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A Hard Day's Write, 3e

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Please Please Me

One of the great strengths of the Beatles was that by 1962, the year they cut their first record, they were already seasoned performers, well-versed in American soul, gospel, rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll. Most of what they knew had been learned the hard way. They knew how songs were constructed because, unable to afford sheet music, they had to decipher lyrics and work out chord changes by listening to records over and over again. Having played rock'n'roll to adoring teenagers at the lunch-time Cavern Club sessions in Liverpool, as well as to inebriated German businessmen in Hamburg, they also knew how to excite, calm and seduce an audience.

John and Paul had been together for five years; George had been with them for almost as long. Ringo was a recent member, having replaced Pete Best on drums, but they'd known him since 1959 and his previous position with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes meant that he had played the same venues as they had.

At this time, the Beatles' material was standard beat group fare -- the best-known songs by the best-known rock'n'roll artists. Top of their list was Elvis Presley. They covered almost 30 of the songs he'drecorded, as well as numbers by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Larry Williams, Ray Charles, the Coasters, Arthur Alexander, Little Richard and the Everly Brothers. Studying the music of these artists taught John and Paul the basics of songwriting. When they came together at Paul's house to write their own material, it was a case of reassembling the familiar chords and words to make something distinctively theirs. This is how a bass riff from a Chuck Berry number came to be incorporated into 'I Saw Her Standing There', a song about seeing a girl at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, and explains how the sound of Roy Orbison's voice came to be the inspiration behind 'Please Please Me', the Beatles' first Number 1 single. Sometimes their songs were 'about' incidents from their lives but often the words, like the chords, were borrowed from what had gone before. At this stage, the words were important to create sounds and impressions, rather than to convey a message.

Most of their debut album was recorded in a single session on February 11, 1963. It was released on March 22, 1963, and reached the top spot in the British charts. In America it was titled Introducing The Beatles and released on the little known Vee Jay label. The US version didn't include 'Please Please Me' or 'Ask Me Why' and failed to make the charts.

I Saw Her Standing There

Producer George Martin's original idea had been to tape a Beatles' show at the Cavern Club in Liverpool but it was later decided to get the group to play their live show in the studio and cut the album in a day. This was done on February 11, 1963, when in a 1 5-hour session the Beatles recorded ten new tracks to which were added both sides of their first two singles.

'I Saw Her Standing There' was the perfect song with which to open the Beatles' first album because it set the group firmly in the context of sweaty ballrooms, full of dancing teenage girls. They decided to keep the 1-2-3-4 'intro' as this added to the impression of a raw Liverpool beat group captured in live performance.

Originally titled 'Seventeen', the song tells the simple story of a boy who sees a girl dancing at the local ballroom and, after deciding that her looks are 'way beyond compare', determines never to dance with anyone else again.

As the story unfolds there is a wonderful mixture of youthful arrogance and insecurity portrayed. There is no hint that the narrator has considered the possibility of rejection and yet, in that unforgettable beat group rhyme, we're told that as he 'crossed the room' his heart 'went boom'.

Paul started composing this song one night in September 1962 while driving back to his home in Allerton, Liverpool. He liked the idea of writing about a 17-year-old girl because he was conscious of the need to have songs which the group's largely female audience could easily relate to. "I didn't think a lot about it as I sang it to myself," he said four years later. "Originally the first two lines were 'She was just seventeen, Never been a beauty queen'.

It sounded like a good rhyme to me at the time. But when I played it through to John the next day, I realized that it was a useless line and so did John. So we both sat down and tried to come up with another line which rhymed with 17 but which meant something." After a while, John came up with 'you know what I mean', which, as Paul recognized, could either be dismissed as a filler or accepted as sexual innuendo, 16 being the legal age of sexual consent. It was also a very Liverpudlian phrase that neatly avoided the borrowed Americanisms which littered most English rock'n'roll of the time.

Mike McCartney photographed his brother and John sitting by the fireplace in Forthlin Road working on this song. Paul was sitting in front of a small black and white television and John was beside him wearing his horn-rimmed spectacles. They were both playing acoustic guitars and a Liverpool Institute exercise book was open in front of them on the floor with the crossings out in the song clearly visible.

Paul later explained in an interview with Beat Instrumental that the bass riff was stolen from Chuck Berry's 1961 song 'I'm Talking About You'. "I played exactly the same notes as he did and it fitted our number perfectly," he confessed. "Even now, when I tell people about it, I find few of them believe me. Therefore, I maintain that a bass riff doesn't have to be original."

Continues...

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Excerpted from A Hard Day's Write, 3e by Steve Turner Copyright © 2006 by Steve Turner. Excerpted by permission.
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