Review: The Beatles - Help! (1965)

Tracks: 1) Help!; 2) The Night Before; 3) You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away; 4) I Need You; 5) Another Girl; 6) You’re Going To Lose That Girl; 7) Ticket To Ride; 8) Act Naturally; 9) It’s Only Love; 10) You Like Me Too Much; 11) Tell Me What You See; 12) I’ve Just Seen A Face; 13) Yesterday; 14) Dizzy Miss Lizzy.

REVIEW

Although the overall critical reputation of Help! traditionally holds it in more esteem than Beatles For Sale — no doubt, due to the presence of such titanic breakthroughs as the title track and ‘Yesterday’ — I do believe that if we place it in its proper context, it may safely be concluded that it is here, really, that the band allowed themselves a bit of a creative sag (at least, in some respects). In fact, relatively little was heard of The Beatles throughout the first half of 1965, as they’d spent a large chunk of that period «undercover», shooting for their second movie in various locations around the world and taking a rather extended break from touring; their only new record releases from January to June were the «teaser» singles — ‘Ticket To Ride’ and ‘Help!’ itself — which certainly whetted public appetite but could hardly satisfy the hunger for another Beatles LP. Meanwhile, this (somewhat illusive) «procrastination» was giving other artists plenty of time to catch up.

Thus, the Stones came up with ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Satisfaction’, finally proving their worth as original songwriters and creators of a whole new type of rock’n’roll sound; the Kinks pumped out single after single in a continuous journey of putting the «British» back into the British Invasion; The Beach Boys Today! tremendously raised the stakes in the pop-rock business on the other side of the Atlantic; The Byrds were pressing from behind the lines with their ability to fuse folk and rock into a single whole; and, of course, Bob Dylan himself was going electric. Things were really happening — and this time around, the Fab Four would find themselves surrounded with mighty impressive competitors, both on the UK and the US scenes. Suddenly, the idea of «progress» — the understanding that the popular music field was the perfect space for honing one’s creativity and using it to transform the world — was up in the air in a way it hadn’t been since at least the Jazz Revolution; and having helped, to a far greater extent that they may have realized themselves, to open those floodgates, The Beatles were now founding themselves challenged to defend their royalty status against the rising tide.

In all fairness, Help! — the movie — was hardly a great defensive move in this situation. Where Richard Lesterʼs first experience with the boys bordered on the biographical and, at least in some places, read like a smart jab on the relation crisis between the older and younger generations, Help!, with its absurdist and lightly parodic plot, was clearly just a comic excuse for a bunch of Beatle-acted gags and a handful of Beatle-mimed songs. For sure, quality-wise it was still miles ahead of the average contemporary Elvis movie, but only because the gags were seriously funnier and the songs, written by the Beatles themselves rather than commissioned from a bunch of disinterested (and probably underpaid) court songwriters, were incomparable. In retrospect, this helps a lot: amusingly, every time I rewatch it, Hard Dayʼs Night seems to shrink a little bit in stature, while Help!, on the other hand, seems to grow — not because it is the better movie of the two, but simply because A Hard Day’s Night, with its sociological pretense, has far more potential to be overrated from the start, while Help!, with its «look-at-me-I’m-so-unabashedly-shallow» lack of ambition, may be too much of an initial disappointment for the viewer to notice the finer qualities of its humor. ("He’s out to rule the world!... if he can get a government grant.")

But even if time helps correct a bit of balance, there is still hardly any doubt that of the two «proper» Beatle movies, A Hard Day’s Night is bound to forever hold the status of critical darling — and it doesn’t help matters, either, that PC pundits these days would be more than happy to bounce upon Help!’s dated racial stereotypes ("look what you have done with your filthy Eastern ways!") and casting choices (e.g. Jewish actress Eleanor Bron playing an Indian woman). More importantly, The Beatles themselves simply have much less agency in their second movie: for one of the very few times in their entire career, they look here as if they’re playing second fiddle to the system. (In fact, the movie actually works better if you decide to view it as a subtle metaphor of the system itself — the fanatical Indian cult striving to get Ringo sacrificed to their gods should be seen as the record industry trying to subjugate the band’s independence and bend them to their will... and, of course, you can never hide from the sharks of capitalism, who’ll get you both in the Alps and in the Bahamas). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that quite a few people may have temporarily lost faith in the Fab Four upon returning from the movie theater on a late summer night in 1965, feeling that a certain barrier that separated them from the laughable movie career of Elvis had just been pushed to the side.

The good news was that, unlike in Elvis movies, the soundtrack of Help! continued to be completely and utterly unrelated to the movie itself, with none of the songs specifically written for or adapted to the purposes of its plot and atmosphere; like A Hard Day’s Night, the resulting album — at least, in its proper UK form, not the US release that intersperses the movie songs with Ken Thorne-arranged instrumentals — could not even be suspected of being a «soundtrack» if heard outside of the proper information context. Nor could it be accused of not containing plenty of «tactical», if not necessarily «strategic», breakthroughs. But on the whole, it wasn’t jaw-droppingly amazing, either, especially at a time when things like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Satisfaction’, ‘See My Friends’, and ‘My Generation’ were beginning to snatch the musical crown away from Jazz and place it on the head of Rock as music’s chief cutting-edge creative force.

To be fair, most of the album was recorded rather hurriedly, over a week-long session in mid-February 1965 right before the Beatles flew over to the Bahamas to begin shooting for the movie — and if we are drawing strict chronological lines between the «adolescence» and «maturity» of rock music, I’d still place those winter months in the first category, which gives the Fab Four a good excuse if you feel like they need an excuse. Some might feel they don’t, though, because even the most lightweight numbers recorded during that session are still excellent pop songs in their own right, and what’s wrong with that? Each of them continues to nurture some special vibe, dissolving the «feel-of-formula» — the secret Beatles trick that places their «filler» on a whole other level compared to, say, The Dave Clark 5.

Thus, it is easy to dismiss something like Paul’s ʽAnother Girlʼ — whose swinging rhythm, at first, would seem to denounce it as just an attempt to capitalize on the formula of ʽCanʼt Buy Me Loveʼ, that is, something decidedly beyond the Beatles’ dignity. But then ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was an exhilarated, drunkenly-delirious explosion; ‘Another Girl’, in comparison, is a pretty gloomy song with a subtle context. Paul expressly sings the verses in a tired, morose, and a tad threatening manner: the way he intones "you’re making me say that I’ve got nobody but you / but as from today, well, I’ve got somebody that’s new" has always made me suspect that the protagonist is really bluffing his way out of a conflict situation here — the ‘Another Girl’ in question is just a phantom invented to trick his partner into backing down and submitting, and throughout the song, the singer is feeling quite nervous about whether the bluff is going to be successful. With the addition of some rather weird bluesy lead lines, alternating between high-pitched aggressive stings and rambling, paranoid licks (all of it played by Paul himself because George apparently had problems working out the perfect mood), ‘Another Girl’ is more than just self-derivative filler — it’s a cute little psychological maneuver. (It’s also possible that the song might have been subtly referring to some tensions in Paul’s relations with Jane Asher at the time — and it is slightly symbolic that in the movie, it is the song that the Beatles play upon their arrival to the Bahamas, while frolicking around on the beach with some local beauties... infidelity check!).

Interestingly, the exact same topic of friction between the two lovers dominates ‘The Night Before’, the second out of three «pure McCartney» creations at the February sessions. ‘The Night Before’ is, in fact, a thematic prelude to ‘Another Girl’ — the guy sees diminished passion in the girl’s behavior, so then he tries to salvage the relationship by calling on the remedy of jealousy. The song, too, may be treated as filler, but it is also a cool example of how the Beatles smoothly merge blues and pop — the instrumental introduction consists of several bars of «tough» guitar-driven rock’n’roll in the vein of ‘Some Other Guy’ or ‘Leave My Kitten Alone’, and then wham!, ten seconds into the song we forget all about the instruments as our attention is completely switched over to the gorgeous vocal trade-offs between solo Paul "we said our goodbyes..." and the rest of the band ("ah, the night before...") who conflate their group harmonies with Paul’s in what has sometimes been described as their adoption of the «hocket» technique.

Again, there are subtle mood swings here that find no immediate analogies in contemporary pop: the first two lines, with John and George picking up Paul’s line and footballing it high up in the stars, symbolize the atmosphere of lovers’ bliss, then in the third line those harmonies return crashing back to Earth while Paul’s lead vocal changes to bitter and sardonic ("now today I found you have changed your mind..."), and then to gently pleading ("treat me like you did the night before"). I’m a little disappointed by the exceedingly simplistic double-tracked guitar solo (which, honestly, feels more like a temporary placeholder where they forgot to fill in the real thing), and the "last night is a night I will remember you by" bridge carries relatively little emotional weight, but the main body of the song still remains a thing that only the Beatles were capable of back in 1965, filler or no filler.

The third of the «pure McCartney» tracks was ‘Tell Me What You See’, though in this case, the «purity» was a bit disturbed by Paul using as inspiration a religious motto that used to hang on the wall of John’s Aunt Mimi’s house ("however black the clouds may be, in time they’ll pass away; have faith and trust and you will see, God’s light make bright your day"). In contrast with the other two, this one might seem to be completely devoid of any psychologism — just an optimistic little piece, relatively relaxed and nonchalant, good to play on a lazy warm summer day or something. Alan Pollack, in his description of the song, keeps referring to it as «Latin-flavored», but the only justification for this is the use of semi-exotic percussion instruments (like the güiro, which is apparently manned by Harrison here — since the song has no use for the lead guitar, he had to leave his mark in some special way). I don’t really hear a lot of «Latin» influences here; instead, to me the song feels more like something in an early folk-pop, Sonny & Cher-like style, thus incidentally presaging the stylistic twists on Rubber Soul.

The most interesting part of the song, though, in this case is its bridge section — the Beatles’ unpredictability strikes again as the languid flow of the song is suddenly interrupted by the louder-than-expected chanting of the title, followed by Paul’s bluesy mini-solo on the electric piano. Are these interruptions supposed to be the «big black clouds» in person, breaking up the overall serenity, only to be promptly whisked away by the friendly arpeggios from John’s rhythm guitar? And what’s up with Ringo’s drumming here, as he briefly lays it all on the big bass drum, while the rest of the song only relies on very light percussion in comparison? However you interpret it, the bridge section does remain unusual and enigmatic. Remove it, and you are left with a smooth, well-behaved, pleasant and ultimately quite forgettable composition. Put it back, and you learn an important lesson about creativity — there’s always room for it even in the most generic of environments, as long as you do not forget that surprise is one of the most essential components of good art.

Meanwhile, John, too, brought three new songs to the same session, and, from a certain angle at least, we see him largely being on the same page with Paul: insecure and dissatisfied, though, naturally, with a bit more of a snarl about it. ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’, perhaps not incidentally placed right after ‘Another Girl’, gives us another triangle — except this time it’s not one guy and two girls, but rather two guys and one girl, with John «punishing» his rival for his inefficient (insufficiently alpha?) behavior. (Might this be a hint that in real life, Paul always had two girls where John had just one?) Whether this is just a conniving strategy or a true knight-in-shining-armor moment, though, remains largely irrelevant because nobody (apart from picky critics) ever listens to ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ for the lyrics — we all love the song for its unique vocal harmony arrangements, clearly influenced by the Beach Boys but adapted to the Beatles’ own abilities. The call-and-response mechanics between John’s lead and Paul and George’s backing are arguably their most complex on a song chorus up to that date, and the falsetto note sustained for two whole seconds is John’s proudest achievement in that range so far, as well. (There’s some great instrumental stuff happening here, too, like the unpredictable shift from E Major to G Major in the bridge, but I’ll just refer you to Alan Pollack for such matters).

There’s still a bit of atmospheric mystery about that song for me: it’s clearly meant to be «triumphant» in tone, and on their previous records, the Beatles had no problems coming across as beaming victors on the field of battle, but there seems to be a shadow of regret and self-doubt on ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’: the protagonist almost feels forced to make his move on the lady out of pure compassion ("if you don’t take her out tonight... I’m gonna treat her kind"), and the melody, albeit lively and upbeat, also feels compassionate rather than aggressive — even the brief guitar solo seems to sting you with notes of pity rather than violence. (In fact, thinking about this situation gets me to realize that the song would be perfect for the soundtrack to a docudrama about the relationship between Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and Anita Pallenberg — the three of whom pretty much re-enacted this whole story in 1967). Regardless of any concrete judgements, it can hardly be denied that ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’, behind the still rather simplistic wordcraft, shows a ton of psychological maturity next to John’s output circa 1964 — here, he is beginning to use the simple form of the commercial pop song to express fairly complex human feelings, rather than a cartoonish approximation thereof.

And this, mind you, is one out of three Lennon songs from February ’65 that is usually the least commented upon, with most of the critical attention diverted toward ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ and ‘Ticket To Ride’, both of which feel unusual and attractive from the outset. The former, as is well acknowledged by John himself and everybody else who ever mentions the song, continues his fascination with Dylan, and, indeed, if you only play the first two seconds, you might suspect that you are going to be treated to a Beatle cover of ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’. But the funny thing is that the vocal melody — "here I stand, head in hand..." — has nothing whatsoever to do with Dylan. Hum it in your head and you shall rather feel the atmosphere of an old-fashioned lullaby — "hush-a-bye, don’t you cry", something to that effect. Bob himself would never have sung anything like this (and not because the song is too vulnerable for the size of his ego — Bob could be very vulnerable on record, but only on his own terms of what defines vulnerability); instead, amusingly, the song would catch the eyes and ears of the Beach Boys that same year, and be included on their Party! record with Dennis Wilson singing lead vocal — the first time, ironically, that the «wild» Beach Boy would reveal his bleeding heart, albeit in a comic, vaudevillian setting.

Anyway, while I have always found this early excursion into folk-pop territory a bit tentative and repetitive, and its chorus hook seriously undercooked (couldn’t he have at least thought of a second rhyming line, rather than chant the title twice in a row?), there’s no denying that, once again, here we have a big step forward in terms of emotional content. Most of John’s love songs on previous albums were either of the knight-in-shining-armor kind ("anytime at all, all you gotta do is call" blah blah blah), or of the jealous and/or angry kind ("I’ve got every reason on earth to be mad" and so on) — typical teenage stuff when the thing that matters most is asserting your masculinity rather than honing your empathy. With lines like "if she’s gone I can’t go on, feeling two-foot small", he takes a giant leap forward — farther along than Dylan himself, in fact. The funny thing is that the inspiration behind this imagery could hardly have been Cynthia; there are speculations that the song is a reflection of John’s married status which he had to downplay or conceal for reasons of public image (hence the "everywhere people stare" line), but they hardly hold water. Instead, I do believe that ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ is the very first one (and the next one would follow in just a few months — see below) of John’s many songs about... Yoko Ono, yes, a year and a half before the two even met for the first time. It’s an imaginary, premonitory vision of that particular type of love that this «big, strong man» was craving for — blind, submissive, perhaps even with a slight whiff of some sort of emotional masochism. (For what it’s worth, Dennis Wilson spent a lot of his life also looking for that kind of love, though his self-destructive nature made it much more difficult for him).

Thus it is probably not an accident that ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ uses a flute part, played by guest musician John Scott, in the outro — formally, this just serves to reinforce the folksy, «pastoral» vibe of the song, and they probably settled on flute instead of the more usual harmonica just so as to avoid accusations of copying Dylan’s style way too blindly; but the flute is a more tender and «vulnerable» instrument than harmonica (unless you’re playing it Ian Anderson-style), and the switch from harmonica (one of John’s most common self-expressing instruments in the past) to flute is perfectly symbolic of the switch from a «dominant» to a «submissive» attitude. (It’s amusing that in the movie the song is played by the band in their home while entertaining their newest guest, the beautiful Eleanor Bron — except that John isn’t even looking in her direction, instead it’s George who keeps making eyes at her, as in «hey there, see what a beautiful song my friend John wrote about no-one in particular? how ’bout we make it about you and me, gorgeous?» Meanwhile, John is just blankly staring into space — maybe there’s a ghost of Yoko already floating somewhere out there).

But now let us rewind just a little bit to February 15 for the very first song recorded during those sessions, most of the credit for which also goes to Lennon. On a purely personal level, ‘Ticket To Ride’ has never been a favorite of mine. It’s slow, it’s very repetitive, there’s no solo section, and the revved-up "my baby don’t care" bit cuts out way too fast. But this gut impression is only there if you think of ‘Ticket To Ride’ as what it is — a verse-chorus-bridge pop song — and not as what it could aspire to be, namely, an early psychedelic drone that might, perhaps, best be enjoyed under the influence. Because there is no denying that, in sheer technical terms of melody, arrangement, and production, ‘Ticket To Ride’ marks the band’s greatest leap forward on the album (‘Yesterday’ comes close, but from a completely different perspective). Unlike the average Beatles song that gets better and better for me the more I listen to it, ‘Ticket To Ride’ has the distinction of getting better and better for me the more I think about it — not coincidental, perhaps, for a song that is sometimes described as being the Beatles’ first properly experimental creation, taking full advantage of the studio as its own instrument.

Sometime around 1970, John boastfully called ‘Ticket To Ride’ «the earliest heavy-metal record ever made» or something to that effect — probably being jealous of the rise of the new generation of heavy music around him, though even hyperbolic remarks like that one have their use in that they get you to notice things you might have otherwise missed. The main riff of the song — the jangly, shrill ostinato figure that traverses the entire tune — is far more The Byrds than The Kinks or The Who (in fact, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the opening riff of The Byrds’ cover of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, though this is almost certainly a coincidence, as both bands were working on these songs around the same time); but its arrogant insistence on the A chord does also give it a bit of a raga feel, which means it’s «folk-pop going psychedelic» — an early precursor of what the Byrds and all those other West Coast bands would start doing in about a year’s time. What does make the song heavy, though, is McCartney’s bass which, for most of the verses, he does not so much «play» as «manipulate», using just a few notes to generate a constant deep, monotonous hum (if you look at his playing in the accompanying video, he seems to be barely moving his fingers — just a leisurely twitch of the thumb here and there). In between that sort of loose-wiring bass and Ringo’s unusually complex and loud-as-heck drumming pattern, ‘Ticket To Ride’ does sound... well, I still wouldn’t describe it as heavy, but monumental would probably be a good term.

Monumental and high: having ingested quite a bit of weed since being officially introduced to it by Dylan in August 1964, the band had definitely opened their minds to new vibes and sensations such as this one — up until now, I haven’t ever used the word «trippy» to describe any Beatle song, but ‘Ticket To Ride’ is a pretty good start, I believe. Before ‘Ticket To Ride’, most of the band’s loud numbers were party anthems, sonic firecrackers to get the girls thrashing and screaming and wetting their seats; ‘Ticket To Ride’, even if, through the inevitable pull of momentum, it did get the girls to do the same things when played live, is still their first «loud» song that would rather put you in a trance instead, slow and repetitive as it is, while Doctor McCartney’s hypnotizing bass pendulum subjugates your brainwaves. In this respect, I’d rather put ‘Ticket To Ride’ into the same category as the (still upcoming at the time) Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’ than any of the hard-’n’-heavy songs on the mid-1965 circuit.

One semi-observation, semi-complaint here could be that the musical vibe of the song feels rather detached from the lyrics, which, in themselves, also mark an important development. Both in ‘You’re Going To Lose That Girl’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, the male protagonist steadily remains in focus, whether he’s being competitive, chivalrous, or masochistic. In ‘Ticket To Ride’, however, it is the girl who’s shown to go all these-boots-are-made-for-walkin’ over our hero: "She said that living with me was bringing her down / She would never be free when I was around" — now that’s definitely not about Cynthia, is it? People are still debating, after all these years, what ticket to ride really means, but to me it’s never been about anything other than an abstract declaration of personal freedom, so, kind of, welcome to the first proper feminist anthem out of the ever-unpredictable mind of John Lennon, professional wife-beater. The only question is: what the hell does that particular message got to do with the proto-psych folk drone and the deep proto-metal bass rumble of the musical arrangement? I’m still having a bit of trouble connecting the dots here — the same sort of thing would work much better next year with ‘She Said She Said’, but in this case, it’s two different dimensions of the conscience sitting next to each other like two accidental passengers in adjoining airplane seats.

Regardless, ‘Ticket To Ride’ was very important in that, as the only officially released piece of new Beatle output over the entire first half of 1965 (backed with ‘Yes It Is’ on the B-side), it gave the world a proper reassurance that the Fab Four were involved in the great big race to finally make rock’n’roll into serious art — clearly, of all the songs recorded at that February session this was the most stereotypically «mind-blowing» candidate, topping UK and US charts as usual. But as important as the song is, I think that the truly outstanding moment of the February sessions was the emergence of George Harrison as an accomplished songwriter in his own right. After the acceptable, but forgettable ‘Don’t Bother Me’ on With The Beatles, and a frustratingly bungled effort to turn ‘You Know What To Do’ into something accomplished during the Hard Day’s Night sessions, George finally hits the jackpot, proving that mediocre talent can mutate into something grander, given a conveniently beneficial environment, so to speak.

Of the two songs he contributed for the sessions, only ‘I Need You’ made it into the movie, but ‘You Like Me Too Much’ was still deemed good enough to make it onto Side B of the LP — although as a proper «Harrisong», it feels rather conventional, and the greatest attraction here comes from some ingenious keyboard work, where John, Paul, and even George Martin are all involved in combining acoustic and electric piano parts. Lyrics-wise, George has not yet progressed beyond standard boy-girl thematics (then again, neither have his superiors), but the words to ‘You Like Me Too Much’ aren’t too bad; as both John and Paul are upping their game in this department a little, progressing beyond simplistic stock clichés to thinking up slightly more realistic and emotionally complex situations, so does George, giving us a more nuanced tale than the trivial "I’m so happy" or "I’m so gloomy" message. ("Though you’ve gone away this morning, you’ll be back again tonight" kind of gives us both at the same time already, doesn’t it?).

Ironically, though, it is the lyrically and emotionally simpler ‘I Need You’ that ends up being the best of the two — arguably, George’s very first serious emotional punch captured on record. It’s possible to treat it as a direct sequel to ‘Don’t Bother Me’, except this time the atmosphere of doomed melancholy, permeating the imaginary conversation between the dumped protagonist and his friends, shifts to one of subtly hopeful melancholy, reflected in what might be an imaginary letter from the dumped protagonist to the love of his life (the song is said to have been inspired by George’s feelings for Pattie Boyd, but if so, it comes about a decade too early). One thing both have in common is George’s love for long-winded verse lines: 12 syllables in ‘Don’t Bother Me’, 10 in ‘I Need You’ — this skill would later come in handy for all of George’s religious-philo­sophical needs — but where ‘Don’t Bother Me’ does not expand much beyond the angry grumble, ‘I Need You’ makes a terrific shift between depressed exposition ("you don’t realize how much I need you...") and desperate pleading ("please come on back to me..."), where John and Paul also seriously enhance the effects with extra harmonies that reinforce the feeling of hope-beyond-despair.

For all of its superficial simplicity, George has no other song like ‘I Need You’ in his entire Beatle-era catalog, and maybe even beyond that, too, though it is hard for me to quickly rewind all of it in the back of my mind; already on Rubber Soul, his seriousness and preachiness would start to get the better of him, and his desperate pleading in the future would rather be addressed to the Lord above than any of his blonde-haired creations below, which is a whole different story already. But if you’re looking for a proper starting point to that famous «George heart tug» which affects some of us so deeply, look no further than the chord change from "love you all the time and never leave you" to "please come on back to me". Forty years later, the first man to properly play tribute to that moment would be Tom Petty, whose performance of ‘I Need You’ during the memorial Concert For George is one of the show’s major highlights — and, of course, that chord change, along with the words, took on a whole different meaning back then. Whoever implied that George Harrison only began to compete with the level of Lennon-McCartney around 1968–69, with songs like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ or ‘Something’ (I think Paul, rather condescendingly, said something to that effect), is willingly ignoring the fact that it is George Harrison who is responsible for one of the strongest, most painful flashes of genuine feeling on this whole album, and it would take a pretty thick-skinned non-believer not to notice that.

With the work on those eight songs mostly completed, the Beatles headed off to the Bahamas and to Austria in order to film Help!, and, ironically enough, ‘Help!’ — the actual song — was not written or recorded until early April, after most of the shooting was over; in fact, Lennon actually wrote it to match the agreed upon title of the movie, not the other way around. The really interesting thing here is that, later on, John would always talk about the song as representing a true «call for help», reflecting his feelings of being trapped, exploited, and miserable at the time ("I WAS crying out for help!"); yet if you look more closely, the lyrics here actually continue the motif already initiated in ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, with a perfectly logical transition from "if she’s gone I can’t go on" to "I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before". In other words, this is not just a vague, abstract call for help — it’s more like an explicit advertisement for a soulmate. On the other hand, there is no serious contradiction here: John did feel trapped, and it did take his falling in love with Yoko to free him from the trap eventually — regardless of any of our own perspectives on the breakup of the Beatles.

Years later, John would also regret the decision to record the song as a speedy pop-rocker instead of a slow ballad, in the context of which the words might gain more emotional resonance (as it is, I’m sure most people barely pay them any attention indeed, other than just the chanted title). No evidence exists, as far as I can tell, of the Beatles themselves trying it out slow and mellow — but, of course, you can always go to later cover versions by Deep Purple or the Carpenters to see how it would work out, and I’m pretty sure you’ll agree with me that it wouldn’t work out nearly as well as the original (although I have my share of respect for both attempts). The «breakneck» tempo is not there merely for commercial purposes; it is there to underline the urgency and seriousness of the situation. The hero is not just sitting, all gloomy and depressed, finding masochistic pleasure in his own wounds in some hotel room; he’s panicking, running through the streets in his underwear after having just set the hotel room on fire, or something like that. At a slower tempo, John’s voice would never have sounded as urgently desperate as it does on "but-now-these-days-are-gone-I’m-not-so-self-assured" (note how on the slower Carpenters version, the tempo allows Karen to throw on a little flowery melismatic hop on self-assured — it’s totally adorable, but it also kiddifies the song, downplaying the pain and upping the playfulness).

The most inventive trick associated with ‘Help!’ are its vocal harmony arrangements, particularly the idea of George and Paul’s lines «previewing» the lead vocal, creating the effect of an echo that comes before the main part — "[and now] and now these days are gone...". I always like to imagine that the boys came up with this solution to help John better memorize his own lyrics: what with the long-winded nature of the verse lines and the high speed of delivery, it would have been hard for him not to flub the words — in fact, several live recordings of the song do exist where he still messes up — and thus it’s quite helpful to have yourself an official prompter in such dire straits. According to Mark Hertsgaard, the author of The Music And Artistry Of The Beatles, this strategy is "underlining the importance of the words even as it softens their sorrow with wistful nostalgia", but I don’t know where the nostalgia bit is coming from, other than an association with the song’s single line of "when I was younger, so much younger than today...". To me, it’s more about a realistic symbiosis of the internal voices disrupting the protagonist’s peace of mind — his inner demons, if you like — and his own inevitable reaction. Paul and George are playing out the role of John’s nerve impulses, driving him to act in crazy ways, and he is their obedient slave like most of us are obedient slaves to our own impulses. Make sense?

Anyway, regardless of the actual interpretation, the vocal harmonies on ‘Help!’ are just another awesome example of how the Beatles, whose singing and harmonizing techniques could never hope to match those of the Beach Boys (well, maybe if John and Paul and George had all been blood brothers and living under the same roof with their dictatorial and abusive father... ah well, never mind), could compensate for that by relying on their sheer creativity and coming up with inventive and meaningful arrangements that might not require all that much training and practice but could still earn them a place at the same table with all the great masters of vocal harmony, past and present. And not that this should in any way downplay the importance of the instrumental parts — the doom-laden three-chord mini-stairway-to-hell guitar line between each of the chorus lines, the sympathetic arpeggiated jangle backing up John’s "won’t you please please help me?" falsetto, or that panicky Ringo fill connecting the verse to the chorus.

If there’s anything seriously critical to be said about any of those songs, it is probably that they feel totally disconnected from the movie for which, allegedly, they should have been written. Granted, so was most of the material used for A Hard Day’s Night, but there at least the band had the excuse of the pseudo-documentary approach, being free to perform just about anything as long as it was in a relatively realistic setting. By contrast, within Help! all the songs play out like early examples of music videos where the visual content has practically nothing to do with the musical, which seriously detracts from the songs’ power — it’s hard to take John singing ‘Help!’ seriously when he is having darts thrown at his onscreen image by infuriated cult members, or to notice the actual pain within ‘I Need You’ when it’s all about tanks and artillery setting up positions to safeguard the Beatles against the cult during their recording process. And what exactly does ‘Ticket To Ride’ have to do with skiing up in the Alps? Is the cable car supposed to be a metaphor for "riding so high"?

Clearly, this problem is no longer relevant in the 21st century, but back in 1965, it was relevant: the music written for the movie was so far ahead of the movie that the very existence of the movie was a bit insulting next to it. These days, it’s just harmless nostalgic fun and adorable old-school silliness, but back then it could reinforce some pretty harmful stereotypes about the band, and indeed it is quite telling that the conservative Daily Express praised the movie while the liberal Daily Mirror condemned it, or that the movie is often listed as a chief source of inspiration for the Monkees’ TV show — not that there was anything wrong with the Monkees’ TV show, mind you, but it was good-natured fluffy light entertainment, and most of the songs written for Help! go way beyond good-natured fluffy light entertainment.

The «proper» soundtrack version of the album was, just as it was with A Hard Day’s Night, only released in the US, where the seven songs used in the movie were padded out with additional instrumentals from the score, composed and conducted by Ken Thorne; it’s mostly rubbish, but due to the film’s «Indian» motifs, a few of the compositions featured Eastern instruments such as sitar — thus officially marking the first presence of a sitar on a Beatles album, several months prior to ‘Norwegian Wood’. (Joking aside, George’s introduction to the sitar did occur during the shooting of the movie, so there was at least one long-lasting positive effect from those almost-wasted months). For the UK release, however, it was artistically necessary to come up with a whole other side of new songs, given that fans had been impatiently waiting for a proper new Beatles LP for more than half a year already.

Two of the songs for that Side B came from the same February ’65 sessions — ‘You Like Me Too Much’ and ‘Tell Me What You See’, which did not make it into the movie — but five more had to be rounded up to complete the picture, and this was a bit of a patch-job: spread over two or three different sessions in May and June ’65, including two covers of outside artists (the last ever time the Beatles would include somebody else’s songwriting) and at least one song that John would later come to despise with a vengeance (‘It’s Only Love’). However, even if on an objective level Side B of Help! clearly loses the game to Side A, even the weakest of its songs still have their moments and aspects of redemption.

Perhaps opening things up with Ringo singing Buck Owens might feel like a corny move when taken outside of context; but inside of context, ‘Act Naturally’ is the perfect opener, especially if you listen to it in its proper place. The monumentality of ‘Ticket To Ride’ has just faded away, the curtain has fallen, you have turned the record over — and now, as if breaking the fourth wall, the principal star of the movie (by then, it was a general consensus that Ringo had the best acting abilities of all four Beatles) walks out on stage and delivers a boastful-but-humble closing reflection on how "they’re gonna put me in the movies, they’re gonna make a big star out of me", which, I dare say, hits even harder home with Ringo than it did with Owens (although I would think that "they’ll make a scene about a man that’s sad and lonely" better describes his part in A Hard Day’s Night than Help!). If you think of it that way, it’s the first theatrical-conceptual move on the part of the band to ever appear on an LP, and you can even draw a straight line from here to Sgt. Pepper if you so desire.

Additionally, if you compare the performance to the original Buck Owens recording, you’ll see just how much the band brings to the table — the original is pretty barebones, while the Beatles version features some excellent lead guitar licks from George throughout, starting from the opening descending «guffawing» riff and shadowing Ringo’s vocal for most of the song. A very similar style would soon be adopted for Rubber Soul’s original ‘What Goes On’, also with Ringo on vocals and with even more intricate country-style guitar arrangements, so ‘Act Naturally’ also happens to be a small step forward in the Beatles embracing the «folk-rock revolution» of 1965. See how much food for thought is provided even by the tiniest of trifles at the time!

Meanwhile, John took things easy and went on a brief Larry Williams kick: the Beatles definitely knew of Larry from their earliest days, as ‘Bony Moronie’ had allegedly featured already in the Quarrymen’ live setlist as early as 1957, and with a couple new tracks required a.s.a.p. for their upcoming American LP Beatles VI, they went into the studio on May 10, 1965 (Larry’s birthday!) and knocked off ‘Bad Boy’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, with John taking lead vocal on both. Unfortunately, ‘Bad Boy’ ended up half-lost (apart from Beatles VI, it would only surface on various compilations, from Golden Oldies to Rarities to Past Masters etc.), even if it’s the better song of the two — less repetitive, featuring a tremendous George solo, and one of the «nastiest» ever Lennon vocals from his Beatle days.

But there is something to be said about the minimalism of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, too, even if the band quite intentionally limits George to replaying the same lead line over and over for eternity. Like with ‘Rock And Roll Music’ and other early rock’n’roll songs, the aim here is to toughen up a song whose original vibe was relatively toothless and friendly. Larry recorded ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ — like every other hit of his — as a bit of a joke number; the Beatles, particularly George with his alarm siren-like guitar tone and John with his «hungry» vocal delivery, take it far more seriously, turning the song into a modernized headbanger that would also be perfect for their live show (and even long after they ceased doing live shows, ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ would be one of the few songs John would perform at Live Peace Toronto in 1969 with the Plastic Ono Band, though, admittedly, they might have settled on it back then mostly because they had no time to rehearse anything more complex). In any case, it’s one of his finest «all-out shouting» performances since the days of ‘Twist And Shout’... and I do admire George’s tenacity in holding down that riff non-stop for three minutes (while also chuckling at the occasional mistake here and there, like at 1:46 when he drops an extra note out of the blue and they decide to keep it in — just so, you know, sixty years later unsuspecting people would not assume the whole track had been AI-generated or something).

John’s last and only fully original contribution to Side B was ‘It’s Only Love’, a song he would later single out as one of his favorite targets for self-criticism, and perhaps the self-criticism is justified when it comes to the lyrics: after the impressive verbal progress seen on ‘Help!’, ‘Ticket To Ride’, and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’, something like "when you sigh, my inside just flies, butterflies" and "just the sight of you makes night time bright" feels like a conscious nod to the young and innocent days of 1963 — back then, John could have been given plenty of slack for the likes of ‘Ask Me Why’, but this here is the equivalent of a full-grown man walking around in his school uniform (and not in an Angus Young manner of doing it). In his defense, though, the song does begin with "I get high when I see you go by", which may have been a con­scious or subconscious reference to the famous conversation with Dylan who, allegedly, was surprised by the Beatles having never smoked pot before despite singing "it’s such a feeling I get high" on ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. Now we have tricky John actually slipping that bit into the beginning of a sugary love ballad and nobody paying attention — and to think of all the fuss around Jim Morrison and his "girl we couldn’t get much higher" bit two years later...

What is really surprising is that by this time, John had all but stopped writing simple, sentimental love songs, and when he later returned to that practice, he would always make sure the simple feeling would be transferred directly from the heart; ‘It’s Only Love’ does feel somewhat hollow and fake as a «Lennon song», though, in its defense, it fares pretty well as a «Beatles song». We can criticize the words all we like, but there’s no denying the beauty of the tremolo-laden lead guitar figure, or the prettiness of the interplay between John’s 12-string rhythm and George’s little syncopated «pecks» in the other channel, or, most importantly, the power of the final melismatic falsetto vocal coda — that last note genuinely gives me the proverbial butterflies in the same manner that only a few other people are capable of, like, say, Ray Davies on ‘Waterloo Sunset’. In the end, ‘It’s Only Love’ may be «regressive» in attitude, but in terms of writing and arrangement it is still miles ahead of the level of Please Please Me and, ultimately, nothing to be ashamed of.

Finally, we are left with two more McCartney songs, and these really couldn’t have come sooner, given Paul’s relatively «auxiliary» involvement with the proper soundtrack of Help! (as good as ‘The Night Before’ and ‘Another Girl’ turned out to be, they do feel humble and insignificant next to Lennon’s tracks on Side A). Although nothing shall ever take away the champion crown from ‘Scrambled Eggs’, it could be argued that ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ does not really drag too far behind its ten-times-more-famous neighbor — even if it could be formally classified as a «bluegrass ballad», it’s the kind of song that could only be written by a compositional genius working outside of any strict genre conventions or formalities. The contrast alone between the slow, almost meditative introduction, gallantly picked by three different Beatles on three different acoustic guitars, and the breakneck speed of the main melody is something we’d never previously heard on a Beatles song, or, for that matter, on any song on the pop market — and the twisted shape of the verse, which feels as if it’s propelling you forward through a narrow corridor with no clear indication of when and how it’s going to stop, is another innovative feature that may, perhaps, have been inspired by the «rappy» likes of Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ but is realized in full-on Paul McCartney style: no aggression or cynicism, just pure charm.

My personal moment of mystery with the song has always been with the chorus: "Falling, yes I am falling / And she keeps calling / Me back again". It turns out a bit clumsy, with the words clipped and overpressed to fit into the musical structure, but this is also what gives the whole thing a bit of an extra dimension. Falling naturally supposes falling in love, but it is rare that the complement in love is omitted in such situations, and a simple I am falling could just as equally mean going to Hell or the like — and in this context, "she keeps calling me back again" would have an almost Gothic flair. I mean, if you see a vision of someone at night who "keeps calling you back again", it’s gotta be some Edgar Allan Poe shit, right? To me, it was as if, quite inadvertently, Paul was penning a love song to a ghost here, and if you add this perspective to the song, it actually becomes... something completely different, as if all the melodic tricks alone didn’t already make it so completely different. If it were up to me, I’d add a bit of haunting graveyard laughter to the outro to complete the picture.

As for ‘Scrambled Eggs’ (I find that calling the song by its original working title helps it feel a little less clichéd in the back of your mind), anything I say on the subject shall most likely repeat something already written a dozen times before even if I spend an eternity trying to come up with something original. I can’t help noticing, though, that the theme of ‘Yesterday’ is precisely the same as that of ‘The Night Before’ — it’s like the same subject relived in the mind of the protagonist after he’d mellowed out a little — and also that the song marks McCartney’s initiation into the ranks of the greatest «nostalgic» song­writers of all time, along with Ray Davies and maybe, to a lesser extent, Brian Wilson. For some reason, while one of Paul’s biggest weaknesses in songwriting is the all-too-common lack of psychological depth, he has few equals when it comes to writing about (a) loneliness and (b) looking back into the past (sometimes even imagining looking back into the past from the future, e.g. ‘Things We Said Today’), and ‘Yesterday’ is the first massive and unassailable argument for that. As is well known, even John regularly expressed respect and admiration for the song ("thank you Ringo, that was wonderful!" is a classic moment in Beatle history), and that’s, like, the highest praise Paul McCartney of Liverpool could ever aspire to. But it’s also much to Paul’s honor that the success of ‘Yesterday’ as, essentially, his solo creation never went to his head enough to opt out for a solo career — the time had certainly not yet come to loosen the Beatle bonds.

Yet speaking of Beatle bonds, we can already see here that they are beginning to loosen up. As the Beatles mature as artists, their individualities begin to overshadow their collective influences, and the sharp contrast between a song like ‘Help!’ (pure John) and ‘Yesterday’ (pure Paul) is felt much more intensely than any John-Paul contrast on the previous four albums; not coincidentally, it is on Help! that George comes into his own right as a third, and equally distinctive, creative force. At the very same time, the Jagger/Richards songwriting team was coming into its own with great original compositions like ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Satisfaction’, yet there was hardly any sign of a «this is a Jagger song» and «this is a Richards song» dichotomy, which is basically your obvious answer to the question of why the Beatles broke up and the Rolling Stones survived. Naturally, at this time the band was still working as a whole, with John and Paul adding beneficial touches to each other’s material; but even though they continued to spend a lot of time together, including touring and stuff, the days of their working out ideas between them in hotel rooms were already more or less a thing of the past.

Which is telling, if you ask me — great art is rarely, if ever, produced collectively on a 50-50 basis, and it is quite telling that the closer the Beatles got to their peak, the more fleshed out their individual styles would become. From that point of view, Help! might indeed represent a bit of a stutter in the band’s relentless journey to the top of the pantheon, but it is the record that almost officially gave us «John Lennon, of Liverpool», «Paul McCartney, of Liverpool», and «George Harrison, of Liverpool», for all three of whom «opportunity knocked», and without the satisfaction of that particular condition prior to everything else, the quality and impact of Rubber Soul and Revolver would have been far less than they are seen today. Thus, Help! might still have one of its feet dragging behind in the soil of 1963-64, while the other one is faintly beginning to grope for the big musical innovations of 1965-66; but it is important to remember that all those innovations, no matter how many gushing pages of text have been produced about them by fans, critics, and musicologists alike, would have signified very little if they were purely a matter of form, not substance — and that the substance could only be provided by the individual natures, feelings, and reflections of each of the band members, rather than by getting together under some sort of «okay, let’s write something like Roy Orbison does!» pretext. The best songs on Help! all satisfy that requirement, and the worst seem to at least acknowledge it. That’s a pretty good ticket to ride if there ever was one.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Beatles