WITH THE BEATLES

The earliest Beatles recordings, released on their first album, Please Please Me, show a promising, but not entirely mature band (see my review of that album). Between that album and their second, With the Beatles, the band had gone through quite a change, even though they were still playing simple dance pop and rock'n roll. Lennon and McCartney had revealed their true force as pop songwriters with the singles "From Me To You" and especially "She Loves You", and the band now found themselves in the centre of a mass hysteria (known as Beatlemania).

Listening to With the Beatles, I sense a much more self-assured band, and it is clear that they have improved as instrumentalists too. This may however be due, in parts, to the fact that the album was not recorded in the same rush as Please Please Me (which was recorded literarily in one day, except for the A and B sides). The recording was spread over several sessions, so clearly there must have been more time to correct fluffs and work with the arrangements, vocal performances etc. At least it sounds that way.

With the Beatles contains no singles; a practice that would go for many of their subsequent studio albums, and which was fairly common in Britain in the 60's. Apart from that, the album follows the pattern of Please Please Me by containing a mix of original compositions and cover versions of mostly (black) American music. The cover versions on With the Beatles are generally stronger than those on Please Please Me. "Money (That's What I Want)" is a truly electrifying performance, and it is clearly on par with - probably even better than - their rendition of "Twist And Shout". I would even go as far as to say that it is much better, and more homogeneous that Barrett Strong's original Motown recording. Two other Motown covers appear on the album; they are both infective and well performed even though they may not really add something new to the original songs. Other cover versions include Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" (Harrison's vocal performance is a bit dull) and - as quite a contrast - the sentimental ballad "Till There Was You" which only Paul McCartney could have sung.

As for the original compositions, there are two songs that really stand out: Lennon's "It Won't Be Long" and McCartney's "All My Loving". The first one is typical of Lennon with an irregular number of bars in the verse and a harmonic structure in the chorus that isn't entirely straight forward. The song is in a major key, but the chorus (which comes first) starts with the tonic parallel and then goes directly to the tonic rather than through a subdominant and a dominant, and then back to the parallel. There is also the nicely dissonant "dim chord" on "till I beLONG to you". In contrast, "All My Loving" is much more straight forward and has hit single written all over it. But also that song begins with another chord than its tonic (in this case the subdominant parallel).

The other original songs are more anonymous. "I Wanna Be Your Man" is rather monotonous, both melodically and lyrically, "Hold Me Tight" was a leftover from Please Please Me which had been brought back for some reason, and "Not a Second Time" sounds like it doesn't entirely knows where it is going (it was famously praised for its Aeolian cadenzes). Then there is "Don't Bother Me" which is Harrison's first contribution as a songwriter and which somehow contains a darker tone than Lennon's and McCartney's songs. It is absolutely not uninteresting (its privacy topic probably suited Harrison's public image well at that time), and there is something a bit resigning about the music - the verse starts with the dominant chord and then continues with what is normally the final four bars in a standard 12 bar blues phrase (with a lower III step chord added between the IV and the I in the 3rd bar), thus possibly signalling a sense of disorder or unease. Moreover, the odd drum that appears on all the downbeats makes the song sound rather heavy. Harrison would make much stronger songs later, but it is clear that there is something else going on here.

Overall, With the Beatles is the sound of a much more self-assured band, and despite some less interesting songs, several key tracks make for quite an engaging listening. I wish I could give it 3,5 stars which is what I think it really deserves. The first truly great Beatles album comes next....