Our final classic night song of the day this week is “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles. The title song from their 1964 film, A Hard Day’s Night, this single was released in July of that year and shot to #1 all around the world—Australia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and, in the U.S., both the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100 charts. It was the fifth of seven Beatles songs to hit #1 within a one-year period, a record that still stands today.
Although credited to the Lennon-McCartney team, as were all the duo’s compositions, “A Hard Day’s Night” was primarily a John Lennon song. He apparently got the title from a Ringo Starr malapropism. Ringo remembered it this way:
“We went to do a job, and we’d worked all day and we happened to work all night. I came up still thinking it was day I suppose, and I said, ‘It’s been a hard day …’ and I looked around and saw it was dark so I said, ‘… night!’ So we came to ‘A Hard Day’s Night.'”
Others remember it slightly different, but all agree the phrase was one of Ringo’s. The reality is, the boys needed a name for the movie they’d been filming and then a song to match that name, so John came up with “A Hard Day’s Night” in relatively short order. It took the boys less than three hours to record it, on April 16, 1964, at EMI Studios. Take nine was the magic pass.
Then there’s that opening chord, which has perplexed music theorists for years. By all current accounts, it was created by George Harrison playing an Fadd9 on his Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar; John Lennon playing the same Fadd9 on his Gibson 6-string acoustic; Paul McCartney playing a high D (12th fret) on his Hohner bass; and George Martin adding the notes D-G-D on a Steinway grand piano. Add all those together and do the music math and you come up with a Dm7sus4, more or less. It’s certainly distinctive and how they thought it up escapes me.
The movie A Hard Day’s Night, directed by Richard Lester, introduced the Fab Four to a global audience. Even today, sixty years later, the film has an energy that is infectious. Part of that’s due to all the great songs, including classics like “I Should Have Known Better,” “If I Fell,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “And I Love Her,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” “Tell Me Why,” “She Loves You,” and the title song. Part of it is the loose, madcap screenplay by Alun Davis. Part of it is Dick Lester’s innovative cinematic style. But a lot of it is the boys themselves, exuding wit, confidence, nonchalance, and pure cheekiness. It was a breath of fresh air in the staid early ’60s and remains just as fresh today.
And here’s your daily bonus video of the day, the song “It’s a Hard Day’s Night” as presented in the opening minutes of the movie, A Hard Day’s Night. It pretty much gets across the entire movie in a concise two minutes and twenty-three seconds. I defy you to keep from grinning when you watch it.
