The Beatles' Second Album [US]

Bruce Beatlefan (October 29, 2005)

I know now what I didn't know then. This album which was so jampacked with wonderful songs is actually a mishmash of leftover "With the Beatles" material, two B-sides, half an EP, and "She Loves You". I was too young to realize I was being ripped off! Out this American repackaging job came one incredibly serendipitous moment: the pairing of "You Can't Do That" and "Money" at the end of side one. For all my life those two songs were linked together in my mind (rather like Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker/Living Loving Maid") and it's hard for me to get around the fact that it was just an accident. Those songs have incredible power together.

The British invasion brought to us the rock n roll trick of kicking up the key of a song in the latter verses to bring a song to its climax (the Kinks: You Really Got Me, the Who: I Can See For Miles). The Beatles never did this in any of their songs. Not once. Isn't that strange? The reason I bring that up here is because they do something similar in the second guitar break of "Long Tall Sally" but so much more dramatically --that up-the-scale progression is simply one of the most incredible "moments" in the history of rock n roll. Also, comparing this song to the live versions in "Anthology" and "Live at BBC", we understand just how much George Martin's piano added to the fullness of this song (as well as "Slow Down", "Rock and Roll Music", and "Bad Boy", etc.).