50 years of Please, Please Me & The Beatles

I was reminded of The Beatles last week when I came across a story written by Jody Rosen for Rolling Stone magazine, The Beatles’ Please, Please Me 50th Anniversary. It was about that fateful day of Feb. 11 in 1963. That was when four young punks from Liverpool recorded their first album at the Abbey Road Studios in London. Has it really been 50 years ago?

The next day, March 22, I was reading Ripley’s Believe It Or Not at the comics section of this paper and there were The Beatles again. “The Beatles’ first album Please, Please Me released 50 years ago today was recorded in one day for only 400 pounds ($619).” It has really been 50 years ago. You cannot make even a single with that amount nowadays. I wonder how much that is in 2013 money.

Surely not much. John Lennon, 23 on rhythm guitar; Paul McCartney, 21 on bass guitar; George Harrison, 20 on lead guitar; and Ringo Starr, 23, on drums, came cheap in those days. Just think, they were herded off to the studio to record an entire album, over 10 songs in 12 hours in a single day. And they even had to play the instruments themselves. Producer George Martin must have been a kind of slave driver.

Artists nowadays are a spoiled lot indeed. They can spend hours or even days perfecting a single song. A band can take its time just finding the right spot for a guitar in the studio. As for the engineers, they can go from days on end, mixing and mixing and mixing the tracks again and again to get the sound they like best. The Beatles did not have that kind of luxury in those early days.

Martin did not take long putting Please, Please Me in the can in 1963. He had to, because The Beatles’ first two singles, Love Me Do and Please, Please Me, were zooming up the charts. An album will definitely sell. That was the way they did it in those days. Artists had to have two hit singles before they were considered worthy of an album. That is why a lot of one-hit wonders never got that coveted long-play album.

The Beatles recorded on Feb. 11 and released on March 22. That time frame includes the cover pictorial and printing. The photo used was that one taken at the stairwell of the EMI Records office in London. I wonder if this was intentional or if Martin’s label, Parlophone, was skimping on the budget to have the lads sit for their first cover in a decent studio.

Within a few weeks after it was taken though, that picture was on the most in-demand pop album in the UK. It is now every bit as iconic as the seeds of genius sown in those songs that made up the first Beatles LP. Just think, those boys had only the barest of music education and learned how to play on second-hand guitars but they came out with tunes like these: I Saw Her Standing There, Misery, Anna (Go To Him), Chains, Boys, Ask Me Why, Please Please Me, Love Me Do, P.S. I Love You, Baby It’s You, Do You Want To Know A Secret, A Taste Of Honey, There’s A Place and Twist And Shout.

There was genius, too, in the way their manager Brian Epstein sort of recreated the Beatles. A small record store owner, also inexperienced in the ways of show business, he knew instinctively how to sell the band that he believed would be bigger than Elvis. It was Epstein who cleaned up the image they developed as a combo performing at the Cavern in Frankfurt, Germany.

Epstein ruled no smoking, swearing or drinking on stage. He did not say anything about drug use which would come later. It was also Epstein who got them out of their sideburns and black leather jackets into moptop hairdos and teddyboy suits. As a result The Beatles looked cute, wholesome and utterly lovable. Who would have known they would change the face of popular music forever. 

The single Please, Please Me became available in the US, and also here in the Philippines, from the small Vee Jay label in 1963. But it was actually the release of I Want To Hold Your Hand a year later that would ignite Beatlemania all over the world. Nobody has looked back since. Save, of course, for occasions like these, when we recall that innocent time. Ready now, “A 1, 2, 3, 4, well she was just 17…..”