A$# 022 Beatles | With The Beatles

The Beatles had a hard act to follow after their first album and two huge inter-album singles, From Me To You and She Loves You.

Britain was in the middle of Beatlemania, and the Fabs would hit new heights. But they didn't know that for sure when they entered Studio 2 at Abbey Road on July 18, 1963 to lay down the first tracks for their second album. As Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn put it:

The present day notion that pop/rock artists make only one album every two years was certainly not operative in 1963. Quite the reverse, in fact. With Please Please Me out just four months, and seemingly parked on a permanent basis at number one on the charts, the Beatles found themselves back at Abbey Road working on the follow-up, at this point untitled but later named With The Beatles, in keeping with the Epstein/Martin plan of two LPs and four singles per year.

Sessions for this album quickly revealed the astonishing maturity the Beatles were gaining inside the studio. There were to be cover versions of other artists' songs nestling alongside Beatles originals, just as on Please Please Me, yet these all sound far superior on the second album.

With wasn't recorded (almost) all in one the way Please Please me had been. They worked on it in several sessions from July to late October - while they were busy doing tours nationwide in Britain (in August, September and October), their first tour of Sweden, recording performances for BBC Radio and various TV appearances! Yet they managed to produce a superb record.

The album opens with a strong trio of Lennon/McCartney originals: It Won't Be Long, All I've Got To Do and All My Loving. Just these three tracks reveal the magnitude of their compositional abilities, at their rocking and ballad best.

There's also George's first solo composition, the bluesy Don't Bother Me. The other Fab-written songs are Little Child, Hold Me Tight, Not A Second Time and the rousing I Wanna Be Your Man (which Paul and John also gave to the Stones), a song that has become a concert staple for Ringo to sing.

Their choices of covers are equally inspired: Till There Was You (Paul's vocals have since made generations of females swoon to this tune), Please Mr. Postman, George's excellent read of Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven, Smokey Robinson's You Really Got A Hold On Me, Devil In Her Heart, and the boisterous closer, Money (That's What I Want).

During these sessions, they also recorded This Boy, with its excellent three-part harmonizing, and I Want To Hold Your Hand, the song that would lead the invasion of North American shores mere months later.

With The Beatles was released in the UK on Nov. 22, 1963 (a day also tinged by great sadness an ocean away because that's the day JFK was killed), and rocketed to the top of the charts. (It had advance orders of a then-unprecedented 300,000 and even, somehow, hit the singles chart.) The IW2HYH/This Boy single was issued a week later.

By the fall of 1963, the Beatles had conquered the UK and much of Europe. The rest of the world was just around the corner, and With was a potent part of their arsenal of great music.

Many of the songs would end up on the first Capitol Fab album, Meet The Beatles. But when I got into the Beatles in 1980, I bought the British vinyl, and that's what you get on CD (though you can buy Meet as part of the Capitol Albums Vol. 1 set).

Track listing:
1. It Won't Be Long
2. All I've Got to Do
3. All My Loving
4. Don't Bother Me
5. Little Child
6. Till There Was You
7. Please Mr. Postman
8. Roll over Beethoven
9. Hold Me Tight
10. You've Really Got a Hold on Me
11. I Wanna Be Your Man
12. Devil in Her Heart
13. Not a Second Time
14. Money (That's What I Want)