I’ve had a lot of fun with this finger

The famous Scotland Yard offers its protection, of which it is justly proud, for a finger. But not just any finger. This finger has kept the steady backbeat on a revolution that galvanized the world and profited England greatly.

Patrick Cargill as the superstitious Superintendent, is a broad bundle of British stereotypes. His lip is entirely stiff but his feet are molded grey clay. “The palace is haunted you know, I daren’t look.” He chides the pop group as a flash in the pan. “How long do you think you’ll last?” he posits. Lennon counters with “Great train robbery. How’s that going?” Like Bugs Bunny, The Beatles get in their cheeky backtalk. I love when Harrison tells the spy-of-a-thousand-voices that he doesn’t sound a thing like Cagney.

“I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.” The Superintendent might as well be trying to build a Bridge on the River Ganges with his “show on the road, battle commence” cries. But, like all clueless colonialists he has no idea who he is up against. In a nationalistic sense, he’s created both threats as a representative of Great Britain, with the Union Jack and tea bags without strings.

The Beatles hole up at a well-known Palace and no one knows they are there except each other. And they’re not even sure about that. I don’t think it’s a coincidence when George reminds John that he knows the he’s there right before the band tumbles into “I Need You” (by George Harrison). The Beatles saw the comic possibilities of the cowbell before Christopher Walken hosted Saturday Night Live even once.

James Bond drove an Astin Martin DB 3, hee hee hee, in the madcap romp Casino Royale. Help! has the scene of the George riding on top of the car while Ringo is locked in the trunk. That’s a pretty heavy stunt for a rock star to be doing. But Harrison said he best bit was left out of the movie: The Beatles doing donuts on a track and crashing into each other in race cars.

Another deleted scene involved all the Beatles but George falling into a trance at the “Sam Ahab School of Trancendental Elocution.” Sam Ahab was played by British comic actor Frankie Howerd and he was teaching Wendy Richard, who played a character based on Lady Macbeth, to scream apparently. Richard would later go on to play Miss Brahms in the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? Lester said Howerd was driven to polite distraction by the Beatles’ ad-libbing and forced-fed lines and the “Sam Ahab” scene was cut from the film for lack of time and chemistry.

A novelization called The Beatles in Help! was written by Al Hine and published by Dell in 1965. It included the Frankie Howerd and Wendy Richard sequence.

The Beatles loved their in-jokes. Mal Evans, the Beatles road manager and all around beast friend, plays the Channel swimmer asking for directions to the White Cliffs of Dover. Another subliminal, probably unintentional, in-joke is that “She’s a Woman” is heard on the tape machine underground in the Salisbury Plain scene. The Beatles never put singles on albums. They still put the song in the movie that wouldn’t be on vinyl until Beatles 65 in the United States.

The incessant moptop press coverage is used against itself as the Beatles put it round that that are bent for the Bahamas, which of course they were only circulating to throw Clang off the track. But Paul realizes that he’d actually like to go to the Bahamas and the boys, being for the workers and the Socialist vote and all that, decide Nassau’s not a bad place after all. After all, what are unions for?

Leo McKern is a master comedian. His timing is impeccable, even without words, he makes anyone a sidekick. At the Nassau airport, there’s a wonderfully quick scene where he just points to one of the guard and says “Him” and Bhuta slaps the man across the face. It means nothing, it’s funny because it’s funny. Like how The Beatles never actually worry about the disemboweling. That’s all gaff, disemboweling.

Part two of the film was a very short, improvised visual scene of the Beatles running, jumping, and standing still all at the same time. Part three of the film is Ahme’s sister coming home all hours and all colors after the wild romp with the inaccessible mother.

The fight scene in the Beatles’ flat, while Paul is having his miniature adventure, always reminded me of the obligatory fight scenes that end Bowery Boys movies. The Beatles almost featured two Dead End Kids on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, but Leo Gorcey asked for money for bail and so only Huntz Hall got the privilege. Hall always maintained that the Dead End Kids were the first Beatles because they were also mobbed as the first teen idols. Ringo plays the Huntz Hall role of hiding by the Orange Crush machine until he turns into Frankenstein’s monster and gets painted red. Such a sad loss, such a nice suit.

How does the mad scientist know to pull Ringo’s nose? It is the Kaili clan that’s been nabbed while trying to nab his big neb. But there they are checking the nose. And his of all noses. There goes my knighthood.

Treacherous woman, tremble.

I think Ahme really isn’t what she seems. A self-admitted dead eye shot, shooting, she throws Clang to the wolves and enthusiastically takes the mantle of head priestess. The Beatle chase was probably a power play she meted out from the very beginning, and I think she’d rather see Ringo dead, than be reborn as another girl.

Ahme tells Ringo that a potion made of the essence of certain orchids and would shrink his finger so the ring would come off. But, she says it “would not be necessary” if he were brave. I think she still holds on to the idea that Ringo should maybe be sacrificed. There she is lulling the Beatles with her filthy eastern ways and tricking them into believing that it is Clang who is filthy with his eastern ways while the boys are being quite enthralled by all these filthy eastern ways. Someone’s neck is going to be slit from ear to ear and Ahme is quite willing to give Ringo every chance to have the privilege.

These filthy eastern ways include an attempt to hypnotize the former Quarry Bank High School quartet though the through the phone. After Ahme rescues Ringo from Foot by exchanging him for a vial of the orchid essence shrinking solution, she leads him directly into two battalions of mercenary Kukhri Rifles.

The best laid plans

As in A Hard Day’s Night, Lester’s film is aided by its imperfections. The scene where the Beatles are looking for the ancient temple, you can see a big bug or a lizard or something crawling up the wall. Lennon flinches when he see it and it scurries away. That’s method. He was trying to show his famous pluck.

The Bengal man-eating tiger, Roger, was kept behind a glass during the shooting. The scene sparks the great global encompassing sequence that celebrates Ringo’s favorite lyricist, Ludwig Van. The scene is so goofy and yet so infectious. It encapsulates the power of music and does it while whistling with a tongue in a cheek.

Lester, a musician himself who jammed on piano with the band on the sets of both movies, tried to capture the intricacies of recording. He can’t show all the overdubbing that goes into a song, but he gets a feel for the studio process by cutting to a shot of Paul playing his piano part while Ringo is laying an obvious rhythm track. For musicians, this is subliminally surreal.

“You shall have fun eh?” Clang asks Lennon, who doesn’t consider amusements beyond rhythm guitar and mouth organ. The Beatles are musicians and anything beyond that is a rest between beats. You can believe that they would be forced to make an album if only for the national coffers. I can see the most famous band in the world being told to make an album or report for the draft. That’s why the army surrounds them while they cut two tracks. Recording outside is a logistical and acoustical nightmare, even on electric guitars.

The songs used in the film were “Help!”; “You’re Going to Lose That Girl”; “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”; “Ticket to Ride”; “I Need You”; “The Night Before”; “Another Girl”; “A Hard Day’s Night” on sitar at the Indian restaurant; “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” during “not if I get the boot in first” bike scene and “You Can’t Do That” in the Alps, because the lord alps those who alp themselves.

Besides the original Lennon-McCartney songs, and “I Need You” by George Harrison, Help! featured Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” with the Beatles goofing along; Wagner’s Lohengrin, Act III Overture, Tchaikovsky’s top ten it of 1840: “1812 Overture” and Beethoven’s famous “Ninth Symphony.” Is it me or do they sing the name Heidi Klum during the famous “Ode to Joy?”

The Album

In the movie, The Beatles were given protection while they recorded their newest album. How did that album turn out? Pretty great. Personally, I think that was a lot of pressure, finishing an album while being chased by a bunch of religious zealots. It’s a good thing the record was worth it.

Help! was the fifth studio album by the Beatles. It was produced by George Martin. The album put the songs from the movie on side 1 and the non-soundtrack songs on side B. The title track played with call and response harmonies and was one of Lennon’s earliest confessional songs.

“When ‘Help!’ came out in ’65, I was actually crying out for help,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970.

“Most people think it’s just a fast rock-‘n’-roll song. I didn’t realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. It was my fat Elvis period….I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was. Now I may be very positive — yes, yes — but I also go through deep depressions where I would like to jump out the window, you know. It becomes easier to deal with as I get older; I don’t know whether you learn control or, when you grow up, you calm down a little. Anyway, I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.”

Lennon counted the song among his personal Beatles favorites, such “I am the Walrus,” “Strawberry Fields” and “In My Life,” “Because I meant it — it’s real. The lyric is as good now as it was then. It is no different, and it makes me feel secure to know that I was that aware of myself then. It was just me singing ‘Help’ and I meant it,” Lennon told Rolling Stone.

“Ticket to Ride” was an amazingly progressive song. The lyrics are among the earliest in rock and roll to talk about female independence. The guitar interplay, with Paul taking on the end-verse leads, is dramatic, but it is the drums that turn that song into a sonic masterpiece.

“In 1965, the structure of 4/4 rock drumming was fairly simple: play the kick on the 1 and 3 (downbeat), and the snare on the 2 and 4 (backbeat),” George Roberts, a seasoned recording session drummer whose current gig is with The Swamptones, New York City’s longest running swamp-rock quartet, explained to Den of Geek.

“There were exceptions where a beat would be ‘displaced’ (e.g. New Orleans R&B) but for the most part, drummers stayed with the basic 4/4 formula. When ‘Ticket to Ride’ was released that year, the downbeat was “normal” (on the “1” and “2”) but the backbeats were displaced on the 3 “and” 4 “and” counts. Most unusual for the time, it was played across close mic’d toms instead of the snare (recording technology was just beginning to expand to multi tracks). The drum track for ‘Ticket to Ride’ was the beginning of the ‘Big Sound’ of the drum kit on records, where the drums became more dominate in the mix instead of buried in the background. It changed the sound of rock recordings that came after. Think John Bonham on any Led Zepplin cut.”

“In his 1980 Playboy interview, John Lennon said of Ticket to Ride,’ ‘That’s me, one of the earliest heavy-metal records. ‘Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums,’” Roberts ended, on a quote.

Yes, it was Paul who came up with that drum pattern.

What was it that first attracted you to me?

So the Beatles invented heavy metal, just like Help! invented The Monkees TV show and ultimately MTV. The album was a continuous march in the musical revolution of the band. While other groups were getting heavier, The Beatles unplugged for the intimate, possibly gay-positive “You’ve Got To Your Love Away.” Many people think this was a reference to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, who Lennon affectionately and derisively called “queer Jew.” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” was the first song where the Beatles used studio musicians. In case you thought George’s gardener recorded the flute part.

McCartney recorded “Yesterday” as a solo on acoustic guitar. The string quartet was overdubbed. The bass purist didn’t want any fancy tremolo on those strings and was impressed by a blues passage in the arrangement. It went on to be the most covered song in the history of history.

The Beatles covered the Buck Owens song “Act Naturally” and I think George really nails that Bakersfield twang perfected by Owens and Merle Haggard. They also covered Larry Williams’ “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy.” Help! the last time The Beatles recorded cover songs on an album until “Maggie Mae” popped up in 1970’s Let It Be.

Lennon and McCartney wrote “If You’ve Got Trouble” for Ringo, but he preferred to “Act Naturally.” They also wrote and recorded the song “That Means a Lot,” but they gave that to the singer P.J. Proby. “Yes It Is” came out as the B-side of “Ticket to Ride” and on the U.S. Release Beatles VI, which also saw “You Like Me Too Much” and “Tell Me What You See.” They recorded the song “Wait” in June 1965 but it didn’t make the album and wound up on tagged onto Rubber Soul.

Besides “I Need You” by George Harrison, the guitarist also contributed the song “You Like Me Too Much” to the album, his first original tune since “Don’t Bother Me” on With the Beatles from 1963.

The last song on the album, McCartney’s “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” is an early clue to a new direction. I love the baroque acoustic opening.

Critics didn’t like Help! as much as A Hard Day’s Night. But they certainly liked it more than Magical Mystery Tour, another groundbreaking film directed by the Beatles themselves. Help! is a comic masterpiece. It isn’t my favorite movie by the Beatles, but that’s only because I love other of their movies more.