Beatles – "Please Please Me" (1964)

I don't want to sound complaining

But you know there's always rain in my heart

My grandmother used to say, “If you want to have dessert, you have to eat your vegetables first!”  

If you’ve read the two previous 2 or 3 lines posts – long and tedious rants about how politics has perverted covid vaccination priorities – you’ve eaten more than your share of vegetables.

So here’s dessert: a post that has some very nice things to say about today’s featured Beatlemania-era Lennon-McCartney song.  

“He likes it!  Mikey likes it!”

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“Please Please Me” – which was written by John Lennon when he was living in Liverpool with his Aunt Mimi – was the Beatles’ second UK single.  It was released in January 1963, and went all the way to #1 on the New Musical Express and Melody Maker charts.  (It peaked at #2 on the Record Retailer chart.)

The record was released in the U.S. the next month but failed to chart.  It was re-released just after New Year’s Day 1964, and quickly climbed to the #3 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100.”

“Please Please Me” wasn’t an overnight success.  Lennon intended it to sound like a Roy Orbison song, slow and bluesy.  But the first time they recorded, producer George Martin thought it was “a very dreary song” that “badly needed pepping up.”  

McCartney agreed that Martin deserved much of the credit for what “Please Please Me” eventually became:

We sang it and George Martin said, “Can we change the tempo?”  We said, “What’s that?”  He said, “Make it a bit faster. Let me try it.”  And he did.  We thought, “Oh, that’s all right, yes.”  Actually, we were a bit embarrassed that he had found a better tempo than we had.

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In many ways, “Please Please Me” is a typical early Beatles song.  For one thing, it’s more a “songlet” than a song – it consists of two very short verses, a bridge, and a chorus that consists mostly of the phrase “Come on” repeated over and over.  The Beatles had to repeat the first verse to stretch the song to two minutes long (barely).

And the lyrics are “clumsy and trite,” to quote Matt Blick, the creator of the Beatles Songwriting Academy website – and no one’s a bigger Beatles fan than he is.  Like most Lennon-McCartney songs of the era, it doesn’t tell a real story – the boy and girl who are the only two characters in the song are as generic as they can be.  

I can’t resist calling out the lines from the bridge quoted at the beginning of this post:

I don't want to sound complaining

But you know there's always rain in my heart 

 

I like that Lennon doesn’t use an end rhyme in the second line – he rhymes “complaining” with “rain in,” but then adds “my heart.”

But those lines sound like there were written by someone for who English was a second language – a very distant second.  (Can you imagine saying “I don’t want to sound complaining” in an actual conversation?  And “there’s always rain in my heart” won’t make anyone forget Shakespeare.)

In contrast to what Marc Antony said about Julius Caesar, I come not to bury “Please Please Me,” but to praise it.

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As Matt Blick has pointed out in his Beatles Songwriting Academy post about the song, there’s no wasted motion in this song – the arrangement is very economical.

The main theme – the melody that the first two lines of each verse is sung to – is used in the guitar/harmonica introduction.  But only the first part of that theme is played.  

That’s enough so that you recognize the melody when John starts singing, but it’s not too much – having the entire theme played twice by the guitar and harmonica, and then repeated twice more in the verse would be too much.

The guitar and harmonica play the first half of the theme at the end of the chorus, before the second verse starts up – but instead of playing it twice (as they did in the intro), they only play it once.  That’s enough for the listener to recognize it – particular when it’s played by the harmonica, which has a very  distinctive sound quality – but not enough to be tiresome.

The guitar and harmonica play that truncated theme once more between the second chorus and the bridge, but shorten it by a couple of notes.  Now that you’ve heard it a few times, even just the first few notes become recognizable – it gets the job done, but very economically.

Finally, the guitar and harmonica play the same half-theme used in the intro after the final chorus – when John and Paul are singing “Oh yeah, like I please you” three times.  The notes are the same, but the effect is different because you’re not hearing them all by themselves, but simultaneously with the sung lines.

To sum up, the basic theme is repeated at least a dozen times – plenty for it to worm its way into your brain.  But each time the guitar and harmonica play it, it’s different – once they repeat it twice, the next time they play it once, and the next time they shorten it by a couple of notes.  It tastes great, but it’s less filling at the same time.

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Blick also points out that the lyrics in each line of the verses fill up three measures, but leave the fourth free for two very sharp little riffs by George Harrison.  Those riffs (which are quite different) are suddenly there, and just as quickly are gone – they make an impression, but they don’t linger too long.  

The song ends not by fading out, but with an interesting and somewhat unexpected five-chord progression that brings things to a very definitive close.  I have to think that the Beatles mastered this kind of ending during their many years of performing live – I can imagine that the crowd held its  collective breath as the Beatles surprised them with that final chord progression, and then burst into cheers and applause.

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Unlike many other early Lennon-McCartney songs, “Please Please Me” uses repetition sparingly – just a pinch here and there – and to good effect.  There’s no excess filler in this song – nothing that was added just to stretch the song to an acceptable length.

I wish all the early Lennon-McCartney songs were as tightly constructed as “Please Please Me.”

 

Click here to listen to the stereo recording of “Please Please Me” that was included on the album of the same name.  I’ve chosen it because it contains an obvious vocal error by Lennon in the final verse – listen to what should be “I know you never even try, girl” at 1:27 of the song.  (I guess Martin and the lads thought the resulting take was good enough for government work.)

Click below to buy the single (mono) version of the record from Amazon: