Episode 120: “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles

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.

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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.

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