Music videos on Beatles ‘1’ and ‘1+’ offer fans a lot to chew on
One of the most revealing moments in the new Beatles “1” and “1+” releases is perhaps the least ambitious of 50 music videos that were meant to accompany more than two dozen of their biggest hits.
It’s an alternate version of the film they shot in 1965 to accompany “I Feel Fine,” one of three takes shot on a day when the group cranked out 10 films for five songs targeting different markets. The Beatles had taken a break, or so they thought, to chow down on some fish and chips. But such was the intensity of their schedule that the crew kept the cameras rolling, so we see John Lennon and Paul McCartney gamely attempting to lip sync lyrics while they munch their midday meal.
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The revealing part is that even this trifle doesn’t feel like a waste of anyone’s time. The camaraderie among Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr is so utterly endearing that a viewer can be charmed by the Beatles even during their downtime.
For the uninitiated, the new edition of “1” is essentially a reissue of the hits compilation album released in 2000, which became the biggest-selling album of the decade by compiling the group’s 27 No. 1 hits in the U.S. and Britain onto a single CD, spanning “Love Me Do” in 1962 through “The Long and Winding Road” in 1970. The new version pairs those songs with a second disc that includes alternate takes and early performance footage as well as promotional films they started making to meet worldwide demand that was impossible for them to meet with live appearances.
Many of these films have been circulated in widely varying technical quality, so it’s a treat to finally have them looking so crisp and clean thanks to a comprehensive restoration effort.
“From Me to You” was filmed at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, “She Loves You” comes from an appearance in Stockholm, Sweden, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” issues from a TV appearance in Manchester, England.
The version of “Can’t Buy Me Love” is briefly disorienting because even though it is chiefly a McCartney lead vocal, the director of the shoot at London’s Wembley Studio focuses predominantly on Lennon. Not terribly surprising in the early days when many establishment types griped that all Beatles look alike.
Things started getting more sophisticated and imaginative in 1965. It’s almost as if these films were being treated as improv exercises. We see the quartet on a bare stage except for a few spare props. For “I Feel Fine,” they work with a boxer’s punching bag, which Harrison treats as microphone, a stationary bicycle and a barbell that all four largely ignore.
For “Help!” they perch themselves on a plank of wood between two sawhorses, Lennon in front and the other three behind bobbing and weaving to catch the camera’s eye as the song unfolds. The camera also spends an inordinate amount of time on Lennon in the “Penny Lane” promo film, even though it’s largely Paul’s song. Starr recently told The Times that he recalled this shoot, which involved the Beatles clambering aboard horses for a ride through the streets of London and the countryside, as “truly scary” because none of them were experienced horsemen.
What becomes apparent over the course of the films is the phenomenal speed of the Beatles’ evolution. Less than four years elapsed between the innocence of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1963 to the global call for peace in “All You Need is Love” in 1967.
The “1+” disc includes 23 additional performances stretching from “Twist and Shout” and “Please Please Me” through the two songs completed long after Lennon’s death in 1980, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.”
In between we get the spirited televised version of “Revolution” from 1968, two versions of “Rain,” a fittingly cataclysmic visual counterpart to the music and lyrics of “A Day in the Life,” and “Hey Bulldog,” director Tony Palmer’s capturing the Beatles before internal tensions led to the band’s dissolution in 1970.
The one dud in the entire bunch is a video created to accompany “Come Together” when “1” was released in 2000. The blocky and simplistic animation — a reflection of the slow Internet connections typical of that time — has none of the charm of the psychedelic cartoon style of “Yellow Submarine” or, for that matter, even the crudely drawn but spirited mid-’60s animated series created by producer Al Brodax.
New commentaries from the Beatles’ surviving members are generally a letdown. McCartney largely is content to state the obvious (“Here we are walking backward; now we’re walking forward.”), and Starr’s introductions are light on contextual or historical illumination — he sits before a computer screen, shares a few memories, then laughs.
But the works themselves remain well worth the time and effort even half a century after the fact.
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