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'Please Please Me' at 50: How Vee-Jay records brought the Beatles to America

by Steve Proffitt
Take Two
February 7th, 2013, 8:56am

oday is an obscure, but important anniversary in the annals of pop music. You see, on this day, 50 years ago, The Beatles' first single, "Please Please Me," was released in the United States.

The song got a little bit of airplay in February and March of 1963, but not much, and it sold about a little more than 5,000 copies. Remember, this was 1963, the whole Beatlemania thing -- the appearance on Ed Sullivan, the screaming teenage girls -- none of that happened until 1964.

In early 1963, The Beatles British record label, EMI sent a recording of "Please Please Me" to its U.S. affiliate, Capitol Records, but the executives at Capitol passed on it.

The rights to the record were shopped around to other labels, and one called Vee-Jay picked them up. At the time, Indiana-based Vee-Jay was the biggest black-owned record label in the country -- this was long before Motown really got started -- and they were primarily an R&B label. They had artists like Leadbelly, the Staples Singers, and the great Jimmy Reed.

Might seem strange, for an R&B label to release British rock and roll, but by 1963 Vee-Jay had begun to venture beyond R&B.

"Vee-Jay had put out "I Remember You" by Frank Ifield after Capitol had turned that down, and [it] became a number-five hit," said Bruce Spizer, author of the book Beatles' Records on Vee-Jay. Also at this time, The Four Seasons "Big Girls Don't Cry," so the idea wasn't that absurd when you think about it."

Not only did Vee-Jay sign a deal for the rights to "Please Please Me," they also signed a contract for the right to license all the recordings made by this unknown group, The Beatles, and the right to release them in the United States for a period of five years.

"If Vee-Jay had played their cards right, Sgt. Pepper would have been on Vee-Jay," said Spizer. But, sadly, Vee-Jay didn't play their cards right, or perhaps they were dealt a bad hand. Oh, and by the way, that deal? It was signed on April Fool's day.

Hindsight Is Always 20-20

There was no way to predict that the then-unknown Beatles were going to be the biggest thing ever. Capitol Records didn't know it, Vee-Jay didn't know, maybe even The Beatles didn't know it. But by the end of 1963, it's clear that The Beatles are big. Elvis big, and maybe even bigger.

They schedule a tour of the States, and Capitol Records, realizing it made a monumental mistake, mounts a campaign to get back the record rights.

Vee-Jay notices an opportunity and decide to re-release "Please Please Me" in early January of '64. The new release gets to number three on the charts and sells more than a million copies. Meanwhile, just after Christmas in 1963, Capitol violates the licensing agreement and releases "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," The Beatles single that really launches the group in the U.S.

Capitol's executives, and its fleet of lawyers decide to be aggressive, especially since they know Vee-Jay has a problem. Turns out Vee-Jay's president had spent most of the company's reserve funds to pay his personal gambling debts. Plus, it failed to pay some royalties, meaning it may have voided the contract.

Desperate for cash and short on legal talent, Vee-Jay renegotiates the deal. It holds on to the rights to release 16 Beatles songs, but only for about a year. Capitol executives breathe a sigh of relief, and start preparing for the January, 1964 release of their album Meet The Beatles, which will officially introduce America to the Fab Four.

The album is subtitled as "the first album by England's phenomenal pop combo," but, in fact it wasn't the first. Because, in spite of their financial problems, and their lack of legal talent, Vee-Jay managed to release an album, Introducing the Beatles, ten days before Capitol got their record out.

Vee-Jay does very well with Introducing The Beatles. It quickly sells more than a million copies, even though Capitol fought against the release at every turn. But ultimately the financial problems and the legal problems were just too much, and Vee-Jay was pretty much out of business by the end of 1964. Two years later Vee-Jay Records filed for bankruptcy.

Today, Capitol Records is still headquartered in that cylindrical, stack-of-records-like tower on Vine that you can see from the Hollywood freeway. On this day, fifty years ago, when "Please Please Me" was first released, The Beatles were, for practical purposes, unknown. But exactly one year later, on February 7th, 1964 they were superstars.

A Producer's Own Missed Opportunity

Here's where I need to reveal my own missed opportunity, and also the fact that I am pretty old and creaky. You see, as an 11-year-old kid, I owned a copy of that Vee-Jay album, Introducing The Beatles. It was among the first albums I'd ever bought -- I think I had a Ray Charles record, and maybe one by the Beach Boys. Not only that. I had the single, "Please Please Me," too.

Sadly, they're long gone, but according to our Beatles expert, the album could be worth as much as $15,000 and a near-mint copy of the single could command up to 4,000. That's for a record that cost 69 cents in 1964.

Oh, well. Thanks to Bruce Spizer, who you can find at Beatle.net. He expects to re-release his history of Vee-Jay as an e-book later this year. And next year, about this time, there will be a lot of stories about the 50th anniversary of the Beatles conquering America, but now we know that, at least in some measure, that anniversary is really...today. 

The Beatles' 'Please Please Me' 50th Anniversary

50 years ago, the Beatles released their debut album. 'Please Please Me' was made during one epic day of recording and took the Beatles from Liverpool bar band to rock & roll legends
Rolling Stone
March 22, 2013 8:05 AM ET

efore Beatlemania and The Ed Sullivan Show; before they met Queen Elizabeth and smoked pot with Bob Dylan; before they sprouted drooping mustaches, dropped acid, discovered sitars and pilgrimaged to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Himalayan retreat; before John met Yoko, before the walrus was Paul; before they took over popular music and, um, transformed Western culture -- before all that, at 10 in the morning on February 11th, 1963, the Beatles were merely the world's finest little rock & roll band, gathered at Abbey Road studios in London to make a debut album. Twelve hours later, they'd done it. Of all the astonishing things about "Please Please Me" -- and there are many -- the most impressive may simply be the quick-and-dirty haste with which it was recorded. In 2011, it can take a band a dozen hours to mike the kick drum. But in a single long day -- with just a 400 budget -- the Beatles laid down 10 songs for their album, including some of their most indelible early performances: "I Saw Her Standing There," "There's a Place," "Do You Want to Know a Secret," "Baby It's You." The day's work wrapped up, sometime around 10:45, with a shirtless John Lennon roaring himself hoarse through two takes of "Twist and Shout." "It was amazingly cheap, no messing, just a massive effort from us," Paul McCartney later recalled. "At the end of the day, you had your album."

Coming into that day, the Beatles already had two singles under their belts. In October 1962, they released "Love Me Do," the bluesy vamp that McCartney had first dreamed up while playing hooky from school at age 16. "Love Me Do" was backed with another Lennon-McCartney original, "P.S. I Love You," which offered further evidence of their precocious songwriting gifts and the sheer strangeness -- the mixture of rock & roll toughness and old-fashioned tunesmithery, the weirdly beautiful vocal harmonies, the wild left turns of their chord progressions.

"Love Me Do" reached Number 17 in the U.K. and was followed up, on January 11th, 1963, by another single, the emphatically rocking "Please Please Me." A week later, on January 19th, the Beatles performed "Please Please Me" on Thank Your Lucky Stars, a nationally broadcast pop showcase. It was the harshest winter in many years, and a huge audience of snowbound Britons tuned in to a transfixing spectacle: four Liverpudlian lads with odd haircuts, bashing through a ferociously catchy song whose lyric sounded suspiciously like a plea for orgasmic-reciprocation.

That performance was enough to make the Beatles the hottest act in British music. Soon the Beatles' label, Parlophone, sent a request for a full album. In those days, 14 songs were the standard number on a long-playing record. So the Beatles entered Abbey Road that winter morning knowing that their task was to churn out the additional 10 songs. It was a job for which they were uniquely well-suited. They had honed their craft, and made their name, as a volcanic live act. In Hamburg, Germany, and at the Cavern Club in their hometown of Liverpool, the Beatles were renowned for the intensity of their performances, and for their stamina -- for playing marathon shows, fueled by a schoolboyishly giddy love of rock & roll, and by over-the-counter uppers. At Abbey Road on February 11th, the Beatles' producer, George Martin, sought simply to capture the band's live energy, to turn a staid studio -- previously known for recordings made there by the London Symphony Orchestra and Peter Sellers -- into an annex of the sweaty, sepulchral Cavern Club. "It was a straightforward performance of [the Beatles'] stage repertoire -- a broadcast, more or less," Martin recalled. "I had been up to the Cavern and I'd seen what they could do.... I said, 'Let's record every song you've got.' "

Those songs ran the gamut. There were girl-group covers ("Boys" and "Baby It's You," both by the Shirelles), R&B songs (Arthur Alexander's stormy "Anna [Go to Him]") and show tunes ("A Taste of Honey"). There were rave-ups ("Twist and Shout") and ballads ("Do You Want to Know a Secret"). There were unclassifiable things like "There's a Place" -- an unusually introspective midtempo ballad, whose melody was tugged downward by lustrous minor-seventh chords. Soon enough, they'd be calling songs like that "Beatlesque."

The man charged with getting the music on tape was in many ways the temperamental opposite of his young charges. George Martin was a Londoner; the Beatles were Liverpudlian "scousers." Martin was a classically trained musician who as a child dreamed of becoming the next Rachmaninoff; the Beatles were musical autodidacts who couldn't tell a treble clef from a cleft chin. Martin was an Englishman of his generation, born between the First and Second World Wars, restrained, formal, a bit stiff; the Beatles were impish children of the first rock & roll revolution. When they first tested for Martin, he asked them to tell him if there was anything they didn't like. "Well, for a start, I don't like your tie," George Harrison shot back.

But Martin and the Beatles soon formed an odd-bedfellows partnership. The producer had initially been resistant to the Beatles recording their own material, but when they finished recording "Please Please Me," he told them, "Congratulations, gentlemen, you've just made your first Number One." (Not quite: The single peaked at Number Two on the U.K. charts.) "He had a very great musical knowledge and background," Lennon recalled. "I mean, he taught us a lot, and I'm sure we taught him a lot by our primitive musical ability."

Both Martin's sophistication and the Beat-les' rough-and-ready musical intuition were on display during that long Abbey Road session. The Beatles played, and looked, like road-tested rockers. (When they showed up at Abbey Road with their equipment, the amplifiers were filled with mash notes from female fans.) Almost all the songs were recorded live, with only a few overdubs. McCartney's vocal in "A Taste of Honey" was doubled, to delightfully eerie effect. The Beatles added hand claps to "I Saw Her Standing There," and Lennon overdubbed a harmonica part on "There's a Place."

But for the most part, the session was a testament to the Beatles' warhorse durability -- grinding out song after song, take after take, with unflagging adrenaline. They banged through 13 takes of "There's a Place," 12 of "I Saw Her Standing There," three of "Anna (Go to Him)." They nailed Ringo Starr's vocal showpiece, "Boys," in a single take. They even made 13 passes at "Hold Me Tight," a song that was left on the cutting-room floor. When Martin, the engineer Norman Smith and the tape operator Richard Langham piled off to a nearby pub for a lunch break, the Beatles stayed behind to rehearse. No one at the session could remember a band playing through lunch.

Finally, just around 10 p.m., the Beatles had completed nine songs. No one was sure what to do for the final number. Someone suggested the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout," a barnburning fixture of the Beatles' live act, with Lennon on lead vocals. Lennon was suffering from a cold; after 12 straight hours of singing, his voice was nearly shot. But he decided to give it a try. He sucked on a couple of throat lozenges, gargled a glass of milk and headed onto the studio floor. Two takes later, the album was a wrap.

"The last song nearly killed me," Lennon said years later. "Every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it, because I could sing it better than that; but now it doesn't bother me. You can hear that I'm just a frantic guy doing his best."

Even when frantic, the Beatles' best was awfully good. "Please Please Me" is now considered a landmark. It captures the group at its scruffiest and most "bar band" -- it is a document, as Lennon once said, of the Beatles before they were "the 'clever' Beatles."

As their career took off, the Beatles got artier, more sophisticated, more visionary. But they were never purer than on "Please Please Me."

This story is from the special 'Rolling Stone' edition 'The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide', November 24th, 2011. 






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