I was really happy when I asked Halffastcycling to do this and he accepted. I really appreciate his comments on songs that not everyone is going to know like Little Feat and other bands that didn’t live in the top 20. So thank you and go visit his site!
He started the blog halffastcycling.club to chronicle a coast-to-coast bike trip. Recently retired from a series of careers (in co-ops, plumbing, and health care), I spend my time riding my bike (once across the continent wasn’t enough so I quit working to do it again), paddling, writing about bikes and whatever pops into my head, and sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair. I’m old enough that I remember this music when it was new, not from oldies stations. The first hit records I remember hearing were by Little Richard (78 RPM). (I have older siblings.) My intro to live music (besides high school dances) was through BB King (followed quickly by Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Luther Allison, Bonnie Raitt, Pete Seeger, and the Grateful Dead, among others). I wrote a high school term paper on the Beatles (after reading the new Hunter Davies bio in 1968) and got a D.
Beatlemania
It was the 1963-64 school year and the fifth grade talent show was fast approaching. Being only a spectator was not an option. Everyone had to have an act, a talent to display.
My friend Max at Powerpop has declared “Beatles Week” and invited others to write about “a favorite Beatle song”. (In another part of the same post he invites folks to write about “their favorite Beatles song”, an important distinction in my eyes. Who can have a single favorite from their catalog? I’ve written about the my problem of declaring favorites before.)
A classmate approached me about joining an act with a couple of friends. When I asked about the act he was very secretive. He couldn’t tell me what the act was until I agreed to be in it. Once he told me, I couldn’t back out. Note I called him a “classmate”, not a “friend”. I didn’t trust him enough to go along blindly with this. Besides, I already had my act together. What was my act? I have no idea. What was their act? That still sticks in my mind 60 years later.
Four guys took the stage. Each had a rag mop on his head, dyed black and trimmed just so. Three of them held brooms – no mere air guitar for them. The fourth was, of course, Ringo. They lip-synched to “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. It wasn’t my favorite Beatles song even then. I bought the single of “She Loves You” but I didn’t buy “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. It seemed like the sort of song that reinforced parental stereotypes about pop music (and “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” didn’t?) with its simplistic lyrics about holding hands.
Four guys took the stage. Each had a rag mop on his head, dyed black and trimmed just so. Three of them held brooms – no mere air guitar for them. The fourth was, of course, Ringo. They lip-synched to “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. It wasn’t my favorite Beatles song even then. I bought the single of “She Loves You” but I didn’t buy “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. It seemed like the sort of song that reinforced parental stereotypes about pop music (and “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” didn’t?) with its simplistic lyrics about holding hands.
(Image from WebRestaurantStore)
On February 9, 1964, the US saw The Beatles in person for the first time, on The Ed Sullivan Show. Those of us in the know had seen them a month before on grainy, low fidelity video on Jack Paar.
https://www.facebook.com/6Tease/videos/beatles-on-the-jack-paar-show/2585672954835279/
They had appeared in an NBC News story on November 18, 1963. The news was more about Beatlemania than about the music, though they did acknowledge that The Beatles wrote some of their own songs. Early coverage of the band was more from a sense of amusement at the phenomenon of those crazy teenagers than it was about the music.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” was not received with universal acclaim in the US. “Esquire‘s music critic David Newman wrote, ‘Terrible awful. …It’s the bunk. The Beatles are indistinguishable from a hundred other similar loud and twanging rock-and-roll groups. They aren’t talented singers (as Elvis was), they aren’t fun (as Elvis was), they aren’t anything.’[34]”
On the other hand, it did reach #1 in most western countries (stalling at #6 in Belgium and Finland). In the US it was replaced at #1 by “She Loves You”. In the UK, the order was reversed. It was subsequently released in German as “Komm, gib mir diene Hand” – that version also received US airplay.
Contrast Newman with Rob Sheffield’s assessment in the Rolling Stone Album Guide (40 years later): “Just check out ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ which explodes out of the speakers with the most passionate singing, drumming, lyrics, guitars, and girl-crazy howls ever – it’s no insult to the Beatles to say they never topped this song because nobody else has either … It’s the most joyous three minutes in the history of human noise.[40]”
So what made them such a big deal? We were used to “singing groups” lip-synching their latest single on American Bandstand, complete with orchestration and fadeout. These were actual musicians. They played and sang at the same time. Of course, they weren’t the first, but it was still somewhat unusual in the pop music world. And they wrote their own songs. Sure, they covered American R&B (“Twist and Shout”, “Roll Over Beethoven”) and even show tunes (“A Taste of Honey”, “Til There Was You”) but the list of hit songs (and great songs) they wrote is too long to recount here. Some singers can produce great harmonies in a studio with multiple takes and overdubs, but The Beatles sounded great live in an era without monitors (and with fans screaming loudly enough that they might not have heard themselves even with monitors).
I went to a summer camp that had a carnival with games. One game involved headphones through which a few notes of a Beatles tune were played. Your challenge was speed in identifying the song. How many notes did you need? Hw quickly could you answer? With what other band would you play that game?
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” is far from the best Beatles song, it’s not my favorite Beatles song, and it wasn’t even the first Beatles song. But it was the only one that dominated the fifth grade talent show at Winnequah School and made 4 boys instantly popular. I was not one of them.
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So great you have those memories of the early days. I can just picture the lot of you on stage. It’s a great choice of song, it’s bright and a lot of fun. Btw I would think that paper should have earned you a ‘B’ …
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That teacher didn’t like me. She gave me an “F” on another paper. The years before and after I got “A”s in English. I have to admit she was onto me and the dislike was mutual.
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Seems like your English teacher panned you, your paper and the Beatles. I guess she failed you and herself. And, yes, I enjoy the personal reminiscences, how music makes its own mark on the person.
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great story and it’s cool that you have that ‘personal’ connection to the song. Certainly it’s a valid point that needs pointing out more – how rare it was back then for groups to play their own instruments. Nothing against Motown or other 60s singing groups, but they sang and nothing more (then again, as we found out years later that was true of even a good amount of Beach Boys output) so that alone made the Beatles rather revolutionary and better than the competition in ’63-64 I would think.
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It was gratifying when the studio bands (the Funk Brothers at Motown, Booker T & the MGs at Stax /Volt, and the Wrecking Crew in LA) finally got some recognition.
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Awesome to have that recollection of being young and discovering music. I like hearing about peoples entry points into bands/artists etc. Well done!
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Thanks. I saw a t-shirt that said something like, “I may be old but I got to see all the cool bands.” That’s partly true; and especially true if you’re a Chicago blues fan.
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This jogged a memory of lip-synching a couple of Guess Who songs in sixth-grade with another guy as part of a “talent show.” American Woman and No Sugar Tonight never sounded better…primarily because we weren’t actually singing lol. Neither of us became more popular, but we had fun.
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Hey! You could be in Milli Vanilli! How many sixth graders knew what “sugar” means?
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I’m really envious that you lived through this real-time! I can’t imagine what Beatlemania was like…but the post shows some of that. Thanks!
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You’re welcome, and thanks for the invitation. It was definitely weird. Other bands had overwrought fans, but only they had Beatlemania. Maybe Elvis came close, especially when Sullivan only showed him from the waist up.
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It was such an interesting time…right after JFK and America welcomed them for sure.
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After dinner at boarding school on a rainy evening, most would crowd into the school library and pretend to read a book. In reality we had come to hear the latest Beatles song which the librarian would play. That is where I first heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “She’s Got a Ticket to Ride” etc etc!
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Your librarian sounds as cool as my Spanish teacher! (It was in her class that I first heard “Nowhere Man”.)
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Fun write-up! I know I read this before on your blog and enjoyed it just as much this time. So typical that the fuddy duds would hate it and the progressives would love it.
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The other version is slightly different. I added a bit after sending it to Max (and it didn’t duplicate that paragraph).
Thanks for reading it twice!
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My pleasure, Halffast!
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I appreciate how having older brothers and sisters helps you getting an intro into decent music. My older bro had to find his own way to the Beatles, Stones etc after suffering through family TV evenings that were stuffed with dross like Lawrence Welk shows, Val Doonican Shows, the so-not-cool Andy Williams Lame-O Variety Shows and rarely, just rarely, he got to see a snippet from ‘Shindig’ ‘Hullabaloo’ or ‘C’mon’ with someone who (Who?) spoke for his generation. I can remember him finger-tippy holding his brand new copy of ‘Revolver’ with the reverent look of someone who had discovered the Holy Grail.
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I still “got to” see Lawrence Welk, Pat Boone, Andy Williams, et al. We bought a stereo that came equipped with LPs of show tunes and Hugo Winterhalter. It wasn’t all Little Richard and The Beatles and Stones.
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But, yeah. Besides having 78s of Little Richard and Elvis, one of my brothers had a late-night blues show on local radio. Many is the night I huddled under the covers listening to Delta and Chicago blues when I was supposed to be sleeping. Maybe that lack of sleep had something to do with the poor grade on that freshman English paper – the show was 10:30 to 3 AM and I got up at 4:30 to deliver newspapers. I owe him a lot. I hope he doesn’t read this;)
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Great post about lovely memories. And, yes, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” may not be the best Beatles, but it’s still a pretty darn good tune. Plus, it holds the distinction of being one of only two Beatles songs that had a German version. The other one was “She Loves You”. As a German, hearing these songs in German kind of sounds charmingly hilarious!
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Great story! This record was part of my childhood – it was peak Beatlemania after She Loves You, and it was 1 of 2 singles dad bought (he was late 20s at the time) along with Cant Buy Me Love. So i played them to death, saw the movies, watched them on the telly. Fab times musically…!
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I enjoyed this also by him…you two lived it real time which is something I cannot say.
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