FEATURE:
When I Was Younger…
The Beatles’ Help! at Sixty
__________
I have spent a lot of time…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles in Milan in 1965/PHOTO CREDIT: Archivi Farabola
focusing on the two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. McCartney’s birthday was in June and Starr’s earlier this month. The final time I will discuss The Beatles for a little while takes me to one of their standout tracks. The title track from their 1965 Help! album turns sixty on 19th July. Help! is a single that was very different to anything the band released before then. In terms of the lyrical content. Written by John Lennon, it was this very revealing cry for help. You cannot read the song as being fictional or anything other than someone feeling strain, stress and sadness and needing a helping hand. This being The Beatles, the song is delivered in this catchy and singalong style. However, it is impossible to ignore the pain in Lennon’s song. As The Beatles’ official site explains: “Help!" is a song by the Beatles that served as the title song for both the 1965 film and its soundtrack album. It was also released as a single, and was number one for three weeks in both the United States and the United Kingdom. "Help!" was written primarily by John Lennon, but credited to Lennon-McCartney. During an interview with Playboy in 1984, Paul McCartney stated that the title was "out of desperation". In 2004, "Help!" was ranked number 29 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Released on 19th July, 1965 in the U.S. and 23rd July in the U.K., it went to number one in both countries. I am going to comer to a feature regarding the song. However, from The Beatles Bible, we get some interviews archive from Paul McCartney and John Lennon around one of The Beatles’ finest tracks:
“The title track to The Beatles’ fifth album and second film, ‘Help!’ was written mainly by John Lennon at his home in Weybridge.
When ‘Help!’ came out, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it’s just a fast rock ‘n’ roll song. I didn’t realise it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. So it was my fat Elvis period. You see the movie: he – I – is very fat, very insecure, and he’s completely lost himself. And I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was.
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
The film was originally to be called Eight Arms To Hold You, and was announced to the press as such on 17 March 1965. The title had been mooted for some time, with ‘Eight Days A Week’ initially considered for the theme tune.
I think we wrote [‘Eight Days A Week’] when we were trying to write the title song for Help! because there was at one time the thought of calling the film Eight Arms To Hold You.
John Lennon
Hit Parader, April 1972
In mid-April the title Help! was settled upon, probably chosen by director Richard Lester. Paul McCartney later described the genesis behind the title and the song of the same name.
I seem to remember Dick Lester, Brian Epstein, Walter Shenson and ourselves sitting around, maybe Victor Spinetti was there, and thinking, What are we going to call this one? Somehow Help! came out. I didn’t suggest it; John might have suggested it or Dick Lester. It was one of them. John went home and thought about it and got the basis of it, then we had a writing session on it. We sat at his house and wrote it, so he obviously didn’t have that much of it. I would have to credit it to John for original inspiration 70-30. My main contribution is the countermelody to John.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
Following the song’s completion, Lennon and McCartney performed the song on guitars for Cynthia Lennon and visiting journalist Maureen Cleave, a long-time associate of the group.
Once we’d done our writing session there was nothing left to be done except put the instruments on. That’s what I was there for; to complete it. Had John just been left on his own he might have taken weeks to do it, but just one visit and we would go right in and complete it. So we came down and played the intro, into the verse, descant coming in on the second verse. It was all crafted, it was all there, the final verses and the end. ‘Very nice,’ they said. ‘Like it.’
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
Although originally conceived as a ballad, The Beatles performed ‘Help!’ faster in the studio, as they had done with ‘Please Please Me’, to satisfy the group’s commercial instincts.
I remember Maureen Cleave, a writer – the one who did the famous ‘We’re more popular than Jesus’ story in the Evening Standard – asked me, ‘Why don’t you ever write songs with more than one syllable?’ So in ‘Help!’ there are two- or three-syllable words and I very proudly showed them to her and she still didn’t like them. I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn’t think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
Lennon had been a user of marijuana since August 1964, and within six months was introduced to LSD. Introspection increasingly became a hallmark of his songwriting throughout Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver.
I meant it – it’s real. The lyric is as good now as it was then. It is no different, and it makes me feel secure to know that I was aware of myself then. It was just me singing ‘help’ and I meant it.
I don’t like the recording too much; we did it too fast trying to be commercial… I might do ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and ‘Help!’ again, because I like them and I can sing them”.
I am going to end with this feature from 2020. Marking the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Help! album, it discusses how it was The Beatles’ most personal album to that point. Pushing the limits of Pop and seeing what they could get away with. They would release Rubber Soul in December 1965. Help! also contains classics such as Yesterday. It does sound very different to 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale:
“When Help! came out in ’65, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it’s just a fast rock ‘n’ roll song.” That’s John Lennon in 1980, describing the song and anguished word that open the album of the same name. As mid-1960s pop stars, the Beatles were obliged to make a cinematic romp to follow-up 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, and that included a theme song. So, Lennon poured out his pain. His life was starting to seem unreal and absurd, he and his bandmates existed in a perpetual state of stoned giggling, and he was stressed-out and busy. I say all of this not to elicit sympathy for Lennon, but instead to show how he was starting to fuck with the pop system he resented. After all, it would be years before pop songs were assumed to be personal. Did anyone in the room beside Lennon have any idea that he’d just smuggled the most autobiographical song he’d ever written into the end credits of a ludicrous teenybopper flick about an Indian cult trying to kill Ringo?
You might think “Help!” is about a girl, as Beatles songs tended to be about girls back then. But, nothing in the lyrics gives any indication that this is true. (“Think for Yourself” from Rubber Soul also plays with this assumption.) It really is a cry for help, and beyond that, it’s a song about admitting the need for help, a song about itself. Subtexts like these always slither beneath the surface of Lennon’s songs. For instance, “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” frames a man’s naked pursuit of his best friend’s girl as an act of altruism; it was a small step from that to Rubber Soul‘s “Norwegian Wood” and its hidden tale of arson. There’s a sense in these songs of getting away with something. That bravado radiates from every pore of Help! , an album the Beatles made at the peak of their ubiquity and close to the peak of their powers.
Lennon was still the band’s most potent songwriter in 1965 (McCartney would take over the following year, embracing his auteurism) and contributes Help!‘s three best songs: the title track, “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl”, and “Ticket to Ride“. If the former two songs showed how fragrantly Lennon’s songwriting had ripened, the latter showed how the band was beginning to spread out territoriality. A droning and churning thing that predicts much of the decade’s later bad-trip psych, “Ticket to Ride”, was their first tune to surpass three minutes (clocking in at three minutes and ten seconds, no less). Maybe it was the weed, but they had to stay on that chord a little longer; they had to drag out that drum fill an extra two bars, and the song’s better for it”.
I have already covered the first single from Help!, Ticket to Ride. That came out in April 1965. Help! was the second and final single from the album. The opening album track starts out with the title. There is no introduction leading us in. It is such a brilliantly intense song that many fans were not expecting. However, it was a chart-topping song and is seen as one of The Beatles’ best. As it is sixty on 17th July, I wanted to spend time with a pivotal and special moment in Pop history. Even though the single was released in 1965, it sounds more bracing, memorable and original….
THAN anything around today.