She Loves You

The Beatles spent the first half of 1963 gigging relentlessly over the north of England, spending lots of quality time riding in Neil Aspinall's van. They had wrapped up their final Hamburg engagement at the end of 1962 and spent the first two days of the year travelling, from Hamburg to London, and from London to Aberdeen for their first performance of 1963. Their performance in Aberdeen on 3 January was the first of 137 live appearances over the first six months of 1963. They took a two day break in February - they drove down to London to record their first album, in a single 15 hour session. They took another day in March to record their third single, "From Me To You", and they took two weeks off for a breather at the end of April.

 On 26 June, they were riding to Newcastle when Paul had an idea for a song. They needed a song. They already had a session booked for the following week to record their fourth single. Paul had one idea, something about voices answering the singer with "yeah yeah yeah." He and Lennon sat down in a Newcastle hotel room before the show to write it and it went off in a different direction, as often happens. The band did the Newcastle show and drove back to Liverpool the following day. After presumably getting reacquainted with the wife and his two month old child, Lennon came over to Paul's house on Forthlin Road. They finished the song there, and played it for Paul's dad, who thought it was nice although he wasn't too keen on the "yeah yeah yeah" part. The band had to head back up north to Leeds for a show the next day, and then it was down the coast for a show in Great Yarmouth two days later, on the 30th. From there it was down to London for the recording session on the 1st of July.

 So it's quite possible that George and Ringo had never even heard the song before they all assembled at Abbey Road at noon on this day in 1963. It's possible that Lennon and McCartney had shown it to them, before or after a gig, but unlikely. McCartney has said that in those days George and Ringo regularly heard new songs for the first time on the day of the session. They provided their input and made their contributions, which in this particular song were enormous, right there on the spot. "That's how great they were," said Paul. So the band went into the studio with the structure of the song, words and chords. But they had no arrangement. It had never even been played by the band, let alone rehearsed. They had three hours booked to sort all that out, for this song and for the flip side. "I'll Get You" was lined up for the flip side, a song they had already been playing live. They knew what to do with that one. It was this new one, "She Loves You," that they hadn't played. They needed to figure something out. They did.

Ringo kicks it off with a quick flurry on his toms and then... all hell breaks loose. It's like jumping off a cliff, or stepping onto a moving train. Three voices are bawling out the refrain, that unforgettable refrain. The drums are flying all over the place, as rather than lay down a backbeat Ringo responds to and urges on the singers with double hits at the end of each vocal phrase. The band charges through the refrain three times, and then throw in one final "yeah" with an unexpected harmony (George singing a sixth along with the third and the fifth - it was Harrison's idea, and while George Martin thought it was corny, the band insisted). On that last "yeah" Ringo heads for his open hi-hat and finally gives us a backbeat while Harrison sneaks in a quick and ratty little guitar lick. That's the introduction. Eight bars of music, twelve seconds of time. Holy shit.

 John and Paul sing the ascending melody of the first line ("You think you've lost your love") in unison until the very last word, when McCartney suddenly switches to singing a harmony, the third above Lennon's line. George joins in on the harmony for the next line, which ends with the teasing, cocky "yesterday-yay" - and then they repeat this for the next two lines, Paul switching from unison to harmony. On the next line George and Ringo kick in an unexpected accent on the title phrase "she loves you" in the middle of the bar, which McCartney further emphasizes by hitting a low B on his bass (the chord for that bar is G). George ends that line with three carefully apeggioed chords (G, F# minor, and E minor), each just a hair behind the beat so they stand out more, and he ends the verse with a reprise of the guitar lick he'd used to end the introduction.

 Second verse, same as the first. But not quite. We hear the same switch from unision to harmony and back, the same licks and accents - but all played just a touch harder, all leading up to something. Which it is, of course. That opening refrain is going to come back, and heaven knows we've been waiting for it - but just before tumbling into the refrain the three singers would shake their locks and give us that first "Oooh" that would send girls screaming like... nothing since Elvis, anyway. They do that for a full measure and Ringo backs it up with a quick tour of his entire kit. But they don't perform the full refrain - they run through two lines and change it up - "With a love like that" - and then the band stops, on a fucking dime. Absolute silence, for almost the length of a quarter note, and then the voices conclude this modified chorus.

 No other band in the world was capable of this sort of thing, not then, and not for years and years afterwards. There were professional session players who could summon up that level of precision, there were other bands who could generate the same brute force, but there was no one, anywhere in the world, who could do both. At the same time. But why would there be? At this moment in history, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr were by far the most experienced, the most practised rock band in the world. They were inventing the music, and they were inventing the thing that performed the music. They had behind them already almost 300 shows at the Cavern in Liverpool, the five crazed pill-fuelled engagements in Hamburg playing six days a week for as many as eight hours a night, hundreds more shows all over northern England and Scotland. No one knew this kind of music better, no one had been playing it longer.

 Lennon: "...we played straight rock, and there was nobody to touch us in Britain."

 The song is a twist on the form, of course. It's not a love song at all. It's written in the third person, it's a friend giving advice to a friend. It's good news, and the performance has more than enough joy and exuberance to make you feel the good news - but John Lennon's involved, and there's just an undercurrent of "if you don't appreciate this woman, I will." In the six years to come, the band would get much more sophisticated than this, they would get back to this mountain top and many more besides, but they would never get better. Because it doesn't get better than this.

 July 1, 1963.

 Yeah, yeah, yeah.