Category Archives: Beatles

Beatles, Music et al, Music of the 60s

Cannot Buy Beatles Love

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Cannot Buy Beatles Love

April 4, 1964
Hit #1 on Billboard
Cannot Buy Beatles Love
cover for the 45 of Can’t Buy Me Love. Note the cigarette in Paul’s hand.
Cannot Buy Beatles Love

Number 1

It’s April 1964 and Beatlemania is world-wide.  The Beatles released “Can’t Buy Me Love” on March 16 of that year and by April 4 it was, not surprisingly, #1.

Oh yea, and numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 were also Beatle songs!

Beatles Can't Buy Me Love
from Billboard magazine
Cannot Buy Beatles Love

Me love or my love?

As infected as any teenager, I automatically loved the song, though the title seemed grammatically confusing.  Did they mean, “You cannot buy love for me”? Unfamiliar with the British use of “me” for “my”, “You can’t buy my love” didn’t occur to me. 

In any case, I had my transistor radio on as I walked weekdays delivering the local evening newspaper or on Friday evenings collecting the paper’s weekly charge (33 cents)  from my customers.

My radio was simply AM, of course. I hoped WABC or WMCA would play a few in a row and skip some commercials. It was still a few years away from a couple FM station owners realizing that these kids with paper routes had money to spend.

Cannot Buy Beatles Love

Paris inspired

The Beatles had performed for 18 days at the Paris Olympia Theatre, on a nine-act bill, playing two and sometimes three sets each day from January 16 to February 4, 1964.  They had just two days off in the run, on 21 and 28 January. It was during this time that Paul wrote “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

By the way, keep in mind that three days after that grueling 18 day visit, they flew to the United States for the first time for their famous Ed Sullivan Show appearances. 

Cannot Buy Beatles Love

Can’t Buy Me Love

Paul McCartney in Barry Miles’s Many Years from Now  said, “‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is my attempt to write a bluesy mode. The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well but they won’t buy me what I really want. It was a very hooky song. Ella Fitzgerald later did a version of it which I was very honoured by.”

“Can’t Buy Me Love” was mostly recorded on January 29, 1964 at EMI’s Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris. It was the first the first Beatle single to feature just one lead singer.

Cannot Buy Beatles Love

Allan W Pollack

Allan W Pollack at his amazingly thorough Soundscape site writes: “We have here a very standard long form with two refrain-like bridges separated by two verse sections, one of which contains a guitar solo. However the combination within the same song of a verse section so traditionally bluesy with a refrain, intro and outro that is equally so non bluesy is far from routine and makes this number truly groundbreaking in its own quiet way.”

That’s exactly what I was thinking in 1964 while I delivered The Bergen Evening Record.

NOT!

Cannot Buy Beatles Love
Anniversary, Beatles, Music et al, Music of the 60s

Beatles Please Please Me Album

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Beatles Please Please Me album

Released March 22, 1963

Beatles Please Please Me Album

Beatles Please Please Me album

Other preferences

In March 1963 while we were listening to the Four Seasons say Walk Like a Man, Ruby & the Romantics singing Our Day Will Come, and the Chiffons do He’s So Fine, the Beatles released their first album, Please Please Me.

In the UK only.

Their single “Please Please Me” had hit #1 in the UK on February 22. They’d released it in the US on February 7, but the single hardly charted here, reaching No. 35 on the WLS-AM (Chicago) music survey in March and did not chart at all on Billboard.  

The Vee Jay label even misspelled their name.

Beatles Please Please Me Album

Beatles Please Please Me album

No Zoo picture

For the album, producer George Martin, a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, owners of the London Zoo, thought that it might be good publicity for the zoo to have the Beatles pose outside the insect house for album’s cover photo, however, the Zoological Society turned down Martin’s offer and instead, Martin asked Angus McBean.

It was he who took the distinctive picture of the group looking down over the stairwell inside EMI’s London headquarters in Manchester Square.

Martin wrote later: “We rang up the legendary theatre photographer Angus McBean, and bingo, he came round and did it there and then. It was done in an almighty rush, like the music…”

Veterans of the road, John Lennon and Ringo Starr were 22; Paul McCartney and  George Harrison were 20.

Beatles Please Please Me album

Outside help

The album was as much a collection of covers as originals:

Side one               

  1. “I Saw Her Standing There” 2:54
  2. “Misery” 1:49
  3. “Anna (Go to Him)” (Arthur Alexander) 2:57
  4. “Chains” (Gerry Goffin, Carole King) 2:26
  5. “Boys” (Luther Dixon, Wes Farrell) 2:27
  6. “Ask Me Why” 2:26
  7. “Please Please Me” 2:03
 Side two               

  1. “Love Me Do”      2:23
  2. “P.S. I Love You” 2:04
  3. “Baby It’s You” (Mack David, Barney Williams, Burt Bacharach) 2:40
  4. “Do You Want to Know a Secret” 1:59
  5. “A Taste of Honey” (Bobby Scott, Ric Marlow) 2:03
  6. “There’s a Place” 1:51
  7. “Twist & Shout” (Medley, Russell) 2:37
Beatles Please Please Me album

Please Please Me

               From the (great) Beatles Bible site:

Eight of the album’s 14 songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (credited as McCartney-Lennon). At the time it was unusual for a group to write their own material; The Beatles, however, swiftly revealed to listeners that they were anything but a run-of-the mill band.

In early 1963 pop acts commonly released three-minute 45 rpm singles, or occasionally four-song EPs. The long-player was normally beyond the fiscal reach of most teenagers, and the LP as art form was yet to emerge; albums tended to be a handful of hits and a selection of filler songs.

The Beatles were not immune to this trend – the cover of Please Please Me even carried the tagline “with Love Me Do and 12 other songs” – but the quality of the songs on the LP was testament to their ambition and musical knowledge, and the willingness of Parlophone staff producer George Martin to try to get the best from them.

And this he did, effectively capturing highlights from The Beatles’ live set. The sound that had wowed audiences in Liverpool, Hamburg and beyond was most evident in the album’s frenetic closer Twist And Shout, full of boundless energy and with famously hoarse vocals from John Lennon.

The group’s versatility, meanwhile, was shown by R&B ballads Anna (Go To Him) and Baby It’s You, and McCartney’s love for pop standards ensured a place for A Taste Of Honey.

But it was with the original songs that set The Beatles apart from their peers. The opening  I Saw Her Standing There was one of Paul McCartney’s earliest songs, yet after dozens of performances in sweaty basement clubs and dance halls it was something of a rock powerhouse.

There’s A Place and Ask Me Why showcased their talents for melody and harmony, PS I Love You and Do You Want To Know A Secret displayed the group’s lighter side, while the title track was simply one of the most exciting pop songs that 1960s listeners had heard.

Beatles Please Please Me Album
Beatles, Music et al, Music of the 60s

Beatles Visit Penny Lane

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Beatles Visit Penny Lane

Penny Lane hit the #1 spot in the Billboard singles chart on
March 18, 1967
Beatles Visit Penny Lane
photo grabbed from the Beatle video for Penny Lane

Some have argued that much of what the Beatles did wasn’t really Rock and Roll. Even Ringo at the Beatles’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 said, “…the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame…I love…they always called us a pop group.”

Whether “Penny Lane” is rock and roll is perhaps the wrong question, because it is a rare Beatle fan who thinks it isn’t a great song. Some say that it and the flip side, “Strawberry Fields Forever” represent the greatest single ever released. Hard to disagree.

The Beatles recorded the song in late December 1966 and early January 1967. They were off the public stage (where they no longer wanted to be) and in the studio (where they loved being).

Of the song’s inspiration, Paul McCartney said in Anthology, “A lot of our formative years were spent walking around those places. Penny Lane was the depot I had to change buses at to get from my house to John’s and to a lot of my friends. It was a big bus terminal which we all knew very well. I sang in the choir at St Barnabas Church opposite.”

It is a Paul McCartney song, though John Lennon helped out a bit particularly with the line with the line following Paul’s refrain, Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes with A four of fish and finger pies.

John! Always willing stretch the limits and slide in what some would easily recognize as slang.

The song had its US release on February 17, 1967.

Beatles Visit Penny Lane

Penny Lane

Like anything having to do with the Beatles, critics and fans have thoroughly analyzed “Penny Lane.” The person who has broken down Beatle songs more thoroughly than anyone is an Alan W Pollack.  Here is the link to his amazing site.

His examination of Beatle music is from a musical viewpoint and if you are interested there is more there than enough there for even several sittings.

For example, one of his observations about Penny Lane states, “The rhythmic pulse is march-like with an undercurrent of fast triplets and localized syncopations that emphasize, rather than challenge, the rigidity of the four-in-the-bar meter. ” And that is just one of  four comments under the heading “Style and Form.”

Beatles Visit Penny Lane

Penny Lane video 

Also notable about the song is its video. It was filmed by Peter Goldmann. You can view it here and you will notice that the Beatles aren’t singing in the song, but are simply part of the scene. That is because the Musicians Union banned miming–or what we Americans would call lip-syncing.

Beatles Visit Penny Lane

 The Hook!

And if there is a piece of Penny Lane that is THE hook, for me it is that piccolo trumpet solo in the middle. Thank you George Martin. And thank you David Mason, the man who played that solo.

Beatles Visit Penny Lane

David Mason

Penny Lane Penny Lane

Here is a video in which Mason describes how Paul contacted him and his memorable part in the song that he recorded on January 17, 1967. Mason died in 2011.

Beatles Visit Penny Lane
Here are the credits for the song’s instrumentation:
  • Paul McCartney: vocals, piano, bass, harmonium, tambourine, percussion
  • John Lennon: backing vocals, piano, guitar, congas, handclaps
  • George Harrison: backing vocals, guitar
  • Ringo Starr: drums, handbell
  • George Martin: piano
  • Ray Swinfield, P Goody, Manny Winters, Dennis Walton: flutes, piccolos
  • David Mason, Leon Calvert, Freddy Clayton, Bert Courtley, Duncan Campbell: trumpets, flugelhorn
  • Dick Morgan, Mike Winfield: oboes, cor anglais
  • Frank Clarke: double bass
Penny Lane 45 sleeve
Beatles Visit Penny Lane