I Want to Hold Your Hand

• 1. Introduction

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  "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was recorded by the Beatles on the 17th of October 1963, and within weeks it had upended the American music industry in ways no British act had managed before. Advance orders in the United Kingdom alone exceeded one million copies before the record even left the pressing plant. It became the best-selling Beatles single worldwide, moving more than 12 million copies over its lifetime. Yet the song nearly never reached American ears on anyone's schedule but one fourteen-year-old girl's. How a song written in a basement in London, recorded in a single day, translated into the most consequential foreign invasion of American pop music in a generation is a story that runs from a stuffy music room on Wimpole Street to a radio booth in Washington, DC. It touches a German translation the Beatles refused to record, a Capitol Records executive under mounting pressure, and a Beach Boys frontman who sat down with his bandmate to talk strategy after one listen.

• 2. Written Eyeball to Eyeball

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  Paul McCartney had recently moved into 57 Wimpole Street, London, as a lodger with Dr Richard and Margaret Asher. Margaret Asher taught oboe out of the "small, rather stuffy music room" in the basement, and it was there, at a piano, that Lennon and McCartney found a new writing base after years of working at McCartney's Forthlin Road home in Liverpool. In September 1980, Lennon told Playboy magazine exactly how the song came together: "We were in Jane Asher's house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, 'Oh you-u-u/ got that something...' And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, 'That's it!' I said, 'Do that again!'" In 1994, McCartney confirmed that account: "'Eyeball to eyeball' is a very good description of it. That's exactly how it was. 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' was very co-written." According to author Ian MacDonald, lyrically bland, random phrases were likely called out by the pair during these sessions, kept only if they fitted the overall sound. The song's title itself may have grown from a variation on "I Wanna Be Your Man", which the Beatles had recently committed to tape at EMI Studios. One musical debate that followed the session concerned the precise identity of the chord Lennon described as the breakthrough. Wolf Marshall and Walter Everett identified it as the minor vi chord in a G-D7-Em progression, while Dominic Pedler argued that a more surprising moment was the melody note drop from B to F against a B7 chord on the word "understand".

• 3. A First for Four Tracks

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  EMI Studios' Studio 2 was where the Beatles showed up on the 17th of October 1963, and what they recorded that day marked a technical first in their catalogue. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and its B-side "This Boy" were the first Beatles recordings made on four-track equipment. Both songs needed seventeen takes each, and both were committed to tape on the same day. George Martin handled mono and stereo mixing on the 21st of October 1963. Further stereo mixes followed on the 8th of June 1965, produced for compilations released by EMI affiliates in Australia and the Netherlands, and again on the 7th of November 1966. The four-track capability gave the production a clarity and separation that earlier two-track Beatles recordings lacked. John Lennon and Paul McCartney's voices move in and out of unison and harmony throughout the track, and the song was structured so there is no single "lead" singer. Structurally, the song uses a modified 32-bar form built on a two-bridge model with only one intervening verse connecting the two bridges, drawing on Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building techniques. It opens in the key of G major, with the lyric beginning two beats early on the words "Oh yeah, I'll tell you something."

• 4. The German Standoff in Paris

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  Odeon, the German arm of EMI, was convinced the Beatles' records would not sell in Germany unless the vocals were in German. The German-language translation was handled by Luxembourger musician Camillo Felgen, working under the pseudonym "Jean Nicolas". The resulting title, "Komm, gib mir deine Hand", translates literally as "Come, give me your hand". The Beatles detested the idea. When the session was scheduled for the 27th of January 1964 at EMI's Pathe Marconi Studios in Paris, where they were performing eighteen days of concerts at the Olympia Theatre, the Beatles chose to boycott it entirely. George Martin waited several hours before losing patience and insisting they try. Two days after the scheduled date, they relented and recorded it. It was one of the rare instances in their career that they recorded outside London. Martin later conceded: "They were right, actually, it wasn't necessary for them to record in German, but they weren't graceless, they did a good job." The German single was released in March 1964. That July, the recording appeared on the Capitol Records album Something New, and it was later included on the 1988 compilation Past Masters.

• 5. Marsha Albert's Radio Call

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  Capitol Records had repeatedly resisted releasing Beatles material in the United States, leaving the relatively modest Vee-Jay and Swan labels to handle earlier Parlophone counterparts in the American market. Brian Epstein finally persuaded Capitol to release "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and demanded US$40,000 for promotion, a sum that dwarfed the US$5,000 the Beatles had ever previously spent on an advertising campaign. The single was planned for a mid-January 1964 release to coincide with the Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. A fourteen-year-old named Marsha Albert had other ideas. She had seen a television clip featuring "She Loves You" and wrote to WWDC disc jockey Carroll James in Washington, DC, urging him to get a Beatles record on the air. James contacted the station's promotion director, who arranged for British Overseas Airways Corporation to ship in a copy from Britain. James called Albert the day the record arrived: "If you can get down here by 5 o'clock, we'll let you introduce it." Albert made it in time and introduced the song with the words: "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beatles singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'." The song surprised the station, which typically served an audience expecting singers such as Andy Williams or Bobby Vinton. James played it repeatedly, sometimes turning the volume down mid-song to announce, "This is a Carroll James exclusive", a tactic designed to keep other stations from grabbing the recording. Capitol threatened a court order to stop airplay. James and WWDC ignored the threat. Capitol ultimately concluded the publicity worked in their favour, moving the release two weeks ahead of schedule to the 26th of December 1963.

• 6. The Invasion Takes Hold

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  In the first three days after the American release, a quarter of a million copies had already sold, with 10,000 copies moving every hour in New York City alone. Demand so overwhelmed Capitol's pressing capacity that it contracted Columbia Records and RCA to help produce copies. By the 18th of January 1964, the song had entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 45, beginning a 15-week chart run. On the 1st of February, it reached number one, displacing "There! I've Said It Again" by Bobby Vinton. It held that position for seven weeks before being replaced by "She Loves You", the same song it had dislodged at the top of the British charts. The last time an American chart had seen one act replace itself at number one was Elvis Presley in 1956, when "Love Me Tender" beat out "Don't Be Cruel". Across the Atlantic, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had already done something equally unusual: knocking "She Loves You" off the top of the British charts on the 14th of December 1963 marked the first instance in British chart history of an act replacing itself at number one. It also became the Christmas number one of 1963 and stayed in the UK top 50 for 21 weeks. The US single's sleeve featured a photograph of the Beatles with McCartney holding a cigarette; in 1984, Capitol airbrushed the cigarette out for a re-release. Meanwhile, Meet the Beatles!, the American album featuring the song, outsold the single itself after two months on sale, shipping 3,650,000 copies against the single's 3,400,000.

• 7. What Musicians Heard

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  Bob Dylan was among the musicians whose reactions were recorded for history. He said of the Beatles: "They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid." Dylan also admitted he misheard "I can't hide" as "I get high" and was surprised when he eventually met the Beatles to find none of them smoked marijuana. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys described his first reaction as a shock that "went through my system", adding that "everything had changed". Wilson and Mike Love held a meeting to discuss what the Beatles' arrival meant for them. In a separate interview, Wilson tempered his praise: "It wasn't even that great a record, but they just screamed at it... It got us off our asses in the studio." Not everyone was moved. Writing in Esquire, critic David Newman called it "terrible awful" and insisted the Beatles were "indistinguishable from a hundred other similar loud and twanging rock-and-roll groups." Cynthia Lowery of the Associated Press complained that getting a radio weather bulletin had become impossible without running into the song. Cash Box, in its contemporary review, described the track as "an infectious twist-like thumper that could spread like wildfire here." In his book Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald wrote that the song "electrified American pop", and quoted numerous American artists, both black and white, as having said it "ushered in a new era and changed their lives." Rob Sheffield, writing in the 2004 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, called it "the most joyous three minutes in the history of human noise." In 1998, the Recording Academy inducted the song into the Grammy Hall of Fame, having nominated it for Record of the Year in 1964, when the award went instead to Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz for "The Girl from Ipanema". The song also entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll, and was named one of the Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Scholastic Press. Starting from its final week at the top of the American charts, the Beatles went on to set an all-time record of seven number-one songs in a single calendar year: "I Want to Hold Your Hand", "She Loves You", "Can't Buy Me Love", "Love Me Do", "A Hard Day's Night", "I Feel Fine", and "Eight Days a Week".