Hats In The Ring for The Beatles’ first LPs:
Please Please Me
v
With The Beatles
THE PHRASE ‘YOU HAD TO BE THERE’ IS often used as a tag to excuse a lame anecdote and is tedious to hear for those who weren’t there. But for teenage music fans in 1963, the impact of early Beatles music is impossible to describe without reliving the context in which the group’s first two albums were experienced.
They were the soundtrack and background to first romances, to parties (preferably in houses which had vacated by parents), to homework, to dancing, to showing off and growing up. These records were the thrilling indication that the 1960s had arrived and everyone could join in.
A glance at some of the other best-selling albums of that year illustrates the change that was taking place. Cliff and The Shadows were there with Summer Holiday, the soundtrack of West Side Story was a steady seller and, just five months before the release of Please Please Me, The Black and White Minstrel Show was riding high in the charts. Oh yes, the swinging was a long time coming.
The songs on Please Please Me touched every part of your experience. The heady drama of boy meets girl was encapsulated in the raw excitement of I Saw Her Standing There, that fleeting moment in time of being ‘just seventeen’ yet to come for many of us, and momentarily recaptured for others.
There was sweetness and innocence in Do You Want To Know A Secret, melancholy in Misery, heart-piercing romanticism in Ask Me Why, helplessness in Chains and Baby It’s You. The whole album reverberated with vitality and rough-edged emotion, reaching an electrifying climax with Lennon and McCartney’s soaring vocals in There’s A Place and in John’s rendition of Twist and Shout where he chews up the song and spits it back out again with a raw energy.
Please Please Me was a rushed first album, released to cash in on the success of the singles, but in its balance of melodic and lyrical Lennon-McCartney compositions and evocative cover songs it acknowledged its roots and anticipated what was to come.
Ringo’s version of Boys, originally recorded by The Shirelles, is lively, and John does a fair version of Baby It’s You, another Shirelles’song. His rendition of Arthur Alexander’s Anna is a pretty good match for the sublime original. For all of us who didn’t see The Beatles in Hamburg or at The Cavern, the mix of songs gives a flavour of what their stage show was like.
Eight months later that year, With The Beatles was released on November 22. Eight months is a long time in a teenage opera and the second album seemed to speak to our greater maturity, our deeper grasp of the meaning of life and love.
Take the cover, for a start. The cover of Please Please Me depicted the boys dressed in suits, looking down over the stairwell in EMI’s headquarters in London. It’s a great photo, with an interesting viewpoint and a jaunty feel but what do we see on the new album? A moody, black and white composition of head-shots, in which the loveable mop-heads have become polo-necked art students whose expressions hint at deep emotion and inner angst.
And the songs seem musically stronger. John’s voice now blends wonderfully with Paul’s, and is strong and confident on his solo leads. There is more of George’s guitar, it seems, and his vocals on his own song Don’t Bother Me and on Devil In Her Heart are convincing.
The Lennon-McCartney compositions on this album are darker than those on the earlier record. There’s bitterness in Devil In Her Heart, emphasised by the call-and-response structure, and Not A Second Time is suffused with pain and hurt.
The cover songs are more firmly rooted in rock and soul greats. Instead of the teen dream sexiness of The Shirelles, we have the wildness of Chuck Berry. John and George do a great version of Smokey Robinson’s ‘You Really Got a Hold On Me’, capturing its moving urgency.
So perhaps you really did have had to be there, or at least understand what that moment was like, when you didn’t want to do The Twist any more and you didn’t want to be spotted and claimed on a dance floor.
You were four months closer to being seventeen than you were when Please Please Me was released, and you were hungry for a wider range of musical and emotional experience. The first album was shiny and lovely, the second one hinted at the complexities of life we were yet to encounter.
So the winner has to be With The Beatles. My copy has a creased cover, a scratched surface and someone else’s name written in Biro. Says it all, really.
