This is the first song America heard on February 9, 1964, on the Ed Sullivan Show.
I love this song for one big reason. John Lennon plays a hell of a rhythm in the background. He makes it sound so deceptively easy but it’s not. I need to start focusing on some of their earlier music instead of just their late sixties tracks. I have some readers that just like their early stuff and others who like just the mid or later. I love both because it’s the same band… early, middle, or late… both have great melodies but just different tones of instruments.
What is great about the early part is their harmonies. When I played in a band we didn’t do many Beatles songs although they were being requested. If we did we did a later song like Get Back without those harmonies. It takes a band with 2 or better yet 3 singers who can do those harmonies. Not easy to do when you are teen playing instruments at the same time. We stuck with Rolling Stones and CCR songs without the complicated harmonies. Now we couldn’t do I Am The Walrus either because of the craziness of the instruments.
This song was on the first Beatles album I listened to…the American version of With The Beatles named Meet The Beatles with their faces in shadow. We had a clubhouse and my older cousin bought the album and I was hooked…for life. It’s hard not to get hooked by the songs.
On February 9th, 1964, an estimated 73 million viewers watched this much-hyped young Liverpool band perform five songs ‘live’ from CBS-TV Studio 50 in New York City. Capital Records kept rejecting Beatles songs until I Want To Hold Your Hand. A few radio stations started to play the song and soon Capitol realized that they could not reject them anymore. They didn’t like British records and only would release novelty British songs in America. When they started to get behind Meet The Beatles the dam burst.
They chose All My Loving to start the set and made an immediate good first impression and kept that huge television audience tuned in for the whole show. What separated the Beatles from other bands? The thousands of hours they already had under their belt from rocking in Hamburg, The Cavern, and all around Europe. At one point they very well could have had more hours on stage than any other rock band. Another thing was the quantity and more important the quality of the songwriting of the band that would continue to their end.
It’s a Lennon-McCartney song but mostly McCartney. The song peaked at #1 in Canada and New Zealand. It surprisingly only peaked at #45 on the Billboard 100 in 1964.
Paul McCartney: “I don’t know that I was thinking specifically of Jane Asher when I wrote this, though we were courting. It’s probably more of a reflection on what our lives were like then – leaving behind family and friends to go on tour and experience all these new adventures.”
All My Loving
Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you
Tomorrow I’ll miss you
Remember I’ll always be true
And then while I’m away
I’ll write home every day
And I’ll send all my lovin’ to you
I’ll pretend that I’m kissing
The lips I am missing
And hope that my dreams will come true
And then while I’m away
I’ll write home every day
And I’ll send all my lovin’ to you
All my lovin’, I will send to you
All my lovin’, darlin’, I’ll be true
Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you
Tomorrow I’ll miss you
Remember I’ll always be true
And then while I’m away
I’ll write home every day
And I’ll send all my loving to you
All my lovin’, I will send to you
All my lovin’, darlin’, I’ll be true
All my lovin’, all my lovin’
Ooh ooh, all my lovin’, I will send to you
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