To celebrate the anniversary of Help!, released this month in 1965, I talked with Steve Matteo. Matteo’s 33 1/3 title on Let It Be had a big influence on my 2011 Lennon biography, and his new book, Act Naturally, talks to fresh sources who worked on these projects. Turns out A Hard Day’s Night features the same cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, who had just finished filming Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. I started by asking Matteo why he chose the Let It Be album as his first book-length project…
Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film
(Backbeat Books, 2023)
Tim Riley talks with author Steve Matteo:
Next, here’s a sample of some new song essays culled from What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time (Oxford, 2019), which sport nifty silent videos to track production details. See the Beatles page for more.
If the underlying structure of the Beatles’ 1965 calendar proceeded unchanged from the year before, great strides in compositional craft, unique instrumentations, and non-rock styles also deserve recognition. Lennon-McCartney lyrics gained new self-awareness: “Help!” particularly peels back its film’s superficial James Bond parody to uncover new depths of personal insecurity; where the movie exaggerates the mop-top image, the soundtrack everywhere belies it. A curious ironic distance opens between the wacky film spoof and its sometimes sardonic soundtrack. Some general points about the album precede a detailed look at how instrumental color combines with aspects of melody, harmony, rhythm, and form in the LP’s lead single.
From the opening moments of their first recording of the new year, “Ticket to Ride,” electric guitars gain a new authority; Harrison’s ringing twelve-string launches the song with a powerful line, but the track also features subtle timbral differences and rhythmic vitality from a newly intricate sort of ensemble, partly owing to advantages offered in studio procedures (moving the guitars to their own tape track, thus unlocking them from bass and drums; and overdubbing) unavailable in live performance. The shifts of coloring stem from three new guitars—matching Fender Stratocasters played by both John and George and an Epiphone Casino played by Paul—and a new pedal effect used by George. Ringo’s drumming and tambourine playing combine for tension and release as transforming as that created in the retransitions of “From Me to You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but in a quieter, more introspective way.
DEMO:
“Ticket” leads off with a bright melodic repeated riff from George’s electric twelve-string. It’s mostly a syncopated arpeggiation of the tonic triad, with one important exception: a dissonant ninth on an offbeat (B against the tonic root, A, articulated on the second half of beat 3) stubbornly pulls away from the first scale degree and leaps up to the chord’s fifth, repeating the riff without a direct resolution of the non-triadic tone, to sneering effect. (The B neither returns immediately to stable root A nor passes to chordal third, C♯.) The ninth escapes the tonic triad, an appropriate emblem of the woman who jilts the singer, leaving him to lament his ex’s newfound freedom. After a tom-tom flurry reminiscent of the “She Loves You” opening, John and Paul enter (0:03) with a growling Strat that doubles the bass on droning chord roots. Although the two repeat a long-unchanging pitch (tonic A supporting the I chord for two bars and then six more once John’s vocal begins, finally moving to B for ii at 0:18 and to E for V, 0:21), John and Paul syncopate their attacks by following each strong downbeat with an accent on the second half of the second beat and repeating this pattern through the entire verse. Through the six bars of tonic, no one plays a chord—just a drone that also colors the Help! outtake “If You’ve Got Troubles,” pointing the way to unchanging drones throughout much of Revolver, culminating in the mystical bass and tamboura of “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The full texture of the “Ticket” verse’s ostinato—everything played in the recording of the basic track plus an overdubbed tambourine—is represented in Table 5.01, with x’s marking the articulations on every half beat in the two guitars, bass, and drums.
From What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time (Oxford University Press, 2019)
Off-Balance
Alan Feuer’s baffling New York Times lede suffers from the milquetoast approach that got us here. How does “conspiracy” not imply “direct connection,” exactly? Where are the editors at this paper? Worse, very few people complained about it, even though both that headline and opening sentence sport that ominous passive voice. Hard to argue how this approach defends democracy.
Sometimes you wonder whether Times Opinion editors ever read the rest of their own paper. This week the paper ran National Review’s Rich Lowry again, but the question persists: why? Not only does he have his own outlet, his “balance” typically hides some glaring fraud inside a fearsome banality (call it the “David Brooks Tic”). On charges of “collusion” with Russia, Lowry writes, “At the time, he denounced the unfairness of it all, and ultimately, based on any reasonable reading of the record, was vindicated…” And it’s ongoing: see Jack Goldsmith from August 10, arguing Tr*mp shouldn’t even get prosecuted for leading a violent insurrection. See: Mueller report, Attorney General Barr’s malfeasance, and the Paul Manafort jail sentence.
Worth saying over and over again: If you're a New York Times editor covering TFG, read the indictment. That’s the minimum requirement.
Then kill any story about First Amendment rights, “just following counsel’s advice,” what Trump “believed” at the time, or how conspiracy somehow absolves anybody of direct involvement, all debunked explicitly in the first five pages.
elsewhere
Michael Wood, who “makes all the right noises,” captures the Barbie movie, and its subtle nod to Jordan Peele’s Nope:
In the background of Barbieland is a famous mountain, also found in South Dakota and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. In reality the faces of four American presidents are carved out of the rock. In the early part of the film the faces are all those of women. When Gosling and his companions take over the place the faces are those of horses.
For Criterion, Sheila O’Malley writes about the wayward charms of 31 Elvis movies (“Extreme chastity (lots of kissus-interruptus, coitus interruptus being totally off the table…”). Many Criterion titles are available through your local library’s Kanopy subscription, worth the weak UI.
Danyel Smith writes in “Remembering the Rappers We Lost”:
So much of Black journalism is obituary. Early deaths—literal, artistic, carceral—are commonplace. And Black men in hip-hop exist in an endless loop of roller-coaster success, hazy self-worth, bullets, fame and its cousin, paranoia. There’s earned distrust of white people in white medical coats and of the so-called thin blue line. In this loop, the death of Black male potential is a recurring theme…
incoming
Joyce Millman on Springsteen, David Hepworth on EMI’s Abbey Road, and Ray Padgett’s book on Dylan as “bandleader.”
playlist of the month
Laser beams on Sharon Tandy’s “Hold On” (1967 or 1968), Shazam-ed off the radio, immediate and infinite. With Gordon Haskell, bass, Keith Guster, drums, and Bryn Haworth, guitar.
noises off
substack archive; more links at the riley rock index: bylines, youtube finds, reference sites; Bluesky calls for you; Pinterest; beacons.ai; random deep link (no flipping)
hi there — thank you for mentioning my "Remembering" essay. also: cool newsletter.