In 1963, The Beatles were still trying to figure out what they wanted to be. They had spent most of the early ‘60s playing the clubs across Liverpool, and their debut Please Please Me was a way of capturing their live sound. When it came time to deliver the next album though, the band did have a few clunkers left over from the original session.
The original vision for With the Beatles was to give the public more of what they wanted, taking the rock and roll stompers of the first record and balancing them out with the love songs that they were getting better at. Although fans got to hear a different side of the band on this record, John Lennon was never that pleased with the song ‘Hold Me Tight’.
Though the song was a straight-ahead rock and roll love track, it was actually a leftover from their famous marathon session to record Please Please Me. Since it wasn’t good enough to be on the first album, Lennon didn’t have much to say about the song after the fact, saying: “That was Paul’s. Maybe I stuck some bits in there – I don’t remember. It was a pretty poor song and I was never really interested in it either way.”
McCartney was never that fond of the song either, not remembering much about the recording process. Since this was the early Beatles though, the focus was never to write the next ‘Strawberry Fields Forever‘. When discussing the early years, McCartney made it clear that every song was just trying to capitalise on having a nice single. He said: “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 which then became an acceptable album filler.”
There were even a handful of great songs that Lennon suggested were filler though, thinking that the song ‘Yes It Is’ was him trying to redo the song ‘This Boy’ and failing by comparison. Then again, this was only the beginning of the Beatles’ magic.
With each passing month, the band progressed by leaps and bounds. Never content to stay in one genre of music, every one of their songs had to have something different, whether that be new instruments or some weird structure that they hadn’t heard before.
Even when they were making classics, Lennon still had the same animosity towards his own work. Years after working with them, producer George Martin had mentioned that Lennon had a desire to redo every single Beatles song because he thought the production values were terrible, being most aggrieved at how poor ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ came out.
Though artists can sometimes be the harshest critics of their own work, it’s hard to compete with some of the greatest recordings ever made. It’s tough not to realise the vision in your head, but the music world is all the more fortunate that the Beatles had such high standards for themselves.
