With The Beatles

The Beatles didn’t get a lot of breathing room in 1963: In February, they had to be smuggled out of a show in Carlisle in a post office van by a police sergeant disguised as a mail carrier; by November, a couple of weeks before the release of their second album, <i>With the Beatles</i>, a riot broke out after fans <i>pushed a parked car</i> into a line of police officers trying to enforce a cordon outside a show in Dublin. Though the precise coinage is still debated, the word “Beatlemania” entered the public lexicon in October; at a couple of live shows, the band reportedly stopped being able to hear their instruments over the sound of the screaming.<br /> While the bulk of <i>Please Please Me</i> had been recorded in a single 13-hour session, <i>With the Beatles</i> was recorded in seven sessions over three months—a schedule that seems comparatively luxurious until you realise that every session took place on days between tour dates or other travel-oriented obligations, and in at least one case, straddled a three-and-a-half-hour stretch in the middle of the day during which the band drove to a theatre several miles from the studio to record both an interview <i>and</i> a session for the BBC. In London traffic. On a Tuesday. Oh, and they wrote most of the songs, too, and in some mysterious hour during which the accomplished accomplish things, they learned to play them as well.<br /> And so here they were again: Moody on the album cover (a black-and-white Robert Freeman photo inspired by Freeman’s images of John Coltrane), bright and unruffled in the music. Like <i>Please Please Me</i>, about half of <i>With the Beatles</i> was made up of covers of American soul and R&B (The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman”, Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me”), while half were Lennon and/or McCartney originals. If Lennon was emerging as the band’s ironist (Barrett Strong’s “Money [That’s What I Want]”), McCartney was becoming their moony romantic (<i>The Music Man</i> highlight “Till There Was You”)—a yin-yang balance that lasted the duration of their shared career. (At the <i>Royal Variety Performance</i> in early November, Lennon famously encouraged the people in the cheap seats to clap along and the rest of the audience—which included the Queen—“rattle your jewelry.”)<br /> While still basically a youth band, they’d started to get dues from the establishment, too: A couple of days before Christmas, a critic for <i>The Times</i> said they were the finest English composers of the year, noting that they seemed to think simultaneously of harmony <i>and</i> melody, while also singling out the naturalness of their Aeolian cadences and intriguing pandiatonic clusters, none of which mattered to the hoarse-voiced teenagers squatted for days outside ticket booths, but which signalled the possibility that the band was on the brink of universal appeal: pop music handled with the sanctity of art.