The
fourth Beatles album - also known as the ‘haphazardly-put-together-between-tours-to-get-it-out-in-time-for-Christmas’
album - and for me, just as good as the albums on either side of it.I read somewhere that Eight Days A Week is notable as the first ever pop song with a faded-in intro. Now, I don’t know if that’s true - I’m sure whoever came up with that fact hadn’t listened to every pop song that came before this, but it does seem a little unlikely. Especially since the way recording had progressed from single takes into multitracking. With single takes, it’s far more likely that a song would be faded in at the start. Anyway, who knows? Or cares?
I sometime have great difficulty picking the ‘Hidden Gem’ on albums to detail at the foot of these blogs, but with Beatles For Sale it was too easy. The McCartney song What You’re Doing is so underrated - essentially unknown - that it’s almost criminal.
It’s also worth mentioning I Feel Fine (b/w She’s A Woman) which was released a week before this album - a great single, with a lead-guitar riff setting the template for rock music, and proof again that they were starting to get better and better at capturing the excitement of their live performances in the studio.
Hit: Eight Days A Week
Hidden Gem: What You’re Doing
Isn't I Feel Fine also supposed to be the first time feedback was ever put in a song? I don't believe it for a second, but it's supposed to be.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've read that too and not quite sure I believe it either. I think the official claim is that it's the first piece of intentional feedback in a song. Maybe, maybe not.
ReplyDeleteI've just finished reading the Tony Bramwell book - Magical Mystery Tours. Alongside Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, he's the other general dogsbody that you can see in the background of studio photos. It seems he's found everything Beatles-related that hasn't offically been claimed by asomebody, and claimed them:
"So, I was sitting around the studio, and the boys didn't know what to call their album, so I said to them, 'Hey, why don't you just go and walk across the crossing outside, and you can call the album Abbey Road?'"
Hmm.