I'll Cry Instead

A long-standing question I have had concerning this song may have been answered in Dave Rybaczewski's excellent in-depth song-by-song look at the work of the Beatles.  If you have read any of my previous entries regarding I'll Cry Instead, you know that I have always believed that it could not possibly have been written for the soundtrack of A Hard Day's Night, as it was not even recorded until after principal photography of the film was completed.  It was almost certainly not one of the songs written in Paris in January of 1964.

Rybaczewski states that Lennon did not write the song until after the scene of the boys running and jumping around on a field was shot on April 23rd.  Director Richard Lester did not yet know which song he might use to play under that footage, so Lennon ran off to write a song to order as he had recently done for the title song of the movie.  Only after hearing it at that time did Lester reject it and resurrect the recent hit Can't Buy Me Love for the sequence.

The song was recorded on June 1st, as work on the non-soundtrack side of the album began in earnest.  Carl Perkins, an idol of the group, was in the studio that afternoon watching them record his tune Matchbox.  This put George's guitar in a rockabilly groove which it maintained once the boys turned their attention to their first original composition written in that style.  After six takes, they realized that the song was unusually short, so they recorded two more takes of an edit piece playing only the bridge and final verse.

When the US mono mix was prepared on June 4th, a different take of the song's first verse was inserted between take six and take eight, bringing the total time to 2'04" on this version.  The British mixes done on June 9th did not include the repeat of the first verse.  Thus, 1'42" was the running time of those releases.

Producer George Martin was somehow under the impression that Lester might still use the song in the film, so he sent it along with the other soundtrack songs to United Artists and Capitol Records in the US.  All Stateside releases of the song therefore listed it as being part of the official soundtrack.  By the time that the British album was being prepared, the song was correctly relegated to the non-soundtrack side.

The liner notes by Tony Barrow on the UK version of A Hard Day's Night mistakenly credit Paul singing along with John as a duet, but this is surely only John's voice double-tracked.  To complement George's rockabilly guitar part, Paul plays a walking bass line which is briefly highlighted when the rest of the band cuts out near the end of the final verse.  And Ringo adds a very active tambourine throughout the number.

Yet another error appeared on the United Artists soundtrack album A Hard Day's Night with this song incorrectly listed as I Cry Instead.  As the A-side of a single in the US, the song only reached number twenty-five on the Billboard chart.  It was also released on the Capitol Records album Something New, and in the UK on the EP Extracts from the Album A Hard Day's Night.