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!