Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and sung by Ringo Starr, ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’ was originally intended to be a part of the non-soundtrack half of the Help! album.
I recorded a song for the Help! album that was never released – ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’. George Martin found it in the vaults of EMI studios.
Anthology
The songs given to Starr to sing were never among Lennon and McCartney’s finest: ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ and ‘What Goes On’ were little more than album fillers, and often Starr was left to sing cover versions.
‘If You’ve Got Trouble’ bears the unfortunate hallmarks of the two songwriters going through the motions: uninspired lyrics about diamond rings, “money and things”, references to Starr’s haplessness (his persona within the group’s early years was that of an amiable clown), and a tune which was less than inspired.
We’ve just come across that, and it’s the most weird song. I’ve no recollection of ever recording it. It’s got stupid words and is the naffest song. No wonder it didn’t make it onto anything.
In the studio
‘If You’ve Got Trouble’ was recorded in a single take on 18 February 1965, in between two other Lennon–McCartney songs – ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ and ‘Tell Me What You See’.
The rhythm track was recorded first, at 6pm, with drums, bass, and George Harrison’s Gretsch electric guitar. Ringo Starr then overdubbed his first vocal track onto track three at 6.40pm.
Track two was an overdub of three guitars: Harrison’s Gretsch, Paul McCartney’s Epiphone Casino, and John Lennon’s Fender Stratocaster.
At 7.15pm Starr double tracked his lead vocals onto track four, Lennon and McCartney added backing vocals, and Harrison performed a solo on a Fender Stratocaster.
That the song wasn’t working as planned can be heard in Ringo’s desperate call before the guitar solo: “Ah, rock on – anybody!” ‘If You’ve Got Trouble’ was eventually replaced on the Help! album by ‘Act Naturally’, recorded four months later.
Are they kidding? Even the least inspired Beatles song is head and shoulders above anyone else’s material (and that’s not a dandruff reference). If Ringo had blurted “Ah, rock on, anybody!” in one of the classics, we’d celebrate its lunacy instead of taking this as evidence of a throwaway line. The fact that a Beatle mocks it in retrospect signifies nothing; witness the Lennon vitriol leveled at some of his finest work in retrospect.
Yes, but it’s not just that Ringo says “Ah, rock on, anybody!”, it’s the disdainful way he says it that’s so telling.
Raffian – from your response I can tell you haven’t heard it. There are a handful of Beatles songs – maybe 10 or 20 – that I have no desire to listen to. (The rest of them I love.) This is much, much worse than whatever you consider the worst Beatles song. Search for it on YouTube. It is truly godawful. It took me until 1:07 until I would be willing to kill myself to stop the, um, so-called “music” if there were no stop button. It could be used as a weapon during warfare. It makes flowers wilt. It causes cancer. It emits gamma rays. It is that bad. Really.
I like this song, I think it’s pretty good and hummable. The Beatles will I’m sure bash things they did and they’re withing their rights, but as a fan I think it’s alright.
One of the only Beatles songs that really stink…No one is perfect.
Yeah, it’s not such a bad little song, it’s just unremarkable. (In fact, I like it more than either of “Help!”‘s two Harrisongs.) A song as bad as the one Serge is apparently hearing would be a lot more memorable than this little 12-bar throwaway. And yeah, the “Rock on, anybody!” really is the best thing about the song.
I think that is a good song but with nonsense on the lyrics. It would be a good song if they put em’ more better lyrics. But i think it’s great anyway.
I listened to this song on Utube and it is as good as any other songs that Ringo sang. It is much better than the cover he did sing on help! That song, by the way (Act Naturally) should have been on “Beaucoups of Blues”
“Rock on anybody” is totally Ringo funny!
To comment that If You’ve Got Troubles is a much better song than Act Naturally, is a serious lapse in musical appreciation.
Ringo’s lament “Rock on anybody” is easily the only highlight of the Beatle recording which should have left unreleased.
I mean it’s not a great song, but I find myself listening to it from time to time, I mean, come on it’s Ringo! By the way it sounds like Ringo is playing the guitar solos because they are god-awful!
Personally, i think it’s a good song, maybe it’s the less good song wrote by the Lennon-McCartney partnership, and yeah, maybe also, there’s animosity for this song and maybe we can hear it too, but even with the nonsensed lyrics, lack of more good lyrics and drumming and voices, it’s for me a good song. I tie it with Mr. Moonlight of the less good song they did.
Count me among those who like it. It’s not a Grammy winner by any stretch, but God help me I like it.
While the song isn’t very good, it really isn’t all that bad either. I could see that if they practiced it a bit more, created a decent guitar solo, plus maybe a change or two in the arrangement, it would have been a no brainer to go on “Help!” as Ringo’s track and nobody would have thought twice about it.
One can imagine though as they are playing it in the studio that as Ringo is singing, he looks around at the grimacing expressions on John, Paul, and George and decides the song is seriously lacking something.
Not as good as “Act Naturally”, but I’d still rank it ahead of two or three other “Help!” tracks. Riff-wise, it’s certainly better than “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” – you can see a definite progression straight through from “Troubles” to “Day Tripper” to “Taxman”.
I found recently that the Anthology version the order of the lyrics is altered from the original form.
In Anthology starts: ”If You’ve Got Troubles, you’ve got less…”
But the original starts: ”I Don’t think is funny when…”
The Anthology version is extended it lasts 2:44
The original can be find on bootlegs and lasts only 2:25.
Damn, anthology altered other song!
In with another “I like it!” It’s no piece of genius, that’s for sure, but I dig the beat and the drums and Ringo’s voice. As someone else said, it’s definitely “hummable”.
I like this song. Don’t know why some put it down.It’s not regular beatle fare and quite unique. Ringo is an original.
I actually kind of like the song too. Despite the banal and awful lyrics, there is an interesting musical idea at the bottom of it. It always seemed to me to be a riff on the piano intro to Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” (a song the Beatles played during the stage days in Hamburg). I think that if John and Paul had put just a little more effort into it, it may have turned out all right.
That said, Ringo’s version of “Act Naturally” is great — better than the original.
A weak, but kinda funny song.
“If You’ve Got Troubles” is not such a bad little song.
It has nice riff, I think, only the words have gone wrong.
It’s not irredeemably s***e,
and with a few changes it could be put right.
“If You’ve Got Troubles” is not such a bad little song.
It has just three chords,
which any learner on guitar can play.
It has these three chords,
and they’re major ones: E, b7, A.
Well done!
I agree this is amongst the weakest Lennon-McCartney tunes, of which there are only a very small handful i would actually consider truly “weak”. I’ve always been amazed over the years at finding even really rare things they just threw out or gave to other ppl that I absolutely adore(“I’m In Love” comes to mind as one of a zillion examples). This kind of craft is beneath them and i think they knew it, hence first giving it to Ringo then completely discarding it. I have to say its one Beatle song i could have lived my life without hearing. The fact that this made the cut for Anthology and “Love of the Loved” didnt is somewhat criminal, methinks. Any songwriter could pump this out and I NEVER thought I would think that about any Lennon-McCartney song
I don’t think Love of the Loved was ever recorded by the Beatles, which is why it’s not on theCD
You’re right. Only recorded by them for the Decca audition with Pete Best on drums.
A charmless headache of a song, I gotta say… one of the Beatles’ few mis-steps in the studio, and — along with the equally anemic “That Means a Lot” — an exception that proves the rule, as they had the awareness to not put it out. Fascinating, though, to hear what the Fabs sound like doing weak original material — something we seldom ever got to see with their released albums and singles!
Aside from any compositional complaints, this has to be one of George’s *worst* solos on record. (And that’s saying a lot. I love and respect George’s playing, and later on he became quite proficient, but he may have set the record for number of blunders in 16 bars.) The fact that the solo is double-tracked is just boggling.
If he made the same blunders both times, then that means they were deliberate choices and not blunders at all!
I usually don’t mind mistakes in solos – it’s a sign of character.
There’s an old trick one does when playing LIVE – if you make a mistake, make it again because then it sounds like you meant it and thus becomes ‘not a mistake’. However, this being in a studio – perhaps it was intentional? I don’t believe they had quite the clout at that time to spend glorious hours in the studio, though. It doesn’t sound entirely fleshed out and they don’t sound enthusiastic.
Definitely George’s worst, closely beating out Dizzy Miss Lizzy, but Slow Down is worse, which was John (natch)
Count me in as a lover. Part of the appeal to me is how awkward it sounds.
this song is, in mo, catchy. Same goes for ‘you know what to do’.
I am surprised at the number of older fans who are snubbing them.
On first hearing both of these songs I was taken back to, say, 1965. Remembering the way I felt then is similar to the way I feel listening to these two now.
The Bristols did a nice cover of this on their album Introducing the Bristols. Vocals by Fabienne DelSol.
Uh how is John playing the rhythm guitar?
I think he is sliding chords or something? I can’t really explain. It just sounds weird. It also made me fall in love with the song.
You can clearly hear John’s guitar doubling Paul’s bass during the solo and going “chacka-chacka” afterwards (2:00-2:10). He plays rhythm guitar during the verses (that ching-ching sound). His rhythm playing is most obvious during the chorus (right channel).
Some of these so-called fans claim these songs cause cancer, then go away. I personally like the song.. Probably because they performed it well, whether or not the song itself is good.
Besides Ringo’s voice, what I like best is the slashing rhythm guitar…It may have been the Beatles most “punk rock” moment!
Wow. The less said about this one, the better. There were some gems left in the can, but this isn’t one of them. “Ah, rock on, anybody” sounds like a desperate plea for help (no pun intended). Left on the shelf & deservedly so. Uninspired, to say the least. Must’ve had too much reefer that day. When I first heard it on Ultra Rare Trax I laughed out loud at it…
…And the fact that you first heard it on Ultra Rare Trax (one amongst countless bootlegs that contained the song) is EXACTLY why it wasn’t left off Anthology – or why the Anthology exists in the first place. As for me, I laughed at the “you think I’m soft in the head” bit.
Since the Monkees were conceived as an ersatz Beatles, I think THEY should have recorded “If You’ve Got Troubles.” It would have been a good song to let Peter Tork sing, and it would have felt so right with him shouting “Rock on, anybody…”
I like the instrumental track a lot, it’s mainly the lyrics that aren’t good enough. If the lyrics were brilliant and the song had been on the Help! LP, I think people would be saying this was a precursor of the guitar & bass octave riffs later made popular by Cream, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and others.
Ifelt like that this song should’ve been the lead song instead of Help! It justs fits Ringo’s troubles in the film, aand Ringo deserves a chance to sing a song, not having sung a song the previous film. Plus it’s better than Act Naturally.
I’ll bring this up, since nobody else has— who wrote this, Lennon, McCartney, or the two together? And exactly what role did Ringo play in creating the melody?
To me, it sounds as if Lennon scribbled down some resentful-towards-the-wife lyrics on a scrap of paper, McCartney came up with a few backing riffs, and Ringo kinda made up the no-melody melody on the spot, loosely based on the way Lennon had sung it to him.
Harrison’s lead guitar role was made difficult by the lack of melody or interesting chords to work off, so he basically resorts to a series of cliches of the type he must have played every night in Hamburg.
************
“Act Naturally” was done as a sort of joke, I imagine… on one level, it is Ringo mocking the idea of having just finished being the dramatic “star” of “A Hard Day’s Night” (“They’re gonna put me in the movies…”)
A rock group choosing such a tune would have been parodying C & W music in one sense.. but in another sense, I believe the Beatles were also paying some sort of respectful tribute to the great sound and songwriting of Buck Owens.
Truly, in that sense it’s a dazzling display of virtuosity— how many other rock bands could have pulled this off? And made it both fun and funny?
Nobody but the Beatles!
Melody is the songwriter’s domain. Lennon and/or McCartney came up with it. They wouldn’t leave it to Ringo – even on this monstrosity – to “come up with” his own.
As for “Act Naturally” , they did it because Ringo needed a vocal for the album; Lennon and McCartney hadn’t written anything else he could sing; he had the Buck Owens record (the original) and he liked it. So, they did it. Simple.
Another quote:
{At 7 pm the Beatles are working to their time for a well-deserved break and food and drink. They are just completing a song which features Ringo singing.}
I wrote it. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever done — listen to the words.
Lennon, Coleman, 1965?
It’s clunky and uninspired but not offensive. At least the song doesn’t scream at the listener like Paul’s “Wild Honey Pie” does.
this wasn’t a beatle song. this wasn’t supposed to be heard. the beauty of the beatles was that they knew what was s***e and they weeded it out i’d say 99.9% of the time. the fact that it was put out 40 some years later doesn’t mean it was an official release by the beatles, it was a novelty to show what they did in the studio, an UNRELEASED track. was if you want me by george considered a released beatle song? no, it was something they tried and then moved on. free as a bird and real love were the only official releases off anthology
To me, this is a Lennon-Starkey song if there ever was one. Paul is practically invisible on this track and George’s guitar solo is poorly rehearsed. It is John’s badass rhythm guitar that propels the song, and even in the solo section, John’s guitar is overpowering George. Ringo of course, delivers very convincing vocals,
particularly “Rock on, anybody!”
(When you think about it, it’s not Ringo’s cry of “desperation” like haters say, but actually Ringo really getting into character. Etc. imagine him singing this in the movie and then he growls in frustration “rock on anybody!” because he’s so pissed off that he doesn’t care).
Also he beats the hell out of his drums as always. This is light years better than Act Naturally.
I like this one. ‘Biased John Lennon fan’ is right, the desperation in “rock on anybody!” is just being in character for the song. Is he supposed to be all cheerful and happy when he’s singing a song about having so many troubles? I was also quite startled when I heard the line, because I thought ‘Boys’ and ‘Honey Don’t’ were the only two examples of Ringo shouting orders to the other band-members.
What they should’ve done on Help! is they should’ve axed Dizzy Miss Lizzy, put Yesterday as the closer, and replaced Lizzy with this (maybe do some more takes to make it better). In any case, there’s no conceivable universe where this is worse than Dizzy Miss Lizzy.
I don’t care if the Beatles hated it…..this song ROCKS!
It’s not amazing but frankly they released worse – on the Help album alone ‘It’s Only Love’ has much more embarrassing lyrics. Not being a fan of country, I prefer this to Act Naturally as well, although neither are ever going to win many people’s favorite Beatles song!
I like it better than Revolution 9…..
wonder what it would’ve sounded like if they put more time it-
let it gel, deveop a life of its own.
I think the real put-off in the sound is the jerky rhythm, and
if it were somehow reworked into more smooth feel,
the Ringo-centric lyrics and voice wouldn’t have been
so critically received.
I believe this was mainly written by McCartney, about 95%, with only minor input from Lennon.
I was just rewatching the Anthology series and heard this song again for the first time in a while. If it had been a track on Out Of Our Heads or Aftermath it would have been considered a classic Stones album track. Maybe the Beatles should have offered it to them. As it is, the lyrics are way too caustic for sweet natured Ringo to pull them off. Not a Beatles classic, but not as awful as I thought at first.
Of course the Beatles knew this was not a good number and this ‘one and only’ take was never meant for release – that’s why it’s so rough and did not made it onto Help! It’s only on Anthology as a discarded curiosity – which is what is great about Anthology. I listen to their whole list including the (very few) weak ones like this. The problem is the tune has a catchy rhythm which can sometimes be an ear worm – once it gets in your head it can be stuck in there for days! Help!
Well, if it’s a poor song, then I’ve had that poor song in my head all day. I suppose I could apologize for liking it, but I won’t.
LOL yes it’s such a catchy riff isn’t it. I bet we’d see it differently if it had been released back in the day.
The only good part is Ringo yelling, “Rock on Anybody!”
I just heard this song for the first time in probably 20 years on Sirius XM. It took me until about halfway through to realize I’d ever heard it before. Naturally, it will not likely make anyone’s Top 10 list, save for maybe the occasional uber-contrarian. Nonetheless, hearing for the second first time, what jumped out at me was Ringo’s drumming on this track. I kinda like the relentless crash cymbal and way-ahead-of-the-downbeat pattern he no doubt mindlessly threw down. That aside, yes, the lyrics are mostly crap, the main riff is derivative as folk, and there’s a self-evident reason George doesn’t remember recording it. But I will still take this over 85% of anything they put out after Revolver.
Obviously not one of the Beatles’ best songs, but I still find it immensely fun to listen. I really like Ringo’s slightly sarcastic-sounding “Ah, rock on, anybody!” It does feel a bit like a slightly generic rock and roll number, but oh well, I’m glad we got to hear it.
I love this song. A catchy tune, I can’t believe they never released it prior to Anthology. Not sure why many comments are saying it’s horrible. I imagine singing this over and over if it were released with the Help album (my very first album purchase in 1974). As it is I love singing it now as it bobs around in my head.
If one was to judge a great song in other than technical musicianship and craft, then what other criteria make a great song? For me, if it makes me feel good and I don’t tire of hearing it, it’s a winner. I can’t say the same for Act Naturally or Honey Don’t. The former has the most cornball lyrics, if one has to compare.
I just listened to this song for the first time today. It’s not bad! The drum track is a bit too close to Ticket to Ride for comfort, the lyrics are pish and the middle eight frankly isn’t trying, but the verse has a manic Monkees energy with the insistent riff and the chiming, circular guitars. Not the best song by any means, but it’s got more life than some other songs from around the same time (looking at you, Wait and Run For Your Life).
It’s not terrible but it’s not very good. The song’s weaknesses would be easier to look had they been able to grab onto something about it that excited them and deliver a convincing performance. But they just weren’t feelin’ it.
A charmless headache of a song, I gotta say… one of the Beatles’ few mis-steps in the studio, and — along with the equally anemic “That Means a Lot” — an exception that proves the rule, as they had the awareness to not put it out. Fascinating, though, to hear what the Fabs sound like doing weak original material — something we seldom ever got to see with their released albums and singles!