Please Please Me (song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Please Please Me" began life as a slow, bluesy number that John Lennon wrote alone in a bedroom on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, in June 1962. The song he had in mind owed something to Roy Orbison and something to a Bing Crosby line he could not get out of his head: "Please lend a little ear to my pleas." It was the double use of the word "please" that hooked him. What he ended up recording, though, was barely recognisable as that slow original. Getting there would take arguments about song publishing, a disputed drummer, a snowed-in British public, and a Chicago disc jockey who decided to trust a local record label's instinct. The single that emerged on the 11th of January 1963 would reach the top of most British charts, but miss the one that mattered most for history. And when it finally arrived in America, it did so on a label that had misspelled the band's name.

• 2. Writing the Song

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  Lennon recalled the moment of composition with unusual clarity. He was listening to Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely" and thinking about a Bing Crosby lyric. That double use of "please" as both verb and noun struck him as a songwriter's puzzle worth solving. The song he wrote was vocally sparse, with no harmonies, no call-and-response passages, and no harmonica introduction. By his own later description, it was "my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song."

  By late 1962, the Beatles had achieved a modest chart entry with "Love Me Do", but beyond Liverpool and Hamburg they were still largely unknown. Their producer, George Martin, considered that first single a promising start. He had already looked seriously at issuing "How Do You Do It?", a Mitch Murray song he had insisted the Beatles record, as an alternative debut single. The group pushed back. Paul McCartney called their resistance to the song symptomatic of who they were as a band. Ringo Starr remembered them all being prepared to stand on the principle that they had written their own songs and wanted to record them. Martin later said he would still have issued "How Do You Do It?" had the Beatles not persuaded him to hear a new version of "Please Please Me." The Mitch Murray song went on to reach number one for Gerry and the Pacemakers instead.

• 3. A Song Transformed

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  The Beatles first played "Please Please Me" for George Martin at the session on the 4th of September 1962. Ringo Starr, in his recollection of that day, remembered playing the bass drum with a maraca in one hand and a tambourine in the other. Lennon recalled that after a top-thirty entry with "Love Me Do", the group felt they were on top of the world, and aimed "Please Please Me" straight at the hit parade. He also admitted they had nearly relegated it to a B-side, changing their minds only because exhaustion had made the "Love Me Do" session run long.

  Martin was direct about the problem. He described the song at that stage as "very dreary," similar to a Roy Orbison number, with slow bluesy vocals that badly needed lifting. He asked the Beatles to bring it back and try again. Paul McCartney recalled that Martin asked about changing the tempo, a term the group did not know, and then demonstrated by speeding it up himself. McCartney said they were "a bit embarrassed" that Martin had found a better tempo before they had.

  A faster-tempo version without harmonica was recorded at Abbey Road on the 11th of September 1962. That session was the only one attended by session drummer Andy White. The up-tempo track, catalogued as No. 24 on the Anthology 1 compilation, was thought to have been wiped until it turned up again in 1994 during production of the Anthology series. Whether Ringo Starr or Andy White played drums on the eventual hit single became a point of genuine dispute. In a 2012 BBC interview, White said the drum sound on the single was clearly his, distinct from Starr's kit because this was before Starr acquired his Ludwig set. Recording technician Geoff Emerick, however, wrote that he saw roadie Mal Evans set up Starr's kit after White had left, and watched the group record "Please Please Me" with Starr behind the drums. The Mark Lewisohn-researched Anthology notes do not settle the question, though Lewisohn's 1988 book quotes session engineer Ron Richards saying that Ringo did not play drums at all that evening.

  The final recording took place on the 26th of November 1962, with the arrangement now radically altered. Lennon's harmonica, absent in September, opened the track, as it did on "Love Me Do" and "From Me to You". McCartney and Lennon split the vocals, with McCartney holding a high note while Lennon dropped down through the scale. McCartney attributed this technique to the Everly Brothers' UK hit "Cathy's Clown" from April 1960. It took 18 takes before George Martin announced, immediately, that the group had just recorded their first major hit. A stereo mix assembled on the 25th of February 1963, drawn from takes 16, 17 and 18, captured Lennon fluffing the final verse and laughing softly as he sang "come on." It also preserved a difference in George Harrison's guitar line before the final verse, where Harrison drops down a fourth rather than continuing the stepwise motion he had used earlier.

• 4. Dick James and the Deal

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  Brian Epstein had grown frustrated with EMI's promotional handling of "Love Me Do," which had been published through the EMI subsidiary Ardmore and Beechwood. He asked George Martin to suggest a publisher who would push the next single harder. Martin offered three names. One was Dick James.

  Epstein had another appointment that morning, with a different EMI subsidiary, at ten a.m. He arrived on time and waited. By ten twenty-five, the executive he was due to meet had still not appeared. Epstein left. He then arrived at James' office twenty minutes early and apologised to the receptionist for it, saying he was happy to wait. James came out immediately, welcomed him, and got straight to business.

  Epstein played the single. James said it was a number one record. Epstein replied that if James could make that happen, a long-term publishing deal was on offer. James picked up the phone and called Philip Jones, producer of the ITV show Thank Your Lucky Stars, played the song for him over the telephone, and secured the Beatles a slot on the next edition. The two men then shook hands on a deal that would make both of them, and the Beatles, extremely wealthy. The song's writing credit on the Please Please Me album read "McCartney-Lennon"; that reversed sequence was standard for all Lennon-McCartney originals on their first album. The credit was flipped to the familiar "Lennon-McCartney" sequence starting with their second album, With the Beatles.

• 5. The UK Release

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  The single came out in the UK on the 11th of January 1963, during what the source describes as one of the worst winters in British history. On the 19th of January, with much of the population snowed in at home, viewers watched the Beatles perform the song on Thank Your Lucky Stars. The exposure generated significant attention, partly for the music and partly for the band's appearance and hair. Promoter Arthur Howes booked the group for a series of national tours as a result. They opened for Helen Shapiro in February, then for Tommy Roe and Chris Montez in March, then for Roy Orbison in May.

  Between tour dates, the Beatles performed the song on BBC national radio programmes. The touring, the television appearances, and the press coverage combined to carry the single to the top of most British charts. The New Musical Express and Melody Maker both listed it at No. 1. The Record Retailer chart, however, recorded it only at No. 2, and that chart was the one that would eventually evolve into the official UK singles chart. Because "Please Please Me" did not reach No. 1 on that particular ranking, it was left off the Beatles' compilation 1, their collection of chart-topping singles. The slightly awkward consequence of the band's most celebrated early breakthrough is that it does not technically qualify as a UK number one by the measure that counts most.

• 6. America: Two Attempts

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  Capitol Records, EMI's American label, was offered "Please Please Me" first and turned it down. The record was then handled by Transglobal, an EMI affiliate tasked with placing foreign masters with US labels. Atlantic also passed. The single eventually landed at Vee-Jay, a Chicago company that had already released the top-five US hit "I Remember You" by Frank Ifield in 1962, another record Capitol had declined. Research published in 2004 established that Vee-Jay issued the single on the 7th of February 1963.

  Dick Biondi, a disc jockey at WLS in Chicago, was a friend of Vee-Jay executive Ewart Abner. Abner brought a copy of the record to the station. Art Roberts, the music director at WLS at the time, later recounted how he looked at pictures of the group in teen magazines Abner had brought back from England and decided to add the record to the playlist on the reasoning that if the Beatles were as popular in America as in England and Europe, the station would want to have been first. The song peaked at No. 35 on the WLS Silver Dollar Survey on the 15th of March. Outside Chicago, it barely registered, selling approximately 7,310 copies nationwide.

  The first pressings of the Vee-Jay single, given catalog number 498, misspelled the band's name as "The Beattles," with two t's. WLS carried that same misspelling on its survey listings in 1963, and the same error appeared on the station's surveys for the first two weeks of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in 1964. The composers on the Vee-Jay edition were credited as "J. Lennon-P. McCartney" on both sides, the reverse of the UK Parlophone edition's sequence.

  Vee-Jay reissued the single on or about the 3rd of January 1964, the same day that film footage of the Beatles appeared on a prime-time episode of The Jack Paar Program on NBC Television. The label chose "From Me to You" for the new B-side, as Del Shannon's cover version had been a minor US hit in 1963. This time the single peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending the 14th of March 1964, behind only "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You." On the 4th of April 1964, the date the Beatles occupied the entire top five of the Hot 100, "Please Please Me" sat at No. 5. At least 1.1 million copies of the reissue were sold. Vee-Jay was not a member of the RIAA, so the single was never formally certified gold, though the sales figure would have qualified it. Early promotional copies of the reissue came in a sleeve proclaiming the record "The Record That Started Beatlemania," noting the group's recent appearance on Paar's program and their upcoming Ed Sullivan Show booking. That sleeve is now considered extremely rare.