Beatles – "Slow Down" (1964)

You better slow down

Baby, now you’re moving way too fast

“I might have been born in Liverpool,” John Lennon once said, “but I grew up in Hamburg.”

In August 1960, the Beatles went to Hamburg – the second largest city in Germany – where they played in several sleazy joints in the city’s red-light district. 

George Harrison was only 17 at the time, and was deported in November when the authorities found out he was under the legal age limit.  (John and Paul – who were 19 and 18, respectively, were barely legal.)

George, John, and Paul in Hamburg

The band returned to Liverpool, performing at various venues in the area until after Harrison turned 18, when they returned to Hamburg for a three-month gig in the spring of 1961.  They spent the second half of that year and most of the following year in the UK, but visited Hamburg three more times in 1962 – their last performance there was on New Year’s Eve.

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The Beatles relied almost entirely on covers in those 1960-1962 performances in Hamburg and the Liverpool area. 

The set list from one of their November 1962 Hamburg performances included only two Lennon-McCartney originals and over two dozen covers – including songs from the thirties and forties (“Red Sails in the Sunset” and “Falling in Love Again”), hits from Broadway musicals (“A Taste of Honey” and “Till There Was You” from The Music Man), and covers of Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, and Gene Vincent records.

Their first UK album (Please Please Me) contained eight originals and six covers, as did their second album (With The Beatles).  

This year’s 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS! is focussed on deconstructing early Lennon-McCartney originals like they’ve never been deconstructed before.  But we’d be remiss if we didn’t give a nod to one of the covers that was so important to the Beatles’ early success.

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The Beatles had no fewer than 19 records on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1964, and five of them were covers.  (Trust me – not a single one of you can name all five of those covers.)

The best of the five is “Slow Down,” a cover of a raucous 1958 single by Larry Williams – a poor man’s Little Richard who also wrote and recorded “Bony Maronie,” “Dizzy, Miss Lizzy,” and “She Said Yeah” (which was famously covered by the Rolling Stones).

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The Beatles covered the Williams recording of “Slow Down” about as literally as it is possible to cover a record – it is note for note.  (Lennon even throws in a raspberry at the same spot in the chorus that Williams does.)

The song consists of five consecutive 12-bar blues-style segments with the classic 12-bar blues chord progression – I I I I IV IV I I V IV I I.  

The first 12 bars serve as an instrumental introduction.  The next two are verse/chorus combinations, followed by another 12-bar instrumental passage and a third and final verse/chorus.  

The Beatles arrangement is virtually identical to that of the Williams original – they don’t shorten the instrumental introduction to two or four bars, but play all the way through the full 12-bar progression, just as Williams did.  (That’s producer George Martin contributing some nice boogie-woogie piano.)

The Beatles’ cover doesn't feature a saxophone (which the Williams recording used to good effect), but it otherwise almost word-for-word and beat-for-beat identical.  Instead of a saxophone solo, the Beatles’ cover has a very pedestrian guitar solo.  (Opinions differ on whether it is John or George playing that solo.)

One critic has described the Williams recording as “unstoppable, nongimmicky, almost careening out of control with its pounding piano and booting sax.”  I’m not a fan of fifties music generally, but this record is a stick of dynamite.

Click here to listen to the Larry Williams original and to watch some amazing swing dancing.

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The Beatles’ cover isn’t as good as the original, but it ain’t bad.  It’s a little sloppy, but it’s energetic and moves right along.

The original recording of “Slow Down” was not a hit, and I give the Beatles credit for recognizing a great song despite its relative obscurity.  (You can’t say the same for some of the other songs the Beatles regularly covered in Hamburg – I can only explain  their choices as designed to appeal to the drunken sailors and prostitutes who patronized the Reeperbahn clubs where they performed.)

Click here to listen to the Beatles’ cover of “Slow Down,” which peaked at #25 on the Billboard “Hot 100” after being released as the B-side of “Matchbox” in August 1964.  

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: