Hmm, now you've got me wanting some of these US Beatles albums! What about the vinyl quality back then - were they as good as the yellow Parlophone LPs? Were they released in mono, generally held to be better?
Help! was the one US abomination of course - part of it was soundtrack music from the movie, not Beatle songs I understand.
Magical Mystery Tour is one area where the US got lucky. In the UK, the Beatles didn't like putting singles out on albums because it was felt it forced fans to buy the same song twice. But it's good to have Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and I am the Walrus there, among others. I read somewhere that this album did almost as well in sales in the US as Sgt Pepper, and those sales were through the roof.
Did MMT get shown on telly in the States? Was it at Christmas and get the same blown raspberry in response?
For fans of a certain mind, you may want to check out this highly entertaining YouTube clip - McCartney albums ranked from worst to best. Quite an easygoing, easy on the eye presenter, not unlike our 'own' Calvin Dyson, talks you through the decades, though you have to wonder how old he was when some of these were released as he's quite fresh-faced. Lots of info here that I wasn't aware of....
The presenter's tastes lean more to the whimsical Macca than mine do and I can't get around a review of Tug of War that doesn't reference his excellent song Wanderlust, but there you go.
Thanks Napoleon Plural, I'll definitely check this out. There are many gaps in my knowledge of McCartney's albums. I know most of the Wings releases and very familiar with Tug of War, I've listened to Egypt Station...but I'm keen to explore further.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,746Chief of Staff
Will be checking your recommendation out in the near future, NP…I’m pretty conversant with Macca’s stuff but I’m always happy to listen to others informed opinions 🍸
It’s not the last Beatles album I bought, but I thought I’d say something about their second LP, With the Beatles.
This is a remarkable album.
‘Why’s it remarkable, NP?’ I hear you ask.
Well, I’m knocking on a bit and am a massive Beatles fan but only recently did I buy and listen to this LP for the first time. That’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like being a Bond fan and only decades down the line bothering to watch the second Bond film, From Russia With Love. Not quite the same, as of course that’s now on every few weeks on telly it seems, whereas you have to make the effort to buy and listen to an LP, but still.
With the Beatles is a famous, iconic looking LP - when they show clips of US fans burning their LPs in reaction to Lennon’s ‘the Beatles are bigger than Christ’ comment, this one stands out on the stark black and white footage.
Of course, it’s named Meet the Beatles in the US and has slightly different tracks on it, making it arguably an even better album.
I should emphasise that the review I’m giving is for the UK release AND is for the original vinyl LP in mono and on the Yellow Parlophone label. I wouldn’t bother with getting it on CD and in stereo.
Why is this LP overlooked?
Well, firstly, it doesn’t have any no 1 singles on it, in fact no singles at all. Its predecessor in the UK, Please Please Me, has the title track and Love Me Do. Singles released around the time of With the Beatles include From Me to You and She Loves You - but they’re not on the album.
As Paul McCartney later explained, this was to avoid fans feeling a bit cheated that in buying the LP, they’d be getting songs they actually already had, having bought them as a single, given the finite concept of pocket money back then. Buy the LP, you’d get 12 or so shiny new songs, no repeats!
More cynically, it’s a way to ensure your LP gets to no 1 - and your single. A doting parent gifting their kid a Beatles LP for Christmas would not be tempted to sell them short by buying the single instead, likewise the well-off Beatle fan would not be forgoing the single given that it’s not on the LP.
Now, it's only just occurred to me that this pattern of ensuring every alternate LP - usually timed for the Christmas market - would not have any singles released from it would continue for much of the decade.
Please Please Me (1963) - the title track and Love Me Do.
With the Beatles (1963) - no singles.
From Me to You, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand are all singles.
A Hard Day’s Night (1964) - the title track and Can’t Buy Me Love.
Beatles for Sale (1964) - no singles. (I Feel Fine released as a single.)
Help! (1965) - the title track and Ticket to Ride.
Rubber Soul (1965) - no singles. We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper a double A single
Paperback Writer released as a single.
Revolver (1966) - Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine.
Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane released as a single, extracted from upcoming Sgt Pepper to fill a gap. It’s the first not to reach no 1 in the UK.
Sgt Pepper (1967) - no singles.
All You Need Is Love released as a single.
The White Album (1968) - no singles.
Hey Jude and Lady Madonna released as singles.
Get Back and Let It Be released as singles.
Abbey Road (1970) - no singles.
Let It Be (1970) - The Long and Winding Road.
Some things to notice here. By the time we get to 66, the formula is breaking up a bit. Only one single comes from Revolver and there’s the sense they are hedging their bets. Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine are both classic songs but would either on their own be a guaranteed No 1? Possibly not, hence their release as a double A side, to ensure the Beatles’ pop star infallibility is undimmed. Put another way, no cool teenager would ever buy that single unless they were already a Beatles fan, there is nothing there for them.
Beatle biographer Philip Norman is not altogether reliable and wrote in Shout! that Paperback Writer caused some scratched heads after fans bought it and it went straight to No 1, due to its lyrics about ‘a man named Lear’ and so on. He seems to be correct. Personally I think it’s a great record, esp in mono when it is faster and punkier. It is a Beatle record that could be 10 years ahead of its time, it could be played alongside stuff by The Jam, The Police or the Pretenders and not be out of place, the same goes for its B-side Rain, which some see as a precursor to Oasis. But in a rundown of the top selling records of 1966 in the US on YouTube, you find Paperback Writer at 33, outsold all manner of forgettable dross. The Stones’ Paint It Black - which is not dross - is in the teens.
In fact, it’s a real eye-opener to take this whistle stop tour of the US hit parade that year. It’s like some mad alternative nostalgia.
In the top 5 you have The Association with a song called Cherish. I know the band only because of their brilliant song Windy, which opens an episode of Breaking Bad in which a skanky prostitute called Wendy is shown giving head to various locals in various parked cars. But I’ve never heard this song Cherish and given it was big in the US, that makes it massive. Listening to it, you don’t think, ‘Wow, where has this been all my life?’ On YouTube comments you have couples saying, ooh, we danced to this cheek to cheek and now we’ve been married for decades, which is fair enough. I can’t think of many or any Beatles songs you’d slow dance to. Nor even get up and pull to at a party, frankly. There’s an onanistic vibe to the Beatles, I mean even Beatlemania is a sea of teenage girls screaming, you don’t see any young lads there, if they do they look a bit sheepish. Blokes do seem to write an awful lot of books about the Beatles when they could be doing something else - a lengthy review of a decades old Bond film, for instance.
There’s a song in the Top 5 of that year called 96 Tears by Blofeld and the Mysterians - didn’t the Stranglers cover that to no great commercial effect a decade plus later? It doesn’t sound that amazing. Who the hell is Paul Revere & the Raiders? Did he ever make it over here?
He was another act streets ahead of the Beatles in the hit parade that year, according to some charts. But there is a suspicion, only just dawning on me, that if you put on his record at a party and danced to it, you’d be the star of your own life, living your teenage years. Put on a Beatles record, and you’re almost never the star, rather you’re the person celebrating what a great band the Beatles are, which isn’t quite the same. You’d be the audiophile thinking, isn’t this single fantastic, what a great vocal, while you later find out the tone deaf bloke copped off with Suzy Slater in the guest bedroom.
Still, you’d imagine the Beatles would be right at the top of the biggest sellers of 1966 in the US and they’re not, it’s a load of stuff you’ve mostly never heard of or never thought was that big a deal - the Mama and the Papas’s Monday, Monday, or California Dreaming. Simon and Garfunkel feature a lot but most of the other bands like I say, it’s looking through someone else’s photo album. It makes you suspect that nostalgia is almost a fictional narrative, or at any rate highly selective. I mean, we have a piano only cover version of Born Free by Roger Williams at no 12 - outselling Nancy Sinatra’s brilliant These Boots Are Made For Walking. How? There’s a Righteous Brothers song in the top 5 I’ve never, ever heard of. And then there’s Barry Sadler with his Ballad of the Green Berets, I suppose our equivalent was the late - at the time - Jim Reeves and Distant Drums, also about the best-selling record of the year, which as Craig Brown pointed out, shows that while we remember the era as the counter-culture, in fact the likes of Ken Dodd, a newly staid Frank Sinatra and Engelbert Humperdinck were mainstays among an older generation who sought reassurance.
Accounts of the best-sellers of 1966 in the USA vary a bit - one has We Can Work It Out at no 16. Still, compare with the UK, where Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Sub is at no 3 in the entire year, and the Fabs overall have three songs in the Top 20.
Most oddly, the Monkees’ debut single Last Train to Clarksville owes a lot to Paperback Writer and was released a good few months later - and in the US, that was the 4th best selling record of the year, then again it had a TV show to promote it. According to its Wiki page, the writer cheerfully admits to basing it on Paperback Writer, claiming he misheard the title as ‘Take the last train’ which I can’t really see. As if in revenge for ripping off their band, the single didn’t even make the Top 20 in the UK, albeit it was released in 67 somewhat belatedly.
This was the first time the band wasn’t writing about boy meets girl stuff - indeed on Revolver you have to wait five songs in til you get to such a thing. Until then, they’re singing about tax, loneliness, idleness, spiritual love (or whatever) and even Here, There and Everything is not your usual fill the dance floor number.
Day Tripper is a funky number (it would be funkier with a dance floor drummer like Charlie Watts on it, or even Keith Moon) but other than that the Beatles went an awful long time not putting out singles that would appeal to boy-obsessed teenage girls, I mean after Paperback Writer you have Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane, then All You Need Is Love. These are not teenage dance floor hits. But by this time, the Beatles’ Revolver suggested that the album was really where it was at, where they would be showcasing their best material, while the singles were almost mere promos to keep the band’s name out there.
Incidentally, 1966 is oft cited as the best year for pop and while this may be true of the UK, a look at the same YouTube clip for 1967’s top US hits suggests this was a far better year for America though not for the Beatles. In fact, 68 and 69 saw them do better, with Hey Jude cited as the best seller of the year in the US, and Come Together in the Top 10 of the year in 69.
Altogether it signifies that US pop culture just wasn’t quite the same as in the UK, in many ways it seems far looser and a lot more fun, but with a bit of dross slipping through as well. I could go on all night looking at the Billboard charts - who knew that Lennon’s Instant Karma outsold the Beatles’ The Long and Winding Road in 1970? That Wings’ My Love was the fifth best selling record of 1973 in the US, when it didn’t make no 1 in the UK? Easily outselling Live and Let Die, which was in the early 50s?
Another observation is - would some of these single-less LPs be improved with hindsight had they included the No 1 singles? Certainly the US version Meet the Beatles is arguably better, kicking off with I Want To Hold Your Hand, then the earlier LP track I Saw Her Standing There, plus B-side That Boy.
The thing is, the keen fan finds it hard to say for sure. Beatles for Sale generally has an American vibe, it was the first album they did after they’d really conquered America and basically they invent the Byrds on it, with jangley guitar on tracks like What You’re Doing, Words of Love and Every Little Thing. It just has a slight country and western vibe on it too. The single of the time - I Feel Fine backed with what can only be a B-side She’s a Woman - doesn’t quite fit, it somehow feels very British. What’s more, it seems to be that the concurrent singles just aren’t produced quite as lavishly as tracks on the album. I don’t know why. Maybe because singles are just recorded in a day whereas album tracks can be revisited and tweaked during the course of a few weeks?
In theory, Rubber Soul might even better with the double A side Day Tripper and We Can Work it Out on it. But they just don’t seem quite as well produced as tracks on that LP. What would you drop? Where would they fit?
Ditto, Paperback Writer ought to improve Revolver. Again, you can tell it’s from the same era, it’s the same sound. But I can’t quite see it fitting. Tracks from Revolver seem stark and monochrome like the LP cover. Paperback Writer seems navy blue to me. It’s all in the mind perhaps, but…
Nobody would argue that Sgt Pepper would be improved by having All You Need Is Love or Baby You’re A Rich Man on it - that said personally I can’t easily get behind Harrison’s song on it, I’d sooner kick off in practice with the single. And I’ve never got hold of a decent sounding copy of that LP save Side 1 of the Beatles Blue album, which starts with Strawberry Fields and ends with All You Need Is Love, with Pepper all in between.
I can’t place Hey Jude on the White Album. Or Lady Madonna.
The Beatles’ value for money thing harmed the Let It Be release in my view. I’ve come round to this LP, it feels really adult and autumnal, a real glass of Malbec album. But as with virtually all Beatles LP, it can’t be perfect and the track I’d ditch is the clanging buskers disgrace, One After 909, in favour of Lennon’s Don’t Let Me Down - not included simply because it was the B-side to an already released single.
The tendency to not put previous single releases on new LPs seemed to continue on Paul McCartney’s releases into the 70s - neither My Love nor Live and Let Die are on Red Rose Speedway or Band on the Run, the latter in the UK does not include the single Helen Wheels, likewise Mull of Kintyre was not on any LP release, helping it become the biggest seller ever in the UK in 77/78 and wholly unknown in the US where it didn’t sell very well.
Anyway! That’s one reason why With the Beatles wasn’t too well known to me - it doesn’t have any famous No 1 singles on it.
What I’ll also point out is, With the Beatles doesn’t sound like any other Beatles record. It’s got that missing link feel to it.
In a way, the Beatles were trying to find their way. Not their sound as such. But what kind of songs they want to do. As I’ve suggested, From Me To You and She Loves You may have been No 1s, but they don’t sound like they’d fit on this album at all, which is largely R&B.
The same evening I wrote this I caught an evening on BBC2 devoted to Frank Sinatra, and at one point it was mentioned that in the 1950s with Capitol he began - along with others - to create albums devoted to a particular mood. So one might be uplifting and swinging - Come Fly With Me, for instance, and you generally ensure you stick with that and don’t break it, while another - In The Wee Small Hours, for instance, with be steeped in melancholy. Likewise, each Beatle album seemed to have its own particular sound and place in time and it appears that just lobbing on the current single might upset that.
You could argue this LP heralds the true sound of the Beatles in a way its debut does not. Please Please Me was recorded in a single day, amazingly. Their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann told them he liked it but was disappointed in some ways because it didn’t capture the rawness of their live performance. (Voormann is a bit of a legend, he went on to design the cover of Revolver, played bass on John’s Plastic Ono Band - and on Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain, and in the early 80s produced Trio’s No 1 hit Da Da Da. He was the one who introduced the band to his friend Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer who dated Beatle Stu Sutcliffe and took the iconic black and white photos of them in Hamburg, and encouraged them to comb their hair forwards. You’d think it was Astrid who’d taken the LP cover given its look, but it wasn’t).
But you sense that much of With the Beatles fulfils Voormann's brief, if you want to call it that, quite easily. They have the time to do what they want on this, being an established successful band.
A lot of this sounds like no other Beatles album, however. The opener, the frenetic It Won’t be Long, sounds like Frans Ferdinand. If you ever thought Crowded House sounded like the Beatles but couldn’t place how, well All I’ve Got To Do fits the bill That said, All My Loving is a straight down the line Beatle classic it’s true - and would so easily have been a no 1 had it been released.
Harrison’s Don’t Bother Me sounds like a real mod outfit, like Who prototype The High Numbers. Little Child sounds like the sort of thing again another band might do - say Billy J Kramer, maybe he did. Tracks like Hold Me Tight also have that ‘not quite the Beatles, might be somebody else’ feel to them.
Harrison’s song is a revelation, or rather the record, It feels like a real ensemble piece, like they’re really going for it. Of course, at the time the feeling might have been, this is our second LP so let’s not leave it to chance. If George has a song, let’s kill it! That is, maximise it. It is a blistering bit of R&B and rarely do you get the sense on his other tracks - be they on Help or Rubber Soul or Revolver - that they’re really getting behind him as a band, but here you do.
Macca has confessed they often used to rip off other songs and improve them, if so you wonder if it was wise to have Little Child right next to the cover Til There was You, given the phrase ‘There were bells, on a hill’ is melodically an identical jumping off point to ‘Little Child, little child..’
The odd thing about this LP is, you’d struggle to imagine Side 1 is so great, going through the song list. But it really swings. I find it simply more enjoyable than Side 1 of Sgt Pepper or even Revolver. Or any of them. I don’t say it’s better. Just more enjoyable. On other Beatle LPs there are a couple of ‘eat your greens’ tracks, or songs you have to humour. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is an eat your greens track. So is Love To You. Tracks you have to humour might include Yellow Submarine. You get this on all the albums really. The thing about Wings’ Band on the Run is that it’s one album where I love every track, I skip nothing.
I mean, Little Child which I assumed was sung by Ringo when it’a actually John is a load of crap, it really is. It’s almost as bad as that early 60s criminal record by Mike Same featuring Hard Day’s Night reject Wendy Richard, ‘Come Outside’. And yet, when it comes on, it sounds great, it really rolls along, there’s nothing wrong with it.
But the reason this LP has to be good is, it’s their second one. They can’t afford to take chances. It has to land.
I was exaggerating when I said I hadn’t heard this LP before. Many songs I’d heard due to buying a compilation LP - well, two of them - in the mid 80s; the Rock N Roll compilations Vol 1 and 2, originally released as a double LP, to capitalise on the trend for all things 1950s, though the artwork annoyed the now solo Beatles, who complained it looked cheap, pointing out they were never a 50s band anyway - indeed, it’s at odds with the tasteful cover for With the Beatles and Lennon suggested they use some of Astrid Kirshner’s photos of them.
This compilation was a neat way for the impecunious teenage fan to get hold of tracks that would otherwise mean shelling out for numerous LPs such as Revolver, the White Album etc - you could snaffle obscure tracks like Helter Skelter, Hey Bulldog, I’m Down, Taxman and Got To Get You Into My Life etc (though inclusions such as The Night Before off Help seemed a bit odd - it’s not terribly rocky is it).
Tracks from With the Beatles included It Won’t Be Long, I Want To Be Your Man, Please Mr Postman, You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me, Money (That’s What I Want) and Roll Over Beethoven. As Tony Hancock might say, that’s very nearly half an album!
According to Wiki, George Martin had a hand in remixing the stereo versions for the US Capitol release, narrowing the stereo for some tracks, and while this was vetoed for the first UK release on contractual grounds, the albums I got in the 1980s are those same versions.
What made my vintage early pressing of With the Beatles better, however, is that it is on the Yellow Parlophone label, which was a better, more full blooded quality to all the vinyl that followed, plus it’s in mono so the sound is far rockier and punchier than when in stereo. Stereo brings out the melody - something the band never actually had any problem with, but mono highlights their cooler sound. They sound like a real band, knocking it back at the Cavern, or in Hamburg.
Tracks like Please Mr Postman and Money are as good as any singles really. They are just superb.
With the Beatles was released for the Christmas market and coincided with the Big Freeze in the UK where the entire country froze over for months and came to a standstill. You can sort of feel it in the sound, especially with tracks like Devil in Her Heart.
Songs like that seem forgotten generally, as with All I Have To Do and Hold Me Tight (admittedly the prototype for the far better, later (Googles) Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tic song of almost the same
name used by Tarantino in Death Proof.)
Also, the claim this Beatles LP sounds like no other is, while true, hardly a surprise. The band never stood still. Omit any LP from your knowledge and listen to it decades later and you’d get a surprise. Imagine if you’d never heard Revolver! It would knock your socks off. Beatles For Sale doesn’t quite sound like any other to the keen ear, it’s the missing link between A Hard Day’s Night and Help! What other album does Abbey Road sound like? Or the White Album, come to that?
For all that, With the Beatles sounds like more of a time capsule than the others, possibly because some of the songs are the band trying to find what kind of songs they’re actually writing, and those they might discard. As songwriters, they’re not that prolific at this stage - just far more prolific than any other band, not least because they are writing their own songs. Okay, that’s an exaggeration - but there are a fair number of covers here. That doesn’t matter, because of the Beatles’ sound - they Beatle-ify Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson et al. Just as Sinatra would put his own stamp on the standards. But again, while they have the Beatle sound, they don’t have the Beatle songs quite nailed down yet in a way they would the following year. I Want To Be Your Man, for instance, is a song of that year and was gifted to the Stones for the second hit single - I don’t care for it in either guise personally, but it’s not really a Beatles record to my ears. Then again, neither was the McCartney penned A World Without Love, a no 1 for Peter & Gordon the following year. It’s a top tune, but by that time the Beatles had managed to differentiate between a hit song and a Beatles song. The album A Hard Day’s Night - that’s an album of Beatles songs.
Yet you can almost see why movie bosses were chary of shelling out for a Beatles movie, despite or even because of the meteoric success of Beatlemania. Surely something that big a hit, so fast, so soon, might prove unreliable - far more so than the wholesome Cliff Richard. Might it be over as soon as the movie wrapped? That the band wrote their own songs wouldn’t be such an advantage, because who’s to say the well wouldn’t suddenly run dry? Though two numbers from With the Beatles appear in the film (Don’t Bother Me, I Want To Be Your Man), they’re as songs in a club, not performed live by the band. Most of the songs in the film are from the new LP, there are no covers, She Loves You gets a look in but not I Want to Hold Your Hand for some reason. But imagine signing a new Beatles movie without knowing all those songs from A Hard Day’s Night were in the bag. It might seem risky.
You can see why the Beatles hit the States the way they did though in early 64. They wrote so many of their own songs, while making their covers sound their own too. It was like no other band could ever catch up. And by the time they did, the Beatles had vacated that particular stage and moved on to another one.
My sister bought me the Rolling Stones' Hackney Diamonds on vinyl for Christmas and I finally got round to listening to it yesterday.
For some reason, it won't le me upload a picture.
Anyway, it's hard to offer a review either because the vinyl sounds very muted and compressed. You have to turn it up as soon as you put it on - I suppose wanting to turn the volume up when you put a new Stones' album on should be a good thing ordinarily, but not in this context. It's a shame because the Stones are going full throttle, pedal to the metal, but it's almost to no avail, the LP sounds like sex with a condom on, or like it's got a cushion over it.
Charlie's missing save for two tracks of course, maybe they are going full out to make a point. If so, it's a shame the sound isn't full throttle. Charlie's not being there sums up what he brought to the band - a sort of class, a laid-back cool, a bluesy feel that made it R&B rather than straight rock which is what we get here.
McCartney plays bass on one track, Bite My Head Off (I think) though it's really a kind of fuzz box riff that duplicates the main vocal melody, it's okay but when he gets to do it solo and Mick says 'Give us some bass, Paul', well, he doesn't fluff it but it doesn't sound quite on, he doesn't quite step up and own it, unlike his lead guitar solo on Taxman all those years ago.
I'd been playing a few wintery Christmassy singles beforehand so you have to wonder how it is that tracks from Abba, Paul McCartney, Human League, Greg Lake or Hue & Cry some decades old can sound full and fresh when you pick them up for a quid in the local tat shop, while the latest Stones' LP really doesn't.
I am a huge Rolling Stones fan @Napoleon Plural and yet I never even bothered to buy Hackney Diamonds. This band, for all its wonderful history, has been shot for at least two decades. It is easy to say they were never the same since Brian Jones, or Mick Taylor, or Bill Wyman, but there have always been moments after each artist left which suggested there is life after. Charlie Watts I am afraid to say is too big a void to fill. They should rename themselves the Glimmer Twins or something. They did a blues album years ago which was really good, but the Stones haven't touched on anything other than a soft version of basic heavy rock since Undercover had its reggae / disco vibe. I exaggerate a little, but their output has not been up to much for a long time. Those tours and endless vamps of Sympathy for the Devil will always bring in crowds, but while I am amazed at how they defy the odds, the music has been brittle for years. No way back, I am afraid. Thanks for your review.
Well, I was reviewing the vinyl quality as much as anything. What Charlie Watts brought, I seem to realise, is a kind of atmosphere, a sense of place. Hard to pinpoint, but something like Miss You has a feel to it... It ought to feel like it's played live, or recorded in a chateau in the South of France... something. This sounds like it's totally stuck in the studio, though I only played side one.
I don't know how far you go back on this, I liked Steel Wheels a lot at the time - I think Almost Hear You Sigh is a great track and Out of Tears off their follow up Voodoo Lounge was good too. Then again, sigh... Steel Wheels was a bloody long time ago.
I hated Steel Wheels when it came out, thinking it very generic. When I saw the Urban Jungle Tour in 1990 they kicked off with Start Me Up to the obligatory fireworks, then Jagger donned a guitar and the band raced through Sad Sad Sad, Mixed Emotions and Rock & A Hard Place in quick succession. The album, when I next played it, felt very fresh thanksvto this new perspective, but over time it has just become a dull memory. Lyrically it is very poor, with faux romantic poetry alongside sexual and violence images. I haven't played it for years, although it might bevtime for a revisit. For sheer excitement, nothing beats the heavy blues intro to Mercy on Out of Our Heads, which on vinyl seems to have more depth and echo, as if there is air between the volume of notes. Some vinyl sound is extraordinary.
I've recently started adding to my vinyl collection again.
I have every Beatles album now except for Beatles for Sale & Yesterday and Today. I also picked up Canned Wheat and American Woman, by The Guess Who. Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion by Depeche Mode.
Vinyl just sounds so much richer and I'm glad that my kids are now getting into it as well.
Pussy Galore: “My name is Pussy Galore.”
Bond: “I must be dreaming.”
I've been revisiting a 1968 Frank Sinatra album called Cycles.
A few copies were doing the rounds in the charity shops in my high street many years ago but I didn't snap one up because I couldn't see a Sinatra classic on it - some classic songs such as By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Both Sides Now and Little Green Apples but they were made famous by other artists. At the time the number of these dropping made me wonder if there wasn't on a windy plain a huge warehouse of the kind we see at the end of Raiders, loaded with never-sold LPs from decades ago, ready to be offloaded into charity shops when the signal is given. 'Not those Sgt Pepper yellow label stereo LPs Jake - I'm putting them aside for eBay later...'
However, a review on Amazon talked up the song Wandering which opens Side 2 and that really is excellent and one I recommend - a lovely autumnal classic with great orchestration and lovely phrasing by Sinatra, I suggest you look it up on YouTube. True, Sinatra's voice has to dip a little at a couple of points, but it really is very good. After that, I turn the record for track 2 of Side 1 - Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. Sinatra does a speeded up version and initially I thought, well, what tosh, he would have to turn this into a Vegas number, stripping the seriousness out of it, it's almost Austin Powers. Why couldn't he have done a slow version, like Joni does, it's crying out for that? But you know, I'll be damned, listening to it now I can't help getting a tear in my eye, I've really turned around on it - I guess it's a song you just can't mess up, but by singing it fast, it's as if Sinatra is suppressing the emotion and it has a much greater effect, he's holding it in. Perhaps the third classic on this is the title track and it's a proper choon as they say, it closes side 1 but this is where things begin to go slightly awry.
What's wrong with the song Cycles? It was released as a single. It's a bit too wordy for a Sinatra song - though A Very Good Year, released a year earlier, and My Way, recorded around the same time, are also wordy. But those two songs have Sinatra proclaiming - he's laying git down, it's a speech, a monologue. Cycles is more a conversation and I'm not quite sure Sinatra's style lends itself to that. The song is more of a kind by crooners like Val Doonican, Andy Williams or Des O'Connor. More the Irish than the Italian. Even Bing Crosby might put it across better though the lyrics are really too bleak for him. Sinatra tries to interpret this song but it doesn't quite require that. And he doesn't do it right, anyway. He sings of smiling through but as he sings it, he sounds dead beat at the beginning and that gives him nowhere to go. He's dead beat at the end too, singing of how his gal left him and then he got fired. The role doesn't have an arc.
You also have a problem that his voice is now sounding his age - he was around 50 now and that effects the songs you can sing. He sounds older really and how he speaks of getting fired sounds more tragic, plus Sinatra really is leaving that kind of emotional territory - in a few years he's be Chairman of the Board, after all! This is more a song for his Capitol years persona.
The same goes for By The Time I Get To Phoenix, which follows the wonderful Wandering. It's done nicely, it's not his song though. You could argue that Sinatra just wasn't capturing the rhythms of the new generation of songwriters here. Again, it's a wordy song and he doesn't quite get the words out in quite the right way. You saw this on the YouTube clip of Cycles, sung on one of his TV shows - he comes in to early and you see the flash of anger on his face like you sense someone will get the blame for his error later on. The original singer had an emotionless way of putting it over so the sting in the tail - that he isn't going to turn around, he's actually leaving his woman for good - hits hard. Plus, you enjoy the itinerary along the way. Sinatra over interprets it - the orchestration is great btw - but he makes heavy weather of it. The song is a younger man's song - not for a teenager or a guy in his early 20s - that would have you expecting a Mom getting in contact to say 'You better turn around right now buster - we're both very angry about you and we need that vehicle back by Tuesday!' plus he'd be excited about these cities in a way the singer isn't. In fact, his departure would just sound cowardly and a bit unnecessary - can't he dump someone without making a song and dance about it, without leaving town?
No, the song is suited to someone in the first phase of middle age, dodging that bullet. In that context, it's almost heroic - like Jack Nicolson at the end of Five Easy Pieces - but the Sinatra here is too old for that song. He sounds the age where a wife would frankly be glad to have him out of the house and not under her feet. Or older still, like he's escaping from a care home, or Joe Biden losing his special service delegation - 'By the time I get to Oklahoma, I'll realise I've forgotten my medication.. And the Fibregel I'm reliant on to pass each morning's stool... Pretty soon, she'll be contacting Social Services, like she's done, many many times before...'
There are songs that take on a different meaning as a person moves through life.
In fact, this should be a perfect song for the Sinatra of the Capitol years - the salesman and actually the song Cycles now I think about it is the flip side to his song That's Life, done around this time. And it's perfect for Sinatra, who is known to have ditched friends and lovers quite ruthlessly when he wanted (Peter Lawford and Lauren Bacall, for instance among many). Thing is, this was not the Sinatra persona and he preferred to sing of breakups and unrequited loves - at his upbeat he never did the dirty on lovers if I recall. It might be a bit close to home, he didn't like to promote that side. So this song is not a good fit for that reason - except it dawns on me that he is looking to reinterpret it as a sad, regretful song rather than the wistful bit of sociopathy it originally is - he's trying to use it to apologise for his past behaviour to lovers, perhaps? Unfortunately, as with Cycles, the song has nowhere to go emotionally - he sounds regretful at the outset and he is still a t the end.
Sinatra disliked My Way because it bigged him up as the man not to be crossed - while he was very often like this in real life, he really didn't like to project that image in public. Yet like 'Phoenix' both are escapist songs for a certain type of guy who can listen to them and imagine he really is walking out on his nagging or oppressive wife/really is a big shot who kneeled before no one.
Others? If you wondered what Sinatra's Bond theme would have been like, try My Way Of Life which sounds very much like The World Is Not Enough, it's okay, it's a Vegas number. Really, the Bond songs are too silly for Sinatra because they're largely meaningless - you need someone with a smooth vocal or big voice and a big camp sound to sell it, or you don't have anything. Its main verse reminds me of the song by the Welsh 90s singer detailing how much she liked giving her boyfriend head. I can find it for you if you like. Here's the Sinatra song:
Moody River just chugs along, it's another Vegas song, from a time when airport departure lounges were glamorous. It doesn't go well with the folksy feel of the other numbers - Little Green Apples isn't done badly, it's nicely sung but as with Gentle On My Mind you feel Sinatra struggles with these wordy numbers.
I never cared for him doing the covers he did mostly. I'd prefer to here him do the Beatles I Will or even Julia or Sexy Sadie than the likes of Yesterday or Something. I'd like to have heard him do the Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want - but again, it's a young man's song about hope - Sinatra could have done it, he was alive for a good few years after its release but it's a King Lear song at that age isn't it. Not an inappropriate one though given his family circumstances at the time. Marlene could have done Soft Cell's Say Hello Wave Goodbye... I suppose thanks to AI we can hear them do this anyway.
I don't know how you evaluate an album these days. In the Wee Small Hours or Songs for Swinging Lovers (not the kind of swinging you read about in yesterday's Times magazine) are better but I only play two songs off this and it's the one I dip into more often.
The sound quality on the original vinyl - and I must stress this should be purchased on vinyl if at all - is impeccable.
Great review @Napoleon Plural I played this once [CD I am afraid to say] and it is mediocre at best. Sinatra and Tony Bennett both got embroiled in singing modern pop songs with lounge arrangements. It just doesn't work.
Forgot to mention that on the back cover there are pictures of Sinatra meeting George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, a year before Harrision would record the song that Sinatra covered, calling it the best love song of the last 30 years or something though attributing it to Lennon & McCartney. He's also shown with Joan Baez, it all seems pleasant enough though it's like he's trying to be down with the kids a bit and imo on some of this album though not enough by any means he sort of gets there a bit but it's 'last chance trendy' mode. Odd to think he was almost in vogue, he was doing the Tony Rome detective movies but in a few years he acquired that new weight and an angry 'get your scooters off my lawn' expression. This is the album Nancy Sinatra says she likes the best of his, not sure if he'd split up with Mia Farrow by this point.
That Hammer film you and @Barbel like Twins of Evil is on channel 69 Horror channel now btw
Thanks @Napoleon Plural, although I've got a copy of it now (in a box set with Vampire Circus and Countess Dracula).
Cycles is one of Sinatra's weaker albums, and that's a good review. I don't play it much, there are far better albums of his. These days I prefer his Colombia recordings when he was younger.
By way of balance, I happened up on this review of Hackney Diamonds while trying to find a review for the newly released McCartney and Wings documentary One Hand Clapping and found this very positive one from a reviewer who is not given to posting positive reviews (he hates most of Macca's solo stuff).
I've been stuck listening to stuff on YouTube as my hi-fi system has gone awry.
I've replaced the needle and tape thing (can't recall its name) and it's better but I think the sound is wrong with the speakers, as the playing now seems muted.
I think the speaker cables need replacing but this is where there is a problem - on amazon and the like you can buy them - I need the ones with the thin wires you sort of insert into the holes, taking care to get the + and - cables into the right holes - but when I do a search, they're all 10m or 20m long. I mean, why would you need them that long? Three metres is about the max, are we meant to cut them down to size? Why can we buy them like we did when the came with the speakers back in the day, erm, 20 years or more ago?
Comments
Hmm, now you've got me wanting some of these US Beatles albums! What about the vinyl quality back then - were they as good as the yellow Parlophone LPs? Were they released in mono, generally held to be better?
Help! was the one US abomination of course - part of it was soundtrack music from the movie, not Beatle songs I understand.
Magical Mystery Tour is one area where the US got lucky. In the UK, the Beatles didn't like putting singles out on albums because it was felt it forced fans to buy the same song twice. But it's good to have Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and I am the Walrus there, among others. I read somewhere that this album did almost as well in sales in the US as Sgt Pepper, and those sales were through the roof.
Did MMT get shown on telly in the States? Was it at Christmas and get the same blown raspberry in response?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
For fans of a certain mind, you may want to check out this highly entertaining YouTube clip - McCartney albums ranked from worst to best. Quite an easygoing, easy on the eye presenter, not unlike our 'own' Calvin Dyson, talks you through the decades, though you have to wonder how old he was when some of these were released as he's quite fresh-faced. Lots of info here that I wasn't aware of....
The presenter's tastes lean more to the whimsical Macca than mine do and I can't get around a review of Tug of War that doesn't reference his excellent song Wanderlust, but there you go.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks Napoleon Plural, I'll definitely check this out. There are many gaps in my knowledge of McCartney's albums. I know most of the Wings releases and very familiar with Tug of War, I've listened to Egypt Station...but I'm keen to explore further.
Yes, very interesting.
Will be checking your recommendation out in the near future, NP…I’m pretty conversant with Macca’s stuff but I’m always happy to listen to others informed opinions 🍸
It’s not the last Beatles album I bought, but I thought I’d say something about their second LP, With the Beatles.
This is a remarkable album.
‘Why’s it remarkable, NP?’ I hear you ask.
Well, I’m knocking on a bit and am a massive Beatles fan but only recently did I buy and listen to this LP for the first time. That’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like being a Bond fan and only decades down the line bothering to watch the second Bond film, From Russia With Love. Not quite the same, as of course that’s now on every few weeks on telly it seems, whereas you have to make the effort to buy and listen to an LP, but still.
With the Beatles is a famous, iconic looking LP - when they show clips of US fans burning their LPs in reaction to Lennon’s ‘the Beatles are bigger than Christ’ comment, this one stands out on the stark black and white footage.
Of course, it’s named Meet the Beatles in the US and has slightly different tracks on it, making it arguably an even better album.
I should emphasise that the review I’m giving is for the UK release AND is for the original vinyl LP in mono and on the Yellow Parlophone label. I wouldn’t bother with getting it on CD and in stereo.
Why is this LP overlooked?
Well, firstly, it doesn’t have any no 1 singles on it, in fact no singles at all. Its predecessor in the UK, Please Please Me, has the title track and Love Me Do. Singles released around the time of With the Beatles include From Me to You and She Loves You - but they’re not on the album.
As Paul McCartney later explained, this was to avoid fans feeling a bit cheated that in buying the LP, they’d be getting songs they actually already had, having bought them as a single, given the finite concept of pocket money back then. Buy the LP, you’d get 12 or so shiny new songs, no repeats!
More cynically, it’s a way to ensure your LP gets to no 1 - and your single. A doting parent gifting their kid a Beatles LP for Christmas would not be tempted to sell them short by buying the single instead, likewise the well-off Beatle fan would not be forgoing the single given that it’s not on the LP.
Now, it's only just occurred to me that this pattern of ensuring every alternate LP - usually timed for the Christmas market - would not have any singles released from it would continue for much of the decade.
Please Please Me (1963) - the title track and Love Me Do.
With the Beatles (1963) - no singles.
From Me to You, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand are all singles.
A Hard Day’s Night (1964) - the title track and Can’t Buy Me Love.
Beatles for Sale (1964) - no singles. (I Feel Fine released as a single.)
Help! (1965) - the title track and Ticket to Ride.
Rubber Soul (1965) - no singles. We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper a double A single
Paperback Writer released as a single.
Revolver (1966) - Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine.
Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane released as a single, extracted from upcoming Sgt Pepper to fill a gap. It’s the first not to reach no 1 in the UK.
Sgt Pepper (1967) - no singles.
All You Need Is Love released as a single.
The White Album (1968) - no singles.
Hey Jude and Lady Madonna released as singles.
Get Back and Let It Be released as singles.
Abbey Road (1970) - no singles.
Let It Be (1970) - The Long and Winding Road.
Some things to notice here. By the time we get to 66, the formula is breaking up a bit. Only one single comes from Revolver and there’s the sense they are hedging their bets. Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine are both classic songs but would either on their own be a guaranteed No 1? Possibly not, hence their release as a double A side, to ensure the Beatles’ pop star infallibility is undimmed. Put another way, no cool teenager would ever buy that single unless they were already a Beatles fan, there is nothing there for them.
Beatle biographer Philip Norman is not altogether reliable and wrote in Shout! that Paperback Writer caused some scratched heads after fans bought it and it went straight to No 1, due to its lyrics about ‘a man named Lear’ and so on. He seems to be correct. Personally I think it’s a great record, esp in mono when it is faster and punkier. It is a Beatle record that could be 10 years ahead of its time, it could be played alongside stuff by The Jam, The Police or the Pretenders and not be out of place, the same goes for its B-side Rain, which some see as a precursor to Oasis. But in a rundown of the top selling records of 1966 in the US on YouTube, you find Paperback Writer at 33, outsold all manner of forgettable dross. The Stones’ Paint It Black - which is not dross - is in the teens.
In fact, it’s a real eye-opener to take this whistle stop tour of the US hit parade that year. It’s like some mad alternative nostalgia.
In the top 5 you have The Association with a song called Cherish. I know the band only because of their brilliant song Windy, which opens an episode of Breaking Bad in which a skanky prostitute called Wendy is shown giving head to various locals in various parked cars. But I’ve never heard this song Cherish and given it was big in the US, that makes it massive. Listening to it, you don’t think, ‘Wow, where has this been all my life?’ On YouTube comments you have couples saying, ooh, we danced to this cheek to cheek and now we’ve been married for decades, which is fair enough. I can’t think of many or any Beatles songs you’d slow dance to. Nor even get up and pull to at a party, frankly. There’s an onanistic vibe to the Beatles, I mean even Beatlemania is a sea of teenage girls screaming, you don’t see any young lads there, if they do they look a bit sheepish. Blokes do seem to write an awful lot of books about the Beatles when they could be doing something else - a lengthy review of a decades old Bond film, for instance.
There’s a song in the Top 5 of that year called 96 Tears by Blofeld and the Mysterians - didn’t the Stranglers cover that to no great commercial effect a decade plus later? It doesn’t sound that amazing. Who the hell is Paul Revere & the Raiders? Did he ever make it over here?
He was another act streets ahead of the Beatles in the hit parade that year, according to some charts. But there is a suspicion, only just dawning on me, that if you put on his record at a party and danced to it, you’d be the star of your own life, living your teenage years. Put on a Beatles record, and you’re almost never the star, rather you’re the person celebrating what a great band the Beatles are, which isn’t quite the same. You’d be the audiophile thinking, isn’t this single fantastic, what a great vocal, while you later find out the tone deaf bloke copped off with Suzy Slater in the guest bedroom.
Still, you’d imagine the Beatles would be right at the top of the biggest sellers of 1966 in the US and they’re not, it’s a load of stuff you’ve mostly never heard of or never thought was that big a deal - the Mama and the Papas’s Monday, Monday, or California Dreaming. Simon and Garfunkel feature a lot but most of the other bands like I say, it’s looking through someone else’s photo album. It makes you suspect that nostalgia is almost a fictional narrative, or at any rate highly selective. I mean, we have a piano only cover version of Born Free by Roger Williams at no 12 - outselling Nancy Sinatra’s brilliant These Boots Are Made For Walking. How? There’s a Righteous Brothers song in the top 5 I’ve never, ever heard of. And then there’s Barry Sadler with his Ballad of the Green Berets, I suppose our equivalent was the late - at the time - Jim Reeves and Distant Drums, also about the best-selling record of the year, which as Craig Brown pointed out, shows that while we remember the era as the counter-culture, in fact the likes of Ken Dodd, a newly staid Frank Sinatra and Engelbert Humperdinck were mainstays among an older generation who sought reassurance.
Accounts of the best-sellers of 1966 in the USA vary a bit - one has We Can Work It Out at no 16. Still, compare with the UK, where Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Sub is at no 3 in the entire year, and the Fabs overall have three songs in the Top 20.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Most oddly, the Monkees’ debut single Last Train to Clarksville owes a lot to Paperback Writer and was released a good few months later - and in the US, that was the 4th best selling record of the year, then again it had a TV show to promote it. According to its Wiki page, the writer cheerfully admits to basing it on Paperback Writer, claiming he misheard the title as ‘Take the last train’ which I can’t really see. As if in revenge for ripping off their band, the single didn’t even make the Top 20 in the UK, albeit it was released in 67 somewhat belatedly.
This was the first time the band wasn’t writing about boy meets girl stuff - indeed on Revolver you have to wait five songs in til you get to such a thing. Until then, they’re singing about tax, loneliness, idleness, spiritual love (or whatever) and even Here, There and Everything is not your usual fill the dance floor number.
Day Tripper is a funky number (it would be funkier with a dance floor drummer like Charlie Watts on it, or even Keith Moon) but other than that the Beatles went an awful long time not putting out singles that would appeal to boy-obsessed teenage girls, I mean after Paperback Writer you have Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane, then All You Need Is Love. These are not teenage dance floor hits. But by this time, the Beatles’ Revolver suggested that the album was really where it was at, where they would be showcasing their best material, while the singles were almost mere promos to keep the band’s name out there.
Incidentally, 1966 is oft cited as the best year for pop and while this may be true of the UK, a look at the same YouTube clip for 1967’s top US hits suggests this was a far better year for America though not for the Beatles. In fact, 68 and 69 saw them do better, with Hey Jude cited as the best seller of the year in the US, and Come Together in the Top 10 of the year in 69.
Altogether it signifies that US pop culture just wasn’t quite the same as in the UK, in many ways it seems far looser and a lot more fun, but with a bit of dross slipping through as well. I could go on all night looking at the Billboard charts - who knew that Lennon’s Instant Karma outsold the Beatles’ The Long and Winding Road in 1970? That Wings’ My Love was the fifth best selling record of 1973 in the US, when it didn’t make no 1 in the UK? Easily outselling Live and Let Die, which was in the early 50s?
Another observation is - would some of these single-less LPs be improved with hindsight had they included the No 1 singles? Certainly the US version Meet the Beatles is arguably better, kicking off with I Want To Hold Your Hand, then the earlier LP track I Saw Her Standing There, plus B-side That Boy.
The thing is, the keen fan finds it hard to say for sure. Beatles for Sale generally has an American vibe, it was the first album they did after they’d really conquered America and basically they invent the Byrds on it, with jangley guitar on tracks like What You’re Doing, Words of Love and Every Little Thing. It just has a slight country and western vibe on it too. The single of the time - I Feel Fine backed with what can only be a B-side She’s a Woman - doesn’t quite fit, it somehow feels very British. What’s more, it seems to be that the concurrent singles just aren’t produced quite as lavishly as tracks on the album. I don’t know why. Maybe because singles are just recorded in a day whereas album tracks can be revisited and tweaked during the course of a few weeks?
In theory, Rubber Soul might even better with the double A side Day Tripper and We Can Work it Out on it. But they just don’t seem quite as well produced as tracks on that LP. What would you drop? Where would they fit?
Ditto, Paperback Writer ought to improve Revolver. Again, you can tell it’s from the same era, it’s the same sound. But I can’t quite see it fitting. Tracks from Revolver seem stark and monochrome like the LP cover. Paperback Writer seems navy blue to me. It’s all in the mind perhaps, but…
Nobody would argue that Sgt Pepper would be improved by having All You Need Is Love or Baby You’re A Rich Man on it - that said personally I can’t easily get behind Harrison’s song on it, I’d sooner kick off in practice with the single. And I’ve never got hold of a decent sounding copy of that LP save Side 1 of the Beatles Blue album, which starts with Strawberry Fields and ends with All You Need Is Love, with Pepper all in between.
I can’t place Hey Jude on the White Album. Or Lady Madonna.
The Beatles’ value for money thing harmed the Let It Be release in my view. I’ve come round to this LP, it feels really adult and autumnal, a real glass of Malbec album. But as with virtually all Beatles LP, it can’t be perfect and the track I’d ditch is the clanging buskers disgrace, One After 909, in favour of Lennon’s Don’t Let Me Down - not included simply because it was the B-side to an already released single.
The tendency to not put previous single releases on new LPs seemed to continue on Paul McCartney’s releases into the 70s - neither My Love nor Live and Let Die are on Red Rose Speedway or Band on the Run, the latter in the UK does not include the single Helen Wheels, likewise Mull of Kintyre was not on any LP release, helping it become the biggest seller ever in the UK in 77/78 and wholly unknown in the US where it didn’t sell very well.
Anyway! That’s one reason why With the Beatles wasn’t too well known to me - it doesn’t have any famous No 1 singles on it.
What I’ll also point out is, With the Beatles doesn’t sound like any other Beatles record. It’s got that missing link feel to it.
In a way, the Beatles were trying to find their way. Not their sound as such. But what kind of songs they want to do. As I’ve suggested, From Me To You and She Loves You may have been No 1s, but they don’t sound like they’d fit on this album at all, which is largely R&B.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The same evening I wrote this I caught an evening on BBC2 devoted to Frank Sinatra, and at one point it was mentioned that in the 1950s with Capitol he began - along with others - to create albums devoted to a particular mood. So one might be uplifting and swinging - Come Fly With Me, for instance, and you generally ensure you stick with that and don’t break it, while another - In The Wee Small Hours, for instance, with be steeped in melancholy. Likewise, each Beatle album seemed to have its own particular sound and place in time and it appears that just lobbing on the current single might upset that.
You could argue this LP heralds the true sound of the Beatles in a way its debut does not. Please Please Me was recorded in a single day, amazingly. Their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann told them he liked it but was disappointed in some ways because it didn’t capture the rawness of their live performance. (Voormann is a bit of a legend, he went on to design the cover of Revolver, played bass on John’s Plastic Ono Band - and on Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain, and in the early 80s produced Trio’s No 1 hit Da Da Da. He was the one who introduced the band to his friend Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer who dated Beatle Stu Sutcliffe and took the iconic black and white photos of them in Hamburg, and encouraged them to comb their hair forwards. You’d think it was Astrid who’d taken the LP cover given its look, but it wasn’t).
But you sense that much of With the Beatles fulfils Voormann's brief, if you want to call it that, quite easily. They have the time to do what they want on this, being an established successful band.
A lot of this sounds like no other Beatles album, however. The opener, the frenetic It Won’t be Long, sounds like Frans Ferdinand. If you ever thought Crowded House sounded like the Beatles but couldn’t place how, well All I’ve Got To Do fits the bill That said, All My Loving is a straight down the line Beatle classic it’s true - and would so easily have been a no 1 had it been released.
Harrison’s Don’t Bother Me sounds like a real mod outfit, like Who prototype The High Numbers. Little Child sounds like the sort of thing again another band might do - say Billy J Kramer, maybe he did. Tracks like Hold Me Tight also have that ‘not quite the Beatles, might be somebody else’ feel to them.
Harrison’s song is a revelation, or rather the record, It feels like a real ensemble piece, like they’re really going for it. Of course, at the time the feeling might have been, this is our second LP so let’s not leave it to chance. If George has a song, let’s kill it! That is, maximise it. It is a blistering bit of R&B and rarely do you get the sense on his other tracks - be they on Help or Rubber Soul or Revolver - that they’re really getting behind him as a band, but here you do.
Macca has confessed they often used to rip off other songs and improve them, if so you wonder if it was wise to have Little Child right next to the cover Til There was You, given the phrase ‘There were bells, on a hill’ is melodically an identical jumping off point to ‘Little Child, little child..’
The odd thing about this LP is, you’d struggle to imagine Side 1 is so great, going through the song list. But it really swings. I find it simply more enjoyable than Side 1 of Sgt Pepper or even Revolver. Or any of them. I don’t say it’s better. Just more enjoyable. On other Beatle LPs there are a couple of ‘eat your greens’ tracks, or songs you have to humour. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is an eat your greens track. So is Love To You. Tracks you have to humour might include Yellow Submarine. You get this on all the albums really. The thing about Wings’ Band on the Run is that it’s one album where I love every track, I skip nothing.
I mean, Little Child which I assumed was sung by Ringo when it’a actually John is a load of crap, it really is. It’s almost as bad as that early 60s criminal record by Mike Same featuring Hard Day’s Night reject Wendy Richard, ‘Come Outside’. And yet, when it comes on, it sounds great, it really rolls along, there’s nothing wrong with it.
But the reason this LP has to be good is, it’s their second one. They can’t afford to take chances. It has to land.
I was exaggerating when I said I hadn’t heard this LP before. Many songs I’d heard due to buying a compilation LP - well, two of them - in the mid 80s; the Rock N Roll compilations Vol 1 and 2, originally released as a double LP, to capitalise on the trend for all things 1950s, though the artwork annoyed the now solo Beatles, who complained it looked cheap, pointing out they were never a 50s band anyway - indeed, it’s at odds with the tasteful cover for With the Beatles and Lennon suggested they use some of Astrid Kirshner’s photos of them.
This compilation was a neat way for the impecunious teenage fan to get hold of tracks that would otherwise mean shelling out for numerous LPs such as Revolver, the White Album etc - you could snaffle obscure tracks like Helter Skelter, Hey Bulldog, I’m Down, Taxman and Got To Get You Into My Life etc (though inclusions such as The Night Before off Help seemed a bit odd - it’s not terribly rocky is it).
Tracks from With the Beatles included It Won’t Be Long, I Want To Be Your Man, Please Mr Postman, You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me, Money (That’s What I Want) and Roll Over Beethoven. As Tony Hancock might say, that’s very nearly half an album!
According to Wiki, George Martin had a hand in remixing the stereo versions for the US Capitol release, narrowing the stereo for some tracks, and while this was vetoed for the first UK release on contractual grounds, the albums I got in the 1980s are those same versions.
What made my vintage early pressing of With the Beatles better, however, is that it is on the Yellow Parlophone label, which was a better, more full blooded quality to all the vinyl that followed, plus it’s in mono so the sound is far rockier and punchier than when in stereo. Stereo brings out the melody - something the band never actually had any problem with, but mono highlights their cooler sound. They sound like a real band, knocking it back at the Cavern, or in Hamburg.
Tracks like Please Mr Postman and Money are as good as any singles really. They are just superb.
With the Beatles was released for the Christmas market and coincided with the Big Freeze in the UK where the entire country froze over for months and came to a standstill. You can sort of feel it in the sound, especially with tracks like Devil in Her Heart.
Songs like that seem forgotten generally, as with All I Have To Do and Hold Me Tight (admittedly the prototype for the far better, later (Googles) Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tic song of almost the same
name used by Tarantino in Death Proof.)
Also, the claim this Beatles LP sounds like no other is, while true, hardly a surprise. The band never stood still. Omit any LP from your knowledge and listen to it decades later and you’d get a surprise. Imagine if you’d never heard Revolver! It would knock your socks off. Beatles For Sale doesn’t quite sound like any other to the keen ear, it’s the missing link between A Hard Day’s Night and Help! What other album does Abbey Road sound like? Or the White Album, come to that?
For all that, With the Beatles sounds like more of a time capsule than the others, possibly because some of the songs are the band trying to find what kind of songs they’re actually writing, and those they might discard. As songwriters, they’re not that prolific at this stage - just far more prolific than any other band, not least because they are writing their own songs. Okay, that’s an exaggeration - but there are a fair number of covers here. That doesn’t matter, because of the Beatles’ sound - they Beatle-ify Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson et al. Just as Sinatra would put his own stamp on the standards. But again, while they have the Beatle sound, they don’t have the Beatle songs quite nailed down yet in a way they would the following year. I Want To Be Your Man, for instance, is a song of that year and was gifted to the Stones for the second hit single - I don’t care for it in either guise personally, but it’s not really a Beatles record to my ears. Then again, neither was the McCartney penned A World Without Love, a no 1 for Peter & Gordon the following year. It’s a top tune, but by that time the Beatles had managed to differentiate between a hit song and a Beatles song. The album A Hard Day’s Night - that’s an album of Beatles songs.
Yet you can almost see why movie bosses were chary of shelling out for a Beatles movie, despite or even because of the meteoric success of Beatlemania. Surely something that big a hit, so fast, so soon, might prove unreliable - far more so than the wholesome Cliff Richard. Might it be over as soon as the movie wrapped? That the band wrote their own songs wouldn’t be such an advantage, because who’s to say the well wouldn’t suddenly run dry? Though two numbers from With the Beatles appear in the film (Don’t Bother Me, I Want To Be Your Man), they’re as songs in a club, not performed live by the band. Most of the songs in the film are from the new LP, there are no covers, She Loves You gets a look in but not I Want to Hold Your Hand for some reason. But imagine signing a new Beatles movie without knowing all those songs from A Hard Day’s Night were in the bag. It might seem risky.
You can see why the Beatles hit the States the way they did though in early 64. They wrote so many of their own songs, while making their covers sound their own too. It was like no other band could ever catch up. And by the time they did, the Beatles had vacated that particular stage and moved on to another one.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
My sister bought me the Rolling Stones' Hackney Diamonds on vinyl for Christmas and I finally got round to listening to it yesterday.
For some reason, it won't le me upload a picture.
Anyway, it's hard to offer a review either because the vinyl sounds very muted and compressed. You have to turn it up as soon as you put it on - I suppose wanting to turn the volume up when you put a new Stones' album on should be a good thing ordinarily, but not in this context. It's a shame because the Stones are going full throttle, pedal to the metal, but it's almost to no avail, the LP sounds like sex with a condom on, or like it's got a cushion over it.
Charlie's missing save for two tracks of course, maybe they are going full out to make a point. If so, it's a shame the sound isn't full throttle. Charlie's not being there sums up what he brought to the band - a sort of class, a laid-back cool, a bluesy feel that made it R&B rather than straight rock which is what we get here.
McCartney plays bass on one track, Bite My Head Off (I think) though it's really a kind of fuzz box riff that duplicates the main vocal melody, it's okay but when he gets to do it solo and Mick says 'Give us some bass, Paul', well, he doesn't fluff it but it doesn't sound quite on, he doesn't quite step up and own it, unlike his lead guitar solo on Taxman all those years ago.
I'd been playing a few wintery Christmassy singles beforehand so you have to wonder how it is that tracks from Abba, Paul McCartney, Human League, Greg Lake or Hue & Cry some decades old can sound full and fresh when you pick them up for a quid in the local tat shop, while the latest Stones' LP really doesn't.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I am a huge Rolling Stones fan @Napoleon Plural and yet I never even bothered to buy Hackney Diamonds. This band, for all its wonderful history, has been shot for at least two decades. It is easy to say they were never the same since Brian Jones, or Mick Taylor, or Bill Wyman, but there have always been moments after each artist left which suggested there is life after. Charlie Watts I am afraid to say is too big a void to fill. They should rename themselves the Glimmer Twins or something. They did a blues album years ago which was really good, but the Stones haven't touched on anything other than a soft version of basic heavy rock since Undercover had its reggae / disco vibe. I exaggerate a little, but their output has not been up to much for a long time. Those tours and endless vamps of Sympathy for the Devil will always bring in crowds, but while I am amazed at how they defy the odds, the music has been brittle for years. No way back, I am afraid. Thanks for your review.
Well, I was reviewing the vinyl quality as much as anything. What Charlie Watts brought, I seem to realise, is a kind of atmosphere, a sense of place. Hard to pinpoint, but something like Miss You has a feel to it... It ought to feel like it's played live, or recorded in a chateau in the South of France... something. This sounds like it's totally stuck in the studio, though I only played side one.
I don't know how far you go back on this, I liked Steel Wheels a lot at the time - I think Almost Hear You Sigh is a great track and Out of Tears off their follow up Voodoo Lounge was good too. Then again, sigh... Steel Wheels was a bloody long time ago.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I hated Steel Wheels when it came out, thinking it very generic. When I saw the Urban Jungle Tour in 1990 they kicked off with Start Me Up to the obligatory fireworks, then Jagger donned a guitar and the band raced through Sad Sad Sad, Mixed Emotions and Rock & A Hard Place in quick succession. The album, when I next played it, felt very fresh thanksvto this new perspective, but over time it has just become a dull memory. Lyrically it is very poor, with faux romantic poetry alongside sexual and violence images. I haven't played it for years, although it might bevtime for a revisit. For sheer excitement, nothing beats the heavy blues intro to Mercy on Out of Our Heads, which on vinyl seems to have more depth and echo, as if there is air between the volume of notes. Some vinyl sound is extraordinary.
I've recently started adding to my vinyl collection again.
I have every Beatles album now except for Beatles for Sale & Yesterday and Today. I also picked up Canned Wheat and American Woman, by The Guess Who. Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion by Depeche Mode.
Vinyl just sounds so much richer and I'm glad that my kids are now getting into it as well.
Bond: “I must be dreaming.”
I've been revisiting a 1968 Frank Sinatra album called Cycles.
A few copies were doing the rounds in the charity shops in my high street many years ago but I didn't snap one up because I couldn't see a Sinatra classic on it - some classic songs such as By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Both Sides Now and Little Green Apples but they were made famous by other artists. At the time the number of these dropping made me wonder if there wasn't on a windy plain a huge warehouse of the kind we see at the end of Raiders, loaded with never-sold LPs from decades ago, ready to be offloaded into charity shops when the signal is given. 'Not those Sgt Pepper yellow label stereo LPs Jake - I'm putting them aside for eBay later...'
However, a review on Amazon talked up the song Wandering which opens Side 2 and that really is excellent and one I recommend - a lovely autumnal classic with great orchestration and lovely phrasing by Sinatra, I suggest you look it up on YouTube. True, Sinatra's voice has to dip a little at a couple of points, but it really is very good. After that, I turn the record for track 2 of Side 1 - Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. Sinatra does a speeded up version and initially I thought, well, what tosh, he would have to turn this into a Vegas number, stripping the seriousness out of it, it's almost Austin Powers. Why couldn't he have done a slow version, like Joni does, it's crying out for that? But you know, I'll be damned, listening to it now I can't help getting a tear in my eye, I've really turned around on it - I guess it's a song you just can't mess up, but by singing it fast, it's as if Sinatra is suppressing the emotion and it has a much greater effect, he's holding it in. Perhaps the third classic on this is the title track and it's a proper choon as they say, it closes side 1 but this is where things begin to go slightly awry.
What's wrong with the song Cycles? It was released as a single. It's a bit too wordy for a Sinatra song - though A Very Good Year, released a year earlier, and My Way, recorded around the same time, are also wordy. But those two songs have Sinatra proclaiming - he's laying git down, it's a speech, a monologue. Cycles is more a conversation and I'm not quite sure Sinatra's style lends itself to that. The song is more of a kind by crooners like Val Doonican, Andy Williams or Des O'Connor. More the Irish than the Italian. Even Bing Crosby might put it across better though the lyrics are really too bleak for him. Sinatra tries to interpret this song but it doesn't quite require that. And he doesn't do it right, anyway. He sings of smiling through but as he sings it, he sounds dead beat at the beginning and that gives him nowhere to go. He's dead beat at the end too, singing of how his gal left him and then he got fired. The role doesn't have an arc.
You also have a problem that his voice is now sounding his age - he was around 50 now and that effects the songs you can sing. He sounds older really and how he speaks of getting fired sounds more tragic, plus Sinatra really is leaving that kind of emotional territory - in a few years he's be Chairman of the Board, after all! This is more a song for his Capitol years persona.
The same goes for By The Time I Get To Phoenix, which follows the wonderful Wandering. It's done nicely, it's not his song though. You could argue that Sinatra just wasn't capturing the rhythms of the new generation of songwriters here. Again, it's a wordy song and he doesn't quite get the words out in quite the right way. You saw this on the YouTube clip of Cycles, sung on one of his TV shows - he comes in to early and you see the flash of anger on his face like you sense someone will get the blame for his error later on. The original singer had an emotionless way of putting it over so the sting in the tail - that he isn't going to turn around, he's actually leaving his woman for good - hits hard. Plus, you enjoy the itinerary along the way. Sinatra over interprets it - the orchestration is great btw - but he makes heavy weather of it. The song is a younger man's song - not for a teenager or a guy in his early 20s - that would have you expecting a Mom getting in contact to say 'You better turn around right now buster - we're both very angry about you and we need that vehicle back by Tuesday!' plus he'd be excited about these cities in a way the singer isn't. In fact, his departure would just sound cowardly and a bit unnecessary - can't he dump someone without making a song and dance about it, without leaving town?
No, the song is suited to someone in the first phase of middle age, dodging that bullet. In that context, it's almost heroic - like Jack Nicolson at the end of Five Easy Pieces - but the Sinatra here is too old for that song. He sounds the age where a wife would frankly be glad to have him out of the house and not under her feet. Or older still, like he's escaping from a care home, or Joe Biden losing his special service delegation - 'By the time I get to Oklahoma, I'll realise I've forgotten my medication.. And the Fibregel I'm reliant on to pass each morning's stool... Pretty soon, she'll be contacting Social Services, like she's done, many many times before...'
There are songs that take on a different meaning as a person moves through life.
In fact, this should be a perfect song for the Sinatra of the Capitol years - the salesman and actually the song Cycles now I think about it is the flip side to his song That's Life, done around this time. And it's perfect for Sinatra, who is known to have ditched friends and lovers quite ruthlessly when he wanted (Peter Lawford and Lauren Bacall, for instance among many). Thing is, this was not the Sinatra persona and he preferred to sing of breakups and unrequited loves - at his upbeat he never did the dirty on lovers if I recall. It might be a bit close to home, he didn't like to promote that side. So this song is not a good fit for that reason - except it dawns on me that he is looking to reinterpret it as a sad, regretful song rather than the wistful bit of sociopathy it originally is - he's trying to use it to apologise for his past behaviour to lovers, perhaps? Unfortunately, as with Cycles, the song has nowhere to go emotionally - he sounds regretful at the outset and he is still a t the end.
Sinatra disliked My Way because it bigged him up as the man not to be crossed - while he was very often like this in real life, he really didn't like to project that image in public. Yet like 'Phoenix' both are escapist songs for a certain type of guy who can listen to them and imagine he really is walking out on his nagging or oppressive wife/really is a big shot who kneeled before no one.
Others? If you wondered what Sinatra's Bond theme would have been like, try My Way Of Life which sounds very much like The World Is Not Enough, it's okay, it's a Vegas number. Really, the Bond songs are too silly for Sinatra because they're largely meaningless - you need someone with a smooth vocal or big voice and a big camp sound to sell it, or you don't have anything. Its main verse reminds me of the song by the Welsh 90s singer detailing how much she liked giving her boyfriend head. I can find it for you if you like. Here's the Sinatra song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3r7GD0R56s
Moody River just chugs along, it's another Vegas song, from a time when airport departure lounges were glamorous. It doesn't go well with the folksy feel of the other numbers - Little Green Apples isn't done badly, it's nicely sung but as with Gentle On My Mind you feel Sinatra struggles with these wordy numbers.
I never cared for him doing the covers he did mostly. I'd prefer to here him do the Beatles I Will or even Julia or Sexy Sadie than the likes of Yesterday or Something. I'd like to have heard him do the Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want - but again, it's a young man's song about hope - Sinatra could have done it, he was alive for a good few years after its release but it's a King Lear song at that age isn't it. Not an inappropriate one though given his family circumstances at the time. Marlene could have done Soft Cell's Say Hello Wave Goodbye... I suppose thanks to AI we can hear them do this anyway.
I don't know how you evaluate an album these days. In the Wee Small Hours or Songs for Swinging Lovers (not the kind of swinging you read about in yesterday's Times magazine) are better but I only play two songs off this and it's the one I dip into more often.
The sound quality on the original vinyl - and I must stress this should be purchased on vinyl if at all - is impeccable.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Great review @Napoleon Plural I played this once [CD I am afraid to say] and it is mediocre at best. Sinatra and Tony Bennett both got embroiled in singing modern pop songs with lounge arrangements. It just doesn't work.
Forgot to mention that on the back cover there are pictures of Sinatra meeting George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, a year before Harrision would record the song that Sinatra covered, calling it the best love song of the last 30 years or something though attributing it to Lennon & McCartney. He's also shown with Joan Baez, it all seems pleasant enough though it's like he's trying to be down with the kids a bit and imo on some of this album though not enough by any means he sort of gets there a bit but it's 'last chance trendy' mode. Odd to think he was almost in vogue, he was doing the Tony Rome detective movies but in a few years he acquired that new weight and an angry 'get your scooters off my lawn' expression. This is the album Nancy Sinatra says she likes the best of his, not sure if he'd split up with Mia Farrow by this point.
That Hammer film you and @Barbel like Twins of Evil is on channel 69 Horror channel now btw
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks @Napoleon Plural, although I've got a copy of it now (in a box set with Vampire Circus and Countess Dracula).
Cycles is one of Sinatra's weaker albums, and that's a good review. I don't play it much, there are far better albums of his. These days I prefer his Colombia recordings when he was younger.
By way of balance, I happened up on this review of Hackney Diamonds while trying to find a review for the newly released McCartney and Wings documentary One Hand Clapping and found this very positive one from a reviewer who is not given to posting positive reviews (he hates most of Macca's solo stuff).
https://brutallyhonestrockalbumreviews.wordpress.com/2023/10/25/album-review-the-rolling-stones-hackneyed-diamonds/
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I’m hopefully going to see One Hand Clapping later tonight 😁
Almost makes me wanna buy it. Almost.
I've been stuck listening to stuff on YouTube as my hi-fi system has gone awry.
I've replaced the needle and tape thing (can't recall its name) and it's better but I think the sound is wrong with the speakers, as the playing now seems muted.
I think the speaker cables need replacing but this is where there is a problem - on amazon and the like you can buy them - I need the ones with the thin wires you sort of insert into the holes, taking care to get the + and - cables into the right holes - but when I do a search, they're all 10m or 20m long. I mean, why would you need them that long? Three metres is about the max, are we meant to cut them down to size? Why can we buy them like we did when the came with the speakers back in the day, erm, 20 years or more ago?
Roger Moore 1927-2017