“Please Please Me” was an early hit for The Beatles, but it might not have made it far in its original form. According to Beatles producer George Martin, the initial version of the song was slow and dull. When he pointed this out to the band, they felt embarrassed that they hadn’t noticed.
The Beatles’ producer embarrassed the band when he asked them to change ‘Please Please Me’
When The Beatles first played “Please Please Me” for Martin, he could scarcely keep from yawning. They wanted it on the first single, but he thought it was too boring as it stood.
“In the first year, I had the final decision on songs (I didn’t later on, but I did then), but they persuaded me to let them have their own songs on both sides of their first single,” Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “I was still thinking that we should release their recording of ‘How Do You Do It.’ They said, ‘Couldn’t we do one of our own, “Please Please Me?’ When I heard it originally, it was a Roy Orbison type of song, a very slow rocker, with a high vocal part, rather dreary, to be honest.”
Martin told them they should speed up the song’s tempo. When they heard the faster version, they felt embarrassed it hadn’t been their idea.
“We sang it and George Martin said, ‘Can we change the tempo?’ We said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Make it a bit faster. Let me try it.’ And he did,” Paul McCartney recalled. “We thought, ‘Oh, that’s all right, yes.’ Actually, we were a bit embarrassed that he had found a better tempo than we had.”
The Beatles initially wanted ‘Please Please Me’ to sound like Roy Orbison
Martin was correct in saying that the song sounded like Roy Orbison. This was what John Lennon intended when he wrote the song.
“It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song,” Lennon said. “I remember the day I wrote it. I remember the pink eiderdown over the bed, sitting in one of the bedrooms in my house on Menlove Avenue, my auntie’s place. I heard Roy Orbison doing ‘Only The Lonely’ on the radio. I was also always intrigued by the words to a Bing Crosby song that went, ‘Please lend a little ear to my pleas.’ The double use of the word ‘please.’ So it was a combination of Roy Orbison and Bing Crosby.”
They were much happier with the updated version
The band felt that Martin’s suggestions were an improvement on the song. They could hardly wait to record it.
“In the following weeks we went over it again and again,” Lennon said. “We changed the tempo a little, we altered the words slightly and we went over the idea of featuring the harmonica, just as we’d done on ‘Love Me Do.’ By the time the session came around, we were so happy with the result we couldn’t get it recorded fast enough.”
