When exactly did The Beatles become The Beatles? Is it the first performance in The Cavern Club way back in Liverpool? Is it the first step on the tarmac of Kennedy Airport in February 1964? The debut on The Ed Sullivan Show? Or was it the release of A Hard Day’s Night exactly 60 years ago today? It’s chart take over, definitive sounds, and subsequent film that revolutionized how the world viewed rock and roll? Well, if I had to choose, I’d pick the last one.
On July 10th, 1964, The Beatles would release A Hard Day’s Night and revolutionize just about everything in the popular culture sphere. Already being an undeniable fixture of youth culture at this time, the album was bound to reach unprecedented levels of success not yet seen by a teeny-bopper band, but
it was how exactly The Beatles utilized this “all eyes on us” moment - the first of many times in their career they would. It was the first Beatles albums to feature a completely Lennon/McCartney soundtrack, unheard of with pop bands at the time (and still now, in all honesty), and featured complex and interesting lyrics and compositions for popular music (or take something as I Want to Hold Your Hand and then a gander at a song like If I Fell). It was the release of this album and it’s earworms that made The Beatles the most talked about band of all time in 1964, they were inescapable, and whether you liked them or not had no bearing on how often you’d sit and hum one of their hits you’d been forced to hear.
A Hard Day’s Night opens with its title track, and in that, a shocking and abrasive opening chord. It announces the band and what would become the definitive British Invasion sound (an homage to the opening is found in the 1995 Elton John song Made in England, showcasing its synonymous nature with that of all things British in terms of music). It was unlike anything else at its time - if a song like this hadn’t existed we would have never seen a riff like Satisfaction only a year later, or the genre bending sound soon to become infamous within The Yardbirds (Shapes of Things… heard of it?), all those find a home not within this first truly great album of The Beatles, but in one song, it’s opener. It’s a testament to the band how much wouldn’t exist in the musical landscape without them, how much innovation was bred in a few short years. I Should’ve Known Better blares through speakers next, starting with a sharp harmonica intro, when a harmonica wasn’t the most popular instrument of the popular song. I never realized what a kiss could be, oh this could only happen to me / Can you see? When I tell you that I love you, you’re going to say you love me too in a pop song, in a pop song in the early 60s, showcases just how important the lyrical stylings of John Lennon and Paul McCartney were on the popular song. If Bob Dylan was in the midst of teaching those about complex sentence structure and how a song had no rules, it was Lennon and McCartney teaching that even a brain-dead song can be more than marketed. Even going into the aforementioned If I Fell, a lyric on a teeny bopper album had never once sounded like If I love you too, please don’t hurt my pride like her ‘cause I couldn’t stand the pain / And I would be sad if our new love was in vain. Long before a song like Across the Universe there was a simple complexity that the band weaved into these songs, how they spoke to such topics not designed for a hit while remaining catchy has been copied again and again since its first appearance here. I’m Happy Just to Dance With You is sung by George Harrison in one of his first lead spots, a spot that would lead to some of the band's biggest hits later in their career (be that Here Comes the Sun, Something, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, etc.). And I Love Her is another infamous ballad of the band’s found on the album, once more touching on that delicate sensitivity the band's lyricism was experimenting with. The thing about this album, and near all their work, is listening to it decades after it's inital release, it still sounds fresh. There a certain dated nostalgia to it, obviously, but you can listen to it and feel that excitment that was once had upon the listeners of 1964. It still feels new, exciting, different. Same with listening to a Dylan classic from around the same time, you get this feeling your listening to something unparalleled- even divorced by 60 years and with countless imitations having been made. Tell Me Why is a largely Lennon composition, McCartney saying he believed the piece was inspired by real life experiences of Lennon’s at the time. Lennon said the piece was compositionally similar to that of 50s girl group songs, which leads to another point on the outreach of the band at large.
In 1960s America, there was still a large facet of culture trapped within racist ideologies and
segregation had yet to be abolished. With the arrival of British groups who were largely inspired by black American music, there was a certain pushback from most audiences. The Rolling Stones were often not looked upon fondly in southern states by white people, who saw their admiration of the blues and rock and roll as a bad thing, as it was uncommon for white artists
to properly accredit their work to those who came before especially if the musicians that they were inspired by were of any decent other than their own. At the same time, The Beatles took huge inspiration from black 50s girl groups - the way they sang and harmonized was hugely influential on what would become a major fixture of early Beatles output. Instead of ignoring their inspirations and taking the ideas as their own, these “radicals”, with shaggy hair and a love of rock and roll, put a lot of credit where it belonged on their inspirations. In some ways, the British Invasion had a part in breaking down some racial barriers still in place in the US, same as their impact on liberated women. After the war, many women who had been working factory jobs in the absence of men were pushed back into typical feminine roles of cooking and cleaning. With the arrival of The Beatles, suddenly young girls had something to be excited about. Something marketed specifically for women was so popular people couldn’t ignore it, allowing girls to act however they pleased in public excitement for these bands. While the British Invasion was acknowledged by all Americaans, the actual music of the bands was written off as teeny-bopper crap designed to make girls excited. It was only once men decided that the music was important enough to be discussed and dissected did The Beatles, or the Stones for that matter, become more than teenage boy bands designed for young women. The impact of A Hard Day’s Night was huge for reasons past music - without the impact of The Beatles the equal rights movements may have been even slower than they already were. The Beatles refused to play to segregated audiences at a time when artists never stood up like that, they also played to women as opposed to writing off their biggest demographic as unimportant as the world viewed them.
The album topped the charts, spending 14 weeks on top of the Billboard album chart. The album was rushed to release by the band's label, United Artists, to make sure the album was in stores ahead of the film’s release. The movie A Hard Day’s Night was released July 7th, 1964 is considered one of the most influential comedy movies of the 20th century. Considered one of the first mockumentaries, the film follows the band during what we are to believe is a normal day in their life (interviews, television appearances, etc.). It labeled each of The Beatles, played by themselves, into their easily marketed descriptions that would follow them well into 1967: be that Ringo the funny one, George the quiet one, Paul the cute one, and John the witty one. It was unlike anything anyone could expect nor imagine the biggest band in the world to do, invite the world in on a joke at their own expense. While Elvis had become a movie star, he wasn’t starring in Elvis: The Movie as the character of Elvis Presley, going about a bunch of wacky shenanigans. The movie was, to the shock of the record company, a huge success. While you can point to the film for being a blatant cash grab to make consumers buy more Beatles albums, it cannot be
denied how good the 87 minute long commercial was. For those who loved the band it was an unparalleled amount of content surrounding them, for those who didn’t it was a funny movie that happened to be starring The Beatles. Its humor was smart, some lines being taken from press conferences the band had done, and brought that trademark Liverpuddin wit to a world audience. It made The Beatles enterprise truly take over popular culture, what they were doing and the level of success they found was unfathomable and incomparable to anyone before or after this burst of success. The offshoots of the film would be The Monkees, Spinal Tap, and Walk Hard, even the parody film by Monty Python alumni The Rutles finds ties back to what The Beatles did with this film.
The thing about the monstrous success of A Hard Day’s Night is how multifaceted it was:
how revolutionary the songwriting was for it’s time, how it’s instrumentation would inspire decades of musicians, the racial and feminist shift due to the music written and the response to it by the public, the creation of a new film genre, and all this at the same time, done in one month of 1964, at a time when the band was the most famous people can ever become. The Beatles influence and success will always remain confusing and almost inhuman: how could four people change so much of the world and the understanding of art in just seven years? How could they change so much in just thirty days, reinventing the expectations of a boy band and the pop star in one album? While Beatlemania has already been established for months as a cultural phenomenon, A Hard Day's Night fixed The Beatles as historic. As unheard of as this response was then, it's likely another shift like this can never happen again. No one can reinvent pop in the way of The Beatles, revolutionize film and parody in just a side quest laid out my the film industry, and certainly no one will have the cultural impact The Beatles did with this moment in time. If just one of those things were to happen, the band would be remeber for their efforts and looked upon fondly, but it was all of them, swirling togeher in one whirlwind year (month, really) that makes them the most popular musicians of all time. Not only important to music and culture, but historic in countless terms - that is something that is impossible to achieve at this point in time. Though, I suppose it was impossible when they did achieve it as well. The world is much different than the way in was after the initial release of A Hard Day's Night, but in many ways that's due to The Beatles themselves.
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