Baby Love" by the Supremes and then by "Little Red Rooster" by the Rolling Stones. The group quickly followed it up with an EP, Kinksize Session, consisting of three mediocre originals plus the group's version of "Louie Louie". By February 1965 that had hit number one on the EP charts, knocking the Rolling Stones off. Things were going as well as possible for the group. Ray and his girlfriend Rasa got married towards the end of 1964 -- they had to, as Rasa was pregnant and from a very religious Catholic family. By contrast, Dave was leading the kind of life that can only really be led by a seventeen-year-old pop star -- he moved out of the family home and in with Mick Avory after his mother caught him in bed with five women, and once out of her watchful gaze he also started having affairs with men, which was still illegal in 1964. (And which indeed would still be illegal for seventeen-year-olds until 2001). In January, they released their third hit single, "Tired of Waiting for You". The track was a ballad rather than a rocker, but still essentially another variant on the theme of "You Really Got Me" -- a song based around a few repeated phrases of lyric, and with a chorus with two major chords a tone apart. "You Really Got Me"'s chorus has the change going up: [Plays "You Really Got Me" chorus chords] While "Tired Of Waiting For You"'s chorus has the change going down: [Plays "Tired of Waiting For You" chorus chords] But it's trivially easy to switch between the two if you play them in the same key: [Demonstrates] Ray has talked about how "Tired of Waiting for You" was partly inspired by how he felt tired of waiting for the fame that the Kinks deserved, and the music was written even before "You Really Got Me". But when they went into the studio to record it, the only lyrics he had were the chorus. Once they'd recorded the backing track, he worked on the lyrics at home, before coming back into the studio to record his vocals, with Rasa adding backing vocals on the softer middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Tired of Waiting For You"] After that track was recorded, the group went on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. The flight out to Australia was thirty-four hours, and also required a number of stops. One stop to refuel in Moscow saw the group forced back onto the plane at gunpoint after Pete Quaife unwisely made a joke about the recently-deposed Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev. They also had a stop of a couple of days in Mumbai, where Ray was woken up by the sounds of fishermen chanting at the riverside, and enchanted by both the sound and the image. In Adelaide, Ray and Dave met up for the first time in years with their sister Rose and her husband Arthur. Ray was impressed by their comparative wealth, but disliked the slick modernity of their new suburban home. Dave became so emotional about seeing his big sister again that he talked about not leaving her house, not going to the show that night, and just staying in Australia so they could all be a family again. Rose sadly told him that he knew he couldn't do that, and he eventually agreed. But the tour wasn't all touching family reunions. They also got into a friendly rivalry with Manfred Mann, who were also on the tour and were competing with the Kinks to be the third-biggest group in the UK behind the Beatles and the Stones, and at one point both bands ended up on the same floor of the same hotel as the Stones, who were on their own Australian tour. The hotel manager came up in the night after a complaint about the noise, saw the damage that the combined partying of the three groups had caused, and barricaded them into that floor, locking the doors and the lift shafts, so that the damage could be contained to one floor. "Tired of Waiting" hit number one in the UK while the group were on tour, and it also became their biggest hit in the US, reaching number six, so on the way home they stopped off in the US for a quick promotional appearance on Hullabaloo. According to Ray's accounts, they were asked to do a dance like Freddie and the Dreamers, he and Mick decided to waltz together instead, and the cameras cut away horrified at the implied homosexuality. In fact, examining the footage shows the cameras staying on the group as Mick approaches Ray, arms extended, apparently offering to waltz, while Ray backs off nervous and confused, unsure what's going on. Meanwhile Dave and Pete on the other side of the stage are being gloriously camp with their arms around each other's shoulders. When they finally got back to the UK, they were shocked to hear this on the radio: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] Ray was horrified that someone had apparently stolen the group's sound, especially when he found out it was the Who, who as the High Numbers had had a bit of a rivalry with the group. He said later "Dave thought it was us! It was produced by Shel Talmy, like we were. They used the same session singers as us, and Perry Ford played piano, like he did on ‘All Day And All Of The Night'. I felt a bit appalled by that. I think that was worse than stealing a song – they were actually stealing our whole style!” Pete Townshend later admitted as much, saying that he had deliberately demoed "I Can't Explain" to sound as much like the Kinks as possible so that Talmy would see its potential. But the Kinks were still, for the moment, doing far better than the Who. In March, shortly after returning from their foreign tour, they released their second album, Kinda Kinks. Like their first album, it was a very patchy effort, but it made number two on the charts, behind the Rolling Stones. But Ray Davies was starting to get unhappy. He was dissatisfied with everything about his life. He would talk later about looking at his wife lying in bed sleeping and thinking "What's she doing here?", and he was increasingly wondering if the celebrity pop star life was right for him, simultaneously resenting and craving the limelight, and doing things like phoning the music papers to deny rumours that he was leaving the Kinks -- rumours which didn't exist until he made those phone calls. As he thought the Who had stolen the Kinks' style, Ray decided to go in a different direction for the next Kinks single, and recorded "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy", which was apparently intended to sound like Motown, though to my ears it bears no resemblance: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy"] That only went to number nineteen -- still a hit, but a worry for a band who had had three massive hits in a row. Several of the band started to worry seriously that they were going to end up with no career at all. It didn't help that on the tour after recording that, Ray came down with pneumonia. Then Dave came down with bronchitis. Then Pete Quaife hit his head and had to be hospitalised with severe bleeding and concussion. According to Quaife, he fainted in a public toilet and hit his head on the bowl on the way down, but other band members have suggested that Quaife -- who had a reputation for telling tall stories, even in a band whose members are all known for rewriting history -- was ashamed after getting into a fight. In April they played the NME Poll-Winners' Party, on the same bill as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Searchers, Freddie And The Dreamers, Herman's Hermits, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, the Rockin' Berries, the Seekers, the Ivy League, Them, the Bachelors, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Twinkle, Tom Jones, Donovan, and Sounds Incorporated. Because they got there late they ended up headlining, going on after the Beatles, even though they hadn't won an award, only come second in best new group, coming far behind the Stones but just ahead of Manfred Mann and the Animals. The next single, "Set Me Free", was a conscious attempt to correct course after "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy" had been less successful: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Set Me Free"] The song is once again repetitive, and once again based on a riff, structured similarly to "Tired of Waiting" but faster and more upbeat, and with a Beatles-style falsetto in the chorus. It worked -- it returned the group to the top ten -- but Ray wasn't happy at writing to order. He said in August of that year “I'm ashamed of that song. I can stand to hear and even sing most of the songs I've written, but not that one. It's built around pure idiot harmonies that have been used in a thousand songs.” More recently he's talked about how the lyric was an expression of him wanting to be set free from the constraint of having to write a hit song in the style he felt he was outgrowing. By the time the single was released, though, it looked like the group might not even be together any longer. There had always been tensions in the band. Ray and Dave had a relationship that made the Everly Brothers look like the model of family amity, and while Pete Quaife stayed out of the arguments for the most part, Mick Avory couldn't. The core of the group had always been the Davies brothers, and Quaife had known them for years, but Avory was a relative newcomer and hadn't grown up with them, and they also regarded him as a bit less intelligent than the rest of the group. He became the butt of jokes on a fairly constant basis. That would have been OK, except that Avory was also an essentially passive person, who didn't want to take sides in conflicts, while Dave Davies thought that as he and Avory were flatmates they should be on the same side, and resented when Avory didn't take his side in arguments with Ray. As Dave remembered it, the trigger came when he wanted to change the setlist and Mick didn't support him against Ray. In others' recollection, it came when the rest of the band tried to get Dave away from a party and he got violent with them. Both may be true. Either way, Dave got drunk and threw a suitcase at the back of a departing Mick, who was normally a fairly placid person but had had enough, and so he turned round, furious, grabbed Dave, got him in a headlock and just started punching, blackening both his eyes. According to some reports, Avory was so infuriated with Dave that he knocked him out, and Dave was so drunk and angry that when he came to he went for Avory again, and got knocked out again. The next day, the group were driven to their show in separate cars -- the Davies brothers in one, the rhythm section in the other -- they had separate dressing rooms, and made their entrance from separate directions. They got through the first song OK, and then Dave Davies insulted Avory's drumming, spat at him, and kicked his drums so they scattered all over the stage. At this point, a lot of the audience were still thinking this was part of the act, but Avory saw red again and picked up his hi-hat cymbal and smashed it down edge-first onto Dave's head. Everyone involved says that if his aim had been very slightly different he would have actually killed Dave. As it is, Dave collapsed, unconscious, bleeding everywhere. Ray screamed "My brother! He's killed my little brother!" and Mick, convinced he was a murderer, ran out of the theatre, still wearing his stage outfit of a hunting jacket and frilly shirt. He was running away for his life -- and that was literal, as Britain still technically had the death penalty at this point; while the last executions in Britain took place in 1964, capital punishment for murder wasn't abolished until late 1965 -- but at the same time a gang of screaming girls outside who didn't know what was going on were chasing him because he was a pop star. He managed to get back to London, where he found that the police had been looking for him but that Dave was alive and didn't want to press charges. However, he obviously couldn't go back to their shared home, and they had to cancel gigs because Dave had been hospitalised. It looked like the group were finished for good. Four days after that, Ray and Rasa's daughter Louisa was born, and shortly after that Ray was in the studio again, recording demos: [Excerpt: Ray Davies, "I Go to Sleep (demo)"] That song was part of a project that Larry Page, the group's co-manager, and Eddie Kassner, their publisher, had of making Ray's songwriting a bigger income source, and getting his songs recorded by other artists. Ray had been asked to write it for Peggy Lee, who soon recorded her own version: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I Go to Sleep"] Several of the other tracks on that demo session featured Mitch Mitchell on drums. At the time, Mitchell was playing with another band that Page managed, and there seems to have been some thought of him possibly replacing Avory in the group. But instead, Larry Page cut the Gordian knot. He invited each band member to a meeting, just the two of them -- and didn't tell them that he'd scheduled all these meetings at the same time. When they got there, they found that they'd been tricked into having a full band meeting, at which point Page just talked to them about arrangements for their forthcoming American tour, and didn't let them get a word in until he'd finished. At the end he asked if they had any questions, and Mick Avory said he'd need some new cymbals because he'd broken his old ones on Dave's head. Before going on tour, the group recorded a song that Ray had written inspired by that droning chanting he'd heard in Mumbai. The song was variously titled "See My Friend" and "See My Friends" -- it has been released under both titles, and Ray seems to sing both words at different times -- and Ray told Maureen Cleave "The song is about homosexuality… It's like a football team and the way they're always kissing each other.” (We will be talking about Ray Davies' attitudes towards sexuality and gender in a future episode, but suffice to say that like much of Davies' worldview, he has a weird mixture of very progressive and very reactionary views, and he is also prone to observe behaviours in other people's private lives and make them part of his own public persona). The guitar part was recorded on a bad twelve-string guitar that fed back in the studio, creating a drone sound, which Shel Talmy picked up on and heavily compressed, creating a sound that bore more than a little resemblance to a sitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friend"] If that had been released at the time, it would have made the Kinks into trend-setters. Instead it was left in the can for nearly three months, and in the meantime the Yardbirds released the similar-sounding "Heart Full of Soul", making the Kinks look like bandwagon-jumpers when their own record came out, and reinforcing a paranoid belief that Ray had started to develop that his competitors were stealing his ideas. The track taking so long to come out was down to repercussions from the group's American tour, which changed the course of their whole career in ways they could not possibly have predicted. This was still the era when the musicians' unions of the US and UK had a restrictive one-in, one-out policy for musicians, and you couldn't get a visa to play in the US without the musicians' union's agreement -- and the AFM were not very keen on the British invasion, which they saw as taking jobs away from their members. There are countless stories from this period of bands like the Moody Blues getting to the US only to find that the arrangements have fallen through and they can't perform. Around this time, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders were told they weren't notable enough to get permission to play more than one gig, even though they were at number one on the charts in the US at the time. So it took a great deal of effort to get the Kinks' first US tour arranged, and they had to make a good impression. Unfortunately, while the Beatles and Stones knew how to play the game and give irreverent, cheeky answers that still left the interviewers amused and satisfied, the Kinks were just flat-out confusing and rude: [Excerpt: The Kinks Interview with Clay Cole] The whole tour went badly. They were booked into unsuitable venues, and there were a series of events like the group being booked on the same bill as the Dave Clark Five, and both groups having in their contract that they would be the headliner. Promoters started to complain about them to their management and the unions, and Ray was behaving worse and worse. By the time the tour hit LA, Ray was being truly obnoxious. According to Larry Page he refused to play one TV show because there was a Black drummer on the same show. Page said that it was not about personal prejudice -- though it's hard to see how it could not be, at least in part -- but just picking something arbitrary to complain about to show he had the power to mess things up. While shooting a spot for the show Where The Action Is, Ray got into a physical fight with one of the other cast members over nothing. What Ray didn't realise was that the person in question was a representative for AFTRA, the screen performers' union, and was already unhappy because Dave had earlier refused to join the union. Their behaviour got reported up the chain. The day after the fight was supposed to be the highlight of the tour, but Ray was missing his wife. In the mid-sixties, the Beach Boys would put on a big Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl every year, and the Kinks were due to play it, on a bill which as well as the Beach Boys also featured the Byrds, the Righteous Brothers, Dino, Desi & Billy, and Sonny and Cher. But Ray said he wasn't going on unless Rasa was there. And he didn't tell Larry Page, who was there, that. Instead, he told a journalist at the Daily Mirror in London, and the first Page heard about it was when the journalist phoned him to confirm that Ray wouldn't be playing. Now, they had already been working to try to get Rasa there for the show, because Ray had been complaining for a while. But Rasa didn't have a passport. Not only that, but she was an immigrant and her family were from Lithuania, and the US State Department weren't exactly keen on people from the Eastern Bloc flying to the US. And it was a long flight. I don't know exactly how long a flight from London to LA took then, but it takes eleven and a half hours now, and it will have been around that length. Somehow, working a miracle, Larry Page co-ordinated with his co-managers Robert Wace and Grenville Collins back in London -- difficult in itself as Wace and Collins and Page and his business partner Eddie Kassner were by now in two different factions, because Ray had been manipulating them and playing them off against each other for months. But the three of them worked together and somehow got Rasa to LA in time for Ray to go on stage. Page waited around long enough to see that Ray had got on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, then flew back to London. He had had enough of Ray's nonsense, and didn't really see any need to be there anyway, because they had a road manager, their publisher, their agent, and plenty of support staff. He felt that he was only there to be someone for Ray Davies to annoy and take his frustrations out on. And indeed, once Page flew back to the UK, Ray calmed down, though how much of that was the presence of Rasa it's hard to say. Their road manager at the time though said "If Larry wasn't there, Ray couldn't make problems because there was nobody there to make them to. He couldn't make problems for me because I just ignored them. For example, in Hawaii, the shirts got stolen. Ray said, ‘No way am I going onstage without my shirt.' So I turned around and said to him, ‘Great, don't go on!' Of course, they went on.” They did miss the gig the next night in San Francisco, with more or less the same lineup as the Hollywood Bowl show -- they'd had problems with the promoter of that show at an earlier gig in Reno, and so Ray said they weren't going to play unless they got paid in cash upfront. When the promoter refused, the group just walked on stage, waved, and walked off. But other than that, the rest of the tour went OK. What they didn't realise until later was that they had made so many enemies on that tour that it would be impossible for them to return to the US for another four years. They weren't blacklisted, as such, they just didn't get the special treatment that was necessary to make it possible for them to visit there. From that point on they would still have a few hits in the US, but nothing like the sustained massive success they had in the UK in the same period. Ray felt abandoned by Page, and started to side more and more with Wace and Collins. Page though was still trying to promote Ray's songwriting. Some of this, like the album "Kinky Music" by the Larry Page Orchestra, released during the tour, was possibly not the kind of promotion that anyone wanted, though some of it has a certain kitsch charm: [Excerpt: The Larry Page Orchestra, "All Day And All Of The Night"] Incidentally, the guitarist on that album was Jimmy Page, who had previously played rhythm guitar on a few Kinks album tracks. But other stuff that Larry Page was doing would be genuinely helpful. For example, on the tour he had become friendly with Stone and Greene, the managers who we heard about in the Buffalo Springfield episode. At this point they were managing Sonny and Cher, and when they came over to the UK, Page took the opportunity to get Cher into the studio to cut a version of Ray's "I Go to Sleep": [Excerpt: Cher, "I Go to Sleep"] Most songwriters, when told that the biggest new star of the year was cutting a cover version of one of their tracks for her next album, would be delighted. Ray Davies, on the other hand, went to the session and confronted Page, screaming about how Page was stealing his ideas. And it was Page being marginalised that caused "See My Friend" to be delayed, because while they were in the US, Page had produced the group in Gold Star Studios, recording a version of Ray's song "Ring the Bells", and Page wanted that as the next single, but the group had a contract with Shel Talmy which said he would be their producer. They couldn't release anything Talmy hadn't produced, but Page, who had control over the group's publishing with his business partner Kassner, wouldn't let them release "See My Friend". Eventually, Talmy won out, and "See My Friend" became the group's next single. It made the top ten on the Record Retailer chart, the one that's now the official UK chart cited in most sources, but only number fifteen on the NME chart which more people paid attention to at the time, and only spent a few weeks on the charts. Ray spent the summer complaining in the music papers about how the track -- "the only one I've really liked", as he said at the time -- wasn't selling as much as it deserved, and also insulting Larry Page and boasting about his own abilities, saying he was a better singer than Andy Williams and Tony Bennett. The group sacked Larry Page as their co-manager, and legal battles between Page and Kassner on one side and Collins and Wace on the other would continue for years, tying up much of the group's money. Page went on to produce a new band he was managing, making records that sounded very like the Kinks' early hits: [Excerpt: The Troggs, "Wild Thing"] The Kinks, meanwhile, decided to go in a different direction for their new EP, Kwyet Kinks, an EP of mostly softer, folk- and country-inspired songs. The most interesting thing on Kwyet Kinks was "Well-Respected Man", which saw Ray's songwriting go in a completely different direction as he started to write gentle social satires with more complex lyrics, rather than the repetitive riff-based songs he'd been doing before. That track was released as a single in the US, which didn't have much of an EP market, and made the top twenty there, despite its use of a word that in England at the time had a double meaning -- either a cigarette or a younger boy at a public school who has to be the servant of an older boy -- but in America was only used as a slur for gay people: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Well Respected Man"] The group's next album, The Kink Kontroversy, was mostly written in a single week, and is another quickie knockoff album. It had the hit single "Til the End of the Day", another attempt at getting back to their old style of riffy rockers, and one which made the top ten. It also had a rerecorded version of "Ring the Bells", the song Larry Page had wanted to release as a single: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Ring the Bells"] I'm sure that when Ray Davies heard "Ruby Tuesday" a little over a year later he didn't feel any better about the possibility that people were stealing his ideas. The Kink Kontroversy was a transitional album for the group in many ways. It was the first album to prominently feature Nicky Hopkins, who would be an integral part of the band's sound for the next three years, and the last one to feature a session drummer (Clem Cattini, rather than Avory, played on most of the tracks). From this point on there would essentially be a six-person group of studio Kinks who would make the records -- the four Kinks themselves, Rasa Davies on backing vocals, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. At the end of 1965 the group were flailing, mired in lawsuits, and had gone from being the third biggest group in the country at the start of the year to maybe the tenth or twentieth by the end of it. Something had to change. And it did with the group's next single, which in both its sound and its satirical subject matter was very much a return to the style of "Well Respected Man". "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was inspired by anger. Ray was never a particularly sociable person, and he was not the kind to do the rounds of all the fashionable clubs like the other pop stars, including his brother, would. But he did feel a need to make some kind of effort and would occasionally host parties at his home for members of the fashionable set. But Davies didn't keep up with fashion the way they did, and some of them would mock him for the way he dressed. At one such party he got into a fistfight with someone who was making fun of his slightly flared trousers, kicked all the guests out, and then went to a typewriter and banged out a lyric mocking the guest and everyone like him: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] The song wasn't popular with Ray's bandmates -- Dave thought it was too soft and wimpy, while Quaife got annoyed at the time Ray spent in the studio trying to make the opening guitar part sound a bit like a ukulele. But they couldn't argue with the results -- it went to number five on the charts, their biggest success since "Tired of Waiting for You" more than a year earlier, and more importantly in some ways it became part of the culture in a way their more recent singles hadn't. "Til The End of the Day" had made the top ten, but it wasn't a record that stuck in people's minds. But "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was so popular that Ray soon got sick of people coming up to him in the street and singing "Oh yes he is!" at him. But then, Ray was getting sick of everything. In early 1966 he had a full-scale breakdown, brought on by the flu but really just down to pure exhaustion. Friends from this time say that Ray was an introverted control freak, always neurotic and trying to get control and success, but sabotaging it as soon as he attained it so that he didn't have to deal with the public. Just before a tour of Belgium, Rasa gave him an ultimatum -- either he sought medical help or she would leave him. He picked up their phone and slammed it into her face, blacking her eye -- the only time he was ever physically violent to her, she would later emphasise -- at which point it became imperative to get medical help for his mental condition. Ray stayed at home while the rest of the band went to Belgium -- they got in a substitute rhythm player, and Dave took the lead vocals -- though the tour didn't make them any new friends. Their co-manager Grenville Collins went along and with the tact and diplomacy for which the British upper classes are renowned the world over, would say things like “I understand every bloody word you're saying but I won't speak your filthy language. De Gaulle won't speak English, why should I speak French?” At home, Ray was doing worse and worse. When some pre-recorded footage of the Kinks singing "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" came on the TV, he unplugged it and stuck it in the oven. He said later "I was completely out of my mind. I went to sleep and I woke up a week later with a beard. I don't know what happened to me. I'd run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks, I'd tried to punch my press agent, I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere. And I didn't know. I woke up and I said, ‘What's happening? When do we leave for Belgium?' And they said, ‘Ray it's all right. You had a collapse. Don't worry. You'll get better.'” He did get better, though for a long time he found himself unable to listen to any contemporary rock music other than Bob Dylan -- electric guitars made him think of the pop world that had made him ill -- and so he spent his time listening to classical and jazz records. He didn't want to be a pop star any more, and convinced himself he could quit the band if he went out on top by writing a number one single. And so he did: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Or at least, I say it's a single he wrote, but it's here that I finally get to a point I've been dancing round since the beginning of the episode. The chorus line, "In the summertime", was Rasa's suggestion, and in one of the only two interviews I've ever come across with her, for Johnny Rogan's biography of Ray, she calls the song "the only one where I wrote some words". But there's evidence, including another interview with her I'll talk about in a bit, that suggests that's not quite the case. For years, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that Ray Davies' songwriting ability follows a curve that almost precisely matches that of his relationship with Rasa. At the start, he's clearly talented -- "You Really Got Me" is a great track -- but he's an unformed writer and most of his work is pretty poor stuff. Then he marries Rasa, and his writing starts to become more interesting. Rasa starts to regularly contribute in the studio, and he becomes one of the great songwriters of his generation. For a five-year period in the mid-to-late-sixties, the period when their marriage is at its strongest, Ray writes a string of classic songs that are the equal of any catalogue in popular music. Then around 1970 Rasa stops coming to the studio, and their marriage is under strain. The records become patchier -- still plenty of classic tracks, but a lot more misses. And then in 1973, she left him, and his songwriting fell off a cliff. If you look at a typical Ray Davies concert setlist from 2017, the last time he toured, he did twenty songs, of which two were from his new album, one was the Kinks' one-off hit "Come Dancing" from 1983, and every other song was from the period when he and Rasa were married. Now, for a long time I just thought that was interesting, but likely a coincidence. After all, most rock songwriters do their most important work in their twenties, divorces have a way of messing people's mental health up, musical fashions change… there are a myriad reasons why these things could be like that. But… the circumstantial evidence just kept piling up. Ray's paranoia about people stealing his ideas meant that he became a lot more paranoid and secretive in his songwriting process, and would often not tell his bandmates the titles of the songs, the lyrics, or the vocal melody, until after they'd recorded the backing tracks -- they would record the tracks knowing the chord changes and tempo, but not what the actual song was. Increasingly he would be dictating parts to Quaife and Nicky Hopkins in the studio from the piano, telling them exactly what to play. But while Pete Quaife thought that Ray was being dictatorial in the studio and resented it, he resented something else more. As late as 1999 he was complaining about, in his words, "the silly little bint from Bradford virtually running the damn studio", telling him what to do, and feeling unable to argue back even though he regarded her as "a jumped-up groupie". Dave, on the other hand, valued Rasa's musical intuition and felt that Ray was the same. And she was apparently actually more up-to-date with the music in the charts than any of the band -- while they were out on the road, she would stay at home and listen to the radio and make note of what was charting and why. All this started to seem like a lot of circumstantial evidence that Rasa was possibly far more involved in the creation of the music than she gets credit for -- and given that she was never credited for her vocal parts on any Kinks records, was it too unbelievable that she might have contributed to the songwriting without credit? But then I found the other interview with Rasa I'm aware of, a short sidebar piece I'll link in the liner notes, and I'm going to quote that here: "Rasa, however, would sometimes take a very active role during the writing of the songs, many of which were written in the family home, even on occasion adding to the lyrics. She suggested the words “In the summertime” to ‘Sunny Afternoon', it is claimed. She now says, “I would make suggestions for a backing melody, sing along while Ray was playing the song(s) on the piano; at times I would add a lyric line or word(s). It was rewarding for me and was a major part of our life.” That was enough for me to become convinced that Rasa was a proper collaborator with Ray. I laid all this out in a blog post, being very careful how I phrased what I thought -- that while Ray Davies was probably the principal author of the songs credited to him (and to be clear, that is definitely what I think -- there's a stylistic continuity throughout his work that makes it very clear that the same man did the bulk of the work on all of it), the songs were the work of a writing partnership. As I said in that post "But even if Rasa only contributed ten percent, that seems likely to me to have been the ten percent that pulled those songs up to greatness. Even if all she did was pull Ray back from his more excessive instincts, perhaps cause him to show a little more compassion in his more satirical works (and the thing that's most notable about his post-Rasa songwriting is how much less compassionate it is), suggest a melodic line should go up instead of down at the end of a verse, that kind of thing… the cumulative effect of those sorts of suggestions can be enormous." I was just laying out my opinion, not stating anything as a certainty, though I was morally sure that Rasa deserved at least that much credit. And then Rasa commented on the post, saying "Dear Andrew. Your article was so informative and certainly not mischaracterised. Thank you for the 'history' of my input working with Ray. As I said previously, that time was magical and joyous." I think that's as close a statement as we're likely to get that the Kinks' biggest hits were actually the result of the songwriting team of Davies and Davies, and not of Ray alone, since nobody seems interested at all in a woman who sang on -- and likely co-wrote -- some of the biggest hit records of the sixties. Rasa gets mentioned in two sentences in the band's Wikipedia page, and as far as I can tell has only been interviewed twice -- an extensive interview by Johnny Rogan for his biography of Ray, in which he sadly doesn't seem to have pressed her on her songwriting contributions, and the sidebar above. I will probably continue to refer to Ray writing songs in this and the next episode on the Kinks, because I don't know for sure who wrote what, and he is the one who is legally credited as the sole writer. But… just bear that in mind. And bear it in mind whenever I or anyone else talk about the wives and girlfriends of other rock stars, because I'm sure she's not the only one. "Sunny Afternoon" knocked "Paperback Writer" off the number one spot, but by the time it did, Pete Quaife was out of the band. He'd fallen out with the Davies brothers so badly that he'd insisted on travelling separately from them, and he'd been in a car crash that had hospitalised him for six weeks. They'd quickly hired a temporary replacement, John Dalton, who had previously played with The Mark Four, the group that had evolved into The Creation. They needed him to mime for a TV appearance pretty much straight away, so they asked him "can you play a descending D minor scale?" and when he said yes he was hired -- because the opening of "Sunny Afternoon" used a trick Ray was very fond of, of holding a chord in the guitars while the bass descends in a scale, only changing chord when the notes would clash too badly, and then changing to the closest possible chord: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Around this time, the group also successfully renegotiated their contract with Pye Records, with the help of a new lawyer they had been advised to get in touch with -- Allen Klein. As well as helping renegotiate their contracts, Klein also passed on a demo of one of Ray's new songs to Herman's Hermits. “Dandy” was going to be on the Kinks' next album, but the Hermits released it as a single in the US and took it into the top ten: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, “Dandy”] In September, Pete Quaife formally quit the band -- he hadn't played with them in months after his accident -- and the next month the album Face To Face, recorded while Quaife was still in the group, was released. Face to Face was the group's first really solid album, and much of the album was in the same vein as "Sunny Afternoon" -- satirical songs that turned on the songwriter as much as on the people they were ostensibly about. It didn't do as well as the previous albums, but did still make the top twenty on the album chart. The group continued work, recording a new single, "Dead End Street", a song which is musically very similar to "Sunny Afternoon", but is lyrically astonishingly bleak, dealing with poverty and depression rather than more normal topics for a pop song. The group produced a promotional film for it, but the film was banned by the BBC as being in bad taste, as it showed the group as undertakers. But the single happened to be released two days after the broadcast of "Cathy Come Home", the seminal drama about homelessness, which suddenly brought homelessness onto the political agenda. While "Dead End Street" wasn't technically about homelessness, it was close enough that when the TV programme Panorama did a piece on the subject, they used "Dead End Street" to soundtrack it. The song made the top five, an astonishing achievement for something so dark: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dead End Street"] But the track also showed the next possible breach in the Kinks' hitmaking team -- when it was originally recorded, Shel Talmy had produced it, and had a French horn playing, but after he left the session, the band brought in a trombone player to replace the French horn, and rerecorded it without him. They would continue working with him for a little while, recording some of the tracks for their next album, but by the time the next single came out, Talmy would be out of the picture for good. But Pete Quaife, on the other hand, was nowhere near as out of the group as he had seemed. While he'd quit the band in September, Ray persuaded him to rejoin the band four days before "Dead End Street" came out, and John Dalton was back to working in his day job as a builder, though we'll be hearing more from him. The group put out a single in Europe, "Mr. Pleasant", a return to the style of "Well Respected Man" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Mr. Pleasant”] That was a big hit in the Netherlands, but it wasn't released in the UK. They were working on something rather different. Ray had had the idea of writing a song called "Liverpool Sunset", about Liverpool, and about the decline of the Merseybeat bands who had been at the top of the profession when the Kinks had been starting out. But then the Beatles had released "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", and Ray hadn't wanted to release anything about Liverpool's geography and look like he had stolen from them, given his attitudes to plagiarism. He said later "I sensed that the Beatles weren't going to be around long. When they moved to London, and ended up in Knightsbridge or wherever, I was still in Muswell Hill. I was loyal to my origins. Maybe I felt when they left it was all over for Merseybeat.” So instead, he -- or he and Rasa -- came up with a song about London, and about loneliness, and about a couple, Terry and Julie -- Terry was named after his nephew Terry who lived in Australia, while Julie's name came from Julie Christie, as she was then starring in a film with a Terry, Terrence Stamp: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] It's interesting to look at the musical inspirations for the song. Many people at the time pointed out the song's similarity to "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, which had come out six months earlier with a similar melody and was also named after a place: [Excerpt: The New Vaudeville Band, "Winchester Cathedral"] And indeed Spike Milligan had parodied that song and replaced the lyrics with something more London-centric: [Excerpt: Spike Milligan, "Tower Bridge"] But it seems likely that Ray had taken inspiration from an older piece of music. We've talked before about Ferd Grofe in several episodes -- he was the one who orchestrated the original version of "Rhapsody in Blue", who wrote the piece of music that inspired Don Everly to write "Cathy's Clown", and who wrote the first music for the Novachord, the prototype synthesiser from the 1930s. As we saw earlier, Ray was listening to a lot of classical and jazz music rather than rock at this point, and one has to wonder if, at some point during his illness the previous year, he had come across Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy, which Grofe had written for Paul Whiteman's band in 1928, very much in the style of "Rhapsody in Blue", and this section, eight and a half minutes in, in particular: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy" ] "Waterloo Sunset" took three weeks to record. They started out, as usual, with a backing track recorded without the rest of the group knowing anything about the song they were recording -- though the group members did contribute some ideas to the arrangement, which was unusual by this point. Pete Quaife contributed to the bass part, while Dave Davies suggested the slapback echo on the guitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset, Instrumental Take 2"] Only weeks later did they add the vocals. Ray had an ear infection, so rather than use headphones he sang to a playback through a speaker, which meant he had to sing more gently, giving the vocal a different tone from his normal singing style: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And in one of the few contributions Rasa made that has been generally acknowledged, she came up with the "Sha la la" vocals in the middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And the idea of having the track fade out on cascading, round-like vocals: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] Once again the Kinks were at a turning point. A few weeks after "Waterloo Sunset" came out, the Monterey Pop Festival finally broke the Who in America -- a festival the Kinks were invited to play, but had to turn down because of their visa problems. It felt like the group were being passed by -- Ray has talked about how "Waterloo Sunset" would have been another good point for him to quit the group as he kept threatening to, or at least to stay home and just make the records, like Brian Wilson, while letting the band tour with Dave on lead vocals. He decided against it, though, as he would for decades to come. That attitude, of simultaneously wanting to be part of something and be a distanced, dispassionate observer of it, is what made "Waterloo Sunset" so special. As Ray has said, in words that seem almost to invoke the story of Moses: "it's a culmination of all my desires and hopes – it's a song about people going to a better world, but somehow I stayed where I was and became the observer in the song rather than the person who is proactive . . . I did not cross the river. They did and had a good life apparently." Ray stayed with the group, and we'll be picking up on what he and they did next in about a year's time. "Waterloo Sunset" went to number two on the charts, and has since become the most beloved song in the Kinks' whole catalogue. It's been called "the most beautiful song in the English language", and "the most beautiful song of the rock 'n' roll era", though Ray Davies, ever self-critical when he's not being self-aggrandising, thinks it could be improved upon. But most of the rest of us disagree. As the song itself says, "Waterloo Sunset's fine".

Todos los viernes Fernando Urban nos trae la historia de un disco de bandas y artistas de Argentina y el mundo.

Paul McCartney ist eine Musiklegende. Die Maßstäbe der Popmusik wurden durch ihn und die Beatles gesetzt. Sein außerordentliches Talent für Melodien, seine Kreativität und Neugier, dazu die symbiotische musikalische Zusammenarbeit mit seinem Freund John Lennon - an ihm kann niemand vorbei. Bei allem Zauber des vierköpfigen Phänomens der Beatles, ihrem märchenhaften Erfolg und bahnbrechenden Einfluss auf die Pop- und Rockmusik stellt sich die Frage: welchen Anteil hatte Paul McCartney daran? Woher kommen seine musikalischen Ideen? Wie hat es der Liverpooler sowohl als Balladenkomponist als auch als Rockmusiker schafft, so viel Neues zu schaffen? Seit 60 Jahren ist Paul McCartney erfolgreich mit seiner Musik, die Zahl seiner Hits ist ohne Beispiel. Peter Urban analysiert das Können von Sir Paul McCartney in den neuen Folgen von „Urban Pop – Musiktalk mit Peter Urban“. Er erzählt in zwei Ausgaben einmal über die Zeit von Paul McCartney bei den Beatles, des Weiteren über seine Arbeiten danach. In der ersten Folge geht es um den musikalischen Hintergrund von Paul McCartney, die Musikwelt seiner Familie, den Impuls des Rock'n‘Roll, die Lehrjahre in Hamburg und Liverpool. Ab wann konnte man sagen: das ist ein Paul-McCartney-Song? Die außerordentliche Balance zwischen unvergesslichen Balladen und mitreißenden Rocknummern – wie haben John Lennon und Paul McCartney zusammengearbeitet? Welchen ganz persönlichen Einfluss hatte der Produzent George Martin auf Paul McCartney, war er dessen Meisterschüler? Im Gespräch mit Ocke Bandixen erklärt Peter Urban das musikalische Schaffen von Paul McCartney zur Beatles-Zeit, er deckt Quellen und Einflüsse auf und beschreibt die Reaktionen und Erwartungen der Fans und Kritiker der Zeit. Den zweiten Teil, in dem es um Paul McCartney ohne die Beatles geht, findet Ihr hier ab dem 16.06.. Peters Playlist für Paul McCartney: der Beatle (1/2) (Album-Titel in Klammern, remastered versions 2009 und Remixe 2017/2019) 1963: I saw her standing there (Please Please Me) From me to you (Single), I want to hold your hand (Single) All my Loving (With the Beatles) 1964: If I fell, And I love her, Can't buy me love, Things we said today (A Hard Days Night) Baby in black, I'll follow the sun (Beatles For Sale) 1965: I've just seen a face, Yesterday (Help!) We can work it out (Single) Drive my car, You won't see me, Michelle, I'm looking through you (Rubber Soul) 1966: Eleanor Rigby, Here, there and everywhere, Good day sunshine, For no one, Got to get you into my life (Revolver) 1967: Penny Lane (Single, Stereo Mix 2017) With a little help from my friends, Getting better, Fixing a hole, She's leaving home, When I'm sixty-four, A day in the life (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – Remix 2017) Hello, Goodbye (Single) The fool on the hill (Magical Mystery Tour, EP) 1968: Hey Jude (Single) Blackbird, I will, Mother Nature's son, Helter skelter, Honey pie 1969: Get back (Single) Oh Darling, You never give me your money, She came in through the bathroom window/Golden slumbers/Carry that weight/The end (Abbey Road – Remix 2019) 1970: Let it be (Let It Be), The long and winding road (Let It Be…Naked, 2014)

We kick into episode 46 by breaking podcast ground (again) before introducing Chris (again); talking about our pump up music;  asking if "Hey Ya" is the best song every written; realizing we are pretty old;  wondering if Chris should be the official Stat-Man, Scat-Man, or Scat-Man (the other kind of scat); drinking Maccaritas; landing on our favorite preparation for corn; wondering about the Ranking the Beatles rankings (again); praising the Tommy Stans; filming the other Beatles doc about them at their worst; wearing a sport coats during 80s rock production; doing the Bartman; challenging Metallica to doubles tennis; listening to an episode of “And Your Nerd Can Sing” that blows everyone's minds; and talking the pop hit "Eight Days a Week."As always, you can find Team Blotto Beatles on Instagram (@blottobeatles) and Twitter (@blottobeatles), by emailing us (blottobeatles@gmail.com), or on the web (blottobeatles.com).  We want to hear from you!Please also take the time to rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.We have a shop!  Grab some merch.  You can also drunk dial us (tel:+18572339793)  or leave us a tip in our new tip jar (don't forget to include a message telling us what drinks we should drink with the money).See the canonical, argument-ending list of Beatles songs we are assembling here: https://www.blottobeatles.com/list; listen to it on Spotify here.Please remember to enjoy Blotto Beatles responsibly.Peace and Love.Hosts: Becker and TommyGuest: Chris Soule (@master_blaster)Executive Producer: Scotty C.Additional Musical Supervision: RB (@ryanobrooks)Associate Musical Supervision: Tim Clark (@nodisassemble)#PeteBestGetThatCheck

On this third episode of Season 1: Ian Hears the Beatles, Ian and Joel talk about The Beatles' 3rd and 4th albums: "Beatles for Sale" and "Help!"   Listening in, you might pick up on topics like   - John Lennon literally crying out for help through his songwriting - What's the worst Beatles song yet? - Which word do the flag letters on the front of the "Help!" album cover actually spell?   And you'll get to hear Joel completely nerd out all about the lyrical and harmonic elegance of the song "Yesterday."   

Angie Martoccio is an associate editor at Rolling Stone Magazine. She's interviewed everyone from Julian & Sean Lennon to Noel Gallagher to Phoebe Bridgers. And now - Jack interviews her. Angie and Jack sit down & talk about Rolling Stone Magazine's long history with The Beatles, the future of The Beatles, and why "Beatles For Sale" needs a re-release similar to 2021's "Let it Be" re-release!   Follow Angie on Twitter: @angiemartoccio If you like this episode, be sure to rate it and leave a review! Subscribe to get notifications for each week's podcast. Follow us on Twitter: @BeatlesEarth and check out our website, BeatlesEarth.com, for more information!

Today I'm starting my most ambitious project so far, i'm tackling The Beatles from when the first got together all the way until they disbanded, covering all 13 of their albums. One episode was just not enough to cover them! On Part 1 I dive into all 4 member's back stories, how The Beatles first came about, their trip to Hamburg, how they made their first album Please Please Me, breaking into the American market, their 1964 world tour, all the way up to their release of Beatles For Sale. Albums I cover in this episode: Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Days Night, Beatles For Sale Follow me for more music content, and how you can support OTM :) OTM Blog: https://onthemixpodcast.wordpress.com/blog/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onthemixpodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/OnTheMixPodcast Discord: https://discord.com/invite/gYFNT2RjtA Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/onthemixpodcast Donation/Tip: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/onthemixpodcast --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/on-the-mix/support

The Weber Brothers - Sam and Ryan - head up a crackin' episode as they dive into 1964's Beatles For Sale, track by track with host Paul Romanuk. If there is an underrated Beatles record, this may be it. It was The Beatles 2nd album of 1964 and came during a busy year that saw them touring the world, starring in a movie and recording two albums. Lots of discussion in this episode about the Fabs - but also the Weber's cool career. They both apprenticed under the great Ronnie "The Hawk" Hawkins and have stories to tell about that. They talk about the time John Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed with Ronnie on his farm (located near Toronto) back in December, 1969. The boys also tell a great story about waiting by a dumpster in St. Louis to serenade the great Chuck Berry and also getting to play with Chuck at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Check out their website: https://weberbrothers.com/ (weberbrothers.com) for all kinds of great info on them, their band and their great music - including their newest record, Choose Your Own Adventure.

This week's episode looks at "Ticket to Ride", the making of the Beatles' second film, and the influence of Bob Dylan on the Beatles' work and lives. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "The Game of Love" by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For material on the making of the film, I referred to Getting Away With It by Steven Soderbergh, a book which is in part a lengthy set of conversations between Soderbergh and Richard Lester. Sadly the only way to legally get the original mix of "Ticket to Ride" is this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the 1987 remix is widely available on the CD issue of the Help! soundtrack. The film is available on DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we last looked at the Beatles, they had just achieved their American success, and had appeared in their first film, A Hard Day's Night. Today, we're going to look at the massive artistic growth that happened to them between late 1964 and mid 1965, the making of their second film, Help!, the influence, both artistic and personal, of Bob Dylan on the group, and their introduction both to studio experimentation and to cannabis. We're going to look at "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] 1964 was a tremendously busy year for the Beatles. After they'd finished making A Hard Day's Night, but even before it was released, they had gone on yet another tour, playing Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, though without Ringo for much of the tour -- Ringo had to have his tonsils removed, and so for the first eight shows of the tour he was replaced by session drummer Jimmy Nicol, the former drummer with Colin Hicks and his Cabin Boys, who had played on several cheap soundalike records of Beatles songs. Nicol was a competent drummer, though very different in style from Ringo, and he found his temporary moment of celebrity hugely upsetting -- he later described it as the worst thing to ever happen to him, and ended up declaring bankruptcy only nine months after touring with the group. Nicol is now a recluse, and hasn't spoken to anyone about his time with the Beatles in more than thirty years. After Ringo returned to the group and the film came out they went back into the studio, only two months after the release of their third album, to start work on their fourth. They recorded four songs in two sessions before departing on their first full US tour. Those songs included two cover versions -- a version of "Mr. Moonlight" by Doctor Feelgood and the Interns that appeared on the album, and a version of Little Willie John's "Leave My Kitten Alone" that didn't see release until 1995 -- and two originals written mostly or entirely by John Lennon, "Baby's In Black", and "I'm a Loser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] "I'm a Loser" was an early sign of an influence that had particularly changed Lennon's attitude to songwriting -- that of Bob Dylan. Dylan had been on the group's radar for some time -- Paul McCartney in the Anthology book seems to have a confused memory of seeing Madhouse on Castle Street, the TV play Dylan had appeared in in January 1963 -- but early 1964 had seen him rise in prominence to the point that he was a major star, not just an obscure folk singer. And Lennon had paid particular attention to what he was doing with his lyrics. We've already seen that Lennon had been writing surreal poetry for years, but at this point in his life he still thought of his songwriting and his poetry as separate. As he would later put it "I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs; we would turn out a certain style of song for a single, and we would do a certain style of thing for this and the other thing. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market, and I didn't consider them (the lyrics or anything) to have any depth at all." This shouldn't be taken as Lennon saying that the early Beatles songs were lacking in quality, or that he didn't take the work seriously, but that it wasn't about self-expression. He was trying to do the best work he could as a craftsman. Listening to Dylan had showed him that it was possible instead to treat pop songwriting as art, in the sense Lennon understood the term -- as a means of personal expression that could also allow for experimentation and playing games. "I'm a Loser" is a first tentative step towards that, with Lennon for one of the first times consciously writing about his own emotions -- though careful to wrap those feelings both in a conventional love song structure and in a thick layer of distancing irony, to avoid making himself vulnerable -- and the stylistic influence of Dylan is very noticeable, as much in the instrumentation as in the lyrics. While several early Beatles singles had featured Lennon playing harmonica, he had been playing a chromatic harmonica, a type of harmonica that's mostly used for playing single-note melodies, because it allows the player to access every single note, but which is not very good for bending notes or playing chords. If you've heard someone playing the harmonica as a single-note melody instrument with few or no chords, whether Stevie Wonder, Larry Adler, or Max Geldray, the chances are they were playing a chromatic harmonica. On "I'm a Loser", though, Lennon plays a diatonic harmonica -- an instrument that he would refer to as a "harp" rather than a harmonica, because he associated it with the blues, where it's often referred to as a harp. Diatonic harmonicas are the instrument of choice for blues players because they allow more note-bending, and it's easier to play a full chord on them -- the downside, that you have a smaller selection of notes available, is less important in the blues, which tends towards harmonic minimalism. Diatonic harmonicas are the ones you're likely to hear on country, blues, and folk recordings -- they're the instrument played by people like Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie McCoy, and Bob Dylan. Lennon had played a diatonic before, on "I Should Have Known Better", another song which shows Dylan's influence in the performance, though not in the lyrics. In both cases he is imitating Dylan's style, which tends to be full of chordal phrases rather than single-note melody. What's interesting about “I'm a Loser” though is contrasting John's harmonica solo with George's guitar solo which follows immediately after: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm a Loser"] That's a pure Carl Perkins solo, and the group would, in their choices of cover versions for the next few months, move away somewhat from the soul and girl-group influences that dominated the covers on their first two albums, and towards country and rockabilly -- they would still cover Larry Williams, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, but there were no more covers of contemporary Black artists, and instead there were cover versions of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, and Buck Owens, and Harrison switched from the Rickenbacker that had been his main instrument on A Hard Day's Night to playing a Gretsch -- the brand of guitar that Chet Atkins and Eddie Cochrane played.  The consensus among commentators -- with which, for once, I agree -- seems to be that this was also because of the influence of Dylan. The argument is that the Beatles heard Dylan's music as a form of country music, and it inspired them to go back to their other country-oriented influences. And this makes a lot of sense -- it was only fifteen years earlier, at the same time as they replaced "race" with "rhythm and blues", that Billboard magazine chose to rename their folk chart to the country and western chart -- as Tyler Mahan Coe puts it, "after years of trying to figure out what to call their “poor Black people music” and “poor white people music” charts". And Dylan had been as influenced by Hank Williams as by Woody Guthrie. In short what the Beatles, especially Lennon, heard in Dylan seems to have been three things -- a reminder of the rockabilly and skiffle influences that had been their first love before they'd discovered R&B and soul, permission to write honestly about one's own experiences, and an acknowledgement that such writing could include surrealistic wordplay. Fundamentally, Dylan, as much as being a direct influence, seems to have given the group a kind of permission -- to have shown them that there was room in the commercial sphere in which they were now operating for them to venture into musical and lyrical areas that had always appealed to them. But of course, that was not the only influence that Dylan had on the group, as anyone who has ever read anything at all about their first full US tour knows. That tour saw them playing huge venues like the Hollywood Bowl -- a show which later made up a big part of their only official live album, which was finally released in 1977: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Things We Said Today (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1964)"] It was nine days into the tour, on the twenty-eighth of August 1964, that they met Bob Dylan for the first time. The meeting with Dylan is usually called the first time the Beatles ever smoked cannabis -- and that's true, at least if you're talking about them as a group. Lennon had tried it around 1960, and both Lennon and Harrison had tried it at a show at the Southport Floral Hall in early 1962, but neither had properly understood what they were smoking, and had both already been drunk before smoking it. According to a later interview with Harrison, that had led to the two of them madly dancing the Twist in their dressing room, shouting "This stuff isn't doing anything!" But it was at this meeting that Paul and Ringo first smoked it, and it also seems to have been taken by Lennon and Harrison as their "real" first time, possibly partly because being introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in a New York hotel sounds a lot cooler than being introduced to it by your support band's drummer in Southport, possibly because it was the first time that they had all smoked it together as a group, but mostly because this was the time when it became a regular part of the group's life. Oddly, it happened because of a misheard lyric. Dylan had loved "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and had misheard "I can't hide" as "I get high", and thus just assumed that the British band were already familiar with cannabis. The drug had a profound effect on them -- McCartney later recalled being convinced he had discovered the meaning of life, writing it down on a bit of paper, and getting their roadie Mal Evans to hold the paper for safekeeping. The next morning, when he looked at the paper, he found it merely said "there are seven levels". Lennon, on the other hand, mostly remembered Dylan playing them his latest demos and telling them to listen to the words, but Lennon characteristically being unable to concentrate on the lyrics because in his stoned state he was overwhelmed by the rhythm and general sound of the music. From this point on, the use of cannabis became a major part of the group's life, and it would soon have a profound effect on their lifestyles, their songwriting, the production on their records, and every other aspect of their career. The Beatle on whom it seems to have had the strongest and most immediate effect was Lennon, possibly because he was the one who was coping least well with success and most needed something to take his mind off things. Lennon had always been susceptible to extremes of mood -- it's likely that he would these days be diagnosed as bipolar, and we've already seen how as soon as he'd started writing personally, he'd written "I'm a Loser". He was feeling trapped in suburbia, unsuited for his role as a husband and father, unhappy about his weight, and just generally miserable. Cannabis seemed, at least at first, to offer a temporary escape from that. All the group spent much of the next couple of years stoned, but Lennon probably more than any of them, and he was the one whose writing it seemed to affect most profoundly. On the group's return from the US, they carried on working on the next album, and on a non-album single designed to be released simultaneously with it. "I Feel Fine" is a major milestone in the group's career in a number of ways. The most obvious is the opening -- a brief bit of feedback which Lennon would always later claim to be the first deliberate use of the technique on a record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Feedback had, up until this point, been something that musicians generally tried to avoid -- an unwanted sound that could wreck a performance. But among guitarists in London, especially, it was becoming the fashionable sound to incorporate, in a carefully controlled manner, in order to make sounds that nobody had heard before. Jeff Beck, Dave Davies, and Pete Townshend would all argue about which of them was the first to use the technique, but all were using it on stage by the time the Beatles recorded "I Feel Fine". But the Beatles were, if not the first to deliberately use feedback on a record (as I've said in the past, there is no such thing as a first anything, and there are debatable examples where feedback may be deliberate going back to the 1930s and some records by Bob Wills), certainly the most prominent artists to do so up to that point, and also the first to make it a major, prominent feature of a hit record in this manner. If they hadn't done it, someone else undoubtedly would, but they were the first to capture the sound that was becoming so popular in the London clubs, and as so often in their career they were able to capture something that was at the cutting edge of the underground culture and turn it into something that would be accepted by millions. "I Feel Fine" was important to the Beatles in another way, though, in that it was the first Beatles original to be based entirely around a guitar riff, and this was if anything a more important departure from their earlier records than the feedback was. Up to this point, while the Beatles had used riffs in covers like "Twist and Shout", their originals had avoided them -- the rhythm guitar had tended to go for strummed chords, while the lead guitar was usually reserved for solos and interjections. Rather than sustaining a riff through the whole record, George Harrison would tend to play answer phrases to the vocal melody, somewhat in the same manner as a backing vocalist. This time, though, Lennon wrote an entire song around a riff -- one he had based on an R&B record from a few years earlier that he particularly loved, "Watch Your Step" by Bobby Parker: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Parker's record had, in turn, been inspired by two others -- the influence of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" is very obvious, but Parker had based the riff on one that Dizzy Gillespie had used in "Manteca", a classic early Afro-Cuban jazz record from 1947: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "Manteca"] Parker had played that riff on his guitar, varied it, and come up with what may be the most influential guitar riff of all time, one lifted not only by the Beatles (on both "I Feel Fine" and, in a modified form, "Day Tripper") but Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Allman Brothers Band, and many, many others: [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Lennon took that riff and based a new song around it -- and it's important to note here that "I Feel Fine" *is* a new song. Both songs share the same riff and twelve-bar blues structure, but Lennon's lyric and melody are totally different, and the record has a different feel. There's a blurry line between plagiarism and homage, and to my mind "I Feel Fine" stays on the right side of that line, although it's a difficult issue because the Beatles were so much more successful than the unknown Parker. Part of the reason "I Feel Fine" could be the Beatles' first single based around a riff was it was recorded on a four-track machine, EMI having finally upgraded their equipment, which meant that the Beatles could record the instrumental and vocal tracks separately. This allowed Lennon and Harrison to hold down the tricky riff in unison, something Lennon couldn't do while also singing the melody -- it's noticeable that when they performed this song live, Lennon usually strummed the chords on a semi-acoustic guitar rather than doubling the riff as he does on the record. It's also worth listening to what Ringo's doing on the drums on the track. One of the more annoying myths about the Beatles is the claim made by a lot of people that Starr was in some way not a good drummer. While there has been some pushback on this, even to the extent that there is now a contrarian counterconsensus that says he was the best drummer in the world at the time, the general public still thinks of him as having been not particularly good. One listen to the part Starr played on "I Feel Fine" -- or indeed a close listen to any of his drum parts -- should get rid of that idea. While George and John are basically duplicating Parker's riff, Ringo picks up on the Parker record's similarity to "What'd I Say" and plays essentially the same part that Ray Charles' drummer had: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine (isolated drum part)"] There are copies of that posted on YouTube, and almost all of them have comments from people claiming that the drumming in question must be a session drummer, because Starr couldn't play that well.  Several of the Beatles' singles for the next two years would feature a heavy guitar riff as their main instrumental hook. Indeed, it seems like late 1964 is a point where things start to change a little for the Beatles in how they conceptualise singles and albums. Up to this point, they seem to have just written every song as a potential single, then chosen the ones they thought of as the most commercial as singles and stuck the rest out as album tracks. But from autumn 1964 through early 1966 there seems, at least on Lennon's part, to be a divide in how he looked at songs. The songs he brought in that became singles were almost uniformly guitar-driven heavy rockers with a strong riff. Meanwhile, the songs recorded for albums were almost all based on strummed acoustic guitars, usually ballads or at most mid-tempo, and often with meditative lyrics. He clearly seems to have been thinking in terms of commercial singles and less commercial album tracks, even if he didn't quite articulate it that way.  I specify Lennon here, because there doesn't seem to be a comparable split in McCartney's writing -- partly because McCartney didn't really start writing riff-based songs until Lennon dropped the idea in late 1966. McCartney instead seems to start expanding his palette of genres -- while Lennon seems to be in two modes for about an eighteen-month period, and not really to venture out of either the bluesy riff-rocker or the country-flavoured folk rock mode, McCartney starts becoming the stylistic magpie he would become in the later period of the group's career. The B-side to the single, "She's a Woman" is, like the A-side, blues-based, but here it's McCartney in Little Richard mode. The most interesting aspect to it, though, is the rhythm guitar part -- off-beat stabs which sound very much like the group continuing to try to incorporate ska into their work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She's a Woman"] The single went to number one, of course, as all the group's singles in this period did. Beatles For Sale, the album that came out of these sessions, is generally regarded as one of the group's weaker efforts, possibly because of the relatively large number of cover versions, but also because of its air of bleakness. From the autumnal cover photo to the laid-back acoustic feel of much of the album, to the depressing nature of Lennon's contributions to the songwriting -- "No Reply", "I'm a Loser", "Baby's in Black", and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" all being a far cry from "I Feel Fine" – it's not a fun album by any means. I've always had a soft spot for the album myself, but it's clearly the work of people who were very tired, depressed, and overworked. And they were working hard -- in the four months after the end of their American tour on the twentieth of September, they recorded most of Beatles For Sale and the accompanying single, played forty-eight gigs, made TV appearances on Shindig, Scene at 6:30, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Ready Steady Go, and Top of the Pops, radio appearances on Top Gear and Saturday Club, and sundry interviews. On top of that John also made an appearance on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's show "Not Only... But Also", performing versions of some of his poetry with Moore and Norman Rossington, who had co-starred in A Hard Day's Night: [Excerpt: John Lennon, Dudley Moore and Norman Rossington, "All Abord Speeching"] They did get a month off from mid-January 1965 through mid-February, but then it was back to work on a new film and accompanying soundtrack album. The group's second film, Help!, is generally regarded with rather less fondness than A Hard Day's Night, and it's certainly the case that some aspects of the film have not dated at all well -- in particular the way that several characters are played by white actors in brownface doing very unconvincing Indian accents, and the less than respectful attitude to Hindu religious beliefs, are things which will make any modern viewer with the slightest sensitivity to such issues cringe terribly.  But those aren't the aspects of the film which most of its critics pick up on -- rather they tend to focus only on the things that the Beatles themselves criticise about the film, mostly that the group spent most of the filming stoned out of their minds, and the performances are thus a lot less focused than those in A Hard Day's Night, and also that the script -- written this time by Richard Lester's regular collaborator Charles Wood, from a story by Marc Behm, rather than by Alun Owen -- is also a little unfocused. All these are fair criticisms as far as they go, but it's also the case that Help! is not a film that is best done justice by being viewed on a small screen on one's own, as most of its critics have viewed it most of the time. Help! is part of a whole subgenre of films which were popular in the 1960s but largely aren't made today -- the loose, chaotic, adventure comedy in which a nominal plot is just an excuse for a series of comedy sketches strung together with spectacular visuals. The genre encompasses everything from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World to Casino Royale to The Pink Panther, and all of these films are meant to be seen on a big screen which allows the audience to appreciate their visual inventiveness, and in a communal audience which is laughing along with them. And when seen in that light, Help! is actually a remarkably entertaining example of the type. Yes, it doesn't hold together as well as A Hard Day's Night, and it doesn't resolve so much as just stop, but structurally it's remarkably close to the films of the Marx Brothers, especially their Paramount films, and it's odd that the Marx comparisons get made about A Hard Day's Night, a slice-of-life film inspired by the French New Wave, and not about the screwball comedy that ends in a confused chase sequence. There is one thing that is worth noting about Help! that is often obscured -- part of the reason for its globetrotting nature was because of the levels of taxation in Britain at the time. For top earners, like the Beatles were, the marginal rate of income tax was as high as ninety-five percent in the mid-sixties. Many of us would think this was a reasonable rate for people who were earning many, many times in a year what most people would earn in a lifetime, but it's also worth noting that the Beatles'  success had so far lasted only two years, and that a pop act who was successful for five years was remarkably long-lived -- in the British pop industry only Cliff Richard and the Shadows had had a successful career as chart artists for longer than that, and even they were doing much less well in 1965 than they had been in 1963. In retrospect, of course, we know that the Beatles would continue to sell millions of records a year for more than sixty years, but that was not something any of them could possibly have imagined at the time, and we're still in a period where Paul McCartney could talk about going into writing musicals once the Beatles fad passed, and Ringo could still imagine himself as the owner of a hairdresser's. So it's not completely unreasonable of them to want to keep as much of their money as they could, while they could, and so while McCartney will always talk in interviews about how many of the scenes in the film were inspired by a wishlist from the group -- "We've never been skiing", "We've never been to the Bahamas" -- and there might even be some truth to that, it's also the case that the Bahamas were as known for their lax tax regime as for their undoubted charm as a tourist destination, and these journeys were not solely about giving the group a chance to have fun. But of course, before making the film itself, the group had to record songs for its soundtrack, and so on February the sixteenth they went into the studio to record four songs, including the next single, "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] While "Ticket to Ride" is mostly -- or possibly solely -- John's song, the record is very much Paul's record. For most of 1964, McCartney hadn't really been pulling his weight in the songwriting department when compared to John -- the handful of songs he had written had included some exceptional ones, but for the most part he hadn't written much, and John had been the more productive member of their partnership, writing almost all of the A Hard Day's Night album, most of the better tracks on Beatles For Sale, and the non-album single "I Feel Fine".  But now, John was sinking into one of his periodic bouts of depression -- he was still writing strong material, and would produce some of the best songs of his career in 1965, but he was unfocused and unhappy, and it was showing in his slowed productivity -- while McCartney was energised by living in London, the cultural capital of the world at that point in time, and having a famous girlfriend who was exposing him to vast areas of culture he had never been aware of before.  I say that "Ticket to Ride" is written by John, but there is some slight dispute about who contributed what to the writing. John's statement was that the song was all him, and that Paul's main contribution was the drum pattern that Ringo plays. Paul, on the other hand, claims that the song is about a sixty-forty split, with John being the sixty. McCartney's evidence for that is the strong vocal harmony he sings -- usually, if there's a two-part harmony like that on a Beatles song, it came about because Lennon and McCartney were in the same room together while writing it, and singing the part together as they were writing. He also talks about how when writing it they were discussing Ryde in the Isle of Wight, where McCartney's cousin ran a pub. I can certainly see it being the case that McCartney co-wrote the song, but I can also easily see the musicianly McCartney feeling the need to harmonise what would otherwise have been a monotonous melody, and adding the harmonies during the recording stage.  Either way, though, the song is primarily John's in the writing, but the arrangement is primarily McCartney's work -- and while Lennon would later claim that McCartney would always pay less attention to Lennon's songs than to McCartney's own, in this middle period of the group's career most of their truly astounding work comes when  Lennon brings in the song but McCartney experiments with the arrangement and production. Over and over again we see McCartney taking control of a Lennon song in the studio and bringing out aspects of it that its composer either had not considered or had not had the musical vocabulary or patience to realise on his own. Indeed one can see this as part of the dynamic that eventually led to the group breaking up. Lennon would bring in a half-formed idea and have the whole group work on it, especially McCartney, and turn it into the best version of itself it could be, but this would then seem like McCartney trying to take over. McCartney, meanwhile, with his greater musical facility, would increasingly not bother asking for the input of the group's other members, even when that input would have turned a mediocre song into a good one or a good one into a great one.  But at this point in their careers, at least, the collaboration brought out the best in both Lennon and McCartney -- though one must wonder what Harrison and Starr felt about having their parts dictated to them or simply replaced. In the case of "Ticket to Ride", one can trace the evolution of McCartney's drum pattern idea over a period of a few months. He was clearly fascinated by Hal Blaine's drum intro to "Be My Baby": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] and came up with a variation of it for his own song "What You're Doing", possibly the most interesting song on Beatles For Sale on a pure production level, the guitar part for which, owing a lot to the Searchers, is also clearly a pointer to the sound on “Ticket to Ride”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "What You're Doing"] "Ticket to Ride"s drum part is a more complex variation on that slightly broken pattern, as you can hear if you listen to the isolated drum part: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] Interestingly, Ringo doesn't keep that precise pattern up all the way through in the studio recording of the song, though he does in subsequent live versions. Instead, from the third verse onwards he shifts to a more straightforward backbeat of the kind he would more normally play: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride (isolated drums)"] The mono mix of "Ticket to Ride", which is how most listeners of the time encountered it, shows much more than the stereo mix just what the group, and particularly Paul, were trying to do.  It's a bass-heavy track, sluggish and thundering. It's also a song that sounds *obsessed*. For the first six bars of the verse, and the whole intro, the song stays on a single chord, A, only changing on the word "away", right before the chorus: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Ticket to Ride"] This obsession with one chord was possibly inspired by soul music, and in particular by "Dancing in the Street", which similarly stays on one chord for a long time: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street"] We'll be looking more at how soul music was increasingly doing away with chord progressions in favour of keeping to an extended groove on a single chord when we next look at James Brown in a few weeks' time. But in its single-chord focus and its broken drum beat, "Ticket to Ride" is very much a precursor of what the group would do a little over a year later, when they recorded "Tomorrow Never Knows". Of course, it was also around this time that the group discovered Indian music for the first time. There are scenes in the film Help! which feature musicians playing Indian instruments, and George Harrison became fascinated by the sound of the sitar and bought one, and we'll be seeing the repercussions of that for much of the next year. But it's interesting to note that a lot of the elements that make Indian classical music so distinctive to ears used to Western popular music -- the lack of harmonic movement, the modal melodies, the use of percussion not to keep a steady beat but in melodic interplay with the string instruments -- were all already present in songs like "Ticket to Ride", albeit far less obviously and in a way that still fit very much into pop song conventions. The Beatles grew immensely as musicians from their exposure to Indian music, but it's also the case that Indian music appealed to them precisely because it was an extension of the tastes they already had. Unlike when recording Beatles For Sale, the group clearly had enough original material to fill out an album, even if they ended up not doing so and including two mediocre cover versions on the album -- the last time that would happen during the group's time together. The B-sides of the two singles, John's "Yes It Is" and Paul's "I'm Down", both remained only available on the singles, even though the previous film soundtrack had included the B-sides of both its singles. Not only that, but they recorded two Lennon/McCartney songs that would remain unreleased until more than thirty years later. "If You've Got Troubles" was left unreleased for good reason -- a song written for Ringo to sing, it's probably the single worst Lennon/McCartney song ever attempted by the group, with little or nothing to redeem it. McCartney's "That Means a Lot" is more interesting. It's clearly an attempt by McCartney to write a "Ticket to Ride" part two, with a similar riff and feel: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] It even has a sped-up repurposing of the hook line at the end, just as "Ticket to Ride" does, with "Can't you see?" taking the place of "My baby don't care": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "That Means a Lot"] The group spent a couple of sessions on that track, but seem to have given up on it. While it's far from the best thing they did, it's not worthless or unreleasable, and one suspects that they ended up thinking that the track couldn't go on the same album as "Ticket to Ride" because the two songs were just too close. Instead, they ended up giving the song to P.J. Proby, the American singer who had been brought over by Jack Good for the About The Beatles show, and who had built something of a career for himself in the UK with a string of minor hits. Lennon said "we found we just couldn't sing it. In fact, we made a hash of it, so we thought we'd better give it to someone who could do it well". And Proby *could* have done it well -- but whether he did or not is something you can judge for yourself: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "That Means a Lot"] Somehow, Proby's version of the song made the top thirty. When the group started filming "Help!", the film was still going under the working title "Eight Arms to Hold You", which absolutely nobody involved liked -- the title was even included on the label of some copies of "Ticket to Ride", but Lennon and McCartney particularly disliked the idea of writing a song to that title. Some have suggested that the plan was to use McCartney's "Eight Days a Week", an album track from Beatles For Sale that had been released as an American single, as a title track, but it seems unlikely that anyone would have considered that -- United Artists wanted something they could put out on a soundtrack album, and the song had already been out for many months. Instead, at almost the last minute, it was decided to name the film "Help!". This was actually close to the very first working title for the film, which had been "Help, Help". According to Lester, "the lawyer said it had already been registered and you mustn't use it so we had Beatles Two and then Eight Arms to Hold You". The only film I've been able to discover with the title "Help, Help", though, is a silent film from 1912, which I don't imagine would have caused much problem in this case.  However, after the group insisted that they couldn't possibly write a song called "Eight Arms to Hold You", Lester realised that if he put an exclamation mark after the word "help", that turned it into a different title. After getting legal approval he announced that the title of the new film was going to be "Help!", and that same day John came up with a song to that title: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Help!"] Lennon later said that the song had started out as a slow, intense, ballad, and he had been persuaded to speed it up in the studio somewhat against his will. The song being performed as an upbeat pop song possibly made it harder for the public to see what was obvious to Lennon himself, that the song itself was a cry for help from someone going through a mental health crisis. Despite the title not being his, the sentiments certainly were, and for the first time there was barely even the fig-leaf of romantic love to disguise this. The song's lyrics certainly could be interpreted as being the singer wanting help from a romantic partner, but they don't actually specify this, which is not something that could be said about any of the group's other originals up to this point. The soundtrack album for Help! is also notable in other ways. George Harrison writes two songs on the album, when he'd only written one in total for the first four albums. From this point on he would be a major songwriting presence in the group. It also contains the most obvious Dylan homage yet, with Lennon impersonating Dylan's vocal style on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", recorded three days after "Ticket to Ride": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"]  "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" was notable in another way as well -- it was the first time that a musician other than the Beatles or George Martin was called in to work on a Beatles record (other than Andy White on the "Love Me Do" session, which was not something the Beatles chose or approved of). The flute player Johnny Scott overdubbed two tracks of flute at the end of the recording: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"] That was a sign of things to come, because in June, once filming had completed, the group went into the studio to continue recording for the non-soundtrack side of the soundtrack album. This was the height of the group's success and embrace by the establishment -- two days earlier it had been announced that they were all to be awarded MBEs -- and it's also the point at which McCartney's new creative growth as a songwriter really became apparent. They recorded three songs on the same day -- his Little Richard soundalike "I'm Down", which ended up being used as the B-side for "Help!", an acoustic country song called "I've Just Seen a Face", and finally a song whose melody had come to him in a dream many months earlier. McCartney had been so impressed by the melody he'd dreamed that he'd been unable to believe it was original to him, and had spent a long time playing it to other people to see if they recognised it. When they didn't, he eventually changed the lyrics from his original jokey "Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs" to something more appropriate, and titled it "Yesterday": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday (Anthology 2 early take)"] "Yesterday" was released as a Beatles track, on a Beatles album, but it had absolutely no involvement from John, George, and Ringo -- nobody could figure out how to adapt the song to a guitars/bass/drums format. Instead George Martin scored it for a string quartet, with some assistance from McCartney who, worried that strings would end up meaning something Mantovani-like, insisted that the score be kept as simple as possible, and played with almost no vibrato. The result was a Beatles track that featured five people, but only one Beatle: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Yesterday"] The group's next album would see all the band members appearing on every track, and no musicians brought in from outside the group and their organisation, but the genie was now out of the bottle -- the label "The Beatles" on a record no longer meant that it featured John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but just that at least one of them was on the track and the others had agreed it could go out under their name. This would lead to immense changes in the way the group worked, and we'll be seeing how that played out throughout the rest of the 1960s.

The Beatles performed before 18,000 fans at the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on August 30, 1964. Among those in attendance were Barry's aunt, Carole Hummel, and family friends Carol "Cris" Crisafulli Johnson, Joan Bacon, and Marie Falzone. Despite the fact that Barry has been a huge Beatles fan since high school, he finally found out about this while discussing our recent Tripping Walruses episode with his aunt! The night before the concert, they stayed at the Lafayette Motel. At 2:15 PM, they left in the back of a fish truck, and a short distance from the Convention Hall, they switched to their waiting tour bus. The Beatles performed their standard 12-song set: Twist And Shout, You Can't Do That, All My Loving, She Loves You, Things We Said Today, Roll Over Beethoven, Can't Buy Me Love, If I Fell, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Boys, A Hard Day's Night, and Long Tall Sally. After the show, The Beatles left the venue in a laundry truck, as their limousine was too conspicuous. That night, they stayed at the Marquis De Lafayette Hotel in nearby Cape May, where they stayed for a few days prior to their September 2nd concert in Philadelphia. During their stay in Atlantic City, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote two songs for the Beatles For Sale album: Every Little Thing and What You're Doing. Follow Barry or Abigail on Untappd to see what we're drinking when we're not on mic! Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Website | Email us --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pops-on-hops-podcast/message

Episode 42: Are you a Beatles fan? If so, this episode is for you!Tune in this week for discussions on The Fab 4, the music and history of the band, and discover which albums we feel are the best (and worst).#TheBeatles #Ranking #Podcast0:00 - Intro (Lee Michaels)1:18 - Welcome John 2:24 - Getting Into The Beatles8:48 - The Greatest Albums Overview9:57 - Please Please Me (1963)15:50 - With The Beatles (1963)21:41 - A Hard Day's Night (1964)29:59 - Beatles For Sale (1964)36:20 - Help! (1965)44:08 - Rubber Soul (1965)52:24 - Revolver (1966)1:01:45 - Sg. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)1:15:43 - Magical Mystery Tour (1967)1:18:59 - The Beatles (The White Album) (1968)1:25:51 - Yellow Submarine (1969)1:30:06 - Abbey Road (1969)1:37:05 - Let It Be (1970)1:43:33 - Runner-Ups1:47:00 - #3 Selections1:48:34 - #2 Selections1:53:00 - #1 Selections1:59:20 - Outro / Close

Co-hosts Karen and Jeff compare notes and argue against the notion that the fab four's 1964 album, Beatles for Sale, was too cynical, a downer or a weak spot in the group's discography. The Beatles for Sale album highlights the Beatles covering their favorite artists with fierce energy, the introduction of Dylan's introspective influence on their own songs and accentuates the vocal power/harmonies of the band.