The 1964 Beatles song Paul McCartney called not good enough to remember: “Failed”
Paul McCartney didn’t get intoThe Beatles trying to be an average rock and roll group.
The band had their sights on becoming as big as Elvis Presley when they were kids, but they would have been delusional to think that they expected the tsunami of fans that they got once they hit the touring circuit for the first time. They were being treated like gods among men, but McCartney knew that he and John Lennon were just as fallible as anyone else when they were making their classics.
Because, in essence, a lot of what the duo were making back in the day was nothing more than traditional rock and roll love songs. They were incredibly accomplished and had been indebted to the music that they had heard coming from America, but compared to what they would be doing once they went psychedelic, no one was listening to what they had done on records like ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’ and thinking that they would single-handedly reshape what rock and roll would sound like.
They were still learning the tricks of the trade in many respects, and since George Martin was willing to work with them on every record, they had a clear line for where they wanted to go. But right before A Hard Day’s Night kicked everything into overdrive, With The Beatles is the kind of album that seemed to be more of the same coming off of their massive debut only a few months earlier.
Given how quickly they put it out, it’s no surprise that it was a lot more of the same, but they did have at least a little bit of room to grow. ‘All My Loving’ was one of the best songs that Macca had made up until that point, and even when choosing their covers, their versions of ‘Til There Was You’ and ‘You Really Got a Hold On Me’ showed a lot more depth to a band that was meant to be a little bit more than traditional rock and roll.
But of all the songs on their sophomore record, ‘Hold Me Tight’ was the kind of song that seemed much more thrown together than everything else. It’s still a decent rock and roll tune, and McCartney sings it beautifully, but if we’re talking about the production standards that the band had for themselves even back then, this feels like we’re hearing the garage rock version of what they were supposed to be.
Which probably explains why McCartney didn’t think the song really needed to be remembered all that often, saying, “When we first started it was all singles and we were always trying to write singles, That’s why you get lots of these two minute 30 second songs; they all came out the same length. ‘Hold Me Tight’ was a failed attempt at a single. I can’t remember much about that one. Certain songs were just ‘work’ songs, you haven’t got much memory of them. That’s one of them.”
And when you talk about filler by Beatles standards, ‘Hold Me Tight’ might be the clearest example of it. That might be bold saying that about an album that also has ‘Little Child’ on it, but since the song was already being used during the Please Please Me sessions and then abandoned, one had to wonder why it was suddenly good enough for their second record after it wasn’t good enough for their debut.
Still, the band do show a lot of promise on this song, and that’s the best that they could have hoped for from any of their filler material. Every one of their tunes was at least trying to be a single, but there’s something to be said about a song that gets the job done effectively and gets out of there fairly quickly.
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