On the surface, the Beatles' fifth album and soundtrack companion to their eponymously titled second movie was two steps forward and a step back for the fabulous foursome. The new songs on Help! were a dramatic improvement over the original material on Beatles For Sale, but much of the music was still the same cheeky pop in the style of A Hard Day's Night. The songs were still about boy-girl relationships, and side two, which contained the songs not in Help!, the movie, included a couple of cover versions that could have easily been on one of their earlier records. But if that's all you hear on Help!, then you clearly haven't heard it enough. First-generation American fans - who originally got a Help! LP with just the seven songs from the movie interspersed with five instrumentals from its orchestral score, and in a cover sleeve as splashy as the film - may have found the Beatles' new music to be good and not much more than that. The 1987 and 2009 U.S. issues of the original British album, though, allow us to realize its importance in the Beatles' progression.
On Help!, the Beatles imagine themselves bereft of love, alone and in need of succor, at least in the movie's songs on side one. The title track is John Lennon literally crying for help after finding he can no longer stand on his own, while the narrator of "Ticket To Ride" expresses a preference for the girl who's leaving him - ironically, for her own freedom - to stay, despite the negative impact she has on his sanity. These Lennon-McCartney tunes are songs not from the cheerful boy band dealing with Eastern cults and mad scientists in Help!, the movie, but from restless young men. In Paul McCartney's "Another Girl," a guy ends a perfectly happy relationship for one that promises to be better, while John's "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away" mocks those who mock him with "advice" for his lovelorn state.
The music was more varied and stretching out beyond the basic rock and roll combo arrangements. Movie songs like "The Night Before" and "You're Going To Lose That Girl" may be shimmering pop tunes, but the electric piano in the former and the pointed guitar solo in the latter underline the more cynical attitude in the lyrics. George Harrison's sweet, plaintive "I Need You," reflecting his then-embryonic songwriting, provides some relief in between, with a nice volume-pedal guitar adding to the more varied instrumentation elsewhere on the LP, which includes flute sounds and acoustic guitars. But even the Beatles' basic rock arrangements have more bite, as "Ticket To Ride"'s jangly riff and Ringo Starr's heavy drums indicate.
Side two of Help! features more acoustic guitars and electric pianos, with the Beatles exploring the burgeoning folk-rock movement with John's confessional "It's Only Love" and delving into country and western with Ringo's droll cover of Buck Owens' "Act Naturally" and Paul's back-porch rave-up "I've Just Seen a Face" (a song Leon Russell would make his own). The latter two numbers brighten up the mood, as does the keyboard-based "Tell Me What You See." But Paul's stately ballad "Yesterday" - like "The Night Before," a song of loss concerned with the very recent past - broke new ground with a string arrangement more reminiscent of chamber music than the Mantovani-style melodrama the Beatles themselves had driven from the pop charts. In a song lasting just over two minutes, the group expanded the horizons of pop and rock (the Rolling Stones soon followed with the similarly conceived recording of "As Tears Go By," a song having been recorded before by Marianne Faithfull) and rewrote the rules for how a pop sound could be defined. Not surprisingly, they followed "Yesterday" here with a scorching closer, a cover of Larry Williams' "Dizzy Miss Lizzy," as an exclamation point on their ambition while simultaneously closing the door on cover versions and concentrating more on their own songs.
The Beatles were extraordinarily productive during the Help! sessions, having recorded twenty songs in all, with cuts surplus to requirements either released as B-sides, issued on an American album ("Bad Boy," a Larry Williams cover no less ferocious than "Dizzy Miss Lizzy"), filed away and unreleased during the group's existence, or saved for later. This creativity produced mixed results, explaining why Help! produced more discarded songs than any other early Beatles album. But what worked only set the stage for the more daring soundscapes they would strive for going forward. Soon they would make a clean break with their hand-holding image; Help! was the first step toward letting go of that hand.
(My Sunday record reviews will resume in late April or early May.)
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