With the Bea­t­les was the sec­ond Bea­t­les album, released six months after Please Please Me. This was a proper multi-track record­ing as opposed to the one shot record­ing of Please Please Me. Inter­est­ingly, this album fea­tures the same ratio of orig­i­nal songs to cov­ers, with 8 orig­i­nals and 6 cov­ers. With the excep­tion of Bea­t­les for Sale, This was the last album to fea­ture any sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of cover songs. It spent 21 straight weeks at #1 on the charts, which, when paired with Please Please Me, gave the Bea­t­les the #1 album for 51 straight weeks. Please Please me was #2 for a part of this, and the top 5 sin­gles were all Bea­t­les as well. That’s prob­a­bly never going to hap­pen again.

I can hear one huge dif­fer­ence right off the bat. On this album most of the lead vocals are dou­ble tracked by whomever is singing the song. This became stan­dard prac­tice for most of the Bea­tle albums until Revolver when, after com­plaints from John Lennon about how tedious it was to dou­ble track all the vocals, came up with a bril­liant inven­tion. Which I’ll talk about when I review Revolver. I’m going to stick to the for­mat from the first review, and just list what jumped out at me about cer­tain songs.

1) All I’ve Got To Do — This isn’t a song that has ever stuck in my head, and I was sur­prised to learn it was actu­ally a Lennon — McCart­ney orig­i­nal song. It’s so Motown I assumed it was a cover. Paul McCart­ney is play­ing Bass chords, which some music reviewer noted was the first time this had been done in a rock recording.

2) All My Lov­ing — Not ever a sin­gle, which sur­prised me. It got lots of radio air­play, so it was even­tu­ally put onto a EP release. It was a sin­gle in Canada, and enough copies were imported to push the song onto the charts at #45. The record­ing isn’t as clear as I would like.

3) Don’t Bother Me — There’s all kinds of extra per­cus­sion stuff going on that I never heard before, includ­ing some kind of african drum. The end of the song gets a lit­tle messy as well, which I had never caught before.

4) Lit­tle Child — Dumb lyrics, but there’s actu­ally a pretty heavy groove going on.

5) Till there was you — This is the best sound­ing song so far. Really nice and clear. And how cool is George Harrison’s pseudo jazz gui­tar solo? And it’s such a pretty song.

6) Roll Over Beethoven — Killer.

7) Hold Me Tight — This song kind of sucks.

You Really Got a Hold On Me — This sounds really, really good. Lennon sounds great, and it’s great song. Go Smokey.

9) I Wanna Be Your Man — Trivia. This song was actu­ally writ­ten for the Rolling Stones. Here’s a quote:

Hear­ing that the band was in need of mate­r­ial for a sin­gle, Lennon and McCart­ney went to their ses­sion at De Lane Lea Stu­dio and fin­ished off the song – whose verse they had already been work­ing on – in the cor­ner of the room while the impressed Rolling Stones watched. Lennon later com­mented, “That shows how much impor­tance we put on it. We weren’t going to give them any­thing great, right?”

I don’t know if any of you have heard the Stones ver­sion, but I don’t think it’s any­where as good as the Bea­t­les ver­sion. It’s a lot slower, and “Funkier”, I guess. I just don’t really like it.

10) Money (That’s What I Want) — Pure killer. Like early punk rock. Lennon is killing it, and McCartney’s high back­round vocal is so cool. And I LOVE a gui­tar solo where noth­ing hap­pens except the rhythm part.

Over­all, for some rea­son I didn’t enjoy lis­ten­ing to With The Bea­t­les as much as Please Please Me. I’m not really sure why, but I think that the album isn’t as good. It doesn’t have quite the same energy, and the song­writ­ing hasn’t quite matured yet. That’s going to hap­pen on Hard Day’s Night, which is the next album. Also, some of the cov­ers are a bit lack­lus­ter. There’s still some good moments, but I don’t think it’s as con­sis­tent. I’m really look­ing for­ward to Hard Day’s Night!

I hope every­one likes the new look! I need to tweak it a bit, but I’m pretty happy with it.

The first Bea­tle album was recorded in quite a hurry. They had released their sec­ond sin­gle, Please Please Me, and it had become a instant #1 smash hit. The music indus­try wasn’t really built on long term suc­cess back then, so it was always about get­ting as much out of an artist while they’re hot. There­fore the record com­pany said “We need a full album. Right now!” If mem­ory serves (from all the Bea­tle books I’ve read) they took the first full day they had free from their live shows and booked all day in Abbey Road. What fol­lowed, in the words of Bea­t­les scholar Mark Lewisohn are “the most pro­duc­tive 585 min­utes in music his­tory.” They recorded 11 songs, play­ing live in the stu­dio. One song “Hold me tight” was recorded, but not used until the next album. The entire album was recorded live, with no over­dubs, and it really show­cases how great a live band they really were.

And now for the actual review. The first thing is WOW do these sound good. The Bass is so much louder than it is on the orig­i­nal albums. It’s almost over­whelm­ing on a song like “I saw her stand­ing there”. But it’s really cool to actu­ally hear it. Paul McCart­ney is prob­a­bly one of the top two or three bass play­ers in music his­tory, and even on this first album, while play­ing and singing, the lines are really cool. And out­side of the Bass, the clar­ity is just stun­ning. Every­thing else is just as clear as day. It’s really like lis­ten­ing to the album for the first time. I didn’t lis­ten to this album over and over like some of the oth­ers, so I’ll really be curi­ous to see how I feel about the other ones. But this is a really good start. The songs that really stick out to me for var­i­ous rea­sons are the following:

1) I Saw Her Stand­ing There — As usual, just rocked. And hear­ing the bass so much louder was cool. It’s all so much clearer that I even could hear some slight weird­ness in the bass part dur­ing the end of the solo. But awesome.

2) Boys — Ringo is the only drum­mer I’ve heard who can play cool fills while singing. And he sounds really good on this track.

3) Please Please Me — Always a great track.

4) Do You Want To Know A Secret? — the depth of all the vocals and the reverb is great on this track. In fact, all the tracks have this huge Phil Spec­tor reverb thing going on, and this one sounds really cool to me. The “Do-dah-do” back­grounds are “in the cave!” And I never caught this before. There’s some kind of click dur­ing the bridge, which to me sounds like some­one hit­ting two drum­sticks together. But the snare is still there, so it’s not Ringo. And I know the album was recorded live, so who is it? Mys­te­ri­ous indeed.

5) Twist and Shout — for those of you who don’t know the orig­i­nal story, here’s the short ver­sion. They needed one more track at the end of the night, and after much debate, this is what they decided on. John Lennon’s voice was pretty much dead, so he said “I’ve got one take in me, and I’m going to kill my voice.” And they pulled it off in one take, and if you really lis­ten, Lennon is just scream­ing it. He did such a good job that he missed the next two live shows, and said his voice wasn’t the same for a long time after­wards. It’s pretty fierce, and at the end of the track you can hear some kind of vocal sound, which sounds like Lennon say­ing “God.” There were sev­eral one take record­ings in Bea­tle his­tory, usu­ally of some of their cover songs from the cav­ern days, and this is one of them. I’ll point them out as I go. It’s also one of the few times in Rock his­tory that a cover ver­sion of a song exceeds the orig­i­nal. I’ll let some­one else spec­u­late on the others.

So over­all, I’m pretty stoked. Just this first album was good enough that I can’t wait for the oth­ers. My main prob­lem is that my favorite Bea­tle album is Abbey Road, which is the last one, so it’s going to take me for­ever to get there.