In part 1, I ranked the twelfth through seventh Beatles album openers. I’ll conclude the list here.
6. Taxman (Revolver). The only non-Lennon-McCartney track to kick off a Beatles’ album, and the second to open with a count-in. (See below for the first.) The Beatles were careful not to use too many contemporaneous references in their songs, which makes the “Ha ha Mr. Wilson, ha ha Mr. Heath” backing vocals stand out here.1 It’s just George’s luck that the first album-opener he wrote is known for Paul’s guitar solo.
5. I Saw Her Standing There (Please Please Me). Paul’s “One-two-three-fah!” count-in is the perfect way to kick off the band’s first album. If a contemporary Beatles fan were to listen to the U.K. albums in order, this would be the first song they encountered. It worked in 1963, and despite the “seventeen” line (which Paul was only 20 when he sang), it still works today.
4. Help! (Help!). The first word of the song is the title of the song, album, and movie. As a former marketing writer, I can’t help but appreciate the economy of John’s lyric. As a non-musician, I don’t have the vocabulary to express this next point perfectly, but you’ll get the gist: The Beatles had a remarkable ability to sound both completely new and entirely like themselves in the same song, and this is one of those songs. (See below for another.)
3. Back in the USSR (the White Album). Any of the final three could have been number one on this list. Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner called the White Album “the history and synthesis of Western music,” and the opening track sets the album’s tone. It contains elements of both Chuck Berry’s music and The Beach Boys’ sound while skewering the anti-communist fervor of the U.S. It’s also, as my gen Z son says, a bop.
2. A Hard Day’s Night (A Hard Day’s Night). If all they’d done was append that opening chord to mid-quality Beatles’ song like, oh, Tell Me Why2, we’d still remember it. But the song that John wrote to follow that historic chord perfectly captures the frenetic pace of the movie and the band’s lives in 1964. George’s 12-string introduces another new sound and influenced the next 30 years of pop/rock music.
1. Come Together (Abbey Road). I often wonder (and might eventually try to work through in one of these posts), when did The Beatles peak? One answer might be 1967, but another answer might be that they kept getting better right up to their final album. Think about it: Abbey Road contains what were probably George’s two best Beatles songs; side 2 ends with their most intricately sequenced long piece of music; and the opening track is another of those songs that sounds both new and familiar. I don’t think we spend enough time marveling at the inventiveness of the opening instrumental section, made up of Ringo’s drums, Paul’s bass, and John’s saying (and I hate that this is true) “Shoot me.” It’s also one of a handful of songs in which Paul, not John, sings the low harmony parts.
How would you rank The Beatles’ album openers? Email me at beatletrack@gmail.com.
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