I’ve Just Seen A Face

[Lennon-McCartney]

Recorded 14 June
Mixed 18 June (mono, stereo)

 

Paul – lead vocals, acoustic guitar
John – acoustic guitar
George – acoustic guitar
Ringo – snare, maracas

 

As if to prove that by now no style of music held any fears for him, Paul turns his writing talents to country and western style folk-rock – and comes up with ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’. The song was originally written as a “theme” for his Aunty Jin (his father’s youngest sister), who played an important part in Paul’s early life, particularly after his mother died when he was fourteen. She was a practical woman who encouraged Paul to talk things through with her – he remembers her as being “like an earth mother”. Within the family she was known as “Control”. Most famously, she gets a name-check in Paul’s 1976 hit ‘Let ’Em In’.

‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ is the group’s first true original C&W song – almost bluegrass, as opposed to the rockabilly compositions and covers seen on Beatles For Sale. The song has stood the test of time in the Beatles’ songbook, but at the time, the industry did not consider that country music was particularly acceptable to the record-buying public. However, despite the wonderfully simple and catchy tune, the strength of the song is in the lyrics.

 

The short musical introduction conjures up an exquisite sense of anticipation. Two confidently hit notes on the acoustic guitar lead into ten full bars of double-4/4 triplets echoed by the “harmony” acoustic in the other channel, after which we are suddenly catapulted headlong into the double two-beat jaunt of the verse.

The quality of the song is evident in the first line, a breathless stream-of-consciousness expression of embryonic love, with “I can’t forget” balancing the two halves of the first line with splendid double meaning. The lyric is immediately personal – “I … I … we … she … me … I” – and the tempo, instrumentation and tone draw the listener in, not to a confidence, but to an outpouring of joy. The babblings of one newly in love are all too familiar, and the undanceably fast pace of the song exudes youth and naivety.

The second verse is more coherent, but still has many thoughts and words unspoken – “other girls were never quite like this” is a throwback to “she’s sweeter than all the girls” of ‘Another Girl’. Love is in the air, but it is still early days: “Falling, yes I’m falling…”. The internal rhymes are carefully structured and, as with ‘She’s A Woman’, Paul uses a trick of spilling a word or two over to the next line – “And I’d have never been aware / but as it is I’ll dream of her / tonight” – a device he was to return to in many forms and with increasing sophistication in the future. The lyric is effortless, with unforced rhymes that still capitalise on the remnants of Scouse, allowing “aware” to rhyme with “her”. The harmonic structure is equally uncomplicated, the verse being an A–F#m (I–vi) progression, returning to A via that old warhorse D–E–A (IV–V–I), this sequence being reversed in the chorus.

Paul’s ad-libs and falsetto harmonising help move the song along at a brisk pace, and eventually the lines make room for themselves – in the final lines the first “Falling” is anticipated and the second “Oh, falling” is delayed as the lines jostle for space within the constraints of the tempo.

The unworded phrase that precedes the chorus – “lie-die-die-dat’n’die” – is a hook that was introduced at the end of the acoustic guitar introduction, but may be easily missed.

 

Throughout, the instrumentation has an acoustic simplicity, as pure as ‘Yesterday’, but emotionally way over at the other end of the spectrum. There is no bass, just John, Paul and George on acoustic guitars, with Ringo brushing away on drums and adding maracas on the “Falling” breaks. The central guitar break tries to maintain a foothold in reality by echoing the verse, but an octave down and played flatly with almost all syncopation removed, providing a neat contrast to the speed and rhythmic sophistication of the verse.

 

As this crotchety break is walloped out, there is an innocent and carefree “yeah, bobadop pop” from the background harmony vocal. The guitar harmonises the final couple of bars of the break, and the little flourish at the end gives us a nod and a wink and we’re back with Paul’s breathless recital once again.

After nailing this track in six takes, with guitar, harmony vocal and maracas overdubs, Paul went on to record ‘I’m Down’ in the same session, and ‘Yesterday’ that evening. A remarkable day’s work indeed. But it was pretty much what was expected of the band at the time:

 

“We’d show up at 10.30 and in the first session we were expected to get a couple of songs. Everyone did. Wally Ridley [an EMI producer] did a whole album in that time. We felt if he could do a whole album, we at least had got to come up with two songs. It would be just slovenly if we didn’t. So we’d sit down, run through a song fifteen, twenty minutes. How long can you run through a song without beating it to death? You always had the song. There was no making it up on the spot until much later … this was lads looking for work, trying to prove themselves with their first contract. So we go down and they’d say: what do you want to start with? Oh, ‘I’m Down’, or whatever it was. Maybe I didn’t want to get into the ballad early. It was probably a case of ‘let’s kick off and get rid of any nerves’.”

 

By now the workload was beginning to ease – in fact, the session for ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ began at 2.30 pm – but the group’s output was nevertheless extraordinary.

When remixing the song for the CD release in 1987, a noticeable amount of echo was added that rather detracts from the directness of the very dry vocal delivery on the original track. Capitol had, of course, already added a healthy dose of echo to the American release back in 1965, but on this occasion, that was the extent of their misdemeanours.

In the US, the Help! LP consisted of just the seven songs that appear in the film, filled out with orchestral soundtrack items by George Martin & Orchestra. So ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ was held back for a while, and selected as the opening track for the American version of Rubber Soul. In spite of the general (and merited) feeling by Brits that the treatment of Beatle albums by Capitol was little short of sacrilege, opening an album with this song works well. The nature of the song’s intro alone makes it a good choice to quickly hustle the audience into the album’s setting. This is particularly the case for what Capitol, for better or worse, did to Rubber Soul, leaving off the tracks ‘Drive My Car’, ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘What Goes On’ and ‘If I Needed Someone’ in favour of ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ and ‘It’s Only Love’, and so focussing on the more acoustic side of the Parlophone LP.

The George Martin Orchestra also released an album in 1965, entitled Help!, featuring orchestral versions of the non-cover songs from the Beatles’ LP. George Martin’s album also included a composition of his own, ‘Bahama Sound’, but curiously omitted just one Beatles original, George’s ‘You Like Me Too Much’.