Introducing With The Beatles

Welcome back for the second installment of my notes on every Beatles album! As with Please Please Me, I don't have an especially close relationship with this album-as-album. One thing I do remember is going through my dad's extensive vinyl collection, and being struck with the album cover. I loved it as a seven year old boy and it still has its claws in me as one of the all time iconic album covers. Possibly only surpassed by the cover of Abbey Road. Maybe after all of this is done I'll review all the album covers and rank them. Oh what the hell: Here they are, ranked. OK, that was like a 30 minute detour, back to our regularly scheduled words.

My most prominent memory of this album is the cover, because I would sit around and mess with my dad's record collection. He is a patient and indulgent man and, to be fair, I was (and am!) very careful and fussy with things that I like. I hope that I don't freak out on my own children when they start messing with my precious things... I don't know if I'll have your strength, Dad. However, my dad was not so foolhardy as to actually let me pull out the vinyls and try to play them myself. No, in those early years I was really only allowed to manage the CD player, because that equipment was able to take the abuse of a (careful!) seven year old. In retrospect, my father's expansive collection of records and CDs fueled my own love of rock and music in general. Huh. Well, that's enough introspection! Let's rip this album apart track by track:

1. It Won't Be Long - A friend and I got a job at the same company and would often start the call and response "It won't be long, yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" back and forth. Good times.

2. All I've Got to Do - For some reason this song evokes a Motown vibe, I can't quite put my finger on why.

3. All My Loving - Another classic. Solid.

4. Don't Bother Me - George Harrison's first writing credit. Up until this point, they would write one song per album for George to sing. He finally got wise and pushed to write his own song. George Martin (the producer on all The Beatles albums) didn't like to spend studio time on George's songs since they were not going to be the A or B side on any single, and therefore not worthy to spend the time on arrangement and production that Lennon/McCartney songs received. I think that's a real shame, since this is my favorite song of the album, and one of the darker, more offbeat songs among those of the early years.

5. Little Child - This one isn't a stand out, but I do like the refrain going from the plaintive I'm so sad and lonely to the hopeful baby take a chance with me.

6. Till There Was You - This is a cover, but in my mind it's the poster child for what John referred to as Paul's "granny music". That's a little flippant and dismissive on John's part, but as you familiarize yourself with their catalogue of songs you'll notice that if a song is real sweet, sappy, with vocals more like one of the crooners of the era rather than a rock band... well it's probably Paul.

7. Please Mister Postman - One of the two covers on this album that I really like.
8. Roll Over Beethoven - A cover of the great Chuck Berry, with Harrison on vocals. I like it, but I like the Beatles' cover of Johnny B. Goode better, which didn't make it on to a studio album.
9. Hold Me Tight - a sweet, very Paul song. I like it but it doesn't rank amongst my favorites.
10. You Really Got a Hold on Me - a cover, one that I really like, OK so there are three from this album I like, I forgot about this one!
11. I Wanna Be Your Man - A great, energetic number, sung by Ringo. Not a lot to say other than it is a favorite from this album.
12. Devil in Her Heart - uninspired cover... They had Georgie sing it, so you know they didn't care much about it. Poor George.
13. Not a Second Time - I love the slightly snotty and now you've changed your mind, I see no reason to change mine ending on a taunting, sing-songy, I-told-you-so.
14. Money - Yep, favorite cover song from this album. Love it. LOVE IT. The slightly raw-edged vocals recall their rendition of Twist and Shout

A solid album. Not a favorite but contains a few faves.

The Beatles album covers ranked from least to most favorite

Thirteen - Please Please Me. At dead last, lucky number 13, we have Please Please Me. I feel like the colors clash, it makes all of the beatles look goofy, and it seems like they were going for what I imagine a the british photographer referred to as "cheeky" but I'm just not a fan.

Twelve - Yellow Submarine. It's basically the movie cover. I love the movie and the artwork, but it looks like they just took a shot from the movie and copy/pasted (or however they did it back in the sixties) the submarine and an extra shot of the disembodied torsos of their Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band alter egos.

Eleven - Magical Mystery Tour. I feel like this is a little too much of a hodgepodge. This is what I think of as the opposite of timeless design. But they didn't know that then! How could they? They were so forward thinking for their era, I guess I just expect more from them.

Ten - Help!. Here we go, getting to the more stripped down design style with a lot of white space. It's a good cover. It was a little hard to put it this low, but I think I have been a stern but fair ruler in my judgments.

Nine - Let It Be. Solid. Exactly where a pick in the middle of the pack should be. I like the framing and the pictures and I even have a pint glass with this album art on it. Cheers!

Eight - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I think this is where I might diverge from most people's opinions. I think that this is certainly one of the more iconic covers from The Beatles. Heck, perhaps in all of music. I even find a certain appeal in the over saturated, garish colors, still I find myself enjoying some of the simpler album covers even more.

Seven - The Beatles. Also known as The White Album, because the cover is just a big empty white space. The original cover had "The BEATLES" embossed on it. Later pressings has the title printed in a light grey. I don't know why I am so drawn to it, I just like the letters kind of lost in all that white space. I find it very appealing, and I think they are one of the first to have more or less a blank cover. I have no idea what their thought process was, but I think the simple-in-the-extreme cover serves as a great counterpoint to what might be considered a somewhat excessive double album.

Six - Rubber Soul. One of my favorite albums ever. I really like the photo, with the slightly green filter over it... the style of the text marks it as a child of the sixties however. I love how this contrasts with the next one on my list. Note the order of the lads from left to right.

Five - Beatles for Sale. First let me say I love this photo, everything about it. Now back to what I started to say before! Compare with Rubber Soul. I feel like this early Beatles album cover photo is a perfect contrast with the Beatles of just ONE year ago. Beatles for Sale and Rubber Soul were released within a two year period, a period in which they released FIVE studio albums. IN. TWO. YEARS. It's no wonder they go from a moody, windswept look on the cover of Beatles for Sale, to literally a stretched, skewed, warped version of themselves in a remarkably similar arrangement (albeit tilted about forty-five degrees). I can't believe I never noticed the similarities between the two covers before, but it is striking, no? I want to believe it was purposeful. I MUST believe.

Four - Revolver. A great, iconic cover. I love the line drawings and all the jumble of stuff in between them. The cover, as the music inside, presage a band that is transitioning from pop icons into some truly new, weird territory.

Three - A Hard Day's Night. I love the striking combo of blue, red, black, and white used here. The repeated pictures in slightly different poses, alternating between serious and silly.

Two - With the Beatles. This is a simple, iconic cover. Innovative in its time and now perhaps in the realm of cliche. Any band would have a hard time pulling off such a pretentious photo but it works because they are the Beatles and they earned it.

One - Abbey Road. I don't have a lot to say about this except that it is one of the most imitated and parodied album covers ever, for good reason. A perfectly composed shot of a band on the brink of dissolution, at the height of their powers, just walking across a street. It has to be one of the best album covers of all time.

Introducing Please Please Me

Just a note on the what and why before this post really gets going. This is the first in a series of introductions that I wrote for a friend who has little familiarity with The Beatles. I know I have nothing substantive to add to the ongoing-for-over-50-years-now Beatles conversation as such. My goal here is to distill my entirely geeky level of knowledge and personal fandom of The Beatles into a sort of little amuse-bouche so that any Beatles layperson (if there are any other than the aforementioned unfortunate) can jump right in to the album with a bit of context. I did my best to fact check as I went (actually just glanced at wikipedia), please send any errors to the corrections department.

During the era that Please Please Me was released, record labels made their bands do a mix of original songs and covers of already popular songs owned by that label. If you are passably familiar with other music of the era, it becomes pretty obvious in most cases which songs are original Lennon/McCartney songs and which are covers just by listening - The Beatles were pushing the boundaries of mainstream pop and rock music forward from the very start. For example - the Billboard top 10 in 1962, the year prior to the release of Please Please Me:

1. "Stranger on the Shore" Acker Bilk
2. "I Can't Stop Loving You" Ray Charles
3. "Mashed Potato Time" Dee Dee Sharp
4. "Roses Are Red (My Love)" Bobby Vinton
5. "The Stripper" David Rose
6. "Johnny Angel" Shelley Fabares
7. "The Loco-Motion" Little Eva
8. "Let Me In" The Sensations
9. "The Twist" Chubby Checker
10. "Soldier Boy" The Shirelles

Compare any of these songs to the first song of Please Please Me (I Saw Her Standing There) and you can immediately feel the difference. The Beatles released their first album in March of 1963, and by 1964 had completely taken over the pop music charts, holding the top two spots with I Want to Hold Your Hand  and She Loves You, FIVE spots in the top 20 (including A Hard Day’s Night, Love Me Do, and Please Please Me) and 9 altogether in the top 100 (Twist and Shout, Can’t Buy Me Love, Do You Want to Know a Secret, and I Saw Her Standing There).

Anyways, this is more to give some context for what was going on in music in the early 60s. I love listening to oldies and grew up on a mix of classic rock and our local oldies station in LA, KRTH (pronounced K-Earth) 101.1. The station is now a shell of its former self, playing awful chart toppers from more recent decades instead of the golden oldies from the 50’s and 60’s that I grew up listening to in the late 80’s and early 90’s (get off my lawn).

Please Please Me is the first studio album (released March 22, 1963), but not the first I was exposed to. To be completely honest, Please Please Me is an album that, although I am very familiar with each and every song, I am less familiar with as an album. Maybe that’s only appropriate, since this was released in a period of pop record making wherein artists hadn’t yet discovered the holistic approach to making an album that would become more prominent over the next decade or so.

Without further ado, here’s the track list, with my favorites selected in bold.

1. I Saw Her Standing There
2. Misery
3. Anna (Go to Him)
4. Chains
5. Boys
6. Ask Me Why
7. Please Please Me
8. Love Me Do
9. P.S. I Love You
10. Baby It’s You
11. Do You Want to Know a Secret?
12. A Taste of Honey
13. There’s a Place
14. Twist and Shout

-Nate