The Beatles – Help!

Personally, it's the title song alone that sounds lousy to my ears--not muffled exactly, but just weirdly mixed in a way that makes for painful listening. But the rest of the record--side 1 included--sounds fine to me.

I suspect that this is the 1966 second pressing because the first pressings had Times New Roman font on the labels and these have Sans Serif. One of the few early Beatles albums that is better in stereo due to the muffled recording of the mono tracks. The De Agostini 2017 pressing is a lot better than most with Ringo's drums regaining the crispness that they are due, but all the stereo pressings are better recorded than the mono one. Maybe they had a duff batch of tape.

In almost MONO, side 2 is fantastic, but side 1 sounds muffled especially you're going to lose that girl and Help!

I adore this album and this is a fantastic pressing. I am delighted to own the mono version.

Can anybody tell me what Version of help should I get it in mono or stereo

I have a copy of the 1965 mono UK but the labels are on the wrong sides. Has anyone any information about this? I can't find any reference to it online.

I have a CD copy not listed here. The catalogue number is B0019706-02 and is a gatefold CD cover presented in both mono and stereo. Please help with value. It says US print 2014.

HELP! I have a Mono UK version, Times New Roman font with KT embossed on SIDE 2.
Runouts Side 1: XEX 549-2 (AAP perpendicular) and Side 2: XEX 550-2 (ACI or AGL? perpendicular)
Any ideas which pressing it might be?

I have a vinyl re-issue inside a plastic sleeve. there is a sticker on the back sleeve "made in Canada." black labels, PCS 3071. I cannot seem to find this version in Discogs. HELP?!

On the surface it’s easy to dismiss The Beatles Help! as nothing more than a Marx Brothers romp across the world, as a rag-tag crew of ne’er-do-wells go to outlandish lengths in an attempt to steal a mystical ring from the hand of Mr. Starr ... and if you haven’t seen this tongue in cheek film, please do. But below the surface, with Sgt. Pepper just around the corner, both the film and the music relay what happens when the public image of The Beatles smacks up against their actual inner lives; lives filled with fame, paranoia, failing marriages, and the need to become adults, with original thoughts, in a world that wanted nothing more than to keep the Fab Four and Beatlemania rolling on and on and on.

These were heady dark days, and it’s true, people were looking for something to take their thoughts away from the Cold War and the ever impending conflict in Viet Nam, that with each ing day brought Beatle fans one step closer to the Induction Center. Counter The Beatles wisecracking frolics with the Civil Rights movement that was changing everything that Americans thought they knew and understood, and it’s no wonder that this is a confusing misunderstood album, one with a foot in two time periods, with The Beatles wanting nothing more than to be taken seriously, comment on all they saw around them, and their place to effect and influence others.

The song “Yesterday” is a prime example, and while certainly personal, much more light and airy than the 900 plus opus covers it would spawn, signifying not a song of love gone south, but of the times in which we all found ourselves living, where what we thought we’d known [yesterday], actually did seem far away as compared to the headlines of the world. The Beatles almost seemed to be putting on a disguise, an act that became a reality with Sgt. Pepper, where The Beatles freed themselves to do anything they wished by creating an alternate band. Just listen to Lennon on “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” where in a Dylan influenced fever he swaps well known harmonies, changing his voice and tenor, almost slashing in his attempt to keep the music rags at bay, to carve out some private space for himself. Yet there’s still a naiveté in the McCartney song “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” a playful number of innocence and first love that connects those early years with these pot smoking changing times.

Keeping in mind the atmosphere from which it rose, Help! was not just a soundtrack to a movie, it was the music for opening credits to the counter culture revolution, one where youth in all of its glory was plastered across the silver screen in living colour and stereophonic sound. Help! defined a corner as it was being turned, and for a brief year and a half of brilliant music, laced with liquid acid, all change seemed magically possible, as if by sheer will and good thoughts, wrongs would be righted, the heavens would part, and the horrors of a previous generation, pushed aside.

Like it or not ... take it seriously or not ... Help! is an album that needs to be reckoned with.

*** Pick the UK edition, it’s the only one worth considering.

Review by Jenell Kesler