Phony Beatlemania: "I Want to Hold Your Hand"

Follow along in the book HERE. Today's song is at #20 and is featured on pages 140-147.

 

 

"I Want to Hold Your Hand"

first a single, then eventually Past Masters, Volume One

1963

This is the moment when I buy into the idea of the Beatles.

You'll read about it in hyperbole, mostly. Plenty of different ways to describe it (this book chooses "the moment the dams broke"), but all the words point to the same phenomenon—there was before "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and after "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and this one song changed everything so thoroughly that the "before" and "after" are two completely different worlds.

Or so I'm told. It is written in the Official History of Music: on this day, the Beatles conquered America, and so forth. I wasn't alive to see it, that so-called historic trip to the U.S. Even the person who birthed me barely made it to see them getting onto the planes back to the U.K. (i.e. my mother was born on the day that the Beatles' U.S. trip ended). The tale has been passed down, through the written word and recorded video of hundreds of thousands of bozos who love the Beatles so much that they think writing yet another book or making another movie on the subject will somehow be unique. All of it, the cyclone of legend and myth, funneled into my brain since I picked up my first Beatles CD.

I know that history is written by the victors, and I know that tales of invasion and triumph are greatly exaggerated. Honestly, when I hear the opening chords of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," I don't care. When I play this song, I believe.

It's all a choice, you know. It's totally okay to not like the Beatles. The Beatles, or at least that aforementioned idea of the Beatles, is fucking oppressive. You're told by every fucking asshole on the planet that the Beatles were the best there ever will be, and I can absolutely see why you'd want to push back against that. I am validating your decision. But when I hear "I Want to Hold Your Hand," I have no choice but to disagree with you. I am Pavlov's Beatlemaniac, and this is my dinner bell. I choose to allow that impulse to repeat every time it rings.

I wasn't even sure until I sat down and wrote this blog post whether "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was actually the Beatles' first #1 song. The book makes it seem like it wasn't ("They had had some success before this song..."), but then why the insistence that this is the chosen one, the tune that brought them instant immortality? The answer is that "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was the first U.S. #1, but not the first U.K. #1. Simple enough, but kind of shitty too, in that we're only handing out the label of "importance" to those who matter in this country. Whatever. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" stands as the beginning of something huge, mostly because that's what I've always been told, and no one seems to want to correct that notion. I've been brainwashed. Give me the Kool-Aid.

My theory, before reading that "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was somehow all the way down at #20 on the "Best Beatles Songs" list, was that the authors were prioritizing import over quality. For example—"A Day in the Life" is a really good, not great, song, but it ended up at #1 because it is important. It's not my list, I'm just trying to play along. Okay. Fine. But now I have to throw out my theory, because I'm struggling to see how there is a single other Beatles song that is "more important" than "I Want to Hold Your Hand," let alone fucking nineteen of them. If you're going strictly on the nuts and bolts, then I might understand where you're coming from—this is a pop song from 1963, and it ain't that complicated. But if you're talking about songs that are integral to the history of this band and to the history of rock 'n' roll music, then there is no other choice.

I get it. This is an arbitrary list, and it wouldn't be as fun if "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was in its rightful place, i.e. at the very goddamn least higher than "I Feel Fine." The argument is fun and funny. It's funny that Lewis obviously spent way too much time reading Playboy as a kid (what, did John Lennon mention every single fucking Beatles song ever written during a Playboy interview?). It's funny that Spignesi has a paragraph to write about why this world-altering song is important to him, and he spends so much time describing what chords are played. It's all so fucking stupid, and that's what makes it fun.

And likewise, I get that four young, dumb, stupidly talented British dudes taking a trip to America to play some pop music isn't actually important in any capacity (it didn't "heal America after the JFK assassin," Michael Lewis, jesus fucking christ, man). But "I Want to Hold Your Hand" certainly feels important. Its legend has been imparted to me, and I totally fucking buy into it. I hear this song and I believe.

BEATLES TRIVIA: It's a well-known piece of trivia, at least to anyone who owns a copy of Past Masters, Volume One—the Beatles recorded a German version of this song, called "Komm, gib mir deine Hand." This is fucking hilarious, especially in retrospect. Shortly afterward, the Beatles would become so huge that they could basically do whatever they wanted to do. They didn't even play live music for the second half of their fucking career, to give you an idea of their towering size. But here at the beginning of 1964, despite taking the entire continent of America and flipping it over like a table at a party with an angry police captain, the Beatles were still small-time enough to be forced to rerecord a couple big hits in a language they didn't even speak. The music world was moving fast, and the Beatles were in the driver's seat, but they weren't using a map.

BETTER BEATLE: No need to reveal too many cards at this juncture, but I'll say that there aren't too many Beatles songs that are better than this one (I too value importance alongside quality). Let's take a cop-out answer and say "Twist and Shout," since, being a cover, the song is not eligible for Lewis and Spignesi's Top 100 list. And, ya know, if we're talking about "importance," then there aren't too many songs, Beatles or otherwise, that were more important to me in my youth.

NEXT TIME: "The Long and Winding Road" at #21