At about 9am on February 11th, 1963, The Beatles arrived at Abbey Road Studio Two to record ten songs in a single day for their debut album Please Please Me. This feat would be unheard of in today’s world of three or even five-year album cycles, and by the late 1960s, the band themselves had left it far behind.
But working on a tiny budget with tight time constraints amid a UK tour that would take up the rest of their year, it was a case of needs must. The band hurriedly set up their equipment and got to work on the first song of the morning, the soaring Lennon-McCartney ballad ‘There’s a Place’, which invoked the yearning melancholia of Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story.
Next, they moved onto a track that would allow lead guitarist George Harrison to flex his fingers. With the band’s previously recorded singles ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’ leaning heavily on John Lennon’s harmonica playing for instrumental embellishment, Harrison’s guitar hadn’t got much of a look-in. A single-bar riff at the end of each verse’s first line in ‘Please Please Me’ added some raw-edged rock and roll to the song and hinted at the music of early garage bands. But the hook still belonged to the harmonica, and it was the same story with ‘There’s a Place’.
Finally, halfway through the sixth song The Beatles were recording for their album, Harrison was getting his moment. A raucous uptempo number designed for dancefloors and live sets afforded him a full 16 bars to go to work.
And which song was it?
The track was another original thought up by Paul McCartney and finished off by his songwriting partner Lennon, under the provisional title ‘Seventeen’. It was later renamed ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and became the opening song on the group’s debut album, getting it off to a flying start following McCartney’s famous “One, two, three, FOUR!” count-in.
Harrison’s solo arrives at the end of the second verse, introduced by wild screams from McCartney in the style of Little Richard. He swings into the song’s groove a touch late with a bluesy minor-key guitar figure that brings a rough-and-ready flavour to the song’s middle section, signalling that it’s time for Merseybeat boppers in the dance halls to get down to business. For the most part, though, the rest of the solo plays around the track’s basic chord structure on the beat in a manner that suits its relentless dance rhythm but shows little of Harrison’s personality as a guitarist.
He was still years away from developing the note-bending, loose and languid style that became his signature, and imbued songs like his own composition ‘Something’ with emotive guitar lines rich in emotion, conveying more than words ever could. We hear glimpses of Harrison’s feel for groove in ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, but he didn’t yet have the confidence to flesh out rhythm variations into the basis for a song-stealing solo.
Harrison was in the band for his technical proficiency as a lead guitarist, but his creativity with the instrument was still to blossom. It’s worth bearing in mind that he was just 19 at the time of the Please Please Me recordings. However, he was on his way as a soloist, and by the end of the decade, he would have a body of work to compare with the very best around.
