OK so I’m a sucker.
As a kid, for me, the role of lead guitarist was given to the fastest, most advanced guitar student, or the guy with the most expensive guitar, or the loudest amp.It usually had nothing to do with soul, magic or even personality. It led to masturbatory self-excess, aimless noodling. It culminated in that horrendous crap that emerged from the Sunset strip in the 80s. Walk into any Guitar Center, and as long as you can stand it, listen. That is the legacy of the church of the lead guitar.
I went out and bought the Help stereo remaster like a million other lunkheads. Why? It had a lot of strikes against it.
Help wasn’t the COOL Beatle movie. It was the other one. Life for the fab four had already accelerated to a frenzied pace that left little room for creativity except “on the fly”.
Richard Lester, who had gotten his breakthrough shot as a filmmaker in Hard Days Night had an amazingly happy accident with these four then unknown lads on that first film. Chemistry was with them, and the blissful charm of low expectations brought hosannas upon all.
Now, Beatlemania was in full flight. and the game had changed. Lester didn’t have access to the boys as he had before. He also picked up the mistaken impression that he could show up at the studio and throw his weight around. George Martin and the band presented a united front and shut him out of the process. So they scripted a preposterous adventure movie, and shoehorned the musicians into it. Then, they came up with songs for said movie. Not necessarily an inspired formula for great art. You can hear the strain on the over stretched capacity of the band. All this being said, it is one of my favorite Beatle albums.
One of the reasons is the public deconstruction of George Harrison. George’s strengths as an artist were easily eclipsed by John and Paul.
Paul’s uber talent and presence on record is easy to track. He was like Michael Jordan in Lead boots, or Michael Phelps leading a pack of average swimmers with his arms tied back. His uncanny ear for quality in pitch, rhythm, and arrangement, his ease in mastering instruments, and his amazing voice (able to shred Little Richard and croon like Presley, but without schmaltzy techniques like vibrato) made him a star player. Yet his first instinct was toward band solidarity. And he had to contend with John.
John was the soul of the Beatles. He did not have the glib shape-shifting ability of Paul, but there was a beautiful gravitas and completeness in his presence. His rhythm guitar playing has an earnest physicality, sturdiness and a willfully crude honesty that I (for one) have spent a lifetime trying to emulate. And his voice, very subtly soulful and honest, happened to blend perfectly with Paul’s. When John had to decide on whether or not to include Paul in the Beatles, someone who could steal his spotlight, John fortunately chose improving his band over eliminating possible rivals.
Ringo was the beautiful sound of someone straining to exceed their limitations, always game, always playing with total commitment to the moment. That ride cymbal on those early records sounds vicious and unapologetic. Listen to the attack on “Ticket to ride”, make no mistake, Ringo rocks.
Then there’s the problem of George. Burdened with the role of junior songwriter in the firm, his voice was the perfect “x-factor-missing-ingredient” in their fantastic harmonic blend, and his songs at this point were clunky and unconfident. But the biggest factor for me that dominates “Help” is the desperate sound of his guitar playing. On all their previous recordings George was either:
- Imitating Carl Perkins (wonderfully)
- Playing almost a second rhythm, little accents and comments rounding out Lennon’s fat bedrock chunking. Or
- Swooping in to save the day with a cool hook (“She Loves You”).
George doesn’t seem to fill any of these roles on “Help”. He seems to be floundering, at a musical cul-de-sac. His playing sounds tortured, like he’s struggling with too-heavy strings or too-high action (distance of the strings from the fretboard). Later on in their career, Paul might have grabbed the reins and played lead (as he did later on “Taxman”), but on these songs George is allowed to stand in his own. His playing sounds distracted, tossed off, with a scabby hesitancy. Biggest band in the world, and they let all sorts of clunkers stay in the mix. In the proTools sanitized recording world of today, such honesty would never stand. This is right before his transformative immersion into Indian music, and his later redemptive reinvention as a solo artist.
With the new mastering job, these elements are popping out with 3D clarity.
Next: Still more on “Help”.
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