| The Beatles for Sale sleeve revealed the flip side of Beatlemania - the exhaustion, dejection and loneliness of life at the top. John, George, Paul and Ringo look frazzled and word-weary in Robert Freeman's cover photographs and, with the sparkle temporarily missing from their songwriting, the group were only able to come up with eight of the 14 tracks themselves. Cover songs from their early rock'n'roll heroes made up the rest of the album.
The songs they did manage to write showed all the signs of being written under pressure. Although "Eight Days A Week" was a love song, the title actually came from a comment Ringo had made about the superhuman demands of being a Beatle. John's songs were bleaker than anything he'd written before, with "I'm A Loser" a foretaste of his confessional style of songwriting. For "I'll Follow The Sun", Paul had gone searching back through his old school notebooks to find a song he'd last played in the Cavern days. The album's most significant new influence was Bob Dylan, who Paul and John both heard and met for the first time in 1964. In the early days, the Beatles had concentrated mainly on mastering the musical side of the songs - chord construction, arrangement and delivery. Dylan was the first recording artist to affect them primarily as lyricists. Initially, Paul was the big Dylan fan, but John soon caught up with him. They were drawn to Dylan because his words were just as important as his tunes. In writing what he felt rather than following any conventions. Dylan's intensely personal style of expression contrasted starkly with the anodyne pop lyrics of the day. His words were always made-to-measure rather than bought off the peg. The shift towards a narrative style that Dylan initiated particularly excited John, because he had been writing poems and short stories for years, mostly for the amusement of friends. Some of these were published in a book "In His Own Write" in 1964, when he was hailed as 'the literary Beatle' and comparisons were made with Lewis Caroll, Edward Lear and the James Joyce of Finnegan's Wake. Dylan, and later the British journalist Kenneth Allsop, impressed upon him the fact that there need not be that great a gap between his 'literary' outpourings and lyric writing. John interpreted this to mean that "Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself (as I had done) in my book." Beatles for Sale took two and a half month to record and was released on November 27, 1964, reaching Number 1 in Britain. The American equivalent, "Beatles '65", also hit the top spot and sold a million copies in the first week. |
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