Introducing Please Please Me

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Just a note on the what and why before this post really gets going. This is the first in a series of introductions that I wrote for a friend who has little familiarity with The Beatles. I know I have nothing substantive to add to the ongoing-for-over-50-years-now Beatles conversation as such. My goal here is to distill my entirely geeky level of knowledge and personal fandom of The Beatles into a sort of little amuse-bouche so that any Beatles layperson (if there are any other than the aforementioned unfortunate) can jump right in to the album with a bit of context. I did my best to fact check as I went (actually just glanced at wikipedia), please send any errors to the corrections department.

During the era that Please Please Me was released, record labels made their bands do a mix of original songs and covers of already popular songs owned by that label. If you are passably familiar with other music of the era, it becomes pretty obvious in most cases which songs are original Lennon/McCartney songs and which are covers just by listening - The Beatles were pushing the boundaries of mainstream pop and rock music forward from the very start. For example - the Billboard top 10 in 1962, the year prior to the release of Please Please Me:

  1. "Stranger on the Shore" Acker Bilk
  2. "I Can't Stop Loving You" Ray Charles
  3. "Mashed Potato Time" Dee Dee Sharp
  4. "Roses Are Red (My Love)" Bobby Vinton
  5. "The Stripper" David Rose
  6. "Johnny Angel" Shelley Fabares
  7. "The Loco-Motion" Little Eva
  8. "Let Me In" The Sensations
  9. "The Twist" Chubby Checker
  10. "Soldier Boy" The Shirelles

Compare any of these songs to the first song of Please Please Me (I Saw Her Standing There) and you can immediately feel the difference. The Beatles released their first album in March of 1963, and by 1964 had completely taken over the pop music charts, holding the top two spots with I Want to Hold Your Hand  and She Loves You, FIVE spots in the top 20 (including A Hard Day’s Night, Love Me Do, and Please Please Me) and 9 altogether in the top 100 (Twist and Shout, Can’t Buy Me Love, Do You Want to Know a Secret, and I Saw Her Standing There).

Anyways, this is more to give some context for what was going on in music in the early 60s. I love listening to oldies and grew up on a mix of classic rock and our local oldies station in LA, KRTH (pronounced K-Earth) 101.1. The station is now a shell of its former self, playing awful chart toppers from more recent decades instead of the golden oldies from the 50’s and 60’s that I grew up listening to in the late 80’s and early 90’s (get off my lawn).

Please Please Me is the first studio album (released March 22, 1963), but not the first I was exposed to. To be completely honest, Please Please Me is an album that, although I am very familiar with each and every song, I am less familiar with as an album. Maybe that’s only appropriate, since this was released in a period of pop record making wherein artists hadn’t yet discovered the holistic approach to making an album that would become more prominent over the next decade or so.

Without further ado, here’s the track list, with my favorites selected in bold.

  1. I Saw Her Standing There
  2. Misery
  3. Anna (Go to Him)
  4. Chains
  5. Boys
  6. Ask Me Why
  7. Please Please Me
  8. Love Me Do
  9. P.S. I Love You
  10. Baby It’s You
  11. Do You Want to Know a Secret?
  12. A Taste of Honey
  13. There’s a Place
  14. Twist and Shout

-Nate