Off The Beatle Track

We’re up to the third in our series naming the Most Valuable Beatle for each album. First up was Please Please Me, then With The Beatles. This time, we’ll tackle:

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

Songwriting:

Famously, A Hard Day’s Night is the only album in The Beatles’ catalog made up entirely of Lennon & McCartney originals. And they’re all good. Among the standouts are the John’s title track, If I Fell, Tell Me Why, Any Time at All, I’ll Cry Instead, You Can’t Do That, and I’ll Be Back; and Paul’s Can’t Buy Me Love, And I Love Her, and Things We Said Today.

What the hell, I might as well mention the other songs that John contributed: I Should Have Known Better, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You (sung by George), and When I Get Home. There’s really not a stinker on the album, although the “I’m gonna love you till the cows come home” lyric from When I Get Home garners its share of valid criticism.

Verdict: For any other band, Can’t Buy Me Love, And I Love Her, and Things We Said Today would make up most of side 1 of the greatest hits album. And I Love Her deserves special mention as the first in a long line of McCartney-penned ballads. But John provided 10 of the album’s 13 tracks. The title track is a bona-fide Beatle classic, as is, I would argue, If I Fell. I also really like the girl-group-inspired Tell Me Why and the country-tinged I’ll Cry Instead. There are no losers in this category, just a clear winner: John.

Singing:

Is A Hard Day’s Night the first track on which John and Paul sing different sections of the lead vocal in this case, John the verses and Paul the bridge)?¹ In any case, they both handle their lead sections admirably. Paul shows that he can sing rockers (Can’t Buy Me Love), ballads (And I Love Her), and folk-ish songs (Things We Said Today²).

George capably handles I’m Happy Just To Dance With You, with John and Paul on backing vocals. John gets (and deserves) the first (A Hard Day’s Night) and last (I’ll Be Back) words on the album. In between, he shines on I Should Have Known Better (“Iiiiiiiiiiiiiii should have known better with a girl like you”), and the nasty You Can’t Do That.

Verdict: John wins a nailbiter, but this decision might have as much to do with quantity as with quality. Let’s say that If I Fell/And I Love Her, You Can’t Do That/Can’t Buy Me Love, and I’ll Cry Instead/Things We Said Today all cancel each other out, and that John and Paul receive equal credit for singing the title track. John has five other lead vocals–including the excellent Any Time at All.

Playing:

Someone deserves credit for the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night. But who? It really is a group effort.³

I never cared for the sound of the African drum or Arabian bongo that Ringo plays on I’m Happy Just To Dance With You.

This is the first album on which George plays the 12-string Rickenbacker that he received when The Beatles were in New York in February 1964. He plays it on the title track, I Should Have Known Better, Any Time at All, You Can’t Do That, and on other subsequent singles and albums.

Verdict: In 2011, we learned from Paul⁴ that George wrote the And I Love Her acoustic guitar riff. Is there a better argument for a Lennon, McCartney & Harrison joint songwriting credit? If someone in your life deserves a songwriting credit, don’t wait for 10 years after their death to acknowledge it. George gets the nod here.

MVB: John wins his third MVB in as many albums.

When I started this MVB exercise, I suspected that I’d conclude that John carried the band on the early albums, and I haven’t been disabused of that notion. I think we Beatle fans forget, possibly because of the leadership role that Paul took after Brian’s death, that it took Paul a little longer to develop as a songwriter than John needed. Paul wrote Yesterday in 1964⁵, and maybe that boosted his confidence. But that song is still two albums away. The Beatles were always a joint effort⁶, but John has emerged as the hero of the early years.

1. That’s the kind of thing that we would ask the Beatletrack intern to check, if, in fact, Beatletrack had an intern. If you’d like to be the Beatletrack intern, email me at beatletrack@gmail.com. I can’t pay you any actual money, but the work is sporadic and largely inconsequential. ↩︎
2. Or, as I started to type it, “Thongs We Said Today.” ↩︎
3. Including George Martin, of course, on piano. ↩︎
4. In the Martin Scorsese documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World. ↩︎
5. Or perhaps late 1963. ↩︎
6. Get it? Joint? ↩︎