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Beatles Rewind Podcast

Beatles Rewind Podcast

De: Steve Weber and Cassandra
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  • 🎸 “Please Please Me”: The Song That Changed Everything for The Beatles 🌟

    🎸 “Please Please Me”: The Song That Changed Everything for The Beatles 🌟
    Nov 20 2025
    🎸 “Please Please Me”: The Song That Changed Everything for The Beatles 🌟From Roy Orbison Blues to BeatlemaniaIn June 1962, John Lennon sat in his bedroom at his Aunt Mimi’s house on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool and wrote a song. 🏠 “I remember the day I wrote it,” Lennon recalled. “I heard Roy Orbison doing ‘Only the Lonely’, or something. And I was also always intrigued by the words to a Bing Crosby song that went, ‘Please lend a little ear to my pleas’. The double use of the word ‘please’. So it was a combination of Roy Orbison and Bing Crosby.” 🎵John’s original version was slow, bluesy, vocally sparse—no harmonies, no responses, no scaled harmonica intro. “It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song, would you believe it?” he later said. It was dreary. It went nowhere. 😴And that’s when George Martin saved it. 💡The Producer’s Magic TouchWhen The Beatles first presented “Please Please Me” to George Martin at their September 4, 1962 session, the producer was unimpressed. “At that stage it was a very dreary song,” Martin recalled. “It was like a Roy Orbison number, very slow, bluesy vocals. It was obvious to me that it badly needed pepping up.” ⚡So, Martin asked them to speed it up. Paul McCartney remembered being embarrassed: “We sang it and George Martin said, ‘Can we change the tempo?’ We said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Make it a bit faster. … Actually, we were a bit embarrassed that he had found a better tempo than we had.” 😅The group recorded a faster version on September 11, but it still wasn’t quite right. They brought it back to the studio on November 26, 1962, with its arrangement radically altered. It took 18 takes.When they finally nailed it, the magical take that would go on the record, George Martin’s voice crackled over the talkback from the studio’s control room above: “Congratulations, gentlemen. You’ve just made your first number one record.” 🎯He was right—sort of. “Please Please Me” reached number one on the New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Disc charts. But on the Record Retailer chart (which eventually became the official UK Singles Chart), it only reached number two, stuck behind Frank Ifield’s “Wayward Wind.” The Beatles would have to wait for “From Me to You” to score their first official number one. 📊The new version featured Lennon’s harmonica opening (similar to “Love Me Do” and “From Me to You”), and a clever vocal trick borrowed from the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown”—McCartney held a high note while Lennon’s melody cascaded down from it. “I did the trick of remaining on the high note while the melody cascaded down from it,” McCartney explained. 🎤This essay continues below. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.Please Please Me (Remastered)The Bawdy Hidden Meaning That Almost Killed It in America 😳But there was something else about the new, faster arrangement that changed the song’s meaning entirely. What had been a melancholy Roy Orbison-style plea became something far more suggestive. 🔥The chorus doesn’t mince words: “Please please me, oh yeah, like I please you.” Combined with the escalating “come on, come on, come on” call-and-response between Lennon and the backing vocals, and lines like “I do all the pleasin’ with you,” the sexual subtext became unmistakable. Many listeners interpreted it as a request for reciprocal sexual favors—specifically oral sex. 😱Capitol Records in the US certainly heard it that way. According to multiple sources, Capitol refused to release “Please Please Me” partly due to its sexual content, which is why the small Chicago label Vee-Jay ended up with it instead. The faster tempo and urgent delivery transformed what might have been an innocent plea for emotional attention into something that sounded decidedly physical.Paul McCartney later acknowledged The Beatles’ early talent for sexual innuendo, saying: “If they had wanted to, they could have found plenty of double meanings in our early work. How about ‘I’ll Keep You Satisfied’ or ‘Please Please Me’? Everything has a double meaning if you look for it long enough.” 😏Whether Lennon intended the double meaning when he wrote it in his bedroom in 1962, or whether it emerged only when George Martin’s uptempo arrangement unleashed the song’s latent energy, “Please Please Me” became one of The Beatles’ first ventures into cheeky sexual territory—a hallmark that would continue throughout their career. 🎭The Power of TelevisionThe single was released in the UK on January 11, 1963, during one of the worst winters in British history. ❄️ Eight days later, on January 19, much of the population was snowed-in at home watching The Beatles perform the song on the Saturday night TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars. 📺That national TV exposure, combined with the band’s ...
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    11 m
  • The Beatles: “More Popular Than Jesus”

    The Beatles: “More Popular Than Jesus”
    Nov 20 2025
    In March 1966, John Lennon sat in his Weybridge living room talking to Maureen Cleave, a journalist from the London Evening Standard whom he’d known for years. The conversation ranged widely—books, religion, his restlessness, his reading habits. Lennon had been devouring works on Christianity, and he offered an observation that was, in context, almost melancholic:“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”In England, nobody blinked. The quote appeared in Cleave’s profile on March 4, 1966, as part of a longer meditation on fame, spirituality, and the emptiness Lennon felt despite having everything. British readers understood it as rueful commentary—Lennon wasn’t boasting about the Beatles’ popularity but lamenting what that popularity revealed about modern values. If anything, he was criticizing a culture that elevated four rock musicians above religious figures. The article generated no controversy whatsoever.Five months later, the American teen magazine Datebook republished the quote on its cover, stripped of context, positioned as provocation. The timing was catastrophic. It landed in the American South during the summer of 1966, in the heart of the Bible Belt, weeks before the Beatles were scheduled to tour. What had been a thoughtful, even self-critical observation in a British broadsheet became, in American tabloid framing, an act of blasphemy.The reaction was immediate and volcanic. Radio stations across the South organized public burnings of Beatles records, photographs, and memorabilia. The Ku Klux Klan picketed concerts and nailed Beatles albums to burning crosses. Religious leaders delivered sermons condemning the band. South Africa and Spain banned Beatles music from the airwaves. The Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, issued a formal denunciation. Death threats poured in. For the first time, the Beatles faced the genuine possibility that their career—and perhaps their lives—were in danger.This essay continues below. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.The Lost Beatles Photographs: The Bob Bonis ArchiveMarion, LarryWhat makes this episode so revealing is how completely it depended on the loss of context. Lennon’s original statement was embedded in a discussion of his spiritual searching, his reading of Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot and other works questioning orthodox Christianity. He was grappling with questions of meaning and authenticity, frustrated by what he saw as the gap between Jesus’s teachings and institutional religion. The “more popular than Jesus” line was descriptive, not aspirational—an indictment of misplaced priorities, not a claim of superiority.But context doesn’t travel well. The quote, isolated and tweaked, became something else entirely: an arrogant rock star claiming to have surpassed Christ. The nuance evaporated. The irony inverted. What Lennon intended as criticism of celebrity culture was received as its apotheosis.The Beatles were terrified. Their manager Brian Epstein considered canceling the American tour entirely. The band members themselves were shaken—they had faced screaming fans and relentless press, but never organized hatred, never genuine threats of violence. For musicians who had spent three years as the world’s most beloved entertainers, the sudden pivot to pariahs was disorienting.On August 11, 1966, at a press conference in Chicago, Lennon apologized. Or rather, he attempted to clarify—and found that clarification satisfied almost no one. “I’m not saying that we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person, or God as a thing, or whatever it is,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. “I just said what I said and it was wrong, or it was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.”The apology was awkward because Lennon was trying to apologize for something he hadn’t actually said—at least not in the way it had been received. He wasn’t sorry for the sentiment, which he still believed was a reasonable observation about contemporary culture. He was sorry for the chaos, the danger to his bandmates, the bonfires. Watching the footage, you can see him struggling with the absurdity of having to retract a statement that, in his view, had been willfully misread.The 1966 tour went ahead, but it was miserable. Attendance was down. The Klan protested. A firecracker thrown onstage in Memphis made all four Beatles flinch, each momentarily believing it was a gunshot. The joy had drained from performing. Between the touring grind, the inability to hear themselves over screaming crowds, and now the hostility, the Beatles were done. The August 29 concert at Candlestick ...
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    11 m
  • The Hardest Sound in Rock History: Six Decades Later, Nobody Can Fully Explain It

    The Hardest Sound in Rock History: Six Decades Later, Nobody Can Fully Explain It
    Nov 20 2025
    The opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” is perhaps the most analyzed, debated, and celebrated single sound in rock history. That explosive, jangling burst that launches the 1964 film and album has captivated musicians, scholars, and fans for six decades—and remarkably, there’s still no absolute consensus on exactly how it was created.The Mystery Takes ShapeWhat makes this chord so enigmatic is its sheer complexity. It contains frequencies that shouldn’t logically fit together if only one or two guitars were playing. The sound is simultaneously crisp and muddy, high and low, acoustic and electric. For years, musicians attempting to recreate it found themselves frustrated—something was always missing.What We Know: The Instruments InvolvedThe chord was definitely a group effort, involving multiple Beatles playing simultaneously. Through decades of analysis, interviews, and even sophisticated audio forensics, a general picture has emerged.George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker forms the backbone of the sound. His new Rickenbacker 360/12—one of the first in England—provided that distinctive chiming quality that would define the Beatles’ 1964 sound. George played a Fadd9 chord, with the 12-string’s natural chorus effect giving it that shimmering, bell-like tone.John Lennon’s acoustic guitar contributed as well. He likely played the same Fadd9 voicing on his Gibson J-160E acoustic, adding body and warmth to the attack.Paul McCartney’s bass is crucial and often overlooked. Paul played a D note, which creates harmonic tension against the F chord above it—one reason the chord sounds so complex and slightly unresolved.The Piano ControversyHere’s where things get interesting, and where George Martin’s role becomes central to the mystery.George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, almost certainly played piano on the chord. This theory gained significant traction when various audio analyses isolated frequencies that could only come from a piano. Randy Bachman of The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive famously visited Abbey Road and was given access to the original multi-track tapes. He reported that when you isolate the tracks, you can clearly hear Martin playing a D-F-G voicing on piano—those low piano notes explain why the chord has such depth and why guitar-only recreations always sound thin by comparison.However, the exact nature of Martin’s contribution has been debated. Some analyses suggest he played specific notes to fill out the bottom end, while others argue his part was more substantial.This essay continues below. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.A Hard Day’s NightThe Participants Remember (Sort Of)The frustrating truth is that the Beatles themselves have given somewhat contradictory accounts over the years, likely because it was simply another day in the studio for them at the time—they had no idea this particular chord would become legendary.George Harrison confirmed in various interviews that he played his Rickenbacker 12-string, and that the chord was a group effort. In a 2001 interview, he acknowledged the complexity but was somewhat vague about the exact arrangement, treating it with the casualness of someone who’d played thousands of chords in his career.Paul McCartney has discussed playing the D bass note, which was essential to the chord’s tension and depth. He’s confirmed the basic setup but hasn’t provided a definitive breakdown.George Martin, before his death in 2016, acknowledged his piano contribution in various interviews, though he too was sometimes hazy on the precise details of a recording made decades earlier.The challenge is that in 1964, the Beatles were recording at an extraordinary pace. “A Hard Day’s Night” the album was completed in just a few weeks to meet the film’s release date. Individual chord voicings weren’t necessarily discussed or documented—they simply played what sounded right.The Hard Night’s WritingThe song was written by Lennon (with some contribution from McCartney) very quickly—essentially overnight—after the film’s title was settled upon (after the filming was finished). The title itself came from a Ringo malapropism, one of his accidental phrases that the band found amusing enough to adopt.The sequence of events went like this: filming began in March 1964 without a title or title song. Director Richard Lester and producer Walter Shenson settled on “A Hard Day’s Night” as the film’s title partway through production, and John was tasked with writing a song to match. He composed it rapidly, reportedly bringing the finished song to the studio the very next morning. The band recorded it on April 16, 1964, at Abbey Road, while filming was still wrapping up (principal photography ended in late April).The song was definitely a late addition. The remarkable thing is how quickly Lennon delivered such an iconic track, complete with that mysterious opening chord that’...
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    12 m
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