Stephen King names the timeless Beatles song that will last forever: “Travelled best over the years”
The release of The Beatles‘ debut single is now closer to the 1800s than it is the present.
That means it’s closer to the founding of the Labour Party, the first manned flight ever made, and way closer to the sinking of the Titanic than it is to this crooked age. ‘Love Me Do’, backed by ‘PS I Love You’, arrived on a warm Friday – October 5th, 1962 – and caused enough of an initial stir to make it to a modest 17th in the charts.
It wouldn’t take long for the Fab Four to improve on that and change the world in the process. It’s their own revolutionary ways that have skewed our view of where they arrived in history. The manic Magical Mystery Tour is now closer to the pomp of Vaudeville shows in the 1910s and a time when less than 5% of houses had electricity than it is to the present. Yet it doesn’t feel that way at all.
The record seems to have stopped aging, shuffling closer to today, towering over newer, ‘cult’ masterpieces as it does so – records comparable, if not better, in terms of objective quality, yet quashed tenfold by the timelessness of The Beatles and the ‘importance’ that their art seemed to impart even at its most playful. They have, by and large, transcended society.
They are no longer just tied to their 1960s pomp but a woven fabric in the unfurling tapestry of our daily lives. As Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues put it, “The Beatles were in a different stratosphere, a different planet to the rest of us. All I know is when I heard ‘Love Me Do’ on the radio, I remember walking down the street and knowing my life was going to be completely different now the Beatles were in it.” Notice he says ‘my life’, not just his record collection or even his wardrobe, but his whole life. And billions of people have felt similarly.
There are a few other works of art and artists that have entered a similar remit. Not many bygone releases feel like common touchstones that still bind all of us together. However, there are a few cinematic examples, too.
Although he wasn’t all that fond of the adaptation, Stanley Kubrick’s take on Stephen King’s novella The Shining is a cultural artefact that also distends a looming influence over the present that feels timeless. It is constantly referenced in modern movies and there are plenty of places and moments in everyday life that seem positively Shining-esque.
So, it perhaps comes as no surprise that when King was assessing the Fab Four’s discography, it was this sense of permanence that he had his eye on. To him, a story should remain relevant regardless of whether its time has passed. On this front, he still feels like ‘She Loves You’ doesn’t have a grey hair on its head. And it was in King’s glossy youth that the track first slapped him around the chops and awakened life in sleepy Durham, Maine.
“It just gets in, it has only one thing to say, and it says it,” he reflected when selecting it as a record he couldn’t live without on Desert Island Discs. The horror writer described it as a track that sounded “totally fresh” then, and remains that way now. It is bursting with juvenile pop and fizz, the essence of youth culture in motion, released before youth culture was even an established thing.
In fact, it saw the band play around with form in a fitting literary postmodernist sense. The beloved group are reaching out to their fans with the track. “It was a third person,“ Paul McCartney told Barry Miles, “which was a shift away. ‘I saw her, and she said to me, to tell you, that she loves you, so there’s a little distance we managed to put in it, which was quite interesting.”
They are effectively taking on the role of the harbinger in one of King’s novels. In this case it was good tidings for the children of the revolution, but King has turned that trope on its head and provided a fair few harbingers of doom for his entranced readers over the years. Whether he would’ve done so without the influence of The Beatles is up for debate, but King himself would seemingly say, ‘Probably not’.
Oddly enough, although King might love the track, it is not one of the many that have appeared in his books. You can check out the inclusions below.
Every Beatles song in Stephen King books:
- ‘Ticket to Ride’ in The Shining
- ‘Back in the USSR’ in The Dead Zone
- ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ in Danse Macabre / 11/22/63
- ‘Hey Jude’ in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger / Doctor Sleep / Sleeping Beauties
- ‘Drive My Car’ in Christine
- ‘Here Comes The Sun’ in Dreamcatcher
- ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ in Duma Key
- ‘I Am The Walrus’ in Dreamcatcher
- ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in 11/22/63
- ‘Lady Madonna’ in Doctor Sleep
- ‘Let It Be’ in Doctor Sleep
- ‘Not A Second Time’ in Doctor Sleep
- ‘Bad Boy’ in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
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