It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ by The Beatles
October 7, 1964
A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles
#1 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, July 25 – October 30, 1964
Welcome to the first installment of It Was 50 Years Ago Today, a new column examining a song, album, movie or book that was number-one on the charts exactly half a century ago. And what better way to launch this series about number-ones than with The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, an album that encapsulates so many firsts, mosts, and bests?
The Beatles have sold more records than anyone else in the world. A Hard Day’s Night, the group’s first album to feature all original compositions, was recorded and released in 1964, Year 1 for Beatlemania in America. It spent the most time at the top of the Billboard Top LPs chart (14 weeks) of any album in 1964. Two of its tracks, “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “A Hard Day’s Night,” also topped the Hot 100 pop singles chart. Lastly, it was the soundtrack to The Beatles’ first movie, which also was #1 at the box office for two weeks in August 1964.
In fact, this last point – that the Hard Day’s Night LP is very much a soundtrack – is often overlooked. Not that the film A Hard Day’s Night has been forgotten; it’s frequently praised as one of the greatest music movies ever made, and its fiftieth anniversary has been honored with a theatrical re-release and a new DVD/Blu-Ray edition by the Criterion Collection. But thanks to the vagaries of international distribution, the album called A Hard Day’s Night that Americans have been listening to for the past three decades differs greatly from the Hard Day’s Night that soared to the top of the charts in 1964. Even the LP covers are different!
All Beatles albums before 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were released in separate British and American versions that often shared only a handful of tracks. It wasn’t until the Beatles’ music was first issued on CD that the UK versions of their albums became the universal standard. Therefore, Americans who were introduced to the Hard Day’s Night album in 1987 or later are accustomed to hearing the same 13 songs that Britons had been listening to since 1964.
But the original US version of A Hard Day’s Night shared only eight tracks with its transatlantic twin: all seven of the songs featured in the movie, plus “I’ll Cry Instead,” which John Lennon had written for the “break out” sequence ultimately scored by “Can’t Buy Me Love.” The other five songs from the UK edition, including favorites like “You Can’t Do That” and “Any Time at All,” were dropped in favor of a quartet of jazzy instrumentals arranged for the film by Beatles producer George Martin. These tracks do a nice job of meshing the energy and melodies of the Fab Four with demands of a film score. Still, it’s hard to imagine many American fans who wouldn’t have preferred five new Beatles songs instead.
Yet these four instrumentals are essential to understanding why A Hard Day’s Night exists at all. The Beatles had signed with British record label EMI in mid-1962, but its American arm, Capitol Records, didn’t release any of the Fab Four’s music until “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in the final week of 1963. Even then, the single only came out because the group was scheduled to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show a few weeks later and needed something to promote.
If Capitol was slow to recognize the Beatles’ potential, though, its competitors weren’t. A Hard Day’s Night was the first product of a three-movie deal United Artists signed with the band earlier in 1963, primarily so the company could cash in through the accompanying soundtrack LPs. So even if Americans had to “suffer” through four perfectly pleasant excerpts from the score – all of which were based on Beatles records – it was a small price to pay for a movie and some songs that wouldn’t have been made otherwise.
At any rate, the five tracks missing from the US edition of A Hard Day’s Night were still available to American fans, provided they were willing to shell out for three more albums. Capitol Records made up for its early lack of interest in the group by releasing five Beatles LPs in 1964 alone, cobbled together from various album tracks, singles, B-sides, EP cuts and other stray recordings. The five missing songs from A Hard Day’s Night were spread over three of these LPs: “You Can’t Do That” turned up on The Beatles’ Second Album in April; “Things We Said Today,” “Any Time at All,” and “When I Get Home” (plus five tracks duplicated with the soundtrack) on Something New in July; and “I’ll Be Back” on Beatles ’65 in December. The Beatles’ US audience was apparently willing to pony up: all of these Capitol LPs managed to top the charts except Something New, which maintained the #2 spot for nine weeks behind A Hard Day’s Night.
Apart from the four George Martin instrumentals and “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which had already topped the charts earlier in 1964, only seven new Beatles songs appeared on the US edition of A Hard Day’s Night released in late June. While The Beatles hadn’t yet become the restless innovators that they would be in a year or so, these new songs demonstrate the group was clearly progressing from their earlier material. Even the more straightforward tracks have interesting twists.
The girl group-ish “Tell Me Why” and the rockabilly-flavored “I’ll Cry Instead” are Beatles-penned spins on the kind of covers that filled their early repertoire, but with angrier, more emotionally direct lyrics than the songs they typically remade. Even “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You,” a so-called “formula song” (per Paul McCartney) written for George Harrison to sing, shifts back and forth between major and minor keys, creating a restless ambivalence that belies the simple lyrics.
This tonal ambiguity also complicates “And I Love Her,” an acoustic ballad built on Latin rhythms, muted percussion, and a simple, flamenco-esque lead guitar. The song is one of the Beatles’ first major departures from their rock and roll sound, but the spare production (no strings overdubs, for instance) grounds it, and the push-pull between major and minor give it an edge that rescues it from easy-listening territory. “If I Fell” is another gorgeous ballad, but with a more familiarly Beatles sound, starring Lennon and McCartney’s close harmonies and a winding chord progression that echoes the hesitant, uncertain lyrics.
But The Beatles’ increasing sophistication didn’t just manifest in polished ballads; the group’s rockers also grew sharper and more complex. The structure of “I Should Have Known Better” alternates between bouncy verses – a fairly conventional, pop-friendly interpretation of heartbreak – and a rawer bridge where the full intensity of the singer’s hurt bursts forth, yet somehow the transition between the two feels organic and seamless.
“A Hard Day’s Night,” meanwhile, is the most aggressive single the Beatles had yet released. Its lightning tempo and Lennon’s snarling vocals would form the template for countless garage punks, even if few could replicate the dense production, roiling percussion, and melodic perfection. Likewise, the blend of George Harrison’s jangly 12-string Rickenbacker with Ringo Starr’s cowbell finds The Beatles inventing the vernacular of folk rock a year before The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” kicked off the trend.
The Beatles spent 30 weeks – roughly seven months! – atop the US album charts in 1964, almost half of which was due to A Hard Day’s Night alone. In the decades since A Hard Day’s Night was released, consensus has marked it as the pinnacle of The Beatles’ early era. The song structures and chord progressions on the album are more inventive than their previous releases, while maintaining a fresh-faced vigor that Beatles for Sale/Beatles ’65, released a few months later, often lacked.
While the American edition of A Hard Day’s Night might not be the ideal version, with its missing tracks and unnecessary instrumentals, it still works as a sampler of some the group’s top material (“I Should Have Known Better,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her,” the title track) with none of the filler (“When I Get Home”). Along with accompanying film, which had heaps more wit, style, and creativity than the typical music movie cash-in, it served as evidence that perhaps these Beatles had a bit more going on than most flashes in the pan.
