Vinyl Release

Some say it’s a dominant 9th of F in the key of C. Others claim it’s a poly-triad ii7/V in A flat major. Still others insist it’s a G7 with added 9th and suspended 4th or a superimposition of Dm, F, and G.

Have I bored you enough yet? There’s more if you want it. Thought not. But here’s the thing; no matter what anyone says, the ’60s indisputably began with one miraculous chord. The gleaming, trebly, shivering strum on George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker 360 that announces ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – the single, the LP and the feature film – signalled the dawn of a new era.

Released in July 1964, A Hard Day’s Night was The Beatles’ third LP. The first two – Please Please Me and With The Beatles – were great, of course, but they were really teases, tradition trendied-up. Nearly half of both were taken up with boisterous cover versions and the rest were pop confectionaries, a wee bit moon-June-y if we’re being honest.

All aboard

But that all changed – and everything along with it – at the ringing of that celestial chord. Allied to Dick Lester’s breathtaking opening black and white movie images of the Fab Four laughing away as they’re being chased through London’s Marylebone train station by a stampede of screaming girls, it heralded the arrival of a new world order where the young and groovy generation usurped the square post-war establishment. Funny, alive, cheeky, carefree, disrespectful, smart of mind and clobber, the group that recorded A Hard Day’s Night took popular music places it had never ventured before.

The A-side of the LP (they weren’t called anything fancy like ‘albums’ back then) featured songs recorded for the film soundtrack, while the B-side housed additional pieces to make up the numbers. Pretty much all are brilliant. ‘If I Fell’ is the first of Lennon’s psychologically vulnerable songs, a plea to a lass to be faithful to him so his old girlfriend who done him wrong will be devastated. ‘You Can’t Do That’, built on an angry riff more suited to The Rolling Stones, is a squirming mess of bruised and threatened macho pride, Lennon’s swagger disguising a fragile, crumbling ego. The deceivingly jaunty-sounding ‘Tell Me Why’ is similar, Lennon wounded by betrayal.

Working like a dog

‘And I Love Her’ and ‘Things We Said Today’ reveal McCartney gliding along in Lennon’s slipstream, the melodies gorgeous but the sentiments more traditionally saccharine. Other numbers, however, are blatantly, near-crudely horny; there’s no coding in the language. The bloke in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ comes home knackered from work to earn the money which keeps his woman happy and in return she rewards him by giving him ‘everything’ – a scenario matching the contemporary Angry Young Man novels, plays and films such as Room At The Top, Look Back In Anger and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

The final nail in the coffin of the influences they formerly wore on their sleeves – and the blazing sign that they’d outstripped their heroes and consigned them to history – is ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Eight months earlier, in November 1963, the group had covered Berry Gordy’s R&B standard ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ for their With The Beatles LP, but here they audaciously disowned and dismembered it. Money is no longer the goal. They can see a future of easy come, easy go.

Small faces

The album’s fantastically gnomic title came from a throwaway remark made by Ringo Starr during filming on the movie in the spring of 1964. The album sleeve – a series of snaps, again in black and white, to resemble film stills – was shot by Robert Freeman and is a work of exquisite Warhol-esque modern art. Each Beatle is presented as both an individual and part of a group, which perfectly sums up the mechanics of their burgeoning appeal. All for one yet one for all. Who’s your favourite Fab?

The group were flying high, and that they achieved all this so rapidly, doing two, even three, albums per year at a time when popular music was considered product to sell more than art to be appreciated, is a truly amazing feat – and A Hard Day’s Night was the band’s early peak. Its follow-up, Beatles For Sale, released just five months later, is an exhausted mess packed with covers. By the time Help! came out, some eight months after that in August 1965, The Beatles had recovered their mojo. Only now they were different, their early innocence replaced by a knowing us-and-them mystique. Turned on to dope and LSD, they were primed to lead their fans and myriad imitators into the uncharted realms of psychedelia.

It’s neither easy nor desirable to divorce A Hard Day’s Night the LP from A Hard Day’s Night the film, they were so perfectly meshed in portrayal and attitude, their galvanising effect working in tandem as a brilliant whole. When Roger McGuinn and his nascent fellow Byrds saw it in Los Angeles on its US release, they entered the cinema a folk group and exited stunned, fired-up and ready to go after a piece of that sexy pop action. McGuinn copied Harrison’s Rickenbacker trill and launched the thrilling West Coast folk rock explosion.

String theory

On a finishing note, that startling intro chord to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was actually an Fadd9, according to George Harrison in an interview some 30 years after it changed the world. Ah, but he also let slip that the resonance it struck was due to John Lennon simultaneously playing an Fadd9 on a Gibson J-160E six-string acoustic guitar, while forensic research has revealed a cymbal and snare drum buried in the mix. Paul McCartney also added a D note, played on the fifth fret of the A string (an octave lower than an open D string on a six-string guitar) on his Höfner violin bass, and producer and elderly fifth Fab George Martin added five notes – D2, G2, D3, G3 and C4 – on a Steinway grand piano with the sustain pedal held down, fostering further harmonics.

To my knowledge, no matter how hard they’ve tried, no one has ever succeeded in duplicating that opening chord, just as no one is ever likely to replicate the seismic impact of its glorious, magical sound.

Re-release Verdict

Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the album’s release, this limited edition reissue of A Hard Day’s Night [Universal Music Group/Apple Records 0094638241317] comes on white 180g vinyl and maintains the original UK track listing and Robert Freeman sleeve art. Stereo mixes – the album debuted in 1964 in both mono and stereo – are from ‘digital remasters of the original stereo analogue master tapes’, completed in 2009 for the set’s ‘enhanced’ CD. HFN