The Beatles, Album by Album--Please Please Me

The success of the Beatles' second single, "Please Please Me," led to their first LP in 1963, Please Please Me. It has one of the all-time great intros with the "One, two, three, faww" countdown by Paul bursting into the youthful exuberance of "I Saw Her Standing There." This song really sets the tone for the whole album. The Beatles' debut is an album of adolescent love, bursting with excitement at the possibilities to come. While relationships seems to be the theme (and will be for about the first half of Beatles albums), you can just as easily read this to be the excitement of creating and playing music. Lennon and McCartney start dipping their feet into the waters of songwriting here, and from the very get-go all of their singles were self-penned, which was rather unusual at the time. Their producer George Martin (the only true candidate for the Fifth Beatle as far as I'm concerned) initially pushed for them to record covers and release them as singles, but quickly learned that nothing they could cover could match up to the Lennon/McCartney originals. Still, at this point, John and Paul weren't the polished hits-makers that they would become later. As is the tradition of all of their early albums other than A Hard Day's Night, there are 6 covers on here and 8 originals. On a lot of these early albums, I love their covers just as much as the originals (sometimes more). Even though their songwriting wasn't always at its peak on these earlier albums, they brought more energy and enthusiasm than anyone else wallowing around in the post-Fifties wasteland of rock and roll before the British Invasion.

To me, this is not so much of a great songs album as much as it is just a great fucking rock 'n' roll record to put on at a party or when you want to have a good time. The two real classics here are the bookends. As mentioned earlier, "I Saw Her Standing There" explodes out of the gates full-throttle (something the Beatles specialized in). This was already a fairly musically advanced band, since they had been perfecting their chemistry by playing their infamous multi-set live shows in Liverpool and Hamburg. The guitar, bass, and drums were all pretty complex for the time, but of course it's the singing that is always the hook in Beatles songs. Paul uses plenty of his patented "Whoo's!" in this one. "Twist and Shout" is the finest song on the album, and one of John's most famous vocal performances. He absolutely tears the shit out of this one, nailing it in two takes with shredded vocals, since this was the last song recorded in a monster 18-hour session in which they cut the entire LP. As with several of their other covers, they managed to top the Isley Brothers original here. The energy is so damn infectious on here.

Elsewhere on this album, there abounds great gems waiting to be discovered. I have always loved "Misery," because of the way the catchy, upbeat music perfectly reflects the fleeting nature of teenage heartbreak and of course John's final doo-woop "Wah wah wah wah." "Anna (Go to Him)" has a great laid-back rhythm and a patented love-sick vocal from John. I love the transition from the choruses to the verse by John: "What am I, what am I supposed to do? Oh oh oh oh." John brought some of the most soul and fire to his vocals out of any white singer of that (or any) era. In fact, his singing on the early albums is what set the band apart from its peers. He was able to bring a lot of credibility and verve to American rock 'n' roll and R&B covers, and was clearly influenced immensely by Chuck Berry, Elvis, and Motown. Paul brought lots of soul to his later vocal performances with the band, but in my opinion John was the first stand-out vocalist.

The two singles on here--"Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me"--don't do particularly much for me, but maybe that's just because they've been so ingrained in my ears and head for all these years that I don't think about them too much anymore. That is certainly the case with a lot of Beatles hits. Both feature John's harmonica, which was apparently a big selling point for Beatles fans back then? Who knows.

There's plenty of other musical gems on here. This and A Hard Day's Night are probably the two most joyful albums in the Beatles catalogue, and while this doesn't have the songwriting perfection of that album, there is no album more raw and innocent of that or any other era than Please Please Me.

--Edward