1962 – Love Me Do

Without fail, popular music provides inescapable evidence of age, even if you are one of those remarkable people who keeps up with music trends and genres.  Most of us have an irrepressible nostalgia for bands and songs from our teenage and young adult lifetimes.  Certainly it’s true for me and the Beatles who, some of the time, sang about the issues I was facing growing up.

The Beatles entered my world when I was 18 years old.  To begin with, they were in the vanguard of the new pop scene, a group who sounded fresh, non-American (!!), and fun.  The singles that I, and millions of others, heard in 1962 were Love Me Do, and then the even more attention grabbing Please Please Me.  In fact, while Love Me Do came out first, I only listened to it after Please Please Me hit the charts.  Both songs are listed as by Lennon-McCartney, but, I recently learnt Love Me Do was largely a McCartney composition, which he had first started working on some four years earlier, whereas Lennon had always made it clear that Please Please Me was his alone.  Fresh and non-American?  No, it was more than that, they were bouncy, sparkling, exciting, teenage fun.  Listening back then we had no idea that these were the modest beginnings in a sequence of compositions that would prove more and more original.

Those two singles were followed by the Beatles first LP, also titled Please Please Me, in 1963, which I rushed out to buy on the first day of its release.  There they were on the cover, John, Paul, George and Ringo.  It never occurred to me they had a past:  I just assumed they had magically appeared out from the famous ‘Cavern Club’ in Liverpool a few months earlier.  It was much later I discovered their origins were from five years earlier.  Back in 1957 a sixteen year old John Lennon had formed a skiffle group.  Skiffle was a mongrel genre, based in jazz, but quickly developing and changing into various types of music, with a loose but common character of improvisation, rebellion against existing genres, and using any kind of instrument, the range almost always including guitars, drums, but going on from there on to washboards, harmonicas, and just about anything else a group might drag in!  Skiffle was eclectic.  Paul McCartney joined Lennon’s Quarrymen, soon after its formation, and George Harrison was added in 1958.   In 1959 John Lennon began studying at the Liverpool College of Art, the other initial Quarrymen left, and Lennon, McCartney and Harrison continued – as The Moondogs!  In 1960 Stuart Sutcliffe, a friend of Lennon, joined as a fourth guitarist, and they performed as The Silver Beetles, dragging in a drummer whenever they could.  From the Silver Beetles, two quick name changes saw them end up as the Beatles, Pete Best joining them as drummer.

This was the beginning of overseas adventures, another reason why most of us knew little about them, unless, of course, you were an habitué of the Cavern Club.  As their popularity grew, we did find out they had been performing in Hamburg for two years.  On their first visit, they played in a converted strip club, but got into trouble when the club was closed over noise complaints, and George Harrison was deported, having lied about the fact he was underage and ineligible to remain in the country.  They all left, and then returned on several occasion over next two years.  While that gave them the opportunity to write and play, it was Liverpool that pushed them forward, as the ‘Merseybeat’ became famous, the throbbing, continuing beat running under local songs.  Back in the UK, they met Brian Epstein, who became their manager, and he negotiated a recording contract with George Martin at EMI’s Parlophone.  They never looked back.

Stuart Sutcliffe left, and they went to the Abbey Road Studios in June of 1962 to begin recording.  George Martin was a professional, and immediately decided Pete Best wasn’t good enough.  The Beatles recruited Ringo Starr, who had been playing for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a group that was as popular as the Beatles in Liverpool and Hamburg, but which was never to transition into a successful recording career.  By leaving the Hurricanes, Ringo had joined a group that was on the way up, despite George Martin’s doubts about him in the early stages.  His addition had one odd consequence.  In 1963, the Beatles had decided all members of the group should be vocalists, a challenge for Ringo, given his rather limited vocal range.  If you’ve heard him narrating Thomas the Tank Engine Stories, you’ll know what I mean!

We are about to enter one of those ‘you had to be there’ segments.  To understand how the Beatles changed and the impact of each successive new phase, well, I suspect you had to have been there.  In just a few years they managed to reinvent themselves several times, and with each new version were always to be found close to the leading edge of pop music trends.  Reviewing the succession of albums from 1962 to 1970, it is hard to separate how much they influenced music culture, and how much they mirrored the changes around them.  Either way, the Beatles were at the centre of the ‘swinging sixties’, a youth-driven hedonistic explosion in music, fashion and art.  As each year saw new trends, many of us would have one of the Beatles’ songs from that year running around in our heads.  Yes, it’s true, you had to have been there!

Over that nine year time span, my life kept changing, and I would find themes in several of the successive Beatles albums that served as a counterpoint to my own experiences.  Not only that, but the music is still there, lodged somewhere in the back of my brain, and pulled to the front as soon as I hear a track or read about a song.  I said at the start this was about nostalgia, but actually I think I was wrong.  It would be better to explain the associations as a process of formation: as the Beatles were growing and maturing, so was I.  There are many, many ways in which their lives and music couldn’t have been more different from mine – drugs, Indian mysticism, and avant-garde sensibilities were way beyond me.  In other ways, the ethos of the times, the zeitgeist, of which they were a central part, was also part of the environment shaping me as I moved out from home, married, studied, and began teaching.

We can go back to that 1963 album, Please Please Me.  At that stage in their career, the Beatles were happy to record other classics, but when I look back over what stood out, there are ‘I saw her standing there’, ‘Please please me’, ‘Love me do’ and ‘Do you want to know a secret’, all listed as written by Lennon-McCartney.  These were songs for late adolescents, romantics, people like me back then, aspirational, hoping to find ‘true love’.  They were undemanding and light, all at a nice rollicking pace.  For those who could dance, eminently rhythmic.  The beat mattered almost as much as the words.  I didn’t take to it at the time, but another track was ‘Misery’.  Rather more bittersweet, and written for another singer before they recorded it on the album, it might have been the first sign that this group was going to explore more than happy dancing tunes.  The album hit the top of the UK charts, and remained there for seven months, an unprecedented success, some commentators calling the music “joyful”.  It was the music for me.

Towards the end of 1963, the second album appeared, With the Beatles.  Appearing some eight months after Please Please Me, it was another mixture of Lennon-McCartney and other tracks.  Did the cover hint at change?  Black and white, four faces, and no words:  artistic, possibly suggesting this album would be more than just good fun.  In retrospect, this didn’t turn out to be the case, and this second album was still largely light, full of dancing music:  four songs, all listed as Lennon-McCartney, are still in my head:  two were largely John’s work, ‘It won’t be long’ and ‘All I’ve got to do’, the other two, “All my loving’ and ‘I wanna be your man’ by Paul.  Perfectly timed, as I was getting married:  we played the LP to death at our wedding reception.  My, I even tried to dance to some of those tracks, an effort fortunately lost without trace!

It was at the end of my first year of university when the next album came out, in July 1964.  A Hard Day’s Night was an album that passed me by.  My first child was three month’s old:  that was more than a distraction.  I hadn’t enjoyed my first year of study, and was trying to work out what to do.  The relentless pop-rock sound, and the film, seemed like marking time, even though this was the first time all the tracks had been written by the Beatles.  The title song was energetic and the kind of tune you can’t get out of your head, and it, with ‘Can’t buy me love’, are the two most memorable for me.  Learning more about that album, I realise that most tracks were written by John Lennon.  However, I really liked McCartney’s ‘And I love her’; my kind of romantic.

My life was changing.  I was fascinated by my new university studies, a second child was on the way, and for me the Beatles had become simply entertainment.  Beatles for Sale came out in late 1964, and I think I didn’t really pick up on its slightly less bouncy character.  For certain, nothing from that album stuck, as I wasn’t feeling down and so slipped out of sync with where the group was heading.  Beatles for Sale included several songs by Lennon-McCartney, and some from others; despite the spirited numbers, there was a sense they were tired. However, when Help came out nearly a year later, there was a change.   This was less like the usual Beatles pop rock:  the sound was more complex and sophisticated.  Among them, there was one song that really grabbed me, ‘Yesterday’.  With a string quartet playing as backing to Paul McCartney, it was evocative, a sad reflection on lost love.  Can’t get that tune out of my head!

Rubber Soul changed my views dramatically, or perhaps I was changing and the music suited my mood.  Half way through my last undergraduate year, surrounded by the rebellious values of the young people around me, the Beatles were back, riding the wave of a social revolution.  Part of their success must have been through their ability to tap into the widening gap between many young people and the generation above them, those that didn’t ‘get it’.  At the same time, drugs were ever more prevalent, especially marihuana, and a craze for LSD.  While these shifts weren’t part of my life, I would hear about drugs and generational battles in the college bar.  I loved so many of the Rubber Soul songs, living vicariously through the disappointments and out-of-kilter experiences they depicted, enthralled, while simultaneously studying hard, just a few months off from my final exams.  If there’s a track that stands out the most, it’s probably ‘Nowhere man’.

A graduate, sorting out what I was going to do next, Revolver (August 1966) came at just the right time.  Any preoccupation with love, and loves lost, had gone.  Now the Beatles’ themes were psychedelics driven by drugs, Indian music, and an extraordinary melding of all sorts of musical traditions from chamber music through to R&B.  This was the music of disillusionment, countercultures, and an underlying sense that all the songs were linked together in a critique of contemporary society.  Where to begin.  ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was a ballad of existential despair, only to be reversed two tracks later by ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ which focussed on living in the moment.  Not all references to the drug culture had disappeared, some tracks clearly referencing LSD and out of the body experiences, like ‘I’m only sleeping’ and ‘Tomorrow never knows’.  The Beatles had me in their grasp again, as it was a time when I was confused, uncertain, and critical, while striving to make sense of where my future path was to be found.

A year later, I had settled into a combination of activities, a mixture of postgraduate research, college tutoring, helping newly arrived couples, and struggling to create a life in a Cambridge satellite town while getting more deeply embedded in college culture. In 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reflected most of that.  It was a celebration, with its loosely linked structure a mirror into what I was trying to do.  From the opening track, which sounded like the prelude to an opera (an idea The Who were to take much further two years later with Tommy), to its astonishing finale, ‘A Day in the Life’, this was a whole experience, not a set of disparate tracks.  A whole experience, but not quite:  I could relate to that, as bits of my life didn’t quite fit together, either!  Every part of Sgt. Pepper, with the exception of ‘Within You, Without You’ is lodged forever in my memories;  if I listen to it today, it’s like an old friend, raucous, funny, crazy, containing yet another evocative McCartney ballad, She’s Leaving Home.

I didn’t know it then, but the central place of the Beatles in my life was coming to an end.  When The Beatles, (aka The White Album) appeared in 1968, I was already entranced by other groups.  Among those reverberating with my evolving person, two stand out.  First, The Who.  They had been around since 1965:  among many other tracks, ‘Thinking about my generation’ was the theme song for the decade as far as I was concerned.  Later, in 1969, Tommy was released, a stunning, extraordinary rock opera, a commentary on the decade.  The other was The Doors: so many evocative songs, but ‘Light my fire’ and ‘The end’ are stuck somewhere inside my brain, both on their 1967 Album.  The Rolling Stones recorded many great tracks, but I wasn’t quite as drawn to their mixture of heavy, pounding rock and blues as I was to the other two groups, and yet I have to ask myself, why it is that ‘Under the Boardwalk’ remains one of my prominent memories from the era.  Finally, Bob Dylan.  Dylan was the poet of the times, and I can’t go past ‘Don’t Think Twice’, ‘It’s Alright’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are a’Changin’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, and, at the end of the decade ,‘Lay Lady Lay’.  What a decade.

The Beatles White Album was almost overwhelming.  A profusion of great songs, from the opening ‘Back in the USSR’, through ‘Dear Prudence’ ‘Bungalow Bill’ ‘Blackbird’ ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ (!!) to ending with ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Goodnight’. A profusion?  It was a crazy collection, crying out for a CD version so you could pick out tracks according to mood (CDs didn’t appear until 1982).  Close to the end of the decade, Abbey Road was almost the last album to be released (and the group was falling apart during the final stage of recording).  It was a strange mixture of fun, an extraordinary mixture of styles and techniques, outstanding songs like ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and the album ending with a non-stop medley, culminating in ‘The End’, with its “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make” (and for conspiracy theorists, a bizarre final short piece, a hidden track called ‘Her Majesty’.

The Beatles had evolved past me, and when Let it Be appeared in 1970, my sense of connection was lost.  While some later singles were great, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Come Together’, I think my head was, and possibly still is partly stuck back in 1962.  An unreconstructed romantic, some words just keep running through my head: “Love, love me do, You know I love you, I’ll always be true, So please, love me do”.  Perhaps it never works out quite like that, but …