Deviations from Select Albums 4: 97. The Beatles

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I was trying to convert the series of monochromes of the faces of the Fav Four (in the case of George Harrison, a silhouette, too) into something like the work of Andy Warhol on Marilyn Monroe.
It can only be of two colours, I thought, for the pictures were already (originally) in black and white. And so I chose the four colours which I thought would make the finished work look childish,
playful and eye-catching while being both contemporary and nostalgic without allowing the mind of the younger-generation viewer to wander around and forget that these are The Beatles.

I started school at age five and was already in Grade IV when this album was released in 1964. Perhaps we had it in the Philippines a bit late during that time but The Beatles,
I thought, were already popular since the song "I Saw Her Standing There" became popular some years back.

One afternoon while on our way home from school, there appeared a mobile movie van from Procter and Gamble. It was moving around town announcing there
would be a free show at the plaza that evening. The announcement was blaring with the song "I Should Have Known Better" in the background. We came before
the sunset; the children squat on the grass in front of the mounted screen, while the oldies, who had brought along their own wooden stools, sat on them in the
back rows. The young lovers strayed away from the crowd; it was as if they had already seen all the movies there were to be shown. Moving but silent, they had
turned into mere shadows in some dark corners of the park as we cheered for the US marines to fight back.

The movie was "Guadalcanal Diary", a 1943 film which recounted the World War II events in the South Pacific of just the year before and which
itself had significance to us because it predated the landing of General Douglas MacArthur in Leyte in 1944, fulfilling his promise "I Shall Return."
In the morning our teacher was telling us that those who did not see the movie had lost half of their lives. At recess time the boys were signing
"I Should Have Known Better."

Here's the original album cover art design.

These photographs were taken by Robert Freeman who also took
the ones on the covers of The Beatles albums With The Beatles,
Beatles for Sale, Help! and Rubber Soul. These shots look
experimental. And there are more.

Photo from Penny Lane on www.dmbeatles.com

No. 22, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000;
No. 282, Billboard, The 300 Best-Selling Albums of All Time;
No. 307, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Photo by Robert Freeman. Album produced by George Martin. Parlophone 1964.

For the cover of the third Beatles album, Robert Freeman was asked again. He wanted to suggest the
idea of movement, by expressing a flow of a pictures: four rows of four head shots, set up as though
they were frames from a movie. The pictures of the four individual Beatles were taken in Freeman’s
studio, in London. He asked them to make another facial expression for each new photo. WogBlog

The title of the album was the accidental creation of drummer Ringo Starr. According to Lennon in a 1980 interview with
Playboy magazine: "I was going home in the car and Dick Lester [director of the movie] suggested the title, 'Hard Day's
Night' from something Ringo had said. I had used it in 'In His Own Write', but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You
know, one of those malapropisms. A Ringo-ism, where he said it not to be funny. . . just said it. So Dick Lester said, 'We
are going to use that title.'" wikipedia