THE BEATLES
“TWIST AND SHOUT”

ISLEY BROTHERS/TOP NOTES COVER

SONG

“TWIST AND SHOUT”
[B/W] “THERE’S A PLACE” (1963)

WRITTEN BY

BURT BERNS, PHIL MEDLEY

FIRST RECORDED BY

THE TOP NOTES (1961)

The adorable mop-tops in February 1963, five months before “Twist and Shout”

Before “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” and “Hey Jude”—before even “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me”—the Beatles were a covers band. Every night they played Top 40 hits to inebriated patrons in Liverpool and Hamburg bars. They catered to their audiences, and their audiences did not want to hear songs a bar band had written themselves.

They didn’t even always want rock and roll, so the covers the Beatles played branched beyond the obvious Elvis and Buddy Holly tunes. “We had these fat old businessmen coming in . . . and saying ‘Play us a mambo or a rumba’ or something,” Paul McCartney said later. “So we had to get into this kind of stuff.”

Blew everybody’s hair back.

The pre-fame Beatles covered Johnny Mercer’s schmaltzy big-band song “Dream.” They covered Irving Berlin’s classic ballad “Blue Skies.” They covered a Leiber and Stoller song much more obscure than “Hound Dog,” “Some Other Guy.” And they covered songs from the era’s dance craze: the twist.

Joey Dee and the Starliters’s “Peppermint Twist” and Gene Vincent’s “Twist in the Street” (rewritten from “Dance in the Street” to capitalize on the fad) both found their way into the band’s repertoire. McCartney even wrote an original twist song called “Pinwheel Twist” (a friend who heard it described it as “fucking awful”). One twist song really got the crowd dancing, though: a cover of the Isley Brothers’ new single, “Twist and Shout.”

It’s a testament to the Beatles’ love of American rhythm and blues that they knew this song at all. As first recorded by the Top Notes, “Twist and Shout” had flopped. The Isley Brothers’ subsequent cover did slightly better, but still had not reached the chart heights of “Peppermint Twist,” Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away,” or any of Chubby Checker’s three twist songs. Not only that, but what success it had was in America, where it was still orders of magnitude more popular than it was England. But among Liverpool’s few superfans of American R&B were John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

The Isley Brothers performing on the British show Ready Steady Go! on November 27, 1964; ironically, one of their fellow performers on that episode was the Beatles.

“If the Beatles ever wanted a sound, it was R&B,” McCartney said. “That’s what we used to listen to, what we used to like and what we wanted to be like. Black, that was basically it.”

But the Beatles weren’t black, and they weren’t an R&B band. They played rock and roll. So over the course of hundreds of concerts, they adapted “Twist and Shout” to fit their abilities. They amped up the guitars. They ditched the original’s prominent horn part. They added a second crescendo (the “Ahh-ahh-ahh” bit) to drag out the audience ecstasy that much longer. They adored the Isley Brothers, but their cover didn’t sound much like them.

Being such fans of the original, they felt a little guilty about their inauthentic cover. “I always hate singing the song ‘Twist and Shout’ when there’s a colored artist on the bill with us,” John Lennon said at the time. “It doesn’t seem right, you know. I feel sort of embarrassed . . . It makes me curl up. I always feel they could do the song much better than me.”

But the crowds loved it, so the band began to make it their sure-fire show closer. It wouldn’t have been as familiar as many of the other covers they did, but crowds never failed to erupt. When Bruce Springsteen closed his own shows with the song, he called it his “stadium-wrecker” for the way it made the building go wild (years later). It served the same purpose for the Beatles—though then in small, sweaty clubs rather than stadiums.

Fast-forward a couple years and hundreds of concerts. By February 1963, the Beatles were no longer a covers band, reportedly boasting over a hundred original compositions even then. Both the singles they had released in their fledgling recording career—“Love Me Do/PS I Love You” the previous October and “Please Please Me/Ask Me Why” in January—had raced up the British charts. They needed to record an album, and fast, to capitalize on their early success. Then called Off the Beatles Track (a title thankfully abandoned), the album needed ten more songs to surround these hit singles. A day was booked at EMI Studios—later to be known as Abbey Road—to bang out some tracks. They had four songs done and only one day to record the rest of the album. It’s become known as the most productive day in the history of recording studios.

“They realized this was quite a different technique than standing in front of a stage with screaming girls,” remembers studio engineer Richard Langham of the recording process. “They were so used to singing and playing on top of each other with everything spilling over into all of the microphones. Our main challenge was to get isolation so you could control them. They were quite amenable [to taking more care to get the sound right].”

Despite their years playing covers, the band members now considered themselves primarily songwriters, and wanted their first album to be entirely original material. “We want to try to make the LP something different,” Lennon said in an interview at the time. “You know, not just all somebody else’s songs.”

However, things got off to a slow start. The first half of the day was spent recording two original songs, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “There’s a Place,” and in neither case did they deliver a satisfactory take after hours of trying. They’d used up half of the only day they had to record the album.

To speed things along, they began recording some of the crowd-pleasing covers they’d honed on club stages, songs they knew backwards and forwards. Whatever notions they’d held of an all-originals album vanished. In short order the band recorded Lenny Welch’s chirpy pop rarity “A Taste of Honey,” Arthur Alexander’s soul weeper “Anna (Go to Him),” and girl group songs by the Cookies (“Chains”) and Shirelles (“Baby It’s You” and “Boys,” Ringo’s singing debut).

They banged out the covers quickly, trying to re-create their stage show within the cold confines of the studio. “That record tried to capture us live, and was the nearest thing to what we might have sounded like in Hamburg and Liverpool,” Lennon said in 1975. “It’s the nearest you can get to knowing what we sounded like before we became the ‘clever’ Beatles.”

The covers required only one or two takes, having been refined over so many shows. Despite the late start, by the time night fell they’d recorded nine complete songs—five originals and four covers. It was late and they were exhausted. But they still needed one more song.

Like so many things in the Beatles’ world, their eleventh-hour decision to record “Twist and Shout” has taken on near-mythic status among fans. Multiple people have claimed credit for suggesting the song that night. The most-told story finds the band hosting a late-night summit in the studio’s cafeteria, exhausted and unsure how to finish the album until a visiting reporter makes the crucial suggestion.

Most people think the Isley Brothers’ 1961 “Twist and Shout” (shown here) was the first recorded version of this song, but the Top Notes actually got there first, in 1956.

It’s a good story, but that and most of the others are bogus, says studio engineer Langham. “If everybody was there who says they were there, there wouldn’t have been any room for me to get in there and work,” he says. “Basically we recorded their stage show, what songs they knew already. ‘Twist and Shout’ was just one more at the end. [Producer] George Martin said to John, ‘Shall we give it a go and see if your voice will take it?’”

Not only did they plan on recording “Twist and Shout,” but they planned on recording it last. Lennon’s only other lead vocals that day—“Anna” and “Baby It’s You”—were midtempo ballads that demanded little vocally. “Twist and Shout” was different. John knew from closing so many concerts with it that performing the song would shred his vocal cords. And that was on a good day. On this day he was sick.

“John’s voice was pretty shot,” first engineer Norman Smith remembered. “They had a whole tin of throat lozenges plus cartons of cigarettes on the piano. John had to do the last track [‘Twist and Shout’] on that first album, so he swallowed two or three of the lozenges before we attacked it. It’s not an easy number for any vocalist to sing, but we had to get it in one take.”

Lozenges downed, Lennon stepped up to the microphone. Despite being sick and exhausted—one report says he was so overheated he took off his shirt, but Langham can’t confirm whether that’s true—he pulled himself together and delivered one of the greatest vocal performances of his career. The Beatles rarely recorded covers as dynamically as they did their own songs. But their performance of “Twist and Shout” proved transcendent, not in spite of the trying circumstances but because of them.

In 1966, the Beatles returned to their old stomping ground of Hamburg, Germany—only this time, they weren’t playing in a grotty beer hall but a 5,600-seat arena.

You can hear the sickness in Lennon’s voice, scratchy and cracking repeatedly like a pubescent teen’s. The rawness is what makes the song stand out, grittier and more passionate than the clean and polished pop nuggets they were doing elsewhere. They tried a second take, but his voice was already gone. If Lennon hadn’t gotten it right that first time, “Twist and Shout” might never have been heard outside the beer halls of Hamburg.

“There’s a power in John’s voice there that certainly hasn’t been equaled since,” McCartney said years later. “And I know exactly why—it’s because he worked his bollocks off that day. We left ‘Twist and Shout’ until the very last thing because we knew there was one take.”

“The last song nearly killed me,” Lennon remembered a few years before his death in 1980. “My voice wasn’t the same for a long time after—every time I swallowed it was like sandpaper. I was always bitterly ashamed of it because I could sing it better than that, but now it doesn’t bother me. You can hear I’m just a frantic guy doing his best.”

The album—retitled Please Please Me—was released a month later, with their “Twist and Shout” cover as the final track. You know what happened next. Ed Sullivan. Screaming girls. The movies. India.

As opposed to “Hound Dog” or many other iconic cover songs, “Twist and Shout” didn’t dramatically change the band’s career arc. They had enough other hit songs in their arsenal, most of them originals. They didn’t need “Twist and Shout.” But it remains important for a reason. Though they continued to include covers on their next few albums, “Twist and Shout” remains the best showcase of the Beatles’ ability as first-rate song interpreters.

It also offers an early example about how a band can learn enough covering other people’s songs to eventually write their own. “Twist and Shout” illustrates the transition happening for cover songs in the mid-’60s. It was the moment when cover songs really came into their own.

Look at any hit from the first half of the twentieth century, and the performer’s name will rarely be the same as the songwriter. From Frank Sinatra through Elvis, performers were not expected to write their own material. As a result, few singers or fans thought of the cover song as a separate category. For the first half of the twentieth century, everything was a cover song for all intents and purposes. Musicians were expected to interpret songs other people wrote, not write anything themselves. Singer and performer were two separate career paths.

But by the mid-sixties, singer-songwriters were on the rise. Fans began placing a premium on singers writing their own material. The three most enduring rock artists of the decade—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan—all followed a similar trajectory: each of them started their career covering other people’s songs, but within a few years began writing their own material. In doing so, they raised the bar for their peers and flipped the pattern. Original songs became the norm; covers the exception.

“Twist and Shout” marks the end of the era where a band could record covers as a matter of course. “Real” musicians were now expected to write their own stuff. That meant that if you were going to buck the trends and do a cover, you’d better be damn sure it was worth it.