Gotta hear it again today

Released sixty years ago, The Beatles' Second Album is also their loudest

I recently scored a clean copy of an original, 1964 pressing of The Beatles’ Second Album, a record that I grew up with. The songs remain as powerful and meaningful to me now as they were when I was a kid, when the top of my head came off as the record spun in my family’s rec room. I was especially happy to get ahold of a nice copy of this album—I believe my younger brother made off with it when he moved from our parents’ house—because the sound is, to my ears, the very sound of the Beatles. Which is another way of saying, the very sound of my adolescence. Which is another way of saying that The Beatles’ Second Album has soundtracked my life in indelible ways, and I’m grateful that I can spin it again.

I hadn’t listened to Second Album for many years, save for some online sampling. (A few tracks sourced from the vinyl appear to have slipped in through YouTube’s back door while the Lords of Apple were dozing; Second Album was released on CD in 2004 in the The Capitol Albums, Volume 1.) I wondered if the vinyl was going to sound the way it did to me when I was ten years-old, or whether I was was fated to be another victim of nostalgia. I dropped the needle, and George Harrison’s opening Gretsch riff to “Roll Over Beethoven” leapt out of the speakers, followed swiftly by Ringo Starr’s snare roll and John Lennon and Paul McCartney barreling-train rhythm attack, everything heightened with reverb and crisp EQs, everything loud as hell, and I knew that I hadn’t imagined a thing. This slab of vinyl is sixty years old, and when I play it it feels as if the Beatles are playing a few feet from my face.

Second Album is nothing less than the Beatles’ garage album, a thunderous sonic testament to the thrills and newness of 1964. There’s aggressive bite to the rhythm and leads guitars, which howl and ring, there are splashy cymbals and rumbling toms everywhere, Ringo swings. I listen and I still feel as if I’m catching up with the songs, as I did when I was a kid hearing this magic for the first time. The sound had everything to do with the mixes that the engineers at the Beatles’ U.S. label Capitol applied to the band’s U.K. source tapes. Dave Dexter Jr. supervised those mixes. Dexter was primarily a Jazz man at Capitol, and was involved with the label’s decision to pass on the Beatles’ early singles, fearing that they were inappropriate for the U.S. market; these days, among Beatles fans he’s most infamous for the hand he had in repackaging the band’s early Capitol albums in order to maximize product, and for those Second Album re-mixes.

Steve Hoffman, an audio engineer who for years has moderated the Steve Hoffman Music Forums, knew Dexter personally, and posted this comment back in 2003: “[Dexter] said [to Hoffman] that all he was trying to do was give the music some ‘life’ by redubbing with chamber echo and new EQ. He felt the British tapes sounded ‘dead as a door nail’ which they probably did on the consumer equipment of the time.” Hoffman added,

He said he was under pressure from the very top to lower the number of tracks on albums and that the Beatles were no exception. Since Capitol had to wait for certain early songs to become available to them, they had to scramble for tracks in 1964.

Mike Segretto in 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute: A Critical Trip Through the Rock LP Era, 1955–1999, does the convoluted math: “Bundling up the five leftover covers from With the Beatles that didn’t make it to Meet the Beatles!, both sides of their second American number one single, side B of their third one, side B of their third British single, and side A of the soon-to-be-released Long Tall Sally EP (marking the first time fresh Beatles material would reach the states before Britain), Dave Dexter Jr. had enough material for an all-new grab bag.” Segretto notes that Capitol employed their infamous duophonic (or, fake stereo) mixes on “I'll Get You” and “She Loves You,” and ends with a claim that’s shared by many: “The imaginatively titled The Beatles’ Second Album showed all the signs of its hasty assembly.”

It is the Beatles’ first American album with no British equivalent. For the first and final time, covers would outnumber originals on LP. All the five originals are strong—and at least “She Loves You” and “You Can’t Do That” are crucial—but the fact that John is the prominent voice on all of them and the sole composer of two (“You Can’t Do That” and “I Call Your Name”) sketches an imbalanced picture. There is none of the stylistic variety of Please Please Me, With the Beatles, or Meet the Beatles! There are no show tunes or light ballads.

As the Beatles might have said, “Gear!” Second Album is indeed so Lennon-heavy as to feel conspicuous. (Interesting, given that Dexter allegedly did not like Lennon all that much personally. Of course, I doubt Dexter was alone in making decisions about song selection and sequencing, though he might’ve had final say.) I realize now that spinning this record endlessly might be why I’ve always been a Lennon Guy. And, yeah: “A Taste of Honey,” “Till There was You,” “And I Love Her”? You’ve got to sniff elsewhere for such delicate aromas—Second Album is all about sweat and propulsion. “Roll Over Beethoven” (which, brilliantly slotted as the opening track, warns of the ecstatic surges to follow), “Thank You Girl,” “Devil in Her Heart,” “Long Tall Sally,” “She Loves You” all storm out of the gate, leaving virtually audible shrieks and screams in their boisterous wake.

Even the slower paced tunes—“Money,” “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Please Mr. Postman,” “I'll Get You”—strut in Hamburg-era groove, ready for some action. The four-on-the-floor arrangements in Lennon’s “You Can't Do That” “I Call Your Name” rock in their aggressive-cowbell way just as hard as the band’s tear through Little Richard, and they make a lot of noise along the way. The stacked harmonies on the bridge of “You Can’t Do That” are so massive as to suggest an enormous, swiftly approaching weather front. (The Lennonian forecast: stormy skies ahead.) This is the album that the Pacific Northwest bands—the Sonics, the Wailers, et al—were cranking and crudely translating in the stuidos.

When the Beatles’ catalogue was reissued in mono in 2009, I was interested in hearing the albums “as the Beatles intended,” producer George Martin and the EMI engineers having spent more time on mono mixes than stereo mixes in the first half of the band’s career. (So the Apple press copy assured us, anyway.) And though it was terrific to be able to listen to the singles and albums without the tepid stereo separation marring the early releases, and though I ultimately willed myself to accept the sonic disparities between the mixes that I’d grown up with and the mono mixes, to my ears the albums, with the exception of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heats Club Band and the “White Album,” sounded a bit thin, flat—”dead,” as Dave Dexter might’ve sniffed. (It must be said that, in some cases, the ‘09 mixes sound better on vinyl.)

It’s heresy to say this in some quarters, but I wish that nearly every Beatles album sounded like Second Album. Each song on this record flashes some muscle. Everyone sounds like they’re hollering, trying to be heard above the din they’re making, grinning all the while. My ears ring from just looking at the album cover.

Beatlemania, optimum settings

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Craig Calcaterra, in a recent Cup of Coffee newsletter, noting that casting for the four main roles in director Sam Mendes’s upcoming films about The Beatles has been completed, wondered about how much we need yet more Fab Four material in this century: “between scores of books, documentaries, interviews, and even previous scripted, theatrical projects, I’m struggling to imagine what about the lives and careers of the four Beatles has gone unexamined before now,” Calcaterra wrote. “They have been scrutinized to the nth degree beginning in late 1962 or so and going on, unabated, through the present day.”

This is something I thought about as I prepared to write this post. No one needs another take on the Beatles, and yet so many, still, feel moved and compelled enough to continue to write about their music, their lives, their culture, their limo drivers, et al. I was born in the middle of the Beatles’ career; certainly as a toddler I heard their songs on the radio, but my first vivid memory of the band occurred three years after their 1970 breakup, when the “Red” and “Blue” compilation albums arrived in my family’s home. Their music has affected me profoundly, is embedded deep in my brain’s pleasure centers, from childhood through adulthood. The photographs on the front and back of Second Album are like cave paintings dating to my Adolescent Era. The band’s songs matter deeply to me—but do you have to care about that?

Nostalgia’s a funny thing, leading us back down paths that we’d left behind, our sentimentality and homesickness perfumely obscuring the fact that what we’ll find there probably no longer exists. Nostalgia’s a kind of taping over of the past, the original memory recordings burdened with, and finally disappearing under, layer upon layer of wishfulness, regrets, blinkered thinking, desire. “Nostalgia”’s a variation of the German word heimweh, which means “homesickness,” itself derived from the Greek algos (“pain, grief, distress”) and nostos (“homecoming”). In the seventeenth century, the condition was described as a “morbid longing to return to one’s home or native country,” a craving so intense and unhappy that it was considered by many medical experts a legitimate, if tough to treat, disease. Lesson in etymology over, summarized with this poignant equation: home + woe = nostalgia.

The Beatles’ Second Album confounds me now because when I listen, I’m transported back to a time when its sounds were yet new to me, and in that surreal travel I’m in touch again with that amazing, wordless rush that that music gave, and continues to give, me. As I listen now, Dexter and his engineers’ massive reverb, mammoth echo, and shiny treble boosts, and the mighty performances by the Beatles themselves, crash loudly through nostalgia into something else entirely: an endlessly renewable soundscape that, in its perpetual motion machine of newness, rolls the horizon back so that, momentarily anyway, I again can feel what it felt like to hear the Beatles for the first time. Thanks, Dave Dexter and Capitol Records for the magic show.

Image of Beatles by Dan Grossi via Creative Commons