‘Anna’: the song Graham Nash taught John Lennon to sing
The fact that The Beatles succeeded at all in their early days feels like a success story for any aspiring musicians. Since none of them had any formal training and learned their trade just by playing night after night, maybe you, nameless music fan, could pick up a guitar and possibly be as great as the Fab Four. That’s not to that the band didn’t have their drawbacks, though, and John Lennon ended up getting help from Graham Nash years before he was famous on ‘Anna (Go To Him)’.
If anyone was going to tell Lennon what to do, though, they probably could not be held responsible for what happened to them next. Lennon was always known to do things his own way, and if any was standing in his way, he was going right over them until he hit the big time. Right as The Beatles were about to get a record deal, they spent one day putting together the beginnings of what would be their debut, Please Please Me.
Whistling through most of their live set, the album is a fantastic demonstration of the band’s love for American music. Since Chuck Berry inspired the bassline to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, most of the other cover tunes showed their versatility, either making brilliant covers of girl groups or making the kind of spooky takes on theatre pieces like ‘A Taste of Honey’.
While Lennon voiced his love for artists like Smokey Robinson from Motown Records, he sounded most at home playing ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ if he could only remember what he was supposed to be doing. As The Beatles started making the rounds on the bar band circuit, Nash remembered Lennon coming to him to ensure he got the words right.
When speaking to Rolling Stone, Nash said that Lennon was practically a nervous mess when it came to him asking for the words, saying, “I remember The Hollies were playing a show around the corner from them, and afterwards, we bribed a guy to let us all into some bar. John said, ‘Fuck, we’re going to EMI tomorrow to make this record, and I can’t remember the words to ‘Anna’. So I sat at the piano and showed him the words he couldn’t remember. What a character he was.”
If this was the day before, Lennon was an incredibly fast learner, singing the words as if he had been singing the song his whole life. Since the tracks were all done in one day, there are a few blemishes on the final recording that do stick out, like Lennon’s hoarse voice coming through in the second verse.
As legend has it, Lennon was nursing a cold throughout the day, and this is the one song where it sounds like it, sounding especially snotty as he talks about girls that broke his heart and left him sad. Given how the band would be treated just a few months afterwards, this would be one of the last times Lennon had to worry about getting the words right.
Once Beatlemania kicked in, Lennon could have said straight gibberish into the microphone and gotten a reaction out of a crowd, with every female fan going crazy the moment they laid eyes on any of the band members. The Beatles circus had officially descended upon the world, and Nash managed to fit his way into the story years before he started making his own masterpieces.
