Beatles For Sale (1964)
Beatles For Sale (1964) is a frequently forgotten Beatles album (as overlooked as any Beatles album can be anyway.) I think that is a bit of a shame because while it’s positively not among The Beatles most important records, it still has it’s good qualities and I do think it’s worth taking a close listen to.
Particularly I think the 8 original Beatles songs on the album are quite good (if not as excellent as the originals on Help! and A Hard Day’s Night) What I really like about these eight originals is that they’ve got a cool cohesive feeling to them. I think they’d work well as an EP. In fact, I normally just skip all of the covers so that I listen to the album as if it were an 8 song EP.
Side one really starts wonderfully with the John Lennon penned originals “No Reply,” “I’m A Loser,” & “Baby’s In Black.” These are three nice tracks and they all have a downcast mood that connects them together wonderfully.
I am not a massive fan of the covers on the album, unfortunately. Even more sadly is that they make up virtually half of the LP (6 of the 14 tracks are covers.) The only covers that I’ve got any patience for are Chuck Berry’s “Rock & Roll Music” and Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love.” However even these are not nearly as good as The Beatles originals.
The most popular of these Beatles originals on this LP is “Eight Days A Week” which is a recording that both John and Paul said negative things about (they wrote it together) and the band never played it live. However despite that, it’s a good tune. No, it isn’t among their greatest songs, but it’s catchy and the fade-in opening is quite cool.
All of the tracks on the album (both the originals and the covers) sound way better on the 2009 remastered discs than they did on the previous 1980s CDs. I highly recommend that you purchase The Beatles Stereo CD Box Set and The Beatles Mono Box Set and give both the mono and stereo remastered versions of this album a close listen before you go about your business.
I am not claiming that the remastered version of Beatles For Sale is going to be your new favorite CD, but I do think you will find that’s far better than it’s reputation. I think it’s better than Please Please Me and With The Beatles.
