Beatles – "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" (1964)

I've known the secret for a week or two

Nobody knows, just we two

The Beatles exploded on to the American pop music scene in 1964.  

That year, they had six #1 hit records – no other recording artist has ever had more than four – and nineteen top-40 singles.

The Fab Four was great – I’m not denying that – but they were also in the right place at the right time.  Because American pop music circa 1963-1964 was horrible.

Let’s look at the Billboard top ten for the last full week of December 1963 – two weeks before “I Want to Hold Your Hand” became the first Beatles record to make an appearance in the “Hot 100”:

#10 – “Be True to Your School”,” by the Beach Boys.

  #9 – “Talk Back, Trembling Lips,” by Johnny Tillotson.

  #8 – “Popsicles and Icicles,” by the Mermaids.

  #7 – “Forget Him,” by Bobby Rydell.

  #6 – “Drip Drop,” by Dion Di Muci.

  #5 – “You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry,” by the Caravelles.

  #4 – “Since I Fell for You,” by Lenny Welch.

  #3 – “Louie, Louie,” by the Kingsmen.

  #2 – “There! I’ve Said It Again,” by Bobby Vinton.

  #1 – “The Singing Nun,” by Dominique.

Pardon my French, but nine of those ten songs totally blow.  (It goes without saying that “Louie Louie” doesn’t blow.  But I have no idea how it climbed all the way to #2 and then stayed there for six weeks – every cool kid in America must have gone out and bought it because there was nothing else to buy.) 

John Lennon with his mother

If I wanted to punish my loyal 2 or 3 lines readers, I could do worse than publishing a series of posts featuring each of those records.  

Don’t worry.  I may be an assh*le, but I’m not that big an assh*le.

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If you’d like proof of just how complete the Beatles’ takeover of American pop music was that year, check out the top five singles from the week of April 4, 1964:

  #5 – “Please Please Me,” by the Beatles.

  #4 – “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” by the Beatles.

  #3 – “She Loves You,” by the Beatles.

  #2 – “Twist and Shout,” by the Beatles.

  #1 – “Can’t Buy Me Love,” by the Beatles.

The “Hot 100” that week also had Beatles records ranked at #31, #41, #46, #58, #65, #68, and #79.  

Do you realize how few artists had a dozen singles chart – including three #1 hits – in their entire career?  The Beatles managed to achieve that in just one week!

The people I grew up with – especially the ladies – love those songs to this day.  But to be honest, none of them are exactly masterpieces.  Except in comparison to the competition, of course.

Let’s face it – it’s not that hard to sell records when you’re going up against has-beens and never-wuzzes like Bobby Vinton, Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell, Al Martino, Connie Francis, Chubby Checker, Vic Dana, Danny Williams, the Monarchs, and the Vibrations (all of whom had records in the “Hot 100” that week).

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The #46 single the week of April 4, 1964, was “Do You Want to Know a Secret?,” which peaked five weeks later  at #2 (behind the Louie Armstrong cover of “Hello, Dolly!”).  

The Beatles had released “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” on Please Please Me, their first UK studio album, in March 1963.  Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas had a #1 single in the UK with their cover of the song, which was released shortly after the Please Please Me album hit the stores.

But the Beatles never released the song as a single in the UK.  And if Billy J. Kramer’s cover was released in the U.S., it sank like a stone – it didn’t make it into the top forty on Billboard.

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Lennon, who wrote the song, told an interviewer in 1980 that its lyrics were inspired by those of a song in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs movie that his mother used to sing to him:

My mother was . . . a comedienne and a singer.  Not professional, but, you know, she used to get up in pubs and things like that.  She had a good voice. . . . She used to do this little tune when I was just a one- or two-year-old. . . . The tune was from the Disney movie – “Want to know a secret?  Promise not to tell.  We are standing by a wishing well.”

Click here to hear the Disney song.

Snow White

In that 1980 interview, Lennon went on to explain why George Harrison was the lead singer on “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”:

So, I had this sort of thing in my head and I wrote it and just gave it to George to sing.  I thought it would be a good vehicle for him because it only had three notes and he wasn’t the best singer in the world.  He has improved a lot since then, but in those days his singing ability was very poor because (a) he hadn’t had the opportunity, and (b) he concentrated more on the guitar.  So I wrote that – not for him as I was writing it, but when I had written it, I thought he could do it.

John could be kind of a d*ck.

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I hate to sound like a broken record, but “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” is another Beatles “songlet” – in 1964, Lennon and McCartney were just not capable of writing even a two-minute song without repeating themselves.

When the Beatles performed live in those days, I’m guessing that they played “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” – which sounds more like a record from 1959 or 1960 – as a change-of-pace number after playing a couple of faster, more energetic tunes.  (I can imagine my 6th-grade ballroom dance class teacher playing it as she taught us to fox trot.) 

After the two-line intro – which seems to have been taken from an even more embryonic “songlet” that never developed any further – the lads go into the first verse.  Then they repeat that verse.  After a very brief bridge, we go right back to the same verse one more time.

Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics were either written for listeners with a sixth-grade vocabulary, or they were written for sixth-graders.  (I suspect the latter, given the composition of their audiences in 1964.)

Lennon’s lyrics for this song are particularly . . . shall we say . . . economical?  There are only 33 different words in the entire song – only six of which have more than one syllable.  (I’m giving John a break and counting “know,” “knows,” and “known” as three different words.)

The only rhyme in the whole damn song is “ear” and “hear.”  Unless you count “two” and “two” in the bridge.  (Lazy . . . very lazy.)

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Relatively few 1964-era Beatles songs ended by fading out – most of them had more definite endings – but I think John must have decided to cut his losses at this point, telling George just to sing ooh-ooh-ooh enough times so George Martin could execute a fadeout and everyone could call it a day.

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Let’s face it: “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” is a pretty slapdash record.

But I still enjoy listening to it when it pops up on the radio.  Nostalgia can be a very powerful thing.  I have to think that’s the reason that most of us who were middle-schoolers in 1964 love the early Beatles records.

Click here to listen to “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”

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