Help!

In A Hard Days Night, after throwing a sarky George Harrison out of their studio, a fashion-maven TV producer and his assistant try and make sense of him. Such a rude young man-- but is he "an early clue to the new direction"? They consult the calendar: no, the new trend isn't due for another three weeks.

It's a gag, and not an original one, but born of truth: the fashion watcher's assumption was that things ran on a two to three year cycle. As 1965 began, the Beatles obviously weren't going away, but being pop's aristocracy didn't necessarily make you pop's leading edge. The kids were coming up from behind. Commentators like Nik Cohn had noted sections of the pop audience looking to R&B clubs for their harder-edged, bluesier sound, and this was bleeding into the mainstream. The Animals could claim a no. 1, the Stones had two. So did London's Kinks, and if the Who didn't it was only because their routines were too extreme.

And so, two years and four albums into their career, the Beatles at last had rivals. Serious ones, who'd rampaged through the door the Beatles opened and blithely ignored the showbiz conventions the Beatles were contractually tied to. While the Rolling Stones recorded "Satisfaction", the Beatles were being trotted around the world shooting the ambitious, ridiculous Help!. Its soundtrack album is as haphazard as Beatles For Sale, but lacks that record's glowering intensity.

Luckily, it replaces moodiness with curiosity and a much-expanded instrumental palette. They'd been intermittent experimenters from the start, but Help! is where the band's interest in sound and arrangement really starts to flower, and this remastered version is a particular feast of new timbres and ideas: the percussion on "You're Gonna Lose That Girl", Indian instrumentation appearing on "Ticket to Ride", the weary woodwind on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away".

All this is put into the service of some of the band's best pop songs. The title track, for instance, where Lennon's as confused and angry as he was on "I'm a Loser", but now the music doesn't follow suit-- its briskness blanks his pleas, and his bandmates sound more mocking than sympathetic. Paul gets similar finger-wagging backing on "The Night Before", a wonderfully jaunty song about being dumped after a one-night stand. "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" is another song happy to marry beauty to venom-- its words an explicit threat, its harmonies an example of the seemingly effortless loveliness that makes people go gooey and mystical when the Beatles are mentioned.

Obviously, their new interest in texture wasn't wholly distinct from their new interest in drugs. The "reference" in "It's Only Love" is played for laughs, but "Tell Me What You See" falls halfway between romance and mysticism and is rather awkward despite its marvelous period percussion. The album has other murky spots-- Harrison's songs are fine, but "Act Naturally" suggests that finding a tune for Ringo every album was becoming an issue. And the closing version of "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" is a farewell to the "end it with a rocker" formula that drags despite Lennon's best efforts to rouse it.

It doesn't help "Dizzy" that it's placed just after two personal breakthroughs for McCartney. "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Yesterday" are both love songs, rich with feeling but never overwrought, with the deceptive lightness that would become trademark and millstone for their writer. "Face", a folksy country song, demonstrated the gift for pastiche that would help give the rest of the Beatles' career such convincing variety. "Yesterday" went further, demonstrating that you could arrange a pop song orchestrally in a way that might deepen it, not just turn it into kitsch. Of all their tracks, "Yesterday" is surely the one that's hardest to listen to with new ears. This remaster, capturing its preternatural serenity, is a terrific opportunity to do exactly that.

Help! is almost the last twitch of the Beatles as a working, gigging beat group. It's a great but confusing record, and no wonder contemporaries felt they might at last be losing direction. With hindsight confusion looks like transition, and the remasters-- issued all at once and linked to a game designed to present the band's story as a story-- can't help but invite that hindsight. But the story could have turned out differently, and these early records are still so fierce and alive. Taking the Beatles one disc at a time lets us recover their precariousness, the risks they took, what they lost as well as what they gained.

[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]