The 1963 song Paul McCartney credited with giving The Beatles a future: “It gave us somewhere to go”
The case for Revolver being The Beatles’ most important record is ultimately rooted in one wildly experimental track from the album.
Without ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, it’s quite possible that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road would have never existed. It was the sonic moment where their decision to abandon touring and focus on the studio made complete sense, for the wild possibilities that existed within those four walls could change the face of music forever.
So its role in acting as a gateway between the relatively safe past and groundbreaking future made ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ perhaps their most important song. But as is always the case with The Beatles, there are more layers to their story than the surface might indicate, and no one song can truly be deemed the most influential, for their influence reaches far beyond just studio innovation.
Being the absolute cultural behemoth they are, they’ve changed the world in more ways than one. Perhaps most simply, the idea that they introduced popular music to a global audience is stronger than that of any other artist. Sure, as I point out, the retirement from touring meant that the Fab Four became the psychedelic groundbreakers of the late decade, but before that, they struck a lightning bolt through pop culture.
Building off of the much-loved American blues sound, they crafted instant pop hits that became ubiquitously popular. They mastered the art of the chorus and thus changed how popular music tapped into the mainstream, and ultimately, helped expedite the removal of artistic conservatism.
Their 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, set this agenda hard and fast. All of the hits that had been sung in clubs across the country and more famously, Hamburg, were now laid down on record for the whole world to enjoy. Recorded in the same way they would play it on stage, it bottled this infectious energy of the up-and-coming band, and let the entire world peek behind the curtain of greatness.
You could argue any of the songs on the record being the turning point, the ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ of this generational record. If any stand out immediately, it’s most likely the chorus of ‘Twist And Shout’. But for Paul McCartney, it was his baby ‘Love Me Do’, that changed it all.
“In Hamburg we clicked…at the Cavern we clicked… but if you want to know when we ‘knew’ we’d arrived,” he teased, “It was getting in the charts with ‘Love Me Do.’ That was the one. It gave us somewhere to go.”
Although it never peaked at number one – a place they would become familiar with for the next seven years – it did reach number 17 in the charts. More importantly, it made headway for the rest of the album, which saw their next singles, ‘Please Please Me’, which went to number one on February 27th, and ‘From Me to You’, which went to number one on May 8th.
But it was when Beatlemania hit America that ‘Love Me Do’ got its moment, hitting number one on May 30th and changing their lives completely.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.