115) Dean Martin – “Everybody Loves Somebody”

The Hot 100 encompasses two contradictory attitudes toward pop music. The first is the unending quest for the newest sound, one fresh enough to render last week’s model obsolete and fascinating enough to invite repeated listens.  The other is the need for musical comfort food, something familiar that requires only a minimal investment in attention and thought.  This perpetual tug-of-war between novelty and nostalgia was never more obvious than in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when rock and roll was transitioning from a fading fad to the most important genre in pop. Every time an innovative, interesting record hit #1, it was inevitably replaced by a backward-looking schmaltz-o-gram. “Stagger Lee” fell to “Venus,” “Telstar” to “Go Away Little Girl,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand”/“She Loves You”/“Can’t Buy Me Love” to “Hello, Dolly!” No one designed it that way – after all, few of the people who bought easy listening records were invested enough in pop music to care about the charts.  It was simply the Hot 100 regaining its natural equilibrium.

Naturally, the same fate befell “A Hard Day’s Night.”  With “Everybody Loves Somebody,” Dean Martin polished off a Frank Sinatra B-side from 1948, loaded up on the strings, and scored the biggest hit of his career.  The song is corny in the way most of those old-timey pop songs are (barring classics by Porter, Berlin, Gershwin et al), but without the goofy charm of Martin’s earlier hit, “That’s Amore.” “Everybody loves somebody sometimes,” the chorus informs us. “Everybody falls in love somehow.” It’s a nicely bland platitude tailored for people who don’t listen too closely to lyrics.  Which is just as well, as Martin’s boozy croon is all but drowned out by the requisite 35-person choir and sopping violins swirling around the chorus.

As with Louis Armstrong, it’s hard to fault an old pro taking a victory lap, especially since their respective styles were teetering on the edge of cultural irrelevance. There’s even a mild concession to ‘50s prom-rock in the accompaniment’s shuffling triplets. But like “Deep Purple” and “It’s All in the Game,” the ostensibly contemporary remake is still likely only to appeal to those who remember the original. Nevertheless, the song served its purpose.  It acted as rebuttal to “A Hard Day’s Night,” thus restoring order to the pop universe.  Then, after a week, it quietly stepped aside and made way for the next new thing. 4

Hit #1 on August 15, 1964; total of 1 week at #1
115 of 985 #1′s reviewed; 11.68% through the Hot 100

114) The Beatles – “A Hard Day’s Night”

A Hard Day’s Night the film – and “A Hard Day’s Night” the song – is arguably the moment when The Beatles became THE BEATLES, when the band proved itself smart and imaginative and indisputably superior to its teen pop peers.  The film in particular drew critical attention in a way that the band’s previous singles hadn’t.  Rock journalism was in utero, and mainstream pop writers were still suspicious of Beatlemania.  But film critics could easily position A Hard Day’s Night alongside other recent European imports: the clever absurdity of the Ealing Comedies, the cinema-vérité of the British kitchen sink drama, the fast cutting and low-budget panache of the French New Wave.  In a landscape dominated by quickie teenybopper cash-ins and Elvis’s cinematic slide into self-parodic irrelevance, A Hard Day’s Night was Dada, droll, almost highbrow – “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice (Aug. 27, 1964).  Even those initially reluctant to embrace The Beatles’ music were swayed.  “My critical theories and preconceptions are all shook up,” Sarris added, “and I am profoundly grateful to The Beatles for such pleasurable softening of hardening aesthetic arteries.” No longer were The Beatles strictly fodder for teenagers and fad marketers.  Now they had legitimate artistic cachet.

The Beatles’ newfound adult audience was paralleled by the band’s rapid lyrical maturation.  Within a few months, The Beatles had progressed from holding hands to cohabitation.  Mysterious adult impulses only hinted at by the harmonica in “Love Me Do” became explicit in John Lennon’s lascivious delivery of “make me feel aaaaaall right.” But “A Hard Day’s Night” also addresses the other thing separating adults from kids: work.  The song’s setting shares little with the adolescent drag races of “I Get Around” or the noblesse oblige of “Rag Doll.”  With just a few phrases, “A Hard Day’s Night” paints a realistic picture familiar to millions of listeners who slaved all day only to crash at home.  It’s a lifestyle reflected contemporaneously in the literature of Alan Sillitoe and John Osborne, and it’s the kind of life The Beatles themselves would have been stuck in had they never left Liverpool.  What it isn’t is a teen idol romantic fantasy.

Even discounting the lyrics, “A Hard Day’s Night” is an astonishing leap forward. George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker and Ringo Starr’s cowbell invent the vocabulary of folk rock, long before the group’s dabble with Dylanate acoustic folk.  Yet the record’s sound is also more aggressive than any previous Beatles single, propelled by the Lennon-McCartney vocal tug-of-war and George Martin’s taut, aerodynamic production.  The record’s muscular sound complements the depiction of a worldview driven by work and lust.  The lightning tempo, Lennon’s snarling vocals, that yowl right before the guitar solo – these would continue to be emulated by countless garage punk bands through the ‘60s and beyond.

Compared with the rest of the Hot 100 in 1964, the early Beatles singles were the proverbial breath of fresh air in a pop chart grown musty with toothless, overproduced rock and roll.  But “A Hard Day’s Night” – and A Hard Day’s Night – is even more so. While their rock and roll peers courted the mainstream by looking backward and outward, The Beatles pushed their sound forward, both in terms of experimentation and forcefulness. It’s the overlap between the tough and the charming, the gritty and the cerebral, where The Beatles came to define themselves and invent a new kind of rock and roll. 10

Hit #1 on August 1, 1964; total of 2 weeks at #1
114 of 985 #1′s reviewed; 11.57% through the Hot 100