Published on Jul 4, 2003
There is something to be said for the album format in general.
No matter how many times a song can be bludgoned to death on rock
radio through overplaying, just pulling out the album it’s from,
slapping it on the turntable or in the CD player and giving it a
spin helps to put those same overplayed songs into perspective.
Take a good portion of The Beatles’ catalog. Now, I’m not
questioning their influence on the rock music genre, but doesn’t it
get tiring to hear classic rock radio play the same songs over and
over again? Yet on my very first listen to
A Hard Day’s Night (restored to the version originally
released across the pond), the songs I can occasionally grow tired
of hearing… well, they just made sense.
I can’t say for certainty if this – the third release from John,
Paul, George and Ringo – was the album that cemented Beatlemania
into the hearts and minds of Americans, mainly because I wasn’t
scheduled to walk the planet for another six years. So if this, the
soundtrack to the Beatles’ first movie, wasn’t the spark, it most
certainly was the explosion as everything came together for the
band.
With no song running over three minutes in length, The Beatles
follow a simple yet powerful rule in rock: Get in, get your message
across, and get out. There’s no need to pad any of these 13 songs
with such effluvia as extended guitar solos or spotlights on drum
work. (Sorry, Ringo – no offense meant.) If anything, these short
blasts of power-pop leave the listener wanting more – even today,
nearly 40 years after its release, it’s still powerful.
I could easily gush about songs like “A Hard Day’s Night,” “If I
Fell” (one of the most beautiful love songs out there), “Can’t Buy
Me Love,” “I Should Have Known Better” or any of the hits any rock
fan worth their weight in salt already know. But what can be said
about these which hasn’t already been said? Let’s leave it at this:
this is the environment in which these songs were meant to
be heard, no slam against any of the “best-of” releases meant. Even
if you haven’t seen the movie (which I’m guilty of), the flow of
these songs just feels right.
Of these selections, only two are not familiar to classic rock
radio fans. “When I Get Home” and “You Can’t Do That” don’t get
nearly the amount of airplay – indeed, if they get any at all – as
their counterparts. Regrettably, these also turn out to be the two
weakest links in the whole album chain – not necessarily bad songs,
but just not of the same caliber as the rest of the material.
So is
A Hard Day’s Night the perfect place for a newcomer to The
Beatles to start with? That’s not an easy call to make, simply
because the band covered so much musical ground in less than a
decade that to limit one’s scope to only this album almost feels
like they’re getting cheated. If, however, someone wanted to go
beyond a “best-of” collection and really start exploring the albums
to discover the true essence of The Beatles, then
A Hard Day’s Night is a great launchpad.