Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix
David K. Israel
A Hard Day’s Birthday
by David K. Israel - June 26, 2006 - 7:39 AM

Actually, I’m celebrating two birthdays today: My brother, Marc’s, who’s turning 36 (For he’s a jolly good fellow…) and my favorite soundtrack album of all-time, the Beatles’: A Hard Day’s Night, which, can you believe turns 42 today?!?

Packed with the hit singles, “And I Love Her,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and, of course, the title track, “A Hard Day’s Night,” the album was the first by the fab-four to contain songs entirely written by Lennon and McCartney. But for the phrase itself, “A Hard Day’s Night,” we have Ringo Starr to thank. (Curiously, the movie went through several title changes before folks over at United Artists settled on Ringo’s coinage. Beatlemania #1 was the working title for a while and then Off the Beatle Track.)

In Ringo’s own words:

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.’

And while my brother doesn’t have his own website I can link to, there are, of course, thousands on the Beatles. One of my favorites is a trivia website called I am the Beatles, which, when said aloud, sounds to me like you can actually Instant Message with John and Ringo… Alas, you can not. But you can discover that the working title for the song “Yesterday” was originally “Scrambled Eggs.”

Comments (1)
  1. Fantastic! Hard Day’s Night has the best geography quip of all time when the reporters are throwing questions at them:

    “How did you find America?”
    “Turned left at Greenland.”

    Well, maybe it’s the second or third best geography quip after “What did Delaware? A New Jersey” but it definitely ranks up there.

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