Ruminations on the Beatles: Help!

If you only had one album from the Beatles Early period, Help! would be the one.
In that period of time, both the band and the music industry at large was more focused on singles, something that doesn't really exist in this day & age.  Singles came on a 7-inch record, and usually housed one song per side, a hit song that you might hear on the radio, and a bonus on side B (hence the term 'b-side').  People who have only a passing knowledge of the Beatles will likely be familiar with the Beatles' singles catalog; they make make up the bulk of Beatles tunes you'll hear on the radio to this day.  But the albums of this period present a wholly different side of the band, one where there was room to breathe, to search out new musical territory, to pay homage to their roots or try out new instruments on songs written especially for their use (see 'Norwegian Wood' on Rubber Soul).
Help!, in my opinion, marks the end of the Beatles early period, and it serves as a distillation of all that came before it, offering up some of their most fully realized songs, and the majority of my favorite deep cuts.
Everybody knows the title track, I hope, and I seriously doubt that anyone out there has never heard "Ticket to Ride" or "Yesterday".  But between those familiar hits is a set list of some of the strongest songs the band has ever come up with.  The driving rocker "The Night Before", the folk-tinged "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", and the George Harrison composition "Another Girl" keep the pace of side one at a gallop.  Side two starts out with Ringo's amusing rendition of Buck Owens' "Act Naturally", then moves through another handful of strong Beatles originals until we hit "I've Just Seen a Face", which probably takes the cake as my favorite early Beatles song.  The brisk drum beat fills us with the excitement of the newly found love that Paul sings about, and the unmatched energy contains the prototype of all hyperactive rock & roll that came after it. 
"Yesterday" is up next, and as most people know it's probably one of the most stirring and memorable songs of the era.  It's one of the most covered songs ever written (over 2200 versions), and one of the top grossing hits of all time.  Any Beatles collection that omits it is a foul misrepresentation of the band.
Interestingly enough, the process of writing "Yesterday" was filled with trouble.  The melody came to Paul one night in a dream, and on a following day over breakfast, in place of the now-famous titular line, he found himself singing "scrambled eggs."  The tune continued to develop, but he could never get that phrase out of his head, and it kept it from being fully realized for quite some time.  Furthermore, since the song had come to him (like all good art does) unbidden and without method, he was deeply concerned that he might have accidentally plagiarized some one else's work without knowing he'd done it.  He kept playing the song to various people in the music industry, asking if they'd heard it before, and after enough people said no, he decided it was his to record.
Help! is a definitive statement, a self-styled masterpiece from a band that had its feet firmly planted in an identity.  Some time after it's release, the Beatles had a fateful meeting with Bob Dylan, who introduced the boys to a something that would spin their lives and their music down a completely new path: Marijuana.  Once Mary Jane opened the gateway and the true spirit of the 60's flooded in, the Beatles were never the same.  In my opinion, they got a helluva lot better, but Help! stands as the final statement of the band as they started out: just a rock & roll group from Liverpool.