What would an artist be without their first record? Although The Beatles would go on to have plenty of No. 1 albums throughout their career, it was Please Please Me that got them started and catapulted them into the spotlight forever. Here are three favorite tracks from the album that The Beatles put together while they were still figuring out what it even was to be “a Beatle.”

“There’s A Place”

“There’s A Place” is one of The Beatles’ more sing-alongy songs, in my opinion. The song actually draws inspiration from “Somewhere” in the musical West Side Story, where Tony meets Maria at her window after the Rumble, during which he kills her brother, Bernardo.

“Someday” sings, “Someday, somehow / We’ll find a new way of living / We’ll find there’s a way of forgiving / Somewhere / There’s a place for us / A time and a place for us /Hold my hand and we’re halfway there.”

“In our case, the place was in the mind, rather than round the back of the stairs for a kiss and a cuddle,” McCartney explains of “There’s A Place” in Many Years From Now.
“Baby It’s You”

“Baby It’s You” has this doo-wop groove that makes you feel like you’re listening to something straight from the jukebox. That’s probably because, before The Beatles did their own spin on it, “Baby It’s You” was first recorded by The Shirelles, a popular 60s girl group. The Beatles were big fans of that type of music, and so when they were finishing up Please Please Me, they chose to finish it off with a couple of covers. “Baby It’s You” made the cut.
“I Saw Her Standing There”

Source: americansongwriter.com/Kat Caudill

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One has to wonder: Did the Beatles know they were about to record one of the most influential songs in rock history when they stepped into the studio 60 years ago this week?

"Tomorrow Never Knows," the last track on Revolver, was actually the first song to be recorded for the album, according to the Beatles Bible, with sessions taking place on April 6, 7, and 22.

The title (which doesn't actually appear anywhere in the song) came from one of Ringo Starr's sayings, while the lyrics were inspired by the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience by Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert.

In Leary's introduction, John Lennon read the words, "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" (which, of course, became the first line of "Tomorrow Never Knows").

As Paul McCartney recalled in Anthology, the song was "definitely John's."

"Round about this time people were starting to experiment with drugs, including LSD," he explained. "John had got hold of Timothy Leary’s adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book. For the first time we got the idea that, as with ancient Egyptian practice, when you die you lie in state for a few days, and then some of your handmaidens come and prepare you for a huge voyage. Rather than the British version, in which you just pop your clogs. With LSD, this theme was all the more interesting."
'Tomorrow Never Knows' helped shape the sound of modern music.

Source: yahoo.com/Jacqueline Burt Cote

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The venue that hosted The Beatles' only concerts in Japan has released long-forgotten photos of the legendary British band six decades after the gigs.

At the height of Beatlemania in 1966, when the quartet was the world's most famous pop group, the Beatles staged five summer performances in Tokyo in front of screaming fans.

Crowds reportedly thronged their hotel, where they stayed in the finest suite.

Then in 2009, more than 100 photos shot during the gigs "were discovered on a shelf" inside an office at the concert venue Nippon Budokan, the arena's operator told AFP.

But the 19 rolls of negative film -- reportedly wrapped in paper and labelled in such a way that it suggested they belonged to Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun -- remained "stored as they were" until recently, the operator in a statement.

However, as the 60th anniversary of the Japan tour approached, the venue operator asked a Beatles expert to examine the negatives, and "his assessment revealed that the photos appear to have never been published" in newspapers or other media.

Among the photos released by the concert venue is a shot of John Lennon smiling beside a Japanese doll that resembles a figurine featuring on the album cover of the 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

Source: thestandard.com.hk/The Standard 英文虎報

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 In a career of over 70 years, through bands and solo work, the five year gap in former Beatle, Paul McCartney’s discography is soon to be closed.

Word of the new album, "The Boys of Dungeon Lane," came on March 25 through a cryptic link texted to fans. The link taking them to a Google Maps page showing the album’s logo on a sign carried by a boy running on Dungeon Lane in Liverpool, England.

Tacked onto the announcement was the first single, "Days We Left Behind." Indicative of what’s to come with the 14-piece LP, the track is packed with nostalgia and introspection, as seen in the first line, "Looking back at white and black reminders of my past."

Having lived a life almost entirely in the spotlight, fans are able to speculate the meanings of McCartney’s songs in a personal manner.

"The first time I listened to it, I was trying to think of it in the perspective of The Beatles and the history of the band," political science freshman Henry Busse said. "Starting when they were like 15 and then becoming famous at like 20, Beatlemania and not having real life ever again. Obviously, that meant a whole lot coming from Paul, and that being the song chosen to release as a single. And then [on second listen] I started thinking about my own life and things that I’ve moved on from, it's a very emotional song."

Source: statenews.com/Julia Roeder

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The Beatles are one of the bestselling musical acts in United Kingdom history, and the group may, in fact, be the single most beloved name of all time when it comes to that nation's music industry. The rockers have scored dozens of top-performing albums, between traditional studio releases and many compilations, live recordings, and other specials that have become immediate bestsellers in the U.K. The outfit regularly claims at least one top-performing album in the home country of the four musicians – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison – but those winning efforts don't always stick around for long stretches.

For just the third time, a Beatles collection hits a longevity milestone on the Official Albums chart, which ranks the most consumed full-lengths and EPs throughout the U.K. The Beatles’ 1967–1970 Reaches Three Years as a Winner

As is often the case, 1967–1970, which is usually referred to as the Blue Album, is the most successful Beatles release in the U.K. This frame, it is the only project by the band to appear on the Official Albums chart, where it dips from No. 42 to No. 53. As it holds on once more, 1967–1970 makes it to 156 weeks on the list, or exactly three years.
1 Remains The Band’s Longest-Running Collection

1967–1970 is only the third release by The Beatles to rack up 156 stays on the 100-space rundown. Another compilation, the simply-titled 1, stands out as the group's longest-charting by an incredible margin. That project, which is more than a quarter-century old at this point, has spent 467 stints as one of the 100 most consumed albums in the U.K. That effort doesn't land on the list as often as it used to, since sales and streams of the tunes that straddle the track lists of both releases can only favor one or the other at a time, not both. That has led to, in many instances, 1967–1970 winning and remaining on multiple rosters, while 1 has disappeared.

The second-longest-running Beatles project on the Official Albums chart remains Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That masterpiece has managed 277 weeks on the roster.

Source: forbes.com/Hugh McIntyre

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The Beatles likely would have been extremely successful no matter who was producing their records. But there’s no doubt that George Martin, who got the producing gig, helped them elevate their music to heights they might not have otherwise have reached.

Martin’s stewardship while the band made Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was essential. But he was passed over by Paul McCartney for a role he normally would have filled on one of the album’s standout songs. And that turn of events caused hard feelings between the two men.  Who Has the Score?

When it came to making Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967, The Beatles wanted every possibility on the table in terms of how the songs would be rendered. Having ceased touring, they had nothing but studio time ahead of them. And they could take as much time as possible to make the sounds in their heads come to life.

True-life events inspired “She’s Leaving Home”. Paul McCartney picked up the newspaper one morning and saw an item about a teenage runaway. With John Lennon assisting, he wrote the song by imagining the inner lives of the girl and her parents and how this happy family had reached this point.

McCartney envisioned the song almost unspooling almost like a television drama. As such, he knew that he didn’t want traditional rock instrumentation. Instead of playing on the song, The Beatles would hand the instrumentation over to hired string players. But a dispute between McCartney and Martin interrupted the band’s usual chain of command. 

On previous occasions when The Beatles had used orchestral instrumentation, a la “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby”, George Martin had written the scores that the instrumentalists used to play their parts. McCartney didn’t have the technical know-how to pull off such a feat, although he’d still be involved in telling Martin what he preferred out of each part.

When he decided he wanted that kind of backing on “She’s Leaving Home”, he called Martin to see if he could come to Paul’s house the next day and work up the score. But Martin already had a previous engagement to produce a session for British singer Cilla Black. McCartney pressed Martin for a bit to see if he could make it work before hanging up.

Martin assumed that McCartney would just postpone the score-writing session for a day or two until George could do it. But Maccca’s simply couldn’t wait. He found another arranger named Mike Leander, who came in and wrote the lovely instrumental score for violins, violas, double bass, cellos, and harp that would adorn the song.

Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia

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