Beatles for Sale is album four for the Fab Four, released on December 4, 1964 (that's a lot of fours). Like most of The Beatles' albums, it contains fourteen tracks. Just like previous albums, it has six covers: "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby", "Words of Love", "Rock and Roll Music", "Mr Moonlight", medley "Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!" and "Honey Don't", sung by drummer Ringo Starr. George Harrison lends his vocals on this album to only "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" while usually he would sing lead on two songs. Track 2 "I'm a Loser", primarily penned by John Lennon, is said to be influenced by the distinctive style of Bob Dylan, who the group had met in August.
Many tracks have sombre and sad tones and lyrics to them. The songwriters themselves have been found to be dismissive of and are not too fond of some of the tracks. McCartney dismissed his song "What You're Doing" as "a bit of a filler". Similarly, Lennon referred to "Eight Days a Week" as "lousy", despite the popularity of both these songs.
1964 was such a colossal year for the Fab Four. Their world tours and frequent performances at the height of Beatlemania, and the fact that that year they had already recorded an album and made a movie, were main contributing factors to this. As a result, the boys became weary, as can be seen on the album cover, which was photographed by Robert Freeman (he also took the photographs for the covers of With the Beatles, Help! and Rubber Soul). Much of the songwriting for the album had to be done in the recording studios as their tight schedule allowed for little spare time to do so.
As to be expected, the album met with a positive reaction from fans. Concurrently, it remained on the top of the charts in the UK during the rest of 1964 and in 1965 until it was knocked off the top spot by successor album Help! The album was also not released in the US until 1987. Instead, another album, Beatles '65, was released, containing only eight of Beatles for Sale's songs. Again, similarly to With the Beatles, the album art was different for the Australian release. The cover used by EMI Australia is quite different to the original - it contains pictures of the four performing in Sydney earlier that year. No singles were produced from this album (except "Eight Days a Week", which was released in America).
Unique to this Beatles album: it contains the only medley released as one track on a studio album - "Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!".
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| The Australian album cover |
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