The Beatles’ domination of the US popular music market in 1964 was absolute. Their songs captured the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Top 100 chart for 18 weeks, 14 of them consecutively between February and May. The numbers are even more staggering when it comes to albums. The band topped the albums chart for more than half the year – 30 weeks. Three of their albums charted in 1964, starting with Meet the Beatles! and The Beatles’ Second Album. But it was their next album, and its companion film, that truly brought about the spread of Beatlemania in the US.
A Hard Day’s Night
The Beatles’ first film was already a month and a half in production, with only one more week left to complete the shooting, before its final name was decided. Since its inception, the intent was to give it the obvious title “Beatlemania”. John Lennon remembers how the name changed: “I was going home in the car and [film director] Dick Lester suggested the title ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ from something Ringo had said. I had used it in ‘In His Own Write’, but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You know, one of those malapropisms. A Ringoism, where he said it not to be funny, just said it. So Dick Lester said we are going to use that title.”
According to Ringo, he coined the phrase in March 1964 after an exhausting day of shooting the film at Twickenham Film Studios: “We’d worked all day, and we happened to work all night. I came up still thinking it was day, I suppose, and I said, ‘It’s been a hard day …’ and I looked around and saw it was dark, so I said, ‘… night!’”. John Lennon indeed uses the phrase in his book In His Own Write, which was published at the end of the same month. One of the poems in the book, Sad Michael, includes the following paragraph:
“There was no reason for Michael to be sad that morning, (the little wretch); everyone liked him, (the scab). He’d had A Hard Day’s Night that day, for Michael was a Cocky Watchtower.”
It is unlikely that the phrase was coined, absorbed in a poem and found its way into publication all in the span of a couple of weeks, but it was 60 years ago, things get hazy. Whichever way it transpired, the new film title necessitated a theme song with the same title to open the film, bringing forth a first for the Beatles: a song made to order. Lennon was quick to the task, as he later commented: “The next morning I brought in the song. ’Cause there was a little competition between Paul and I as to who got the A side, who got the hit singles.”
Film producer Walter Shenson recalled the same turn of events: “I mentioned to Lennon one night that we needed to have a song titled ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ His reaction was to ask what I was talking about. I explained by asking what kind of a producer would I be to have a film called ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ starring the Beatles, and then not have a Beatles song called ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ The next morning, he and Paul called me into their dressing room – we were still shooting – and they played and sang to me their new song, ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ Now, think about this: I got a hit song on demand! That’s almost impossible. And it was one of their biggest hits ever.”
The song was recorded at Abbey Road Studios on April 16, 1964, with nine takes attempted, the last one picked as the keeper. As with other songs recorded for the film’s soundtrack, George Martin took full advantage of the recently acquired four-track recording equipment at Abbey Road: “With the great advance of four-track we were able to overdub and put on secondary voices and guitar solos afterwards. By the time we did A Hard Day’s Night we would certainly put the basic track down and do the vocals afterwards. Invariably, I was putting all the rhythm instruments onto either one or two tracks so you would have bass lumped with guitar. It wasn’t until later still that we began putting bass on afterwards as well, giving Paul the opportunity of using his voice more.”
The song opens with a bang, unleashing one of the most famous opening chords in the history of popular music. George Martin remembers: “We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning. The strident guitar chord was the perfect launch. We needed something striking, to be a sudden jerk into the song.” The Beatles made great use of their newly acquired Rickenbacker guitars, George with his 360 twelve-string electric guitar and John with a Rickenbacker Capri. Paul was no less important with a plucked note on his Höfner bass. George Harrison’s twelve-string guitar was critical to the rest of the album and can be heard on songs like ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and ‘You Can’t Do That’. It was a major influence on bands such as The Byrds and The Searchers.
Another signature moment in the song is the guitar and piano solo, played by George Harrison and George Martin. Harrison was struggling with that one, but studio ingenuity saved the day. Engineering Geoff Emerick remembers: “I was told to roll the tape at half speed while George Martin went down into the studio and doubled the guitar solo on an out-of-tune upright piano. Both parts had to be played simultaneously because there was only one free track, and it was fascinating watching the two Georges—Harrison and Martin—working side by side in the studio, foreheads furrowed in concentration as they played the rhythmically complex solo in tight unison on their respective instruments.” The solo was significant enough to be mentioned in the June issue of Disc magazine: “Midway there’s a fascinating break. It blends piano with two guitars (Paul and George) and the result is a delicate, charming effect.”
As usual with The Beatles, vocal duties were handled by the songwriter. John delivers a great performance, but the melody he wrote challenged him to a point where he had to share the lead part. He remembers: “The only reason Paul sang on ‘Hard Day’s Night’ was because I couldn’t reach the notes. ‘When I’m home, everything seems to be right. When I’m home…’ – which is what we’d do sometimes. One of us couldn’t reach a note, so he’d get the other to do the harmony.”
The song is unique in sharing the musician credits with a sixth person. If you listen carefully, you will hear the sound of bongos playing a fast rhythm on various parts of the song. Sound engineer and later producer Norman Smith, who early in his career played the drums, is the one hitting the skins. He explains: “I only ever played on one Beatles song, and that was ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. I played the bongos. Ringo couldn’t do it. I went down to the studio and showed him what to do, but he just couldn’t get that continual rhythm. So I said, ‘Okay, forget it, I’ll do it.’”
One more tidbit about the music and the interesting ending of the song. Unexpectedly for such an energetic song, it fades out with a calm, arpeggiated pattern on the guitar. The Beatles may have not chosen to end the song that way it if this was only intended as a radio hit, but it fits nicely with the film. Director Richard Lester asked for a ‘dreamy’ fadeout to segue into the movie’s first scene. George Harrison delivered the goods with his Rickenbacker twelve-string.
Less than two years since they first set foot at Abbey Road, all members of The Beatles demonstrate enormous musical progression and maturity on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Geoff Emerick experienced this development first hand: “I hadn’t been on a session with the Beatles for some six months, and I was impressed by how much more professional they had gotten in that relatively short span. Not only was their playing tighter, but they were acting very much like seasoned veterans in the studio, knowing exactly what they were trying to accomplish and getting it done with a minimum of fuss.” The song was completed in a single three-hour recording session, with only five complete takes attempted.
As expected, A Hard Day’s Night was a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic. 250,000 advanced copies were ordered in the UK. By the end of 1964 it had sold 600,000 copies. When released in the UK in July 1964, it topped the singles chart for an astonishing 21 consecutive weeks, and remained in the charts for 38 weeks. In the US the album sold a million copies before it was even released. Sales doubled after three months, making it one of the fastest-selling albums of all time. The Beatles hold an unmatched record for holding the top position the US and UK single and album charts simultaneously with releases all titled A Hard Day’s Night. They are the only ones to ever achieve that feat.
Things We Said Today
In the UK, the single A Hard Day’s Night included the song Things We Said Today as its B-side. This is one of my favorite Paul McCartney songs, showcasing his increasing songwriting maturity. It was written in May 1964, when he was vacationing on a yacht in the Virgin Islands with his girlfriend Jane Asher. Onboard were also Ringo Starr and his future wife Maureen. Paul talked about writing the song: “That particular day on the boat, I started with an A minor chord. A minor to E minor to A minor, which gave me a sort of folksy, whimsical world. And then in the middle, on ‘Me, I’m just the lucky kind’, it goes to the major and gets hopeful. The thing I always loved and still love about writing a song is that, at the end of two or three hours, I have a newborn baby to show everyone. I want to show it to the world, and the world at that moment was the people on the boat.”
The songwriting maturity is also evident in the lyrics. No longer tales about dancing, kissing and holding hands, but this time a trip down memory lane. Paul: “It was a slightly nostalgic thing already, a future nostalgia: we’ll remember the things we said today, sometime in the future, so the song projects itself into the future and then is nostalgic about the moment we’re living in now, which is quite a good trick.”
You may ask yourself how does a song written on a yacht with no means of committing it to tape, not get forgotten until the recording date. Paul has the answer: “I had to remember it, because I didn’t write it down. I didn’t write down music – because I couldn’t. It was all in the head. When I’ve used a little cassette recorder or some other recording device, I find it hard to remember songs because I haven’t made myself remember them. Years later, as I try to explain why I don’t read music or write it down, I blame my Celtic tradition, the bardic tradition. The people I come from trained themselves to rely on their memories.”
Can’t Buy Me Love
Two songs were released ahead of the album on two sides of a single in March 1964. The A-side became a major hit for The Beatles that year, topping the charts in the US and the UK. Can’t Buy Me Love was written and recorded during The Beatles first visit to Paris. They held a residency in the L’Olympia hall in January and February, playing two shows almost every day for three weeks. A rarity at the time, it was not recorded at Abbey Road, but rather at EMI’s Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris. At the same session they also recorded German versions of ‘She Loves You’ (‘Sie Liebt Dich’) and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ (‘Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand’).
The song was written by Paul McCartney, who is the sole singer, a first for the Beatles who up to that point always had more than one vocalist singing either lead or background parts. Paul said of the song: “‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is my attempt to write a bluesy mode. The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well but they won’t buy me what I really want. It was a very hooky song. Ella Fitzgerald later did a version of it which I was very honored by.” Dispelling a rumor, he added: “Personally, I think you can put any interpretation you want on anything, but when someone suggest that ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is about a prostitute, I draw the line. That’s going too far.”
Details from The Beatles recording sessions always shed light into the creative process of the Fab Four. This time it was the fifth Beatle who came up with a cool idea. George Martin: “I thought that we really needed a tag for the song’s ending, and a tag for the beginning; a kind of intro. So I took the first two lines of the chorus and changed the ending, and said ‘Let’s just have these lines, and by altering the second phrase we can get back into the verse pretty quickly’. And they said, ‘That’s not a bad idea, we’ll do it that way’.” The song indeed opens up in full throttle with the chorus, hitting your ears right out of the gate. A sure chart topper.
Norman Smith again contributes his percussion skills on this song, this time out of technical necessity. When the tapes came from Paris to Abbey Road for a mixing session, they were not up to the standard practiced by the fame London studio. Geoff Emerick remembers: “Perhaps because it had been spooled incorrectly, the tape had a ripple in it, resulting in the intermittent loss of treble on Ringo’s hi-hat cymbal. There was tremendous time pressure to get the track mixed and delivered to the pressing plant, and due to touring commitments, the Beatles themselves were unavailable.” What ensued was a switcheroo that put the young Emerick for the first time in the engineering seat, to replace Norman Smith who went into the studio to overdub the hi-hat part. Emerick: “Thanks to Norman’s considerable skills as a drummer, the repair was made quickly and seamlessly.”
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