By Stuart Mitchner

In the sleeve notes accompanying Beatles for Sale, Derek Taylor surmises that “the kids of AD 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of well being and warmth as we do today,” for “the magic of the Beatles” has “cut through our differences of race, age, and class” and “is adored by the world.” Half a century later in AD 2015, “One of the strangest things about the Beatles phenomenon,” according to the group’s first biographer, Hunter Davies, “is that the further we get from them, the bigger they become.”

Taylor’s prophecy serves as the epigraph for Davies’s new book, The Beatles Lyrics (Little Brown 2014), which includes facsimiles of more than 100 drafts of Beatles songs along with “the stories behind the music.”

The story behind one song began for me when Help, the album that followed Beatles for Sale, was released in the U.K. on August 6, 1965 (the less said about the truncated U.S. movie soundtrack LP the better). The first time I heard the title song, I was afraid the group was losing its touch. The contrast between “Help” and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” with its monster riff, was devastating. The self-proclaimed “riff master” Keith Richards’s secret weapon was an effects pedal, the Gibson fuzz tone, which, he says, gave him “the sound that caught everyone’s imagination.” Except that “Satisfaction” bypasses the imagination and hits you like a train, that pounding riff clear as a bell and solid as a sledgehammer, a sonic absolute. There’s no resisting it. And it gives Mick Jagger a powerful engine to stoke as he nails Sat-is-fac-shun, syllable by syllable, taking it apart and putting it together until it’s his word, a new thing under the sun.

Lest we forget, however, the full title of what became, as Jagger puts it, the Stones’ “signature song,” is not the S-word alone, it’s “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Mick is on a tear because the world is too much with him. It’s not just sex. It’s that he’s sick to death of the “useless information” about shirts and cigarettes and such being dinned into him from the man on his radio and the man on his TV. When you come right down to it, what he’s responding to isn’t all that different from the frustrations driving “Help.”

Crying Out

It took more than a few listenings to appreciate what John Lennon accomplished with the one-syllable word pitched his way when the title of the second Beatles film was changed from Eight Arms to Hold You to Help. Dashing off the title song for A Hard Day’s Night, he’d resorted to dumbed-down lines such as “I’ve been working like a dog”/”I should be sleeping like a log.” But the word “help” and the personal history that came with it couldn’t be expressed by dog-log lyrics. Years later he would say, “Most people think it’s just a fast rock-’n’-roll song. I didn’t realize it at the time … I really was crying out for help … I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.”

Keeping Company

The song started getting to me on the way to India. Hitchhiking east from Venice, I kept hearing “Help” in my head, lines like “When I was younger, so much younger than today,” and “now those days are gone I’m not so self-assured,” and especially, the lift off into the chorus with “Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors.” Waiting for rides, on my own with no idea where I would be come evening, every day on the road was a door opening to the unknown and as I went through, the song went with me, John singing, earnest and unstoppable, “I do appreciate your being round” and “Help me get my feet back on the ground” and “now my life has changed in oh so many ways,/My independence seems to vanish in the haze,” which even as it suggested the negative side of massive fame coalesced with what I was feeling on a misty day on the highway to Trieste. I was living and breathing independence, and what had “vanished” was my past, parents, friends, everything I’d left behind. Anticipation, the dominant reality of hitchhiking, gave rise to catchy cliches like “Help is on the way,” along with phrases from other songs I knew by heart, like “Eight Days a Week,” “I Feel Fine,” “I Should Have Known Better,” and of course “Ticket to Ride.” This is what the music of the Beatles was and is all about. It goes where you go, it doesn’t blow past you like the Satisfaction Express, it’s good company, and, as I was about to find out with “Help,” it has remarkable staying powers.

Help, I’m Alive

In a column from August 19, 2009, I wrote about being picked up outside Trieste in a VW driven by an Iranian who’d had a 45-rpm record player installed in the dashboard; he owned two singles, “Help,” and “I’m Alive” by the Hollies, and the only reason he’d stopped for me was that he couldn’t put the 45s in the slot and drive at the same time. At first, he would ask for one, then the other, easy enough; he had no interest in the B sides — the only time I inserted the flip side of “Help,” Paul McCartney’s screamer “I’m Down,” he nearly drove the car off the road. After a while, all he asked for was “Help.” Since the record titles were among the only words of English he knew, and since his driving was erratic at best, I began to suspect that this was the first time he’d ever driven a car, he was “learning on the job,” and the song was expressing his panic.

According to an online map, the distance between Trieste and Zagreb is 229 kilometers, an estimated two hours and 34 minutes. That was enough for me. At a stop light coming into Zagreb, I grabbed my pack and escaped into the rainy night, bumping the door shut behind me. He was driving all the way to Tehran, a dream ride if you were up for 3,800 kilometers of playing and replaying “Help.”

His Mates Pitch In

I’ve just been watching two performances of “Help,” one for a session on British television in August 1965, and one from the Shea Stadium concert two weeks later. In the first, Lennon is looking anything but fat and depressed as he belts out the message with characteristic bravado and grit. What strikes me is how harmoniously, in every sense of the word, his mates pitch in. It’s more than “backing vocals,” it’s the title in action, Paul and George singing the first three exclamatory “helps,” while John sings, “I need somebody … not just anybody … I need someone.” The same thing happens in the Shea Stadium video with Lennon doing the voice-over as the camera zooms down on the epitome of pandemonium, girls screaming, a few running across the outfield to be caught and carried bodily off by New York’s Finest. Says John, “Don’t you think the Beatles gave every sodding thing they’ve got to be the Beatles? That took a whole section of our youth. That whole period when everyone else was just goofing off, we were working 24 hours a day. The whole Beatles thing was just beyond comprehension.”

The Album

It was early November before I landed in a Calcutta record store listening booth and finally heard Help — the full album — shoulder to shoulder with a Brit and a Californian. You could say we were “goofing off.” Sharing the bliss. Taking turns holding shut the door every time the frantic clerk tried to get us out of there after we’d listened to the whole thing twice and were spinning the wheel a third time. We were drunk on the music, especially McCartney’s “The Night Before,” one of the many overlooked Beatles wonders that you want to hear again the instant it finishes. But the song that really held us was Lennon’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a passionate sequel to “Help” in which the singer turns his face to the wall while people stare and laugh. “Hearing them, seeing them,” he “can never win,” when in fact it’s one of his most irresistible songs.

As for working 24 hours a day and never winning, I’m reminded of Liberace’s famous come-back to his critics, “I cry all the way to the bank.” According to The Beatles Lyrics, John wrote “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” while traveling in his Rolls. Having nothing to write in, he borrowed his chauffeur’s address book.

Princeton’s Most Famous Brand

Fifteen years after the Beatles released Help, Barry Weisfeld opened a record store on Nassau Street. What better way to end a Record Review about the Beatles than with a reference to this week’s page one story, the sale of the Princeton Record Exchange (Prex), one of the music world’s most illustrious brands, to store manager Jon Lambert. If you want evidence of the continuing impact of the Fab Four on the world of vinyl, all you need to do is visit Prex’s massive Beatles section or browse in New Arrivals. I replaced my worn-out copy of the UK edition of Help there, and back in the late 1970s when Barry’s traveling record fair set up in the U-Store, the first record I bought there was Red Rose Speedway by Paul McCartney and Wings.