Brian Epstein & The Beatles Top 100 Countdown (#60-51)

Last time we met Brian Epstein he had secured the Beatles a contract, when they were signed by George Martin, head of one of EMI's smallest labels, Parlophone. The saga was about to begin.

George Martin commented later that he signed the Beatles in considerable part because of Epstein's enthusiasm. He thought that the Beatles had promise, but he was not entirely convinced by their talent. However, he was very impressed by Epstein's conviction that the Beatles would be world famous.

Shortly after they signed with EMI, John, Paul and George (who had been together as the nucleus of the group since 1958) gave Brian the unpleasant job of telling drummer Pete Best that they wanted him out of the group, to be replaced by Ringo Starr. Brian was uncomfortable but accomplished this difficult task.

In a very real sense Epstein had now passed his 'audition' with the Beatles. In a mere six months he had secured them the record contract that they had desired for so long. And he had proven his ability to handle the most awkward of managerial tasks.

When The Beatles released their first single Love Me Do, Brian creativly co-ordinated his family and friends to frequent the music stores having them ask for The Beatles new single, this in turn caused a buzz on the streets which is what Brian wanted. His desire to have the Beatles succeed was the key to his own success, he began expanding his operations, and was soon managing other bands such as Gerry and The Pacemakers. Brian Epstein became a major player in the Liverpool music scene.

It’s well known that John Lennon would tease Brian about being gay. It has been claimed that he would suggest Brian call his autobiography A Cellarful of Boys or simply Queer Jew, but fans like Vivek Tiwary – author of The Fifth Beatle – are adamant it should be taken in context. “All of my research on Lennon suggests that’s who he was as a person,” he told me. “He would make really rude, harsh jokes about his closest and dearest friends all the time. It was almost like a rite of passage. I think it was a test. That allowed Brian to be close to John.” One scene in the graphic novel portrays a now famous trip Brian and John took to Spain, which has been mythologised as something of a dirty weekend. Vivek doesn’t believe anything ever happened between the men other than a strong platonic love. Indeed upon their return, when the DJ Bob Wooler commented on the trip having been a romantic one, John punched him in the face. “John was defending Brian”, Vivek explains. “A lot of people have looked back and said John didn’t want to be branded as a gay person. I actually think it was because John cared about Brian, and he knew if it came out that Brian was gay, Brian could’ve been thrown in jail.” Of the relationship, Lennon told Playboy in 1980, “It was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated.” More on the trip to Spain tomorrow.

Now, let's get on with our Top 100 Beatles' songs countdown.

At #60 is Eight Days a Week, a song written by both McCartney and Lennon and recorded in late 1964.

The title of Eight Days a Week came from a chance remark by a driver chauffeuring McCartney out to Lennon's house. McCartney casually asked the driver if he'd been busy. "Busy?" he replied. "I've been working eight days a week." "Neither of us had heard that expression before," said McCartney. "It was like a little blessing from the gods. I didn't have any idea for it other than the title, and we just knocked it off together, just filling in from the title."

Although McCartney claimed the rest of the song "came quickly," it lacked a beginning, a middle eight and an ending when he and Lennon brought it into the studio. The Beatles tried a variety of approaches, including a wordless harmony for the intro, but stumbled repeatedly getting the melody right. "We struggled to record it and struggled to make it into a song," Lennon recalled. "But it was lousy anyway."

The Beatles were working at least nine days a week in late 1964, which may account for Lennon's sour take on the song. They'd been touring constantly, had just released A Hard Day's Night in June and were rushed back into a recording studio the week after they returned from America to record a new album and single in time for Christmas. "They were rather war-weary," George Martin said. "They'd been battered like mad throughout 1964, and much of 1963. Success is a wonderful thing, but it is very, very tiring." With little time to write original songs, almost half of the Beatles for Sale LP consisted of covers the group had been playing onstage for years. The same day the Beatles finished Eight Days a Week, they knocked out seven complete tracks.

Twelve days later, they settled on the final arrangement, with its innovative instrumental fade-in that gives the song the warm, jubilant "feel[ing] like you've heard it before," as Ray Davies of the Kinks told Rolling Stone in 2001.

Beatles for Sale was released in the UK in December 1964. Beatles '65, its US counterpart, did not include Eight Days a Week. The song was released as a single in the US two months later, and it went to Number One. But the Beatles continued to disregard it. It was never a single in the UK, and in their subsequent two years of radio performances and touring, they never played it live. Despite its popularity, Lennon believes it "was never a good song."

Eight Days A Week

At #59 is the B-Side to their first single, Love Me Do. The song in question is P.S. I Love You. It is composed principally by Paul, who is also on lead vocal.

The version featured on the single and album was recorded in ten takes on 11 September 1962 at EMI's Abbey Road Studios, London. Producer George Martin had booked session drummer Andy White as a replacement for Pete Best, whom he considered not technically good enough for recording purposes (Martin had been unaware that the other Beatles had already replaced Pete Best with Ringo Starr, who attended the session and plays maracas on the song). White was a freelance show band and session drummer, and gave the recording a lightweight cha cha treatment.

Paul said about the song:

It's just an idea for a song really, a theme song based on a letter, like the Paperback Writer idea. It was pretty much mine. I don't think John had much of a hand in it. There are certain themes that are easier than others to hang a song on, and a letter is one of them... The letter is a popular theme and it's just my attempt at one of those. It's not based in reality, nor did I write it to my girlfriend from Hamburg, which some people think.

John said:

That's Paul's song. He was trying to write a Soldier Boy like the Shirelles. He wrote that in Germany, or when we were going to and from Hamburg. I might have contributed something. I can't remember anything in particular. It was mainly his song.

This mix was the best version I could find on YouTube:

At #58 there's Because, a song from Abbey Road (1969), written by John. Lennon wrote the sweet, dreamy melody after hearing Yoko Ono playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on the couple's piano; he asked if she could play the chords backward, and he based the song on those changes. McCartney assumed that Ono also had a hand in crafting the song's lyrics. "It's rather her kind of writing," McCartney said. "Wind, sky and earth are recurring. . . . John was heavily influenced by her at the time."

George Martin arranged a nine-part harmony for the song, but there were only five tracks on which to record the vocals. So Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sang the three-part harmony live, then overdubbed it twice. This approach took extensive rehearsal, and more than five hours of extremely focused recording, to capture correctly. But the resulting song was stunning: a gorgeous, richly layered daydream that McCartney and Harrison both said was their favorite track on Abbey Road. "They knew they were doing something special," said engineer Geoff Emerick, "and they were determined to get it right."

I couldn't find an acceptable version that I could embed. If you're registered on Deezer, you can catch the original version here:

Because

At #57 is another song by John, recorded for The White Album (1968), called Revolution.

In the spring of 1968, the Vietnam War raged on, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and strikes and student protests in Paris brought the French government to its knees. When the Beatles — who had long been outspoken critics of the Vietnam War — hit Abbey Road Studios to make the White Album at the end of May, the first thing they recorded was Revolution, which was also the first explicitly political song the band ever released. "I wanted to put out what I felt about revolution," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. "I thought it was time we f*ckin' spoke about it. The same as we stopped not answering about the Vietnamese War [when we were] on tour with Brian [Epstein]. We had to tell him, 'We're going to talk about the war this time, and we're not going to just waffle.'"

The first version of Revolution the Beatles recorded was a slow, bluesy shuffle that eventually became Revolution 1. (The last six minutes of the master take were a menacing jam that was sheared off and eventually became Revolution 9.) On July 10th, they returned to Revolution for a charged-up electric take — the best-known version of the song, which ended up as the B side of Hey Jude. It was the hardest-rocking performance the Beatles ever caught on tape, from Lennon's scalding guitar introduction (a reference to Pee Wee Crayton's 1954 blues single Do Unto Others) to the final howl. "John wanted a really distorted sound," engineer Phil McDonald said. "The guitars were put through the recording console, which was technically not the thing to do. It completely overloaded the channel. Fortunately the technical people didn't find out. They didn't approve of 'abuse of equipment.'"

The crucial lyric difference between the two versions was a single word. Revolution 1 included the line "When you talk about destruction/Don't you know that you can count me out . . . in." (As McCartney noted, "John was just hedging his bets, covering all eventualities.") But by the time the Beatles cut the single version, it was an unambiguous "count me out." While the mainstream media praised Lennon's stance — Time approved of the song's criticism of "radical activists the world over" — the hard left was unimpressed. Ramparts magazine called its ambivalence a "betrayal."

"The lyrics stand today," Lennon said in 1980. "They're still my feeling about politics: I want to see the plan. . . . I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people."

At #56, is another Lennon song, from The White Album (1968), Julia.

Julia Lennon had encouraged her son's interest in music and bought him his first guitar. But after splitting with John's father, she started a new family with another man and left John to be raised by her sister; though she lived just a few miles from John, Julia did not spend much time with him. In 1958, when John was 17 and on better terms with her, Julia was struck and killed by a car. "I lost her twice," Lennon said. "Once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie. And once again when she actually physically died."

The only solo Lennon recording in the Beatles' catalog, Julia was the final addition to the White Album, recorded just three days before the album was sequenced. His original demo, recorded in May, had included harmonies from McCartney, but this version was just Lennon's voice and guitar. "Julia was my mother," Lennon said. "But it was sort of a combination of Yoko and my mother blended into one" — the "ocean child" in the lyrics refers to Ono's name, which is Japanese for "child of the ocean." To the end of his life, he often called Yoko "Mother."

This is a version of the song that's not too bad:

At #55, And I Love Her, is a song recorded for A Hard Day's Night (1964) and written mainly by McCartney.

McCartney called And I Love Her "the first ballad I impressed myself with." Lennon called it McCartney's "first Yesterday." He also claimed he helped out with the bridge. "The 'And' in the title was an important thing — And I Love Her, it came right out of left field, you were right up to speed the minute you heard it," McCartney said. "The title comes in the second verse and it doesn't repeat. You would often go to town on the title, but this was almost an aside: 'Oh . . . and I love you.'"

It took a few tries for the Beatles to figure out how to play it: Their initial attempts treated it as a subdued electric Rock song, but once Starr switched from his drum kit to a set of bongos, it began to assume its classic form. The secret motor of the song, Tom Petty told Rolling Stone, was Lennon's guitar part: "If you ever want to see some great rhythm-guitar playing, check out in A Hard Day's Night when they do And I Love Her. He could really make a band just kind of surge and jump."

At #54 there is a Lennon song from Rubber Soul (1965) simply called Girl. Like so many of the love songs the Beatles were writing on Rubber Soul, this deceptively simple ballad sounds like the confession of a man who's vulnerable and confused in the presence of a woman who's tougher and more independent than he is ("The kind of girl you want so much/It makes you sorry"). Yet even as she keeps making a fool out of him, his voice is full of admiration and affection for her as he sings, "She promises the Earth to me/And I believe her/After all this time, I don't know why." "When I heard this, as a young teenager, it hit the nail on the head," Jackson Browne told Rolling Stone. "It embodied the feelings I was living with every day — completely burning with sexual desire, with almost a regret at being so overpowered." The obvious inspiration is Bob Dylan, but there are also echoes of the Beach Boys.

Years later, Lennon said that the fantasy girl in the song's lyric was an archetype he had been searching for his entire life ("There is no such thing as THE girl — she was a dream") and finally found in Yoko Ono.

Girl

At #53, we find the highest positioned song not written by the Beatles. Twist and Shout is a 1961 song written by Phil Medley and Bert Berns. The song was originally recorded by The Top Notes. It first became a chart hit as a cover single by the Isley Brothers in 1962. It was the final track on the Beatles' first album (1963). Lennon is on lead vocals. George Martin knew Lennon's voice would suffer from the performance, so he left it until last, with only 15 minutes of scheduled recording time remaining.

Lennon was suffering from a cold, and was drinking milk and sucking on cough drops to soothe his throat. His coughing is audible on the album, as is the cold's effect on his voice. Even so, he produced a memorable vocal performance: a raucous, dynamic rocker. He later said his voice was not the same for a long time afterward, and that "every time [he] swallowed, it felt like sandpaper".

Released as a single in the US on March 2, 1964, with There's a Place as its B-side, by Chicago-based Vee-Jay Records on the Tollie label, it reached number 2 on April 4, 1964, during the week that the top five places on the chart were all Beatles singles (in the Cashbox singles chart for the same week, Twist and Shout was No. 1). In the United States, Twist and Shout was the only million-selling Beatles single that was a cover record, and the only Beatles cover single to reach the Top 10 on a national record chart. The song failed to hit #1 because the Beatles had another song occupying the top spot, Can't Buy Me Love. Here's a live version, in 1964:

At #52 is All My Loving, a McCartney song, recorded in 1963 for The Beatles 2nd UK album, With The Beatles.

"It was the first song I'd ever written the words first," said McCartney of All My Loving, one of the Beatles' most irresistible early rockers. He sketched out the lyrics one day on the bus while the band was touring with Roy Orbison. When they reached the venue, he didn't have his guitar, so he found a piano backstage and set the words to music. "I had in my mind a little Country & Western song," McCartney later said.

The sweet tale of yearning does have a bit of Nashville flair, especially evident in Harrison's twangy, Carl Perkins-flavored guitar solo. Harrison was such a fan of the man who wrote Blue Suede Shoes that on one early Beatles tour, he took the stage name "Carl Harrison." The band covered more Perkins songs than those of any other writer.

All My Loving became a staple of the Beatles' live set and the first song they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. "It's a damn good piece of work," Lennon once said in admiration of McCartney's songwriting, "but I play a pretty mean guitar in back." Here's a live version:

Finally for today, at #51, is one of The Beatles' biggest hits, Can't Buy Me Love (1964). Until Billboard began using SoundScan for their charts in 1991, it held the record of having the biggest jump to number one: (number twenty-seven to number one; no other single had ever done this). It was also a huge #1 in the UK (It has sold 1.53 million copies in the UK as of November 2012), as well as in most major markets.

This was in the height of Beatlemania in the US. So there are other records connected with Can't Buy Me Love's chart run in the US.

It gave the Beatles three consecutive number-one songs (I Want to Hold Your Hand was replaced at number one by She Loves You which was in turn replaced by Can't Buy Me Love). The three songs spent a combined total of 14 consecutive weeks at No. 1. This is the only time an artist had three number ones in a row.

When Can't Buy Me Love went to number one (4 April 1964), the entire top five of the Hot 100 was by the Beatles, the next positions being filled by Twist and Shout, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand and Please Please Me, respectively. No other act has held the top five spots simultaneously.

During its second week at number one (11 April 1964), the Beatles had fourteen songs on the Hot 100 at the same time.

The song was written by McCartney, while John and Paul shared lead vocals.

The Beatles were in prime live form when they recorded Can't Buy Me Love, charged up from playing up to three shows a day at a 18-day residency at Paris' Olympia Theatre. They only needed four tries to get the basic track; 11 days later, they would have their US television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, and then the single would be released five weeks later in the US. With Beatlemania, everything moved at supersonic speed.

McCartney later said Can't Buy Me Love was "my attempt to write [in] a bluesy mode." But the song is much closer to the group's primary influences: the bright gallop of uptempo Motown and brisk Fifties rockabilly. Lennon and McCartney had their own deep roots in the latter, but Harrison was the expert: His guitar style, especially in the Beatles' early recording years, was an aggressive updating of the simplicity of Carl Perkins and Scotty Moore's breaks on Elvis Presley's Sun singles. In Can't Buy Me Love, Harrison's solo — which takes off after one of McCartney's Little Richard-inspired screams — is classic '56 Memphis with jet-age sheen.

The lyrics in Can't Buy Me Love were essentially sweet stuff about valuing romance over material things, although some fans somehow missed the point, baffling McCartney. "I think you can put any interpretation you want on anything," he said. "But when someone suggests that Can't Buy Me Love is about a prostitute, I draw the line." Here's a live version: