Beatles – "Any Time at All" (1964)

When you need a shoulder to cry on

I hope it will be mine

I think that even the most devout believers in the Bible would agree that some of its books are better than others.

Genesis is possibly numero uno among the books of the Bible when it comes to having memorable characters – Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his family, Abraham and Isaac, and Joseph and his rotten brothers among them.

Psalms is pure poetry, and Revelations is a real mind-blower.   And they don’t call the Gospels “The Greatest Story Ever Told” for nothing!

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Numbers and Leviticus and pretty much all the books of the minor prophets.  (With the exception of Jonah, of course – Jonah is money!)

There are some people out there who would object vehemently to me dividing the Bible into great books and not-so-great books – to them, every word in it was divinely inspired and is beyond criticism.

I would respond to those people by asking them to read, say, Exodus and John – and then read Numbers and Lamentations.  There’s no comparison, right?  

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All this is by way of explaining my attitude toward the many Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  (NOTE: Not every Lennon-McCartney was co-written – some were written entirely by John or entirely by Paul.  But the two of them agreed when they were teenagers that all the songs written by them – whether individually or jointly – would be credited to both of them.)

  

Some Lennon-McCartney songs are very, very good – no doubt about it.  But some of them aren’t.

But woe be to anyone who is willing to call that spade a spade – like 2 or 3 lines.  

Beatles cultists can’t handle that truth, and they will descend on you with weeping and gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and sarcastic comments on your Facebook page if you dare speak it.

They will accuse you of having a “vendetta” against the greatest boy band in history, and characterize your calm and objective evaluations of Lennon-McCartney songs as “anti-Fab Four diatribes.”  They will even utilize “whataboutism” – a fallacious rhetorical technique much favored by Soviet propagandists – in hopes of throwing dust into the eyes of your readers.

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Let me make something perfectly clear: I think the Beatles were a great band who released a lot of great recordings in the course of their years together.  

This year’s 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS! – which takes a close look at the lyrics and structure of a sampling  of “Beatlemania”-era Lennon-McCartney songs – doesn’t argue otherwise.  

What it does argue is that most of the Lennon-McCartney songs that the Beatles recorded during the “Beatlemania” days are pretty small beer when it comes to their lyrics.

Beatles lyrics from that era are often rudimentary and unimaginative.  The boys and girls who are the subjects of the early Lennon-McCartney songs are two-dimensional stick figures – we learn nothing about them as individuals.  (We don’t even know if the girls are blondes, brunettes, or redheads.)  

The situations they find themselves in are generic, and their reactions to those situations aren’t tailor-made, but strictly ready-to-wear.  There’s no drama, no surprises, no insights into the human condition – nothing in those songs is beyond the emotional comprehension of the young teenagers who made up the bulk of the Beatles’ fan base in those days, which may in part explain their success.

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There’s a quantity problem as well as a quality problem here.  

Many of the early Lennon-McCartney songs were embryonic, not fully formed – they aren’t songs as much as they are “songlets.”   Those songs were so underdeveloped when it came to lyrical content that they would have timed out at 1:15 or 1:30 if they hadn’t been inflated to a fare-thee-well by repetition and redundancy.  

The best example of what I’m talking about is probably “Love Me Do,” their first UK single, which has only one verse – which it repeats no fewer than four times.  (That song’s lyrics contain only 19 unique words.) 

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John and Paul didn’t exactly give 110% when it came to writing and recording those early songs.

To be fair, they were quite busy in 1964.  Besides touring and making a movie, the Beatles released six albums in the U.S. that year, not to mention a couple of EPs – they recorded 78 tracks altogether, of which 55 were originals.

Such a frenetic pace doesn’t lend itself to a lot of rewriting and revising.  After finishing one song, they were (to quote Jay-Z) “on to the next one” as quickly as possible.

More than once, things fell through the cracks.  For example, consider today’s featured song, which was the first track of the second side of the A Hard Day’s Night Album. 

The lyrics to “Any Time at All” are quite perfunctory.  I’m no songwriter, but I think that I could have come up with better lyrics – at least I could have had come up with lyrics that matched up better with the rhythmic structure of this song.  (Listen to “There’s nothing I won’t do” in the second verse.  If Lennon had put in a bit more time and effort, he might have come up with a line that had another syllable or two – obviating the need for him to stretch the “I” to fill three beats.)

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An even more egregious example of just how sloppy the Beatles could be back in the day is the bridge to this song.  

When the Beatles entered the studio to record “Any Time at All,” the song didn’t have a bridge – or “middle eight.”  (It’s called that become the bridge is usually eight bars long, and is positioned somewhere in the middle of the song.)

Paul came up with chords for the bridge, and they recorded those chords as an instrumental placeholder, planning to write some lyrics and add a vocal track later.  

But when it was time to mix “Any Time at All,” no one had remembered to do that.  (“Did you bring the bridge lyrics with you, John?”  “No, Paul, I thought you were going to write the bridge lyrics.”)  

So the unfinished bridge was left as is, as an instrumental.  You can hear it at about 1:30 of the record.

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The Beatles had an amazing nineteen top-40 singles in 1964, and no fewer than six Lennon-McCartney songs reached the #1 spot on the U.S. charts.  

The lyrics of those songs may have been lacking in subtlety or sophistication – or, in the case of the “Any Time at All” bridge, just plain lacking – but they apparently struck just the right notes with pubescent girls.   

To be fair, those early Lennon-McCartney songs were quite appealing musically – they had hooks out the wazoo, and were very sing-along-able.  

Combine that with the Beatles’ energetic performing style and their undeniable personal charm, and you’ve got a formula for success – perfunctory lyrics and shameless repetition be damned!

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Click here to listen to “Any Time at All.”

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