The Beatles song that wasn’t cool enough for them: “We wouldn’t have made it”
The Beatles were never meant to be one of the heaviest bands in the world when they started out. They did eventually have their moments where they could rock harder than most people, but when people first got a load of them on the Ed Sullivan Show, it was about them being four of the biggest heartthrobs since Elvis Presley together on one stage. Then again, their heavy side should never be discounted, considering the dives they had to play to get on that stage in New York.
The whole point behind their music was to entertain at all costs, and that normally meant jamming until the early hours of the morning, playing whatever they could. If they thought that working on a handful of originals was going to be tough, they had no idea what was in store for them when they got to Hamburg, playing regular eight-hour shifts onstage and making sure that they kept the music going for as long as they could.
And when the former Fabs talked about their behaviour back then, it was almost a snapshot into what punk would become. John Lennon had famously said that he had the kind of stage performances that the Sex Pistols would go on to perform in the 1970s, and it wasn’t out of the question for them to play as brawls broke out on the street outside. That didn’t mean they didn’t have a sensitive side.
After all, one of the biggest draws of their sound was playing what the audience wanted to hear, and that meant learning a few non-rock and roll tunes to get them ahead. It may have been a fun way of diversifying their catalogue, but it was no secret that Lennon suffered through some of McCartney’s ‘granny music’ after having to deal with playing show tunes in their downtime like ‘A Taste of Honey.’
“I think if we’d just been cool, we wouldn’t have made it how we did… “
paul mccartney
When listening to Beatles Anthology, though, there were a lot more tunes in their arsenal they didn’t put on record. ‘Besame Mucho’ was a welcome change of pace during their audition process, and while ‘Til There Was You’ did end up on With The Beatles, the lads were much more known for tunes like ‘All My Loving.’ If there was any song the band was particularly embarrassed of, it was ‘Ain’t She Sweet.’
Despite the band playing the tune regularly in their club days, Paul McCartney remembered the tune being a bit too soft compared to their usual output, saying, “A lot of our tracks may not have been ‘cool’. I think if we’d just been cool, we wouldn’t have made it how we did… The fact that we weren’t ashamed of those [cabaret] leanings meant that the band could be a bit more varied. And there was a need for that because we played cabaret a lot. Songs like ‘Till There Was You’ and ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ would be the late-night cabaret material.”
Even if it earned them a few dirty looks from rock and roll fans, those songs actually gave them much more musicality later on. Since many of them were taken from Broadway plays, that meant the band started learning jazzy chords and looking at their subsequent releases, songs from ‘Michelle’ to ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ would have never worked had they not had that same musical vocabulary.
But even if the band had stayed a purely rock and roll outfit, their versions of these tunes were a delight to hear. The boys in the crowd may have been itching to hear some rock and roll, but throwing in an odd show tune here and there was the perfect way for the band to connect with the more sophisticated listeners in their audience.
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