Review(This review was originally published by Apple Music) -- https://music.apple.com/us/album/help/1441164524
If A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles For Sale sounded like a band chafing at the confines of their own success, Help! was more like a meditation: four people seeking solace from inside a storm they’d never seen gather. Lennon, in particular, was miserable: drinking a lot, numbed out, riding the tail of a crumbling marriage for which he had plenty to atone from a 17-room mansion adjacent to a golf course over which he’d never imagined living—a stretch he later called his “Fat Elvis” period. Where Beatles For Sale had captured the vitality of angry young men, the songs on Help!—Lennon’s “Help!” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” McCartney’s “Yesterday” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face”—felt naked to the point of abstraction, the heat of the feelings stripped away to reveal something pining, innocent, planted on the ground but strangely displaced: alienation without angst. Cannabis, which the band had been smoking with heroic regularity, probably didn’t hurt: You had the sense that they were singing not from themselves, but about themselves, even to themselves, pieces on a great existential chessboard observed from a place of melancholic remove. (McCartney said the drug made him feel like he was thinking for the first time; Ringo, recalling the filming of the movie that accompanied this album, said—in charming Ringo fashion—that the crew got used to the fact that the band didn’t get much done after lunch.) Even Ringo’s “Act Naturally”—a lighthearted, Kinks-y country song—seemed tinted by a new, more ruminative frame of mind: The guy in the song is an actor playing himself. And while you could still hear the sweaty club band lurking underneath (“Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” “Help!”), most of the album tilted toward classical austerity: “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” was the band’s first fully acoustic arrangement (and featured the eternally un-rock sound of flutes); “Yesterday”—a song that seemed so comforting and eternal that McCartney was reportedly haunted by the feeling that it had somehow, somewhere already been written—had a string quartet (a move suggested to a hesitant McCartney by producer George Martin). Having spent their youth in extroversion, the Beatles were turning inward. About a week after the album came out, the band played a show to 56,000 screaming people at Shea Stadium, a scenario and scale so unprecedented that Vox had designed special amplifiers for the event. A week or so after that, they took a few much-needed days off at a rented house in Beverly Hills (featuring a moat and a drawbridge), only to be discovered by four teenage female fans. When security guards turned the girls away, they went home, opened the Yellow Pages, and rented a helicopter. Help!—that sounds right.
I have a two box copy similar to nicoldo64 with alternate song list variation, I assume it's from the 70's 169-4 matrix..Will add soon....added, two images
Its odd that the Garrod & Lofthouse printing code on the back (as is on my copy too) is 6509 i.e. September '65, considering it was initially released in August was this an error on GL's part?
Interesting to see the back of the sleeve as mine has PCS then 3071 underneath it at the top right with flipback top and bottom. Also has '6509 Printed and made by Garrod &Lofthouse Ltd. Patients Pending PMC 1255 PCS 3071' written on the bottom flipback.
The images for PCS 3071 is a repress from 1973, if your Mono copy is the same as the images already on the linked release below, then you have the first pressing of the Mono edition.
Was the PCS 3071 issue from 1969? I'm not an expert in any kind but looking in the Record Collector" book, it looks that way. I'm just trying to determine where mine is from! My PMC 1255 copy certainly looks grubby enough to be a 1st issue tho!