Help (Album) 1965

- The fifth studio album by the band, released in August 1965.
- It was released to coincide with the film Help! It features seven tracks from this movie, plus seven other songs. Only two songs overall were covers.
- Harrison got two of his original compositions included on the album, the first McCartney and Lennon allowed such a thing since the band's second album back in 1963.
- The cover was meant to show the band spelling out 'help' in flag-signage, but it didn't look aesthetically pleasing to the photographer so they instead spell out something like 'NUJV'.
- Two of the songs featured on the album were intended to be featured in the film alongside the other seven songs, but the director rejected them. These were You Like Me Too Much and Tell Me What You See.
- Two other tracks were recorded for the album but ultimately ditched because the band weren't happy with them. These were If You've Got Trouble (ultimately replaced by Act Naturally) and That Means a Lot (which the band decided to give to P. J. Proby to release as a single). Both of these songs ended up on the Anthology compilations a couple of decades later.
- Other songs written for the album but rejected include: Yes It Is (which ended up as a pre-album B-side) and Wait (which later turned up on the Rubber Soul album).
- The U.S. release of the album only featured the seven songs that were in the movie, alongside a bunch of instrumental tracks from the film composed by Ken Thorne and conducted by George Martin.
- This was the last Beatles album to feature any covers until Let It Be (and even that doesn't really count).

1. Help
- Released as a single prior to the album's release. See full song info here.

2. The Night Before
- Written by McCartney.
- It's kind of a mix between a very 60s-sounding pop song and a more traditional blues arrangement.
- McCartney sings the lead vocal, and Lennon plays an electric piano instead of guitar. Harrison and Lennon provide harmony vocals in the verse and chorus.
- This is probably the first recording where Lennon doesn't play guitar.
- The guitar solo is actually played by McCartney, and achieved by overdubbing two guitar leads over each other.
- Took just two takes to complete and runs for two and a half minutes.

3. You've Got to Hide Your Love Away
- Written by Lennon, who also provides the lead vocals.
- A very Dylanesque track, it features little more than acoustic guitar and some sparse percussion. Lennon even apes Dylan's gruff way of singing. Lennon would revisit this folksy style of song throughout the rest of the band's career.
- The line 'two foot small' was meant to be 'two foot tall' but Lennon muddled up the words. He decided to leave the mistake-version in for 'the pseuds' (I assume this means 'pseudo-intellectuals', a long time bugbear of Lennon's).
- Folklore has it that this song is about Brian Epstein, the band's gay manager (this doesn't mean he managed their gay tendencies, it means he himself was gay). Lennon acknowledged that the song was a shift towards a more personal style of lyric-writing but actually confirmed what it was about (it may have been just as easily about an extra-marital affair Lennon was having another woman while married to his first wife Cynthia).
- Lennon plays a 12-string acoustic guitar, and Ringo plays tambourine, a shaker and some maracas. A guy named John Scott was brought in to play the flute for the bridge section (which is actually two different kinds of flutes put together in the recording). Both McCartney and Harrison also play acoustic guitar in the track.
- One of the first Beatles songs not to feature any bass at all. Very few other Beatles songs would do the same.
- You can barely hear but Harrison is actually singing a harmony in the chorus.
- Runs for just two minutes and took 9 takes.

4. I Need You
- Written by Harrison, who also sings the lead vocals.
- Thought to be about Pattie Boyd (the first of several songs she inspired!)
- Harrison uses a volume/tone pedal to help colour the song up a bit. Along with his more successful use of it on Yes It Is, it's considered to be one of the first times such a thing was used in a recording.
- Lennon plays an acoustic guitar instead of an electric in the recording, and both he and McCartney provide backing vocals.
- A rather melancholy song, and quite a dud.
- Runs for 2 and a half minutes, and took five takes to record.

5. Another Girl
- Written by McCartney, he wrote the lyrics whilst on holidays in Tunisia.
- The lyrics reflect McCartney's increasing distance from his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher.
- Around this time the band put lesser songs along these lines to a 'test'... meaning that all 4 members of the band had to seriously like it for it to be included on an album.
- Harrison did about 10 rejected takes of lead guitar with his new tone pedal before McCartney decided to do the lead himself. This marked the beginning of a trend where McCartney would sometimes take lead guitar duties, which must've annoyed Harrison a bit.
- Aside from the lead guitar overdub, most of the song was completed in just one take. The song itself runs for two minutes.
- Lennon plays acoustic guitar, and both he and Harrison provide backing vocals.

6. You're Going to Lose That Girl
- Written by Lennon.
- Features an unusual and effective key change between two parts of the song.
- The lyrics reflect the third-person technique used previously in She Loves You.
- McCartney plays piano on the recording, and Ringo dubs in some bongo action. Lennon's guitar track is acoustic, and both McCartney and Harrison provide backing vocals.
- The recording was actually a bit rushed as the band was due to start filming the Help film, which accounts for the way the backing vocals sometimes warble from an offkey note into the right one, and why McCartney's piano-playing hits an occasional bum note.
- Harrison later re-recorded his guitar solo but it was never used.
- The record company planned to release this as a B-side to the special single release of the song Girl to help promote the 1977 Beatles compilation Love Songs. It was canned at the last minute.
- Runs for two minutes and twenty seconds, and took three takes to complete.

7. Ticket to Ride
- Released as a single prior to the album's release. See full song info here.

8. Act Naturally
- The first track on Side B of the album.
- This is a country song that was originally written by Johnny Russell in 1961, and recorded by Buck Owens as a hit in 1963.
- It was tradition to give Ringo a song on each album to sing... he originally sang the Beatles' original If You've Got Trouble but the rest of the band decided to drop this song altogether as it was a real piece of crap (even Ringo didn't like it!). As Ringo was a big fan of country music Act Naturally was chosen as a quick replacement.
- Only McCarney provides backing vocals.
- The band mucked about with the arrangement (hence the multiple takes) before deciding to keep it like Buck Owens' rockabilly version.
- This song was also released as the B-side for the U.S. single Yesterday. HOWEVER when this single was re-released in 1971, Act Naturally was actually included as the A-side as the American record company had always considered it better than Yesterday!
- At one point the band was allegedly going to record a song written by their recording engineer, Norman Smith. He was apparently offered 15 000 pounds for the band to buy the song outright but when McCartney and Lennon realised they had yet to record a song for Ringo to sing on Help! the plan was scrapped altogether. Poor Norman!
- In 1989 Ringo and Buck Owens teamed up to do a duet version of this song as a single.
- I really, really, really hate this song. And yet it's still better than If You've Got Trouble.
- Took 13 takes, and comes in at two and a half minutes.

9. It's Only Love
- Written mainly by Lennon, with some input from McCartney.
- Lennon didn't think very highly of it afterwards, he liked the melody but thought the lyrics were too run-of-the-mill.
- The song's working title was That's a Nice Cap.
- Lennon sings the lead vocal and plays a 12-string acoustic guitar, with Harrison playing not one but two guitar tracks. There are no backing vocals.
- The guitar solo is played through the speaker of a Hammond organ, which is what accounts for the unusually bright sound.
- Ringo had trouble with the drums for this song, which is why it took a few takes. He overdubbed some tambourine afterwards, perhaps hoping to make it sound stronger.
- Runs just under two minutes, and took six takes.

10. You Like Me Too Much
- Written by Harrison, another song about Pattie Boyd. It's likely that Lennon helped him with structuring it.
- Harrison sings the lead vocals.
- Features Lennon playing electric piano, and both McCartney and George Martin play two seperate parts on a normal piano at the same time. Ringo gets to add in some tambourine as well as his drum track.
- Lennon also plays acoustic guitar but as usual for songs not written by himself or McCartney he was reluctant to provide any backing vocals, so McCartney sings harmony alongside a second vocal track from Harrison.
- The piano and bass were dubbed into the song seperately to the rest of the instruments, the piano bit in question is the boogie-woogie intro and outro.
- Runs for two and a half minutes and took 8 takes.

11. Tell Me What You See
- Written mainly by McCartney, though it has the fairly dubious distinction of being one of the few Beatles song he has very little memory of.
- The electric piano on this track is played by McCartney. He also provided some extra instrumentation in the form of the guiro, an Afro-Cuban percussion instrument. Ringo also overdubbed some tambourine and claves.
- The guitar played in this recording is a typical electric guitar but played in a more acoustic-style of strumming to suit the song's folkish style.
- Runs for two and a half minutes, and took four takes.

12. I've Just Seen a Face
- Written by McCartney, another folk-ish styled track for the album (and almost Simon and Garfunkelesque).
- Was tentatively titled Aunty Jin's Theme after McCartney's aunt.
- Lennon, McCartney and Harrison all play acoustic guitar on this track. Like You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, it's one of the few Beatles songs to not feature any bass.
- McCartney sings both the lead vocal and the backing harmony vocal, probably because the backing vocals were too high for Lennon to hit.
- Ringo uses the brushes on his snare for this track and also overdubbed some maracas.
- McCartney still continues to play this song in his live set.
- Runs for two minutes, and took six takes.

13. Yesterday
- Written by McCartney.
- McCartney famously claims to have composed this in a dream and then eagerly recorded it after waking up so that he wouldn't forget it. This was most likely in 1964.
- The song was written in pieces a long time before finally turning up in a recording... McCartney was afraid he had unknowingly plagiarised an already existing song (due to the manner he had written it) and so he showed it to everyone he could in order to check it wasn't something that already existed before he felt comfortable enough to think it was his own song.
- After this it still took some time for the song to appear, most likely because George Martin and McCartney disagreed about the arrangement of the track or perhaps because...
- ...the rest of the band didn't really like the song. They felt it was too different to everything else they had been recording and they vetoed it being released as a single in the U.K.
- The record company considered releasing it as a solo Paul McCartney single after this but McCartney decided it wasn't worth causing trouble in the band over.
- The song was ultimately released as a single, but only in the U.S.
- A string quartet (two violins, a viola and a cello) features in the recording along with McCartney and his acoustic guitar, but none of the other Beatles contribute anything to the track.
- McCartney was initially afraid that George Martin's idea for the arrangement (just acoustic guitar and strings) might be a bit too easy listening. Martin also had to talk him into using the one-word title Yesterday, as McCartney at that point felt one-word titles were a bit cheesy.
- A full band version was attempted but it didn't really go ahead. Some concerts in Japan apparently featured the entire band playing it together.
- The working title for this song, for a long time, was Scrambled Eggs... this was because of the nonsensical working lyrics McCartney originally used before finishing the song.
- It was offered to Chris Farlowe to record and release as a single but he turned it down because it was too soft.
- Although it wasn't released as as single, it did see release as the title track of a UK-released EP in 1966 along with Act Naturally, You Like Me Too Much and It's Only Love. A tenth anniversary single was also rfeleased in 1976 with I Should've Known Better as the B-side.
- The song is the most covered song ever, with over 3000 known cover versions released since 1965!
- Runs for just two minutes and took two takes to complete.

14. Dizzy Miss Lizzy
- A cover; originally by Larry Williams, who released it as a single in 1958.
- Was originally recorded with the intention of putting it on a compilation album for release in the U.S. McCartney was so happy with how it turned out that they ended up putting it on the Help! album instead.
- The lead vocals are sung by Lennon. McCartney supplies an electric piano track in addition to his bass.
- Brian Epstein originally suggested it as a possible cover. Ringo later brought the idea up again, leading to this recording.
- The Beatles extended the song a bit longer than the original version by adding an extra verse, most likely something they may have done while playing it in their Hamburg days.
- Lennon later played it live on his own after the band broke up.
- Runs for nearly 3 minutes, and took 7 takes.