Behka’s Breakfast with The Beatles Recap: Week of December 23

I'm a huge Beatles fan, have been since I was small.  I grew up with it, and I kept growing into it as the years went on.  Every morning at the beginning of the morning show, I pick a different Beatles song from their extensive catalog to play, just to kick things off.  Here's a recap of all the songs I played this week, in case you missed it. On Monday, I chose "Good Day, Sunshine".

"Good Day Sunshine" is a song by the Beatles on the 1966 album Revolver. It was written mainly by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney. McCartney said that he was influenced by the Lovin' Spoonful: the song's "old-timey vaudevillian feel" particularly recalls the Spoonful's hit "Daydream", to which "Good Day Sunshine" bears some harmonic resemblance. "Good Day Sunshine" has been played as the wake-up music on multiple Space Shuttle missions. I picked it just because it was freggin cold on Monday, and I wanted to play something that might make us feel warm.

On Tuesday, I played "Christmas Time Is Here Again".

Most every year, the Beatles would send out a little 45 rpm record to their fan club at Christmas time.  It would sometimes be them goofing off, greeting the fans, doing little sketches, or sharing favorite music.  This is from the 1967 Christmas Fan Club record.  It was finally released to the public in the nineties, when they came back for The Beatles  Anthology.

On Wednesday, well, I wasn't here.  It was Christmas, durn it. 

Don't question me.  Just go with it.

On Thursday, I played a song off of The White Album called "Cry, Baby, Cry".

This one was  written by  John Lennon from their 1968 album The Beatles. The outro of the song is a short segment referred to as "Can You Take Me Back", written by Paul McCartney.  It was originally inspired by advertising, and in particular a way of advertising directed to children.  The original lyric was "Cry Baby Cry, make your mother buy", which would imply encouraging tantrums to get toys.  It was changed before it got past the demo stage, though.

On Friday, I played "Eight Days A Week".

This one was originally inspired by early script drafts of what would become the movie "Help!".  One of the early titles was "Eight Arms to Hold You", and this was an attempt to try to write a title track for the film.  It didn't quite work out, and the song was good enough to keep, so the title of the film ended up getting changed to another song they already had at the time.  There's another story about how the song came about, that says that Paul heard another of Ringo's malapropisms, saying he'd been working "eight days a week".  This one is slightly interesting because of the fade in, which was unusual at the time.  It was also a very successful single, as it was their 7th US number one.   John Lennon in particular wasn't too happy with the song, and although it was a big hit, they never played it live.

Let me know if there's something you want to hear, and I'll play it next week!

Beatle-ly yours,
Behka