Yes It Is

If you are not a die-hard fan of the Beatles, you might be scratching your head, wondering why you have never heard of the film Eight Arms to Hold You listed on the Capitol Records single pictured above.  That is because the film was eventually titled Help!, and Yes It Is was not a part of that film's soundtrack.  Instead, this terrific ballad merely served as the B-side to the progressive rocker Ticket to Ride, which was featured prominently in the movie.

However, Yes It Is was among the eleven songs recorded by the group during the last week of February in 1965 in consideration for the soundtrack.  Lennon wrote this number in the same style as the earlier B-side This Boy, though he always considered this song to be inferior to that great 1963 effort.  The boys spent five hours working on the song on February 16th after finishing up two tracks begun the previous day.

The basic track simply consisted of John on acoustic guitar and guide vocal, Paul on bass and Ringo on drums, though Anthology 2 reveals that George was already fiddling about with his tone pedal guitar, as it can briefly be heard at the top of take two.  We also hear that John used a quicker phrasing of the song's title at the end of each verse.  It required fourteen takes to arrive at the master before George actually got to overdub his beautifully subdued tone pedal (later popularly known as the wah wah pedal) guitar part. 

John, Paul and George then gathered around a single microphone to record their intricate three-part harmonies.  Even with producer George Martin assisting with the vocal arrangement, it took many attempts to get them right, yet I still hear the odd sour note a few times in the released version.  Overdubs continued with John double-tracking his lead vocal in the bridges, George adding more tone pedal guitar in places, and Paul - not Ringo - adding some accents on cymbals.  Supposedly there is a Hammond organ part buried in the mix, as well, but I am unable to pick it out.

The song was submitted to film director Richard Lester, but he did not select it for the soundtrack.  Thus, it was chosen for the B-side of the single which was released in April of 1965, well in advance of the film.  Manager Brian Epstein made sure that the Beatles promoted both sides of their singles around this time, but Yes It Is was too tricky for them to perform live, so they merely mimed to the record in television appearances on Thank Your Lucky Stars, Top of the Pops, and the Eamonn Andrews Show.

Capitol Records was not content to simply release the song as a B-side in the USA, so it also appeared on the compilation album Beatles VI in June of 1965.  After the group's career, Yes It Is first surfaced on the 1977 collection Love Songs.  It was featured on the British version of the album Rarities, and we finally got to hear the stereo mix, which had been languishing in the vaults for all of those years, when it appeared on Past Masters, Volume One in 1988.