   #copyright

Beatles for Sale

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Musical Recordings and
compositions

   Beatles for Sale
   Beatles for Sale cover
   Studio album by The Beatles
   Released December 4, 1964
   Recorded Abbey Road August 10 - August 14, September 29 - October 26,
   1964
   Genre Rock and roll
   Length 33:26
   Label Parlophone
   PMC 1240 (mono)
   PCS 3062 (stereo)
   CDP 7 46438 2
   Producer(s) George Martin
   Professional reviews
     * All Music Guide 5/5 stars link
     * Q magazine 4/5 stars link

   The Beatles chronology
   A Hard Day's Night
   (1964) Beatles for Sale
   (1964) Help!
   (1965)

   Beatles for sale by The Beatles (side 1) - Parlophone yellow and black
   label. This is an original pressing as the "Kansas City" track listing
   was not yet corrected.
   Enlarge
   Beatles for sale by The Beatles (side 1) - Parlophone yellow and black
   label. This is an original pressing as the "Kansas City" track listing
   was not yet corrected.

   Beatles for Sale was The Beatles' fourth album, released in late 1964
   and produced by George Martin for Parlophone. The album marked a minor
   turning point in the evolution of Lennon and McCartney as lyricists,
   Lennon particularly now showing interest in composing songs of a more
   autobiographical nature. "I'm a Loser" shows Lennon for the first time
   seemingly coming under the influence of Bob Dylan, according to leading
   Beatles archivist Mark Lewisohn (see Complete Beatles Chronicle,
   p.168), having met him for the first time in New York while on tour on
   August 28th, 1964 (see Paul McCartney - Many Years From Now by Barry
   Miles).

Album information

   The album is considered by some to be the weakest in the group's
   history, because of the "war weariness" ( Lewisohn) the band was
   suffering from due to the now constant slog of touring and recording.
   Others note that the album, with its ironic title, and downbeat lyrics
   and cover photo, seems intended as a direct challenge to fans who
   wanted The Beatles to continue writing upbeat, happy songs. Only two
   months and eight days separates the last session for A Hard Day's Night
   (Tuesday 2nd June) and the first for Beatles For Sale. Prior to the new
   recording sessions, the band toured Australia and New Zealand (after a
   two-show night in Hong Kong), played concerts in the Netherlands,
   Denmark and Sweden and made several TV, radio and live concert
   appearances in the UK. It was "inevitable that the constant grind of
   touring, writing, promoting, and recording would grate on The Beatles,"
   (All Music Guide) leading to the inclusion of several cover versions
   after the all-original A Hard Day's Night. And yet, during these
   sessions, they were still capable of recording the single " I Feel
   Fine" and its B-side, " She's a Woman," both songs of considerable
   quality and interest. The former contains the first known controlled
   use of feedback in the pop music idiom (Lewisohn), and illustrates,
   according to McCartney biographer Barry Miles, their "conscious
   awareness of the Surrealist tradition that they incorporated found
   objects into their work." The sound was found completely accidentally
   by Lennon, according to McCartney in Many Years From Now. McDonald
   refers to "She's a Woman" as "in every respect revolutionary," which
   illustrates, in the midst of recording the second and last studio album
   of an exhausting 1964, they could still push the parameters of pop
   music outwards.

   Beatles for Sale and its modified counterpart in the United States,
   Beatles '65, each reached number one on the charts in their respective
   countries, with the former taking over from A Hard Day's Night in the
   United Kingdom. Almost 23 years after its original release, the album
   charted in the United Kingdom for a fortnight in 1987. Even though this
   album was recorded on four-track tape, the CD version is available only
   in mono.

Writing and recording

   When Beatles for Sale was being recorded, Beatlemania was just past its
   peak; in early 1964, the Beatles had made waves with their television
   appearances in the United States, sparking unprecedented demand for
   their records. Beatles for Sale was the Beatles' fourth album in 21
   months; recording for the album began on August 11, just two months
   after the release of A Hard Day's Night, following on the heels of
   several tours. Much of the production on the album was done on "off
   days" from performances in the UK, and most of the songwriting was done
   in the studio itself. Most of the album's recording sessions were
   completed in a three-week period beginning on September 29. Beatles
   producer George Martin recalled: "They were rather war-weary during
   Beatles For Sale. One must remember that they'd been battered like mad
   throughout '64, and much of '63. Success is a wonderful thing, but it
   is very, very tiring."

   Even the prolific John Lennon/Paul McCartney songwriting team could not
   keep up with the demand for their songs, and with a targeted deadline
   of Christmas to meet, the band resorted to recording several cover
   versions for the album. This had been their mode of operation for their
   first albums but had been abandoned for the all-original A Hard Day's
   Night. The album included six covers, the same number as their first
   two albums. Paul McCartney recalled: "Recording Beatles For Sale didn't
   take long. Basically it was our stage show, with some new songs."
   Indeed, three of the cover tunes were recorded in a total of five takes
   in one session on October 18.

   Beatles for Sale featured eight original Lennon and McCartney works. At
   this stage in their collaboration, Lennon and McCartney's songwriting
   was highly collaborative; even where songs had a primary author the
   other would often contribute key parts, as with "No Reply" where
   McCartney provided a middle-eight for what was otherwise almost
   entirely a Lennon song.

   In 1994, McCartney described the songwriting process he and Lennon went
   through: "We would normally be rung a couple of weeks before the
   recording session and they'd say, 'We're recording in a month's time
   and you've got a week off before the recordings to write some stuff.' .
   . . So I'd go out to John's every day for the week, and the rest of the
   time was just time off. We always wrote a song a day, whatever happened
   we always wrote a song a day... Mostly it was me getting out of London,
   to John's rather nice, comfortable Weybridge house near the golf
   course... So John and I would sit down, and by then it might be one or
   two o'clock, and by four or five o'clock we'd be done."

   The recording of Beatles for Sale took place at Abbey Road Studios in
   London. The Beatles had to share the studio with classical musicians,
   as McCartney would relate in 1988: "These days you go to a recording
   studio and you tend to see other groups, other musicians . . . you'd
   see classical sessions going on in 'number one.' We were always asked
   to turn down because a classical piano was being recorded in 'number
   one' and they could hear us." George Harrison recalled that the band
   was becoming more sophisticated about recording techniques: "Our
   records were progressing. We'd started out like anyone spending their
   first time in a studio — nervous and naive and looking for success. By
   this time we'd had loads of hits and were becoming more relaxed with
   ourselves, and more comfortable in the studio (. . . ) We were
   beginning to do a little overdubbing, too, probably to a four-track."

   Recording was completed on October 18. The band participated in several
   mixing and editing sessions before completing the project on November
   4; the album was rushed into production and released exactly a month
   later. It was their fourth in 21 months. Beatles manager Neil Aspinall
   later reflected: "No band today would come off a long US tour at the
   end of September, go into the studio and start a new album, still
   writing songs, and then go on a UK tour, finish the album in five
   weeks, still touring, and have the album out in time for Christmas. But
   that's what the Beatles did at the end of 1964. A lot of it was down to
   naivety, thinking that this was the way things were done. If the record
   company needs another album, you go and make one."

Original songs

   The opening three tracks, "No Reply", "I'm A Loser" and "Baby's In
   Black", are sometimes referred to as the "Lennon Trilogy", as Lennon
   was the chief writer of all three tracks. Unusual for pop music, each
   one has a sad or resentful emotion attached to it. This opening
   sequence set the sombre overall mood of the album, revisited in another
   Lennon tune, "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party", which, "consistent in
   tone with 'No Reply,' 'I'm a Loser,' and 'Baby's in Black,'" according
   to All Music Guide (AMG), "finds the singer showing up at a party only
   to find that the girl he expected to find isn't there".

   According to Lennon in 1972, The Beatles' music publisher Dick James
   was quite pleased with "No Reply": "I remember Dick James coming up to
   me after we did this one and saying, 'You're getting better now — that
   was a complete story.' Apparently, before that, he thought my songs
   wandered off." Reviewer David Rowley found its lyrics to "read like a
   picture story from a girl's comic," and to depict the picture "of
   walking down a street and seeing a girl silhouetted in a window, not
   answering the telephone."

   AMG singled "I'm A Loser" out as "one of the very first Beatles
   compositions with lyrics addressing more serious points than young
   love." Rowley found it to be an "obvious copy of [Bob] Dylan," and to
   "openly subvert the simple true love themes of their earlier work".

   Although "Baby's In Black", which AMG described as "a love lament for a
   grieving girl that was perhaps more morose than any previous Beatles
   song," was mostly Lennon's work, it was written in the same room with
   McCartney, who contributed a harmony to it. Rowley considered the track
   to veer "between the banal and the sublime," and thought the lyrics to
   be "world-weary, sardonic and in places deliberately awful."

   McCartney considered the Beatles for Sale sessions to be the beginning
   of a more mature phase for the band: "We got more and more free to get
   into ourselves. Our student selves rather than 'we must please the
   girls and make money', which is all that 'From Me to You', 'Thank You
   Girl', 'PS I Love You' is about. 'Baby's in Black' we did because we
   liked waltz-time (. . . ) And I think also John and I wanted to do
   something bluesy, a bit darker, more grown-up, rather than just
   straight pop."

   The dark theme of the album was balanced by McCartney's "Every Little
   Thing", "a celebration of what a wonderful girl the guy has," according
   to AMG, that appeared later in the album and had been written as an
   attempt for a single, according to McCartney: "'Every Little Thing',
   like most of the stuff I did, was my attempt at the next single... but
   it became an album filler rather than the great almighty single. It
   didn't have quite what was required." (The song later resurfaced in
   highly embellished form, on the 1969 debut album of the British
   progressive rock band Yes (album)).

   "Eight Days A Week" is noteworthy as one of the first examples of the
   in-studio experimentation that the band would use extensively in the
   future; in two recording sessions totaling nearly seven hours on
   October 6 and devoted exclusively to this song, Lennon and McCartney
   tried one technique after another before settling on the eventual
   arrangement. Each of the first six takes of the song featured a
   strikingly different approach to the beginning and ending sections of
   the song; the eventual chiming guitar-based introduction to the song
   would be recorded in a different session and edited in later. The final
   version of the song incorporated another Beatle first and pop music
   rarity in that the song begins with a fade-in as a counterpoint to pop
   songs which end in a fade-out. AMG dismissed it as a "standard
   celebratory love song," and Rowley found it to lack "both conviction
   and the trademark upbeat mood of early Beatles singles."

   Other McCartney songs on the album included the rocker "What You're
   Doing" that implored the singer's girl to "stop your lying". Although
   "Eight Days A Week" and "What You're Doing" are well-regarded by many
   fans, they were regarded negatively by their creators; McCartney
   dismissed "What You're Doing" as "[A] bit of filler... Maybe it's a
   better recording than it is a song...", while Lennon referred to "Eight
   Days A Week" in a 1980 interview with Playboy magazine as "lousy". In
   1972, Lennon revealed that "Eight Days A Week" had been made with the
   goal of being the theme song for the Help! movie: "I think we wrote
   this 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'."

   "I'll Follow the Sun", which Rowley thought to have a "lovely melody"
   that made "it a minor classic," was a reworking of an old song; it had
   originally been written when McCartney was a youth, as he related in
   1988: "I wrote that in my front parlour in Forthlin Road. I was about
   16... We had this hard R&B image in Liverpool, so I think songs like
   'I'll Follow The Sun', ballads like that, got pushed back to later."
   AMG argued that although the song was "sometimes described as a ballad
   because of its light and mild nature, it's actually taken at a pretty
   brisk tempo."

   By prior agreement, all songs written by either McCartney or Lennon
   were credited to " Lennon/McCartney".

Cover versions

   The remainder of the album consisted of cover versions, several of
   which had been staples of the Beatles' live shows years earlier,
   especially in Hamburg, Germany and at The Cavern in Liverpool, the
   United Kingdom. The band, which in the previous year had grown weary of
   performing for screaming audiences, followed the, at that time,
   standard industry practice of including covers in order to maintain an
   expected level of productivity which many later artists would consider
   excessive. Q found the album title to hold a "hint of cynicism" in
   depicting The Beatles as a "product" to be sold. Nevertheless, AMG
   said, "the weariness of Beatles for Sale comes as something of a
   shock."

   However, even in a somewhat weakened state the Beatles created an album
   some critics such as AMG found to be a stepping stone "from Merseybeat
   to the sophisticated pop/rock they developed in mid-career". Some of
   the cover versions on the album included Chuck Berry's " Rock and Roll
   Music", Buddy Holly's "Words of Love", and two Carl Perkins tunes:
   "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby", sung by George Harrison, and "Honey
   Don't", sung by Ringo Starr. Starr recalled: "We all knew 'Honey
   Don't'; it was one of those songs that every band in Liverpool played
   (. . .) that's why we did it on Beatles for Sale. It was comfortable.
   And I was finally getting one track on a record: my little featured
   spot." Rowley found "Honey Don't" to have "lost the raunch" of the
   original, and considered "Words of Love" to be "a touch too reverential
   and polite."

   Many critics panned the cover version of "Mr Moonlight", and AMG went
   as far to call it Lennon's "beloved obscurity" that wound up as
   "arguably the worst thing the group ever recorded." ' Q magazine
   agreed, calling "Mr Moonlight" "appalling". Rowley was more restrained,
   referring to it as "hardly outstanding".

   The recording of the medley of "Kansas City" and "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey"
   was memorable for McCartney, who in 1984 stated that it required "a
   great deal of nerve to just jump up and scream like an idiot". His
   efforts were egged on by Lennon, who "would go, 'Come on! You can sing
   it better than that, man! Come on, come on! Really throw it!'" The song
   was inspired by Little Richard who combined "Kansas City" with his own
   composition "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey", but Rowley found the lead vocals
   "strained" and considered it McCartney's "weakest Little Richard cover
   version". The original LP sleeve listed the song as "Kansas City" (
   Leiber & Stoller). After the attorneys for Venice Music did their job,
   the record label was corrected to read "Medley: (a) Kansas City
   (Leiber/Stoller) (P)1964 Macmelodies Ltd./KPM. (b) Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey
   (Penniman) Venice Mus. Ltd. (P)1964".

The release

   Beatles for Sale was released in the United Kingdom on December 4,
   1964. On December 12, it began a 46-week-long run in the charts, and a
   week later knocked A Hard Day's Night off the top of the charts. After
   seven weeks, the album's time at the top seemed over, but Beatles for
   Sale made a comeback on February 27, 1965, by dethroning the Rolling
   Stones and returning to the top spot for a week. The album's run in the
   charts was not complete either; on March 7, 1987, almost 23 years after
   its original release, Beatles for Sale reentered the charts briefly for
   a period of two weeks.

The album design

   The downbeat mood of the songs on Beatles for Sale was also reflected
   in the album cover, showing the unsmiling, weary-looking Beatles in an
   autumn scene photographed at Hyde Park, London. Paul McCartney
   recalled: "The album cover was rather nice: Robert Freeman's photos. It
   was easy. We did a session lasting a couple of hours and had some
   reasonable pictures to use (. . .) The photographer would always be
   able to say to us, 'Just show up,' because we all wore the same kind of
   gear all the time. Black stuff; white shirts and big black scarves."
   The inner sleeve showed the Beatles standing in front of a montage of
   photos, which some have assumed was the source of inspiration for the
   cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band though there is no
   evidence for this.

   The sleeve notes featured an observation by Derek Taylor on what the
   album would mean to people of the future:

          There's priceless history between these covers. When, in a
          generation or so, a radioactive, cigar-smoking child, picnicking
          on Saturn, asks you what the Beatle affair was all about, don't
          try to explain all about the long hair and the screams! Just
          play them a few tracks from this album and he'll probably
          understand. The kids of AD2000 will draw from the music much the
          same sense of well being and warmth as we do today.

American release

   The concurrent Beatles release in the United States, Beatles '65,
   included eight songs from Beatles for Sale, omitting the tracks "Kansas
   City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey", "Eight Days A Week"(a #1 hit single in the
   U.S.), "What You're Doing", "Words Of Love", "Every Little Thing", and
   "I Don't Want To Spoil The Party" (flipside to Eight Days A Week, it
   reached #35 in the U.S.and it would hit #1 on the U.S. Country chart
   for Rosanne Cash when she remade it in 1989). In turn, it added the
   track "I'll Be Back" from the British release of A Hard Day's Night,
   and the single "I Feel Fine" / "She's A Woman". The six tracks that
   were omitted were finally released in America on Beatles VI in 1965.
   Beatles '65 was released eleven days after Beatles for Sale (and just
   ten days before the Christmas holiday) and became the fastest-selling
   album of the year in the United States, shifting a million records in
   its first week alone.

Personnel

     * George Harrison - guitar, drums, vocals
     * John Lennon - guitar, vocals
     * Paul McCartney - piano, bass guitar, Hammond organ, vocals
     * Ringo Starr - drums, tambourine, vocals, timpani
     * George Martin - piano, production, photography
     * Robert Freeman - photography
     * Derek Taylor - liner notes

Track listing

Side one

   All Songs credited by John Lennon and Paul McCartney unless noted
   otherwise
    1. " No Reply"
    2. " I'm a Loser" SAMPLE (92k)
    3. " Baby's in Black"
    4. " Rock and Roll Music" ( Chuck Berry)
    5. " I'll Follow the Sun" SAMPLE (100k)
    6. " Mr. Moonlight" ( Roy Lee Johnson)
    7. Medley:
          + " Kansas City" ( Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller)
          + " Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey" ( Richard Penniman)

Side two

    1. " Eight Days a Week" SAMPLE (100k)
    2. " Words of Love" ( Buddy Holly)
    3. " Honey Don't" ( Carl Perkins)
    4. " Every Little Thing"
    5. " I Don't Want to Spoil the Party"
    6. " What You're Doing"
    7. " Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" ( Carl Perkins)

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatles_for_Sale"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
