The Beatles Mono Reviews 2 – Please Please Me
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
The cover to Please Please Me, from 1963
“Their first album, Please Rut Me, was made in twenty minutes. Their second took even longer. Success was only a drum-beat away.” – The Rutles
Please Please Me is an album that I’ve only experienced in mono – apart from the title track, which I knew in stereo before I got my mono vinyl copy of this album back in the early 90s. Many people will be having the reverse of the shock I got then, when they listen to their new stereo CDs and realise that the stereo and mono mixes of that track are actually different performances (I think the stereo mix actually edits together two different takes – the difference is most noticeable on the line “why do you make me blue?”)
What’s oddest about this album in retrospect is how much it’s Lennon’s album. At this point the songwriting credits for the Lennon/McCartney partnership were still McCartney/Lennon, and McCartney was viewed by George Martin as the obvious ‘frontman’ of the group (he took lead vocals on both sides of the band’s debut single), yet here Lennon gets seven lead vocals (and wrote Do You Want To Know A Secret?, which Harrison sang) to McCartney’s four.
Possibly this was because the album was made in a rush – other than the four songs that had been on previously-released singles, the other ten tracks on the album were recorded in a ten hour period – and so the band (who still at this point regarded Lennon as the ‘leader’) would have fallen back to the songs that were regulars in their live performances – but then, if you look at the tracklisting of the Star Club live album, recorded just over a month before, only four of these songs were in the set, two of them McCartney tracks. It may also be, though, that Martin had changed his mind for the time about who the ‘leader’ was, after McCartney’s Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You had got to number 17 while Lennon’s Please Please Me/Ask Me Why had reached number one.
Either way, this dominance – which Lennon would only achieve once more, on A Hard Day’s Night – was all the odder for the fact that Lennon had a terrible cold on the day the album was recorded, and was having clear problems with pitching on the day. Luckily, even at 22, Lennon was already an experienced enough vocalist that he could turn this to his advantage, and he manages through sheer willpower to turn in some of the best vocals that had ever been heard on a British record to that point.
In particular, praise must go to his take on Anna, the Arthur Alexander song. Ian MacDonald, in Revolution In The Head, describes this as sounding like a youth singing a man’s song, which just goes to show that even MacDonald could have a tin ear. Alexander and Lennon have very different takes on the song – Alexander being more resigned, the key phrase in his version being the repeated ‘go with him’ of the chorus, while for Lennon the key phrase is the practically-screamed “what am I supposed to do?” of the middle eight – but good as Alexander is (and he is extraordinarily good, one of those figures like James Carr who deserve much wider recognition) Lennon just has the edge.
The only time where Lennon’s vocal is let down by his cold is There’s A Place – which is a shame, as it’s one of his best early songs (McCartney claims this one as a straight co-write, suggested by himself based on Bernstein’s “There’s A Place For Us”. This may well be the case, but the finished product has far more of Lennon’s fingerprints than McCartney’s, from the harmony vocals throughout, to the pensive mood of the lyric, to the harmonica part).
On the other hand, his vocal on Twist And Shout is, without a doubt, one of those defining performances that comes along maybe once a decade. Recorded last thing, at the end of a long day, because they knew his voice wouldn’t stand up after this song, you can *hear* him damaging his vocal cords to get the performance out, but backed by an amazing performance by the rest of the band – taut and wiry where the Isley’s original had been loose and swinging – this is the performance where ‘rock’ (as opposed to ‘rock and roll’) is invented.
Lennon also wrote the bulk of the original material on here, from the Roy Orbison pastiche turned uptempo pop song Please Please Me to the Miracles-esque Ask Me Why (with its lovely turnabout in the middle eight – “I can’t conceive of any more misery”). Not all of it is great, but it’s promising.
That said, McCartney does write three songs here – the first single Love Me Do, its B-side P.S. I Love You (quite possibly the worst thing the Beatles ever did – not just bad, but *lazy*), and (the only indicator of his future greatness) I Saw Her Standing There, which opens the album in as much style as Twist And Shout closes it. (It feels like I’ve sold McCartney short on this album, but he’s just not really a presence yet – he really comes into his own from Help! onwards, though he’s more noticeable on all the albums after this one).
At this point, neither George or RIngo could actually sing – George’s vocals on Chains and Do You Want To Know A Secret are those of an adenoidal adolescent, while Ringo just bellows cheerfully on Boys. Both would get better (Ringo less so than George).
What is very obvious here, though, is that the Beatles were music lovers. The cover versions here were all (with the exception of A Taste Of Honey) of black American music, all soul music and girl groups – two songs by the Shirelles, and one each by the Cookies, the Isley Brothers and Arthur Alexander. I’ve seen people recently saying that the Beatles were just doing ‘obvious Motown covers’ at this point, but these records were largely unknown at the time – certainly in Britain, but even in the US.
But the thing that’s obvious from listening to the originals – and the key to their success – is that the band weren’t *just* listening to soul music. If they were, they’d have been the Rolling Stones. But they were taking from *everywhere*. Yes, John tries to do the Miracles in Ask Me Why, but he also borrows from Roy Orbison (Please Please Me) Bernstein and Sondheim (There’s A Place) and Disney songs (Do You Want To Know A Secret?). I Saw Her Standing There is Chuck Berry’s Little Queenie with the serial number filed off, Lennon’s harmonica style comes straight from Hey Baby by Bruce Channel, Lennon’s vocals owe far more to Buddy Holly than most people realise (listen to Holly’s eponymous album – his only solo one released in his lifetime – and you’ll realise just how similar the two were), George Harrison’s guitar is Carl Perkins, the harmonies are the Everlys…
This is a band that had listened to and absorbed every record they could get their hands on, and learned from all of them. The Beatles, like all great musicians, were syncretists – taking elements from every possible style and genre and adding them to their own style. Which is one reason it’s so sad that many musicians who claim the Beatles as role models have such a limited range of musical influences, often involving only groups of four white men with guitars.
As for the remastering, as this was the most primitive of the recordings, being recorded essentially live on two-track tape, it’s also the one improved least by modern technology. That said, the sound here is a lot clearer than on previous releases – the reverb on Lennon’s voice on Ask Me Why is more audible, for example, and as on all the albums there’s a general improved bass response, as well as greater separation of the vocals and instruments. Overall a *lot* of improvement can be found – like being able to distinguish Lennon and Harrison’s guitars from each other in Chains, even when they’re playing the same part – but they’re subtle differences, not the massive eye-openers of some of the later albums.
At times, this can almost be as much a curse as a blessing – Starr’s brushwork always marred A Taste Of Honey for me, sounding more like tape hiss than an actual instrument (one of the few bits of genuinely bad drumming from Ringo, and more a lapse of taste than of ability), and here it’s even more noticeable. And the missed notes (mostly from Lennon, because of his cold), fluffed backing vocal lyrics and general roughness are all more noticeable now.
But that’s also part of the appeal. Nothing like this would *ever* get released today. My band’s last EP took several times as long to record as this full album, used 64-track digital recording and partly pre-programmed music, and *still* sounds vaguely sloppy and ‘unprofessional’ compared to the mechanical, auto-tuned, compressed-to-death output of almost everyone at the moment, because we only had a budget of what Tilt and I could afford to pay.
The progress of recording technology – in large part spurred by the Beatles themselves – has rendered this kind of recording almost as obsolete as illuminated manuscripts, but the result has been that recorded music has lost a lot of character. This is an album made by humans – the occasional fluffs make it all the more impressive that, for the VAST majority of the time, they get it so very right.
This is the Beatles album recorded before ‘Beatles album’ meant something, and as such is effectively the work of a different band from all the rest of them. And much as I love Revolver and Rubber Soul and Abbey Road and Help!, while I’m listening to this I can’t help but wish that this band had made a few more albums, too…
The Beatles Mono Reviews 1 – Mono Masters
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
The Beatles In Mono box set
When the Beatles’ back catalogue was finally issued on CD in 1987, the decision was made (quite rightly) to stick to the original British tracklistings of the albums, except for Magical Mystery Tour, which in the US had been expanded from an EP to an album with the inclusion of some non-album singles. However, the Beatles also released a lot of songs during their career that were never on a proper album – these were collected into the two-disc Past Masters set.
For the mono box set, Past Masters has been slightly rejigged. Three tracks that are on the stereo version – The Ballad Of John & Yoko, Old Brown Shoe and the single mix of Let It Be – were never mixed in mono, so these have been left out. In their place are the four songs from Yellow Submarine that never appeared on any other album, in previously unreleased vintage mono mixes.
While at first a collection of non-album tracks might sound inessential, in fact Past Masters and Mono Masters contain many of the Beatles’ best-known and most-loved songs – along with the B-sides and German language versions and covers of old Larry Williams songs are hits like She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Paperback Writer and Hey Jude.
At first I thought the first disc of the mono masters collection would be of less interest than the second – and I do find myself listening to the second far more – but in fact it’s prompted some rethinking on my part. The first disc consists of tracks from 1962 through early 65, including most of the early hits – Love Me Do, She Loves You, From Me To You, I Want To Hold Your Hand and I Feel Fine are all on here.
The sound quality is a huge improvement over the previous issues – how much of the difference in listening experience is due to mono/stereo or due to remastering is hard to guess, but one can make out elements like Paul’s basslines much more clearly, and likewise John’s rhythm guitar is much more audible (John’s rhythm guitar was always a casualty of bad mastering, being usually quite close to the high hat in both rhythm and frequency range). A ton of little elements I’d never noticed come out even on these, comparatively primitive, recordings (listen for example for the tiny ‘whooping’ effect at the end of I Feel Fine).
The mono mixes also sound a lot more of their time than the stereo mixes. In the early 60s, mono mixes were the ones used for radio play, and were mixed with that in mind, rather than for listening on good equipment. As a result, they had a huge amount of compression whacked on them (though not nearly as much as the frankly ugly amounts used as a matter of course today) to cut through the static, and extra reverb to make them sound ‘bigger’. Listening to these records in these mixes, for the first time in decades the Beatles are occupying the same sonic world as their contemporaries – far more than the weedy-sounding stereo mixes, these sound like they’re from the same time as the Beach Boys or Motown records with which they were competing in the charts.
But the really interesting thing to me is the very early singles – She Loves You, From Me To You and I Want To Hold Your Hand, plus the B-sides like Thank You Girl and how they sound in mono compared to the stereo versions. (These may have been mono on Past Masters originally too – I’m unsure – but my listening to these tracks was primarily on stereo vinyl rather than the original CD issue).
Before, I’d always compared the harmonies on these – primarily Lennon-composed – songs to the Everly Brothers, who *were* clearly an influence, especially on McCartney’s occasional bluegrass-tinged keening. But listening to the mono mixes, there’s far, far less separation between the two lead singers – McCartney matches up to Lennon so closely that it sounds more like double-tracking than conventional harmony vocals. (Remember that before the Beatles ever went into the studio, those two had spent more than five years singing together).
And this got me thinking – the close-harmony style on these early singles was dropped at almost exactly the same time that Lennon discovered double tracking, late 1964. Lennon always hated his own voice, and after this point never (except for the odd live track) allowed any of his vocals to go out without some form of trickery, be it double-tracking, ADT, the ludicrous amounts of reverb Spector slathered over his solo recordings, going through a Leslie speaker or all of the above.
Were these early doubled vocals an attempt by Lennon effectively to double-track himself live (and their live harmony workouts, whether ballads like To Know Him Is To Love Him or rockers like Some Other Guy, were all Lennon-led – McCartney and Harrison were far more likely to introduce solo numbers) to disguise his own voice?
If so, that would be interesting, because Lennon, more than any other songwriter of the time except maybe Brian Wilson, was primarily a chordal rather than melodic composer – his melodies are almost all implied by harmonies, with the lead vocal tending to sit around in a very small range. That kind of songwriting is most suited to close-harmony songs like This Boy or Yes It Is (both included on this CD).
It may well be that Lennon’s entire musical style stemmed, ultimately, from a desire to hide his own voice. Lennon’s self-loathing may have made him the songwriter he became…
The second disc, which covers late 65 through 1969, is by far the better disc musically. It also improves over its Past Masters counterpart as far as sequencing goes. On Past Masters, because of the 1967 non-album tracks all being included on Magical Mystery Tour, we jump straight from Rain‘s 1966 proto-psychedelia to Lady Madonna from 1968, and from there on we’re in their retro-rocker period – Get Back, Revolution and the band generally ‘getting back to their roots’, pretty much ignoring the psych element that stayed with them for the rest of their career.
In Mono Masters on the other hand, the presence of the four Yellow Submarine songs (three of them Pepper/Magical Mystery Tour castoffs from 1967) means that the two other psych songs on the CD – The Inner Light and Across The Universe – sound far less like weird stylistic dead ends than an integral part of the band’s late style.
Starting with the Going To A Go-Go riff of Day Tripper, we’re treated to four of the greatest tracks of all time – Day Tripper, We Can Work It Out, Paperback Writer and Rain. All of these are punchier and thicker sounding than their previous releases.
The songs all show the extra care that went into the mono mixes – Paperback Writer, for example, has a huge slab of reverb on the ‘writer’ at the end of each verse, getting bigger with every repetition, which is absent from the much less dynamic stereo mix, and the bass is much more prominent. Mono also covers up faults better than stereo – if you listen to the stereo mix, it’s much easier to pick out John and George’s muffled laughs at the absurdity of their Beach Boys parody vocals, due to the separation of elements.
But at the same time there are huge benefits that can be found not from the mono mix, but just from the clarity of the new remasters – even listening to this at work, on a computer with a £2 pair of headphones, I was able to pick out Ringo clicking in the vocalists in the a capella sections with his sticks, which I’d never heard before. (The ‘fuckin’ ‘ell’ John mutters in Hey Jude is now almost as audible as the lead vocal).
But of course that clarity would be nothing without the musical quality to make it worthwhile. And this has some of the best tracks ever recorded – Day Tripper combining Motown with casual nastiness, We Can Work It Out with its drop into harmonium-led waltz time, Paperback Writer, possibly the only truly funny comedy song ever to reach number one, Rain with its entirely unique soundscape, Hey Jude, Revolution, Don’t Let Me Down, Hey Bulldog, Across The Universe…
Incidentally, speaking of Rain, one huge benefit that the new Rock Band game may have is to stop the underrating of Ringo. A friend had been making the usual jokes about Ringo (“Not even the best drummer in the Beatles”) on Twitter on Wednesday. On Thursday, after playing the game, she said “Actually, he was a pretty good drummer – some of those parts are very hard”. Maybe now people are actually trying to play along with him, they’ll realise what an incredible player he was.
The fact is, Ringo’s bad reputation comes from two different sources – in the very early 60s, it was customary for recording drummers to lock in their kick drum with the bass, at least in the UK – a style which the Beatles, with their love of records featuring the Funk Brothers or the MGs and their looser rhythm sections, broke almost from the start. Meanwhile in the 80s and the time of ‘sonic power’, and the love of drum machines over human players, it became customary to think of machine-like efficiency as the be-all and end-all of drumming (this is a time when Phil Collins was actually regarded as someone to look up to!)
Ringo’s loose, laid-back style would never appeal to those who look for rigidity and precision in their music, but it’s warm, and human, and imaginative. There are tons of little fills and touches all over the place which are the sign of a true musician, simultaneously ensuring there’s always something interesting to listen to, but always keeping it tasteful and never pushing himself to the fore. On these remasters, with their increased clarity, Ringo’s contribution is even more obvious than it already was. The man has endured decades of mockery for being, in a band with two flamboyant geniuses and a third singer-songwriter who was capable of moments of brilliance, the non-writing down-to-earth member. People with tin ears who haven’t a thousandth of the man’s talent have spent decades laughing at him for perceived faults which didn’t exist (much like the legendary Doctor Who ‘wobbly sets’ – except that sets did wobble about once a decade in Doctor Who, which is far less often than Ringo dropped a beat).
While the Beatles would never have been as huge as they were without John and Paul constantly trying to top their previous songwriting, they would never have had any hits at all without the steady, unassuming, rock-solid drumbeat that powered all their singles. Maybe these reissues will cause the general public to finally reappraise Ringo’s playing.
Why The Beatles Matter
I’ve been planning a post on the Beatles for awhile, but thought today would be a good day for it, partly because it’s so well planned it can get past my writer’s block, and partly because everyone in the world seems to be talking about them thanks to the new game (which I’m not getting) and the reissues (bought the mono box today).
While most people are perfectly aware of why the Beatles were so important, there are many – including some who I know normally have excellent musical taste – who just don’t ‘get’ them. They certainly don’t get why I spent two hundred quid today on a box of albums I already own, just because they’re very slightly differently mixed.
The simple answer to that is this:
Yep, that’s a mildly racist kids’ Saturday morning cartoon from the mid-60s, which includes a drone setting of a section of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead and a bouncy singalong section which encourages the kiddies to sing “She said I know what it’s like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad, and you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born”.
Personally, I think the idea of a ‘best band ever’ is a rather fatuous one, and presumes that the Monkees and the Sun Ra Arkestra were trying to do the same kind of thing and should be judged by the same criteria. But on pure quality alone, I think if there *were* a best band ever, it would be hard to argue that the Beatles were a bad choice – when you consider that songs like I Am The Walrus, Yesterday, Norwegian Wood, Girl, Revolution, Across The Universe, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here, There And Everywhere,Here Comes The Sun and All My Loving were never even released as singles because they always had something better or more commercial lying around, the sheer depth of their catalogue becomes quickly apparent. There are few if any other bands where almost everyone knows almost every album track.
But the key thing about the Beatles is the kind of band they were. When they started, they were disposable pop – their competition at the time was Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and The Tremeloes – and they were a huge success for reasons only very tangentially related to their talent. They were a *good* band of that type – Please Please Me is still a remarkably good album – and they obviously, even then, were music lovers rather than just performing puppets, as their choice of cover versions showed, but there was no immediately obvious reason why they should be bigger than, say, The Searchers.
But they did get big, and what matters is what they did when they were big. Most bands in their position would have continued cranking out formula hits and shaking their mop-tops as long as they could, raked in a huge amount of money, and then retired. The Beatles instead – presumably as much through boredom as through any finer motives – decided to try and expand their art as much as possible, and incorporate as many different influences as they could, everything from Dylan and Ravi Shankar to John Cage and Stockhausen.
The mere *existence* of a track like Revolution #9 (a Stockhausen-esque sound collage on The White Album) is extraordinary. Whether you like it or don’t (I actually do), tens of millions of people own that album and have heard that track at least once. For many of them that will have been their first – and possibly only – exposure to the techniques of the avant-garde from the previous twenty years. Likewise, millions of people first heard of Ravi Shankar via the Beatles.
To understand how unusual this is, imagine if Beyonce decided she was going to have a John Zorn phase, or whatever today’s equivalent of the Spice Girls are (I don’t keep up with the young person’s pop music of the day) citing Throbbing Gristle as the biggest influence on their new album. Normally when teenpop stars try to ‘be a serious artist’, they’re George Michael – just doing the same pabulum without any of the fun.
There have been a few other Pop-with-a-capital-p stars who’ve been quite daring, of course – the Monkees did a hell of a lot to subvert their own image, as well as making some truly great records – but the only one to undergo such a total metamorphosis I can think of is Scott Walker, who did it over a much longer timeframe, was much less popular to start with, and lost most of his original fans along the way.
The Beatles, because of a once-in-a-century combination of luck, talent and willingness to experiment, got six-year-olds singing along to songs about Peter Fonda causing bad acid trips, and teenage girls listening to atonal avant garde tape-loop experiments. And *THAT’S* why they’re important.
As for today’s releases – I’m not buying the stereo reissues, as I have them all on vinyl anyway, and Rock Band doesn’t appeal (partly because I can play real instruments, a bit, partly because I’m no good at video games, and mostly because I own neither a Wii or a TV) but the mono boxset is wonderful – every album up to the White Album, plus the non-album tracks, in their original mono mixes. The sound quality is astounding – I’m hearing all sorts of tiny little details I’ve not heard before, like Ringo’s sticks clicking the vocalists in on Paperback Writer (which I’m sure the rest of you heard on the old versions, and I’m stupid for not noticing before, but anyway), and I also love noticing all the differences between the mono and stereo mixes (the processing on John’s voice on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, the different tape-loops on Tomorrow Never Knows, the different ending to Penny Lane). The bass response in particular has improved drastically.
Is it worth two hundred quid? Unless you’re the kind of obsessive fan who actually owns and has listened to Liverpool Sound Collage and who knew that the second half (but not the first half) of Please Please Me was a different take in the stereo mix to the mono one, then no – unless you don’t own this music at all, in which case yes, but why don’t you? But if, like me, you’re the kind of person who’s been to see Pete Best live, then yes, it is worth it. It’s only a little over a quid a song, after all…
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