The Beatles song Paul Rodgers thought was “perfect”
Most people of a certain age, whether they were fans, musicians, or didn’t care for their music much at all, can probably pinpoint the exact moment when they first heard The Beatles.
Immediately treated as a global phenomenon, the emergence of the Liverpudlian group is something that changed culture forever, and whether your earliest exposure to them would have been through a television performance, through the radio, or simply buying one of their records on a whim, it would almost undoubtedly have stuck with the listener in some regard, knowing that they had become such a cultural powerhouse.
For someone growing up on the opposite coast of the North of England, Paul Rodgers would have been in the right demographic for experiencing The Beatles with an impressionable mind, and considering that he was already at a point in the early ‘60s where he was harbouring ambitions of becoming a performer himself, hearing another fellow act from a similar region to him succeed at doing this would have been a life-changing and eye-opening experience.
While Free would emerge as a more blues-oriented rock act by the end of the decade, the star power of acts like The Beatles would have been a major catalyst in spurring on Rodgers to become a frontman, and when they released their best-known song, ‘All Right Now’ in 1970, it shot them to levels of notoriety on a global scale that Rodgers would perhaps have previously dreamed of when witnessing his idols do the same.
During an interview with journalist Gary James, Rodgers revealed more about his earliest memories of hearing The Beatles, and how they stunned him as a 14-year-old when he heard them deliver a faultless performance on the radio.
“The Beatles, good Lord,” he proclaimed. “What can you say about The Beatles? They sounded good! I remember listening to them on the radio when they had ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ out as a single, right? They were all set up in the studio and they were chatting away to a DJ called Pete Murray in England at the time. And they were chatting away, being The Beatles, funny and witty and all that stuff and then he says: ‘Okay. You gonna play your new single?’ Then they played ‘live’ and it was perfect. It was just like the record. That’s how good The Beatles were.”
It’s such a vivid account of what he remembers from the experience – clearly just as clear to him now as it was back then – which goes to show how deeply the band impacted young people in the 1960s, and just how much those first memories of discovering them are still cherished today.
‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, while a single from their third record, A Hard Day’s Night, is perhaps the band at the peak of their pop prowess, and sees Paul McCartney deliver an attitude-filled yet emotive vocal performance unlike any other that he had given up to that point. Everything they’d promised on previous releases was finally coming to fruition on this track, and it’s no wonder that hearing it on the radio that day ignited something in Rodgers and caused him to develop a lifelong infatuation with them.
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