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.

*     *     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *     *

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).

*     *     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *     *

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:

Beatles – "She's a Woman" (1964)

My love don’t give me presents

I know that she's no peasant

The Beatles owned pop music in 1964.

Their first American hit single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” entered the Billboard “Hot 100” the week of January 25, 1964 – and promptly ascended to the #1 spot, where it remained for seven weeks.

That was merely the first of six #1 singles for the Beatles that year.

Today’s featured song – “She’s a Woman” – was the B-side of “I Feel Fine,” which was the last of those six #1 records.

“She’s a Woman” peaked at #4 – which ain’t too shabby for a B-side.  It was the 19th and final Beatles single to reach the top 40 in 1964.

I can’t imagine that there’s a single one of you who could name all 19 – several of them were extremely forgettable records.

*     *     *     *     *

“She’s a Woman” is constructed on a classic 12-bar blues foundation, with a classic 12-bar blues chord structure: I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-I.

It’s not really a blues song – the tone isn’t that of a classic blues song, and the lyrics don’t conform to the usual blues model.  (In a classic blues song, each verse is in AAB form – meaning the first line or phrase is repeated twice, followed by a different line or phrase.)

The Beatles covered some 12-bar blues songs, but I can’t think of another early Lennon-McCartney original that has a 12-bar blues structure.

*     *     *     *     *

“She’s a Woman” was the first Beatles recording that was longer than three minutes.

As I’ve noted ad infinitum (if not ad nauseam), the Lennon-McCartney team wrote a lot of what I call “songlets.”  What I mean by that is that they had a lot of ideas for songs that they didn’t fully develop – instead of continuing to work on those song ideas, they just ran down to the studio and recorded them – stretching them to an acceptable length by repeating verses and bridges willy nilly.  

“She’s a Woman” is a good example of a shamelessly stretched Beatles songlet.  The first half isn’t a bad little song – but the second half is simply repetition to no purpose (except stretching the song to an acceptable length to be released as a single.)

Listen to the song with the lyrics in front of you and your eyes on a clock with a second hand.

There’s one verse, and then there’s a second verse, and then there’s a very brief bridge – which sort of falls out of the sky.  At that point, we’re at the 1:20 mark – jump to the end for the ten-second fadeout and you’re up to 1:30, which is half the length of the finished record.

What makes up the other 1:30 of the record?  Filler, plain and simple.  

First the Beatles repeat the first verse.  Then they drop in a guitar solo, which has the same chord structure as the verses, but is only half as long.  Then they repeat the bridge.  And then they repeat the first verse once again.

*     *     *     *     *

If the Beatles had asked me – they didn’t, in part because I was a 7th-grader living in Joplin, Missouri at the time – I would have told them to do the first verse, do the second verse, do the guitar solo, do the bridge, and then repeat the first verse before fading out.  That brings the record down to the perfectly acceptable length of 2:25, and tightens it up nicely.

*     *     *     *     *

Two final observations about “She’s a Woman.” 

First, the bridge is so short – two lines – that it really should be referred to as a “bridgelet.”

Second, the first two lines of that thrice-sung first verse – which are quoted at the beginning of this post – are a classic example of the Lennon-McCartney’s songwriting team’s biggest weakness: clumsy and unimaginative rhymes.  (I think that’s more a McCartney fault than a Lennon fault.)

If you want to defend the use of “peasant” in this song, be my guest.  But I think we all know why that word was chosen: because it was the first thing that came to mind when Lennon and McCartney needed a word to rhyme with “pleasant.”  (I guess “peasant” is a better choice than “pheasant” would have been, but it’s almost as lame.)

Hearing that lazy pleasant/peasant rhyming couplet once is bad enough – having to tolerate it three times is adding insult to injury. 

(Rhyming “jealous”with “as well as” is pretty lazy, too, but we are only subjected to it once – not three times.)

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to “She’s a Woman.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Beatles – "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (1963)

I'll tell you somethin'

I think you'll understand

When I say that somethin'

I want to hold your hand

Today’s featured record was the Beatles’ first American hit, which quickly climbed to the #1 spot after entering the Billboard “Hot 100” in January 1964.

*     *     *     *     *

“I Want to Hold Your Hand” is a classic Lennon-McCartney “songlet.”  

John and Paul had zillions of ideas for songs, but they rarely developed those ideas fully – hence my describing them as “songlets.”  

Maybe they just didn’t have the ability to turn a songlet into a fully realized song.  Or maybe they couldn’t find the time to do that because they were just too busy cranking out records and touring and appearing on TV shows and making movies.

Whatever the reason, the Beatles regularly fell back on shameless repetition to stretch their songlets to acceptable lengths.

A lot of pop records from this era have repeated verses and bridges, but the Beatles went a little overboard with the repetition.

*     *     *     *     *

If you break down “I Want to Hold Your Hand” into its component parts, this is what you get:

– Intro

– First verse/refrain (“Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something”)

– Second verse/refrain (“Oh please, say to me”)

– Bridge (“And when I touch you”)

– First verse/refrain

– Bridge

– First verse/refrain

– Outro

Once you get to the end of the first playing of the bridge, you’re basically at the halfway point of this song, which is 2:26 long.  The second half of the record is just repetition to no real end.

I’m not going to bust the Beatles’ b*lls for repeating the first verse/refrain of the song once – but repeating it twice just isn’t acceptable.

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s what the song would look like with the excess repetition removed:

– Intro

– First verse/refrain (“Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something”)

– Second verse/refrain (“Oh please, say to me”)

– Bridge (“And when I touch you”)

– First verse/refrain

– Outro

That cuts “I Want to Hold Your Hold” down to about 1:45.  (That’s short, but not really too short.)

*     *     *     *     *

What’s the difference between a refrain and a chorus?  I’m glad you asked.

Both of them come just after a song’s verses.  While there are usually at least two or three different verses in a song, the words and music of refrains and choruses usually don’t vary – they are pretty much the same every time.

The difference between the two is that a refrain is usually just a line or two tagged on to the end of the verse, while a chorus is usually longer and more developed – it’s quite distinct from the verse, and usually carries greater musical weight. 

Click here for a good basic discussion of the various component parts that songwriters assemble to create a popular song.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” whose lyrics are pretty close to gibberish.  (I loved the record when I was 12 years old, and I still do – but I don’t think anyone would claim that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” demonstrates impressive songwriting skills.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: