“Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.”—“Help!”, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, performed by the Beatles on their Help! LP (1965)
The Beatles’ title single from their film Help!, on this date in 1965, reached the top of the U.S. charts, where it stayed for another three weeks. Its ascent was accomplished with the same breakneck speed (a little over a month since the film’s release) by which the Fab Four were living for the past year and a half, when Beatlemania became a serious American phenomenon.
Once you pay no attention to the rich but fast sound that producer George Martin conjured in the studio, it becomes obvious that the lyrics—primarily John Lennon’s, with a little help from Paul McCartney—echo “the cute Beatle’s” “Yesterday,” as a cry of the heart amid a time of confusion.
For a long time, I speculated about why a song so essentially melancholy could have such a souped-up production. It turns out that the Beatles’ two primary songwriters wondered the same thing: Lennon pleaded to release the song in a slow version, and McCartney would later play it live in the same fashion.
Maybe the thinking, by Martin and the studio heads at Capitol Records, was that the Beatles needed something bouncy, or at least something to distinguish it from “Yesterday,” which practically begged for its eventual classical underpinnings. They didn’t realize –or maybe they simply didn’t care—that by slowing the song down, the loss in energy would be compensated by a more visceral understanding of the lyrics’ emotional exhaustion—in much the same way, for instance, that for awhile in the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen’s live, acoustic version of “Born to Run” turned the song inside out, so it became about commitment—an end to running, if you will.
Lennon wrote the song for the simplest of reasons—the Beatles’ upcoming follow-up to A Hard Day’s Night needed musical material—but it turned out that the songs had about as flimsy relation to the movie’s plot as you can get, so he could compose virtually anything he wanted. Without intending to do so, he ended up writing about himself.
Was Lennon “the smart Beatle,” as the shorthand of the time held? That might be an exaggeration (McCartney, in Martin’s later recollections, was every bit as eager an innovator in the studio). But he was, without a doubt, the most irreverent, subversive, and anguished of the Liverpool quartet.
“Help!” came from what Lennon later termed “my fat Elvis period,” his term for a time when he was drinking and eating too much. But that wasn’t the half of it.
The kid from the streets of Liverpool with the sharp black leather jacket and sharp tongue to match had been replaced by a co-leader of the most wildly successful band on the face of the earth. That slicing wit was misperceived by most of the public as being indistinguishable from the group’s general good-humored frolicking. The married young father whose touring had only taken him to the Continent was now in the midst of a global sojourn, with his pick of eager young women at every stop along the way.
Nor can we forget the impact of drugs. Introduced to marijuana within the past year, the Beatles had taken to it so enthusiastically that they became too giddy for filming at points during the production of Help! As they began to fracture by decade’s end, Lennon’s drug use was more pronounced than any of his bandmates, and it undermined his competition with McCartney as leader of the group.
By the time Help! appeared, a book by Lennon, A Spaniard in the Works, had just been published. He and his bandmates were at the top of the music and movie worlds. They’d been honored by the Queen, which almost never happened to other musicians their age. They’d even gotten to meet their hero, Elvis Presley.
In short, the world was at Lennon’s command—but he felt only a hollowness inside. By the time that void was being filled 15 years later, courtesy of renewed commitment to Yoko Ono and their son Sean, Lennon had his fateful encounter with Mark David Chapman. In the meantime, he left this anthem about how bottoming out opens you up to others.
And I do appreciate you being round.”—“Help!”, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, performed by the Beatles on their Help! LP (1965)
The Beatles’ title single from their film Help!, on this date in 1965, reached the top of the U.S. charts, where it stayed for another three weeks. Its ascent was accomplished with the same breakneck speed (a little over a month since the film’s release) by which the Fab Four were living for the past year and a half, when Beatlemania became a serious American phenomenon.
Once you pay no attention to the rich but fast sound that producer George Martin conjured in the studio, it becomes obvious that the lyrics—primarily John Lennon’s, with a little help from Paul McCartney—echo “the cute Beatle’s” “Yesterday,” as a cry of the heart amid a time of confusion.
For a long time, I speculated about why a song so essentially melancholy could have such a souped-up production. It turns out that the Beatles’ two primary songwriters wondered the same thing: Lennon pleaded to release the song in a slow version, and McCartney would later play it live in the same fashion.
Maybe the thinking, by Martin and the studio heads at Capitol Records, was that the Beatles needed something bouncy, or at least something to distinguish it from “Yesterday,” which practically begged for its eventual classical underpinnings. They didn’t realize –or maybe they simply didn’t care—that by slowing the song down, the loss in energy would be compensated by a more visceral understanding of the lyrics’ emotional exhaustion—in much the same way, for instance, that for awhile in the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen’s live, acoustic version of “Born to Run” turned the song inside out, so it became about commitment—an end to running, if you will.
Lennon wrote the song for the simplest of reasons—the Beatles’ upcoming follow-up to A Hard Day’s Night needed musical material—but it turned out that the songs had about as flimsy relation to the movie’s plot as you can get, so he could compose virtually anything he wanted. Without intending to do so, he ended up writing about himself.
Was Lennon “the smart Beatle,” as the shorthand of the time held? That might be an exaggeration (McCartney, in Martin’s later recollections, was every bit as eager an innovator in the studio). But he was, without a doubt, the most irreverent, subversive, and anguished of the Liverpool quartet.
“Help!” came from what Lennon later termed “my fat Elvis period,” his term for a time when he was drinking and eating too much. But that wasn’t the half of it.
The kid from the streets of Liverpool with the sharp black leather jacket and sharp tongue to match had been replaced by a co-leader of the most wildly successful band on the face of the earth. That slicing wit was misperceived by most of the public as being indistinguishable from the group’s general good-humored frolicking. The married young father whose touring had only taken him to the Continent was now in the midst of a global sojourn, with his pick of eager young women at every stop along the way.
Nor can we forget the impact of drugs. Introduced to marijuana within the past year, the Beatles had taken to it so enthusiastically that they became too giddy for filming at points during the production of Help! As they began to fracture by decade’s end, Lennon’s drug use was more pronounced than any of his bandmates, and it undermined his competition with McCartney as leader of the group.
By the time Help! appeared, a book by Lennon, A Spaniard in the Works, had just been published. He and his bandmates were at the top of the music and movie worlds. They’d been honored by the Queen, which almost never happened to other musicians their age. They’d even gotten to meet their hero, Elvis Presley.
In short, the world was at Lennon’s command—but he felt only a hollowness inside. By the time that void was being filled 15 years later, courtesy of renewed commitment to Yoko Ono and their son Sean, Lennon had his fateful encounter with Mark David Chapman. In the meantime, he left this anthem about how bottoming out opens you up to others.
No comments:
Post a Comment