Andrew Hickey
27 April 2021
This week's episode, the first on the new host, looks at "A Hard Day's Night", and the making of the film that would define music cinema for decades to come. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Tobacco Road" by the Nashville Teens. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I have created a Mixcloud playlist containing every song heard in this episode (though not the Goon Show, Bridge Over the River Wye, or A Show Called Fred recordings, all of which would take up half an hour each) I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them, but the ones I specifically referred to while writing this episode were: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For material on the making of the film, I referred to A Hard Day's Night by Ray Morton, and Getting Away With It by Steven Soderbergh, a book which is in part a lengthy set of conversations between Soderbergh and Richard Lester. Information on the Goons came from various sources, but mostly from The Goon Show Companion by Roger Wilmut and Jimmy Grafton. A Hard Day's Night is available on DVD, while the music is of course on this album. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at a song that has one of the most striking opening chords of any song ever recorded, the title song to a film that was described on its release as "the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals", and which captured the Beatles at the height of their early success. We're going to look at how Beatlemania hit America, and at how the Beatles went from being merely a very popular pop group to being a cultural phenomenon that changed the world. And most importantly, we're going to look at how they changed how music is portrayed on screen forever. We're going to look at "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night"] The sixteenth of January, 1964, seemed at first to be the first misstep in the Beatles' career. After their run of Christmas shows, they'd travelled to Paris to play the Olympia -- the same venue where, a little over two years earlier, John and Paul had seen Vince Taylor play and tried unsuccessfully to blag their own way on to the stage. This time, they were topping the bill, for the first of eighteen nights in a row -- or at least they were equally billed with Sylvie Vartan and Trini Lopez, with none of the promotional material actually saying who was highest billed. But they went down something like a lead balloon, with the audience, mostly made up of VIPs there for opening night, not responding to them, and with their amps failing three times during the show (George Harrison apparently suspected sabotage). It was the first time in almost three years that they'd faced an unappreciative audience, and they were apparently despondent after the show. They were despondent, at least, until they got a telegram after the show, giving them the good news -- "I Want To Hold Your Hand" had jumped up forty-three places on the Cashbox chart. They were number one in America. It was already planned, of course, that they would be going to the US in February to make three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, but now they knew they were big over there. After that, the shows in Paris became somewhat easier for the group, and while the press for the first night was fairly awful, once they started playing to their own audiences rather than VIPs they won the French crowds over as well as any other audience they'd had. While they were in France, they also made what would be their only studio recordings outside London. They'd been asked by the German branch of EMI to record German-language versions of "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand", as at the time it was felt that they didn't have much chance of selling in Germany with English-language recordings. While in the studio, they also recorded a song of Paul's, which became their next single -- the first to only feature a single voice: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Can't Buy Me Love"] But while Paul took the lead on that single, John was dominating in the writing for the duo, who were also working on writing their next album while they were in Paris. That album would be their first to consist entirely of original songs, and the only one to consist entirely of Lennon/McCartney songs, but of its thirteen tracks, ten would be primarily or solely John's work, and only three written mainly by Paul. But before they could record it, they had a trip to the US to make. The Beatles' first trip to the US has had a huge amount of coverage over the years, but it involved a surprisingly small amount of actual work for them -- they made three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, plus two live performances, one in Washington -- filmed for a closed-circuit cinema broadcast along with shows by the Beach Boys and Lesley Gore -- and one at Carnegie Hall. But it was those Ed Sullivan show performances that became legendary. Sullivan's show was always the most popular thing on American TV, and always featured a variety of acts. February the ninth 1964 was no exception, as he featured among others the comedian and impressionist Frank Gorshin (who is now best known for his later role as the Riddler in the Batman TV series) and the cast of Lionel Bart's musical Oliver!: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Georgia Brown: "I'd Do Anything"] The young man playing the Artful Dodger there said later "I watched the Beatles from the side of the stage, I saw the girls going crazy, and I said to myself, this is it, I want a piece of that." But it would be two years before Davy Jones would become famous as one of the Monkees. But, of course, it wasn't songs from the musicals sung in fake Cockney accents, or the impersonation skills of Frank Gorshin, that had people tuning in that night. And there were a lot of people tuning in -- seventy-three million of them, the highest audience figure for any TV show in US history to that point. And they were tuning in to see this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on the Ed Sullivan Show)"] It is impossible to explain or even really comprehend just how big the Beatles were in America after their Ed Sullivan appearances. They may not even have fully realised it themselves, as they were only over there for two weeks at that point and made relatively few appearances -- though they were soon booked in for a full-length tour that summer. But almost every American rock musician who came to prominence in the ten years after those appearances has said that it was seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan -- and the reaction to them from the girls in the audience -- that made them want to become musicians. Guitar-based rock and roll had basically been dead in the US since 1957, with the only real exceptions being surf bands and Duane Eddy. Now, as a result of one TV show, it was back with a vengeance, and the guitar would dominate American music for a generation. The Beatles became even bigger after their return to the UK, though. In the first week of April, they actually had the whole top five of the Billboard charts to themselves, and seven more records in the hot one hundred -- and not only that, but there were two songs about the Beatles also in the hot one hundred. They also had the number one and two spots in the album charts. The week after that, while they no longer had all five top spots, they did have two more singles in the hot one hundred, making fourteen in total. The reason they had so many records in the charts was that Capitol hadn't licensed their early recordings, and so they had been licensed to a couple of small labels, who were releasing everything they could from their small stockpile, and VeeJay, the label that had licensed their first album, were putting out album tracks as singles in the hope of getting as much of the market as they could. And the three companies putting out their records were soon going to be joined by a fourth. Because in an echo of how the Beatles had only been signed to EMI because of their publishing subsidiary, United Artists Records wanted to put out Beatles records, and had realised that there was probably no provision in their contract with EMI for film soundtracks. If their film division signed the Beatles to make a film, and they made it quickly and cheaply enough, they could get a soundtrack album out of it that would more than cover the cost of making the film, and would hopefully be pure profit for them. EMI turned out to have other opinions about this, after the contracts were signed, and United Artists ended up only getting the rights to the soundtrack album in America, but that was the thinking at least when United Artists approached Brian Epstein with a proposal in the autumn of 1963, for a film to be made as early as possible in 1964, to be released before the bubble burst and this Beatle fad was over. The Beatles had actually had multiple proposals to appear in films before, but these had all been for jukebox musicals -- the kind of film we've talked about earlier, where some kids put on a benefit show to save the local youth centre, and twenty different bands mime to
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