Behka’s Breakfast with The Beatles Recap: Week of March 2

This week on Breakfast with Behka and The Beatles, we've been moving along through the soundtrack album for their second movie, Help!

On Monday, I played "Tell Me What You See".

Tell Me What You See" shows the musical growth of the Beatles since Please Please Me, and foreshadows their further exploration on Rubber Soul and Revolver. Following each repetition of the title phrase, there is a brief instrumental break featuring a Hohner Pianet. The instrument is featured on two other tracks on Help!: "You Like Me Too Much" and "The Night Before", both recorded the day before "Tell Me What You See." Starr's drumming on the track is augmented with a trio of percussion instruments; a güiro, a tambourine, and a pair of claves. Although the Beatles had been using additional percussion instruments to flesh out their sound as early as "Don't Bother Me" in 1963, they had rarely been featured this prominently in the mix.

On Tuesday, I played "I've Just Seen a Face".

"I've Just Seen a Face" was written by Paul McCartney and features McCartney on vocals. Before its release, the song was briefly titled "Aunty Gin's Theme" after his father's youngest sister, because it was one of her favourites. It is one of very few Beatles songs that lacks a bass track.

On Wednesday, I played "Yesterday".

According to biographers of McCartney and the Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid forgetting it. Upon being convinced that he had not robbed anyone of their melody, McCartney began writing lyrics to suit it. As Lennon and McCartney were known to do at the time, a substitute working lyric, titled "Scrambled Eggs" (the working opening verse was "Scrambled Eggs/Oh, my baby how I love your legs"), was used for the song until something more suitable was written. It remains popular today with more than 2,200 cover versions and is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music.

On Thursday, I played "Dizzie Miss Lizzie".

"Dizzy, Miss Lizzy" is a song composed and sung by Larry Williams in 1958. It shares many similarities with the Little Richard song "Good Golly Miss Molly". The recording was initially intended for the 1965 American album Beatles VI, along with the Larry Williams cover, "Bad Boy", recorded by the group on the same day. Paul McCartney has stated that he believes this song to be one of the Beatles' best recordings. It features loud, rhythmic instrumentation, along with John Lennon's rousing vocals.

On Friday, I played one side of the double A sided single before their next album, Rubber Soul. The song is "We Can Work It Out".

McCartney wrote the words and music to the verses and the chorus, with lyrics that "might have been personal", probably a reference to his relationship with Jane Asher. With its intimations of mortality, Lennon's contribution to the twelve-bar bridge contrasts typically with what Lennon saw as McCartney's cajoling optimism, a contrast also seen in other collaborations by the pair, such as "Getting Better" and "I've Got a Feeling". The Beatles recorded "We Can Work It Out" on 20 October 1965, four days after its accompanying single track, with an overdub session on 29 October. They spent nearly 11 hours on the song, by far the longest expenditure of studio time up to that point. In a discussion about what song to release as a single, Lennon argued "vociferously" for "Day Tripper", differing with the majority view that "We Can Work It Out" was a more commercial song. As a result, the single was marketed as the first "double A-side," but airplay and point-of-sale requests soon proved "We Can Work It Out" to be more popular, and it reached No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, the Beatles' fastest-selling single since "Can't Buy Me Love", their previous McCartney-led A-side in the UK. It has sold 1.39 million copies in the UK.

Well, that's it for this week. We'll start up again on Monday with the other side of the double A single, "Day Tripper".

Day Trippingly yours,
Behka