The Beatles faced the same pressures every teen sensation has since-- fatigue, frustration, being bounced into recording substandard material. "It isn't a pot-boiling quick-sale any-old-thing-will-do-for-Christmas mixture," claimed Derek Taylor on the Beatles For Sale sleeve. This pre-emptive strike looks more than a little defensive, especially when the cover versions are back in force, and one of them is the notorious and oft-detested "Mr. Moonlight".
The workrate expected of early-1960s pop stars is one of the hardest things for modern listeners to get their heads around. We're used to bands making a record, touring in support, searching for inspiration, trying out new ideas, maybe two years later making another. Because our experience of the early Beatles is structured around their albums, we tend to think of them as doing something similar, except at a much more rapid pace. As Ian Macdonald's superb Revolution in the Head makes clear, this wasn't true: albums, singles, EPs, tours tumbled over one another with hardly a break-- a firehose of almost continuous activity.
There were two reasons for this workload. Firstly the music industry simply hadn't worked out yet how to extend a record's shelf life-- singles weren't taken from albums after all. Secondly the lifespan of acts wasn't expected to be long, so it made sense to get the most work possible out of them. The famous hotch-potch of their early American catalogue was one result. The Beatles themselves were changing how the business worked, but Beatles For Sale, of all the British records, bears the stamp of these business realities. It's a mess.
But it's a really good mess. Taylor's sleevenotes are also interesting because they go out of the way to reassure listeners that everything they're hearing can be reproduced live. Studio experimentation was becoming more important to the band and producer George Martin, but clearly someone viewed it with a little nervousness. You can understand why: The Lennon-McCartney originals on Beatles For Sale are often full of curious arrangements, drones, jagged transitions, and lashings of aggression. Blame pot, or the inspiration of Bob Dylan, or just the pressure-cooker environment the group was in, but the record hits a seam of angry creativity.
This is particularly true of Lennon's amazing first three songs. "No Reply" shatters itself with waves of jealous rage, taking the menace that had flecked Beatles music and bringing it up in the mix: his dangerously quiet "that's a lie" is the most chilling moment in their catalogue. "I'm a Loser" turns that anger inward with just as much brutality. And "Baby's in Black" curdles a nursery rhyme, transforms the group's crisp pop sound into an off-kilter clang, and uses John and Paul McCartney's double vocal to thicken the soupy sound even further. This run of tracks marries the direct attack of their earliest material and the boundary-pushing of their later albums, and stands with the best of both.
Even so it's a relief when "Rock and Roll Music" breaks the tension, especially when you notice that the band are playing their best rock'n'roll since "Twist and Shout". Perhaps the workrate had pushed them back into the Hamburg hot zone, but the uptempo covers on Beatles For Sale are fiercely good-- as ragged, loud and immediate as the songs needed to be. Even "Mr. Moonlight" fits the aggressive mood, the ugliness of its organ solo surely deliberate.
McCartney's songs on Beatles For Sale are more thoughtful than moody, though on his splendid "Every Little Thing"-- given melodramatic thrust by Shangri-Las-style piano and bass drum-- he's distinctly melancholy, his "yes, I know I'm a lucky guy" sounding like an attempt to convince himself of that. But Lennon's anger and the band's rediscovery of rock'n'roll mean For Sale's reputation as the group's meanest album is deserved, even if it has "Eight Days a Week" as its breezy centerpiece. The lumpiest and least welcoming of their early records, it's also one of the most rewarding.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]
