Breakfast With Behka and The Beatles Recap: Week of January 5

Every  morning I start our show with a Beatles song.  Lately I've been going in chronological order, or as close as it can be.  We're working our way through the group's third album, A Hard Day's Night, this week. On Monday, I played "Should Have Known Better".

The song is performed in the train compartment scene of A Hard Day's Night. It was in fact filmed in a van, with crew members rocking the vehicle to fake the action of a train in motion. Paul McCartney is seen singing along both in the train scene and in the live performance at the end of the film, despite not singing in the recording. In January 1964, during a three-week engagement in Paris, the Beatles first became aware of Bob Dylan, and after acquiring a copy of his album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, they began playing it continuously. Dylan subsequently became a big influence on the group, especially John, who even started wearing a copycat cap. One consequence of this “infatuation” was the song "I Should Have Known Better."

On Tuesday, I played "If I Fell".

This one was written by John. "That's my first attempt at a ballad proper....It shows that I wrote sentimental love ballads way back when", Lennon stated in his 1980 Playboy Magazine Interview. Lennon and McCartney shared a single microphone "for their Everly Brothers-like close harmonies." Like much of the Beatles' early work, the song was released in two different mixes for mono and stereo. Lennon's opening vocal is single-tracked in mono but double-tracked in the stereo mix. If you listen closely to the mix, you can hear Paul's voice crack on one of the higher notes. "If I Fell" was a part of the Beatles repertoire during their US and Canadian tour in 1964. The group typically performed the song faster than the studio version, and Lennon and McCartney often sang it with barely suppressed laughter. On more than one occasion it was introduced as "If I Fell Over".

On Wednesday, I played "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You".

This one was written specifically for George Harrison to sing at a time when he lacked the confidence to compose his own material. Structurally, it features hectic Bo Diddley rhythm and busy banjo style guitar playing in juxtaposition with Harrison's vocal. Its composers give it an unpredictable choice of chord right at the crux of its title, jarring the chorus. The song is also unique in that it begins not with a verse or chorus but with the last four bars of the bridge. It was recorded on a Sunday, the first time the group used the studio on anything other than a normal work day.

On Thursday, I played "And I Love Her".

The song was written mainly by McCartney, though John Lennon claimed in an interview with Playboy that his major contribution was the middle eight section ("A love like ours/Could never die/As long as I/Have you near me"). Beatles publisher Dick James lends support to this claim, saying that the middle eight was added during recording at the suggestion of producer George Martin (an early take of the song was released on Anthology 1 in 1995, and the middle eight had not yet been added). McCartney, on the other hand, maintains that the work was his. "The 'And' in the title was an important thing – 'And I Love Her,' it came right out of left field, you were right up to speed the minute you heard it," McCartney said. "The title comes in the second verse and it doesn't repeat. You would often go to town on the title, but this was almost an aside: 'Oh . . . and I love you.'" McCartney credits George Harrison with composing the signature guitar riff, saying it "made a stunning difference to the song". McCartney called "And I Love Her" "the first ballad I impressed myself with." Lennon called it McCartney's "first 'Yesterday.'"

On Friday, I played "Tell Me Why".

Lennon described the song as resembling "a black New York girl-group song". Its basic structure of simple doo-wop chord changes and block harmonies over a walking bass line.
"Tell Me Why" was performed in the Beatles' film, A Hard Day's Night. The song was part of the 'studio performance' sequence, which was filmed at the Scala Theatre, London, on 31 March 1964. Notably, a young Phil Collins is somewhere in that audience.

Well, that'll do it for this week's edition of BWBATB. We'll pick up where we left off on Monday with the next song on the album, "Can't Buy Me Love".

Filmically yours,
Behka