"If I Needed Someone"

I was thinking about "If I Needed Someone" yester-day and realized that it may indicate some of Chuck Berry's influence.  The lines "Carve your number on my wall / And maybe you will get a call from me" bear some resemblance to the lines "She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call / 'Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall" in Berry's "Memphis" (which the Beatles were obviously familiar with since they covered it on the BBC).  Both pairs of lines involve a telephone call and writing or carving on the wall.

"Carol"

This morning, I listened to a compilation album of Chuck Berry (in the 20th Century Masters series) and noticed a small feature in "Carol" that's also present in the version that the Beatles did on the BBC.

In Berry's original, the repetition involved in the alliteration in the line "Ev'ry time you make the scene, you find the joint is jammed" provides a slight sense of this fullness.  In the Beatles' version, Lennon gets the words wrong, but since he substitutes an-other word that also starts with a J, the effect is actually heightened:  "Well, ev'ry time you go to jive, you find the joint is jammed."