Please

 

As they have every year since release on the 11^th of January 1963, the astonishing opening bars of ‘Please Please Me’ still astonish as they reverberate in the air. Whatever the miracle is that these four musicians discovered about their gifts in Hamburg clubs and Liverpool everywhere, it is happening full force in this take. Every listener becomes party to a musical experiment where anything could happen and the air is literally electric. The up starts with a down beat, some of the chords defy explanation, they’re English but what kind of singing is that? Two minutes of what’s that? To me, the song refutes the palaver about greatest albums, the ’Revolver’ apotheosis theory, as what they can do and will do is already there as distinctly as ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ ... every listener was party to seven years of, what’s that? Reflecting on this during intermissions in the last couple of years, it was pleasing to find Haruki Murakami has similar thoughts about ‘Please Please Me’. In his essay ‘On Originality’, Murakami remembers hearing the song aged 15 on his transistor, thinking “This is amazing, not like anything else I’ve heard!” It “totally blew my mind,” whatever blow my mind is in Japanese. Every Beatles Tragic knows that John Lennon wrote the song as a slow Roy Orbison ballad, but George Martin thought it wasn’t working, could they play it double time. Which immediately they did, being the Beatles, taking a sad song and making it better. The result was something typical of many of their songs, a melancholy or begging or frustration lyric performed with an elation breaking into ecstasy, a quizzical contradiction between word and music listeners happily overlooked, or took in their stride. Why do you make me blue? they shout at the tops of their voices. Even at the age of 7 it had an inexplicable beauty. Murakami admits he cannot explain either, other than in commonplaces: “nothing could be more different”, “they had something special”, “its quality was far and away the best.” Trying to define the difference, the Japanese novelist is reduced to saying “Your ears will tell!” True enough, no doubt. For him originality like ‘Please Please Me’ made him feel “a sense of profound well-being, a natural high. Liberated from the constraints of reality, it is as if my feet have left the ground.” Sixty years has not changed the fascination and delight inspired by this and all the sixties songs that followed. John’s witty play on the meanings of ‘please’ (should there be a comma in the title? Is anyone fussed?), the over-the-top Everly Brothers’ backing vocals, the perfect forward and backbeat control of the percussion, we hear them synthesising and transforming different musical forms, making them their own. Nothing could be more different. They had something special. Your ears will tell!

Image: Iso-mandala No. 80, made in August 2020 during lockdown. And here’s a collage of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUPfgC5IzGU