Paul – lead
vocals, bass
John – harmony vocals, rhythm guitar
George – lead guitar
Ringo – drums
The momentous first track on the Beatles’ first LP was well chosen, an inspired opening to the group’s catalogue. Had it been finished in time, it would have made an admirable debut single, outclassing ‘Love Me Do’ and even ‘Please Please Me’ itself. It is with good reason that ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ has since become a rock standard.
If the covers on Please Please Me indicate the sources of influence on the Beatles’ music, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ clearly shows how these influences affected the music of the group. It is literally rhythm and blues – driving rhythm, syncopated melody, and a preponderance of blue notes and progressions: in cover version terms it is ‘Anna’ meets ‘Twist And Shout’. With the full catalogue of songs available to us in the gift of hindsight, it is worth looking closely at ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. Melodically, harmonically and lyrically, it holds clues to the direction John and Paul’s writing would take, miraculously encapsulated in its two minutes fifty seconds.
The song is most notable for a memorable first indication of the strength of John and Paul as a songwriting partnership. The song was written by Paul, who then knocked it into shape with John. Paul has offered slightly conflicting accounts of the writing of the song. He has often stated that he and John were “sagging off” from school when they wrote it in the front parlour of the McCartney home, but he has also said that “it was co-written, my idea, and we finished it that day” in September 1962. Paul, at twenty, had long finished his formal education by then. While many early Lennon-McCartney songs, including ‘Love Me Do’, may have been written during spells of truancy, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ probably was not one of them. Nevertheless, Paul remembers he “had the lyrics ‘just 17, never been a beauty queen’ which John – it was one of the first times he ever went ‘What? Must change that…’ and it became ‘you know what I mean’.” This less explicit, more suggestive alternative shows at the outset of their recording careers, the brilliance of the Lennon-McCartney relationship. Over the years it would develop and blossom, providing an apparently endless wealth of inventiveness, until its premature fracture under the stress of internal development and outside influences. This casual injection of the language of record-buyers – not clichéd, but real – would set them apart from professional or imported songwriters. Already evident in ‘Please Please Me’ (“oh yeah”), this directness is her complemented by the poetry Paul channelled into ‘P.S. I Love You’ (“treasure these few words”), and all in one couplet – “You know what I mean / And the way she looked was way beyond compare”.
Paul has never made any bones about the fact that he and John were musically “always taking a little of this and a little of that. It’s called being influenced. It’s either called that or stealing. And what do they say? A good artist borrows; a great artist steals – or something like that. That makes us great artists then, because we stole a lot of stuff.” For ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, the theft he owns up to is the bass line, lifted from the guitar in Chuck Berry’s 1961 single ‘I’m Talking About You’.
(This Chuck Berry song was a staple of their live set in 1962, and an excellent version can be heard on Live At The BBC Volume 2. This performance is unusual in that it wasn’t pre-recorded, but played live on air. A heavy cold meant that John had had to bow out of the UK tour from 12-14 March 1963. Because of this, and a clashing commitment with Radio Luxembourg, the recording session for the 16 March edition of Saturday Club had to be cancelled, and the group played their contributions live from Broadcasting House.)
The middle “Well my heart went boom” section anticipates the young composers’ early break for freedom from songwriting traditions. Conventional wisdom dictated that the middle section of a song be eight bars in length – the shorthand “middle eight” being almost a definition. But this earliest of songs flaunted the rule, having a middle eight that was a natural ten bars long. Paul realised that the excitement generated by squeezing a higher note out of the falsetto “mine”, and extending it for two bars, would outweigh the need to conform to tradition. The verse was divided into two sections of eight bars each, but the middle had ten. This single-mindedness of song structure, to write what comes naturally rather than what is “right”, can be seen in many of the Beatles’ works, notably the steadfast seven-bar structure of ‘Yesterday’.
This falsetto hook, used more powerfully on the “ooh” of the chorus, was a calculated attempt to generate excitement in concert, and also adds a lot of energy to the recorded songs. They had noticed that the teenage girls in the audience responded particularly well to the combination of high-pitched vocals coupled with head-shaking, and so included it in a number of their up-tempo songs – most notably ‘From Me To You’, ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.
This falsetto “ooh” is of greater musical significance in its harmonic role. Paul and John later spoke of the excitement they felt when writing songs as they stumbled into new territory, such as the D7–Em (V7–vi) switch of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ or the C–Gm7 (I–v7) progression to the middle eight of ‘From Me To You’. But the earliest and strongest example of this must be the chorus of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, with its E7–A7–C (I7–IV7–bVI) progression.
This minor third progression from A to C natural was probably consciously introduced – Buddy Holly used it in some songs and John and Paul were no doubt aware of its effect – but it is important as it had not been used before in up-tempo rhythm and blues material. Terence O’Grady points out that in anticipation of this device, Paul’s bass line (along with John’s rhythm guitar) changes from arpeggio quavers to repeated crotchets to give “a clear signal to the listener that something exceptional is about to happen”. That it is capped by Paul’s trademark whoop only reinforces it power – a tremendous moment at the peak of a great song. The anticipation of the moment before its third and final appearance makes it all the more moving.
The melody of the verse itself is unexceptional, being predominantly on one note, E, but hovers on the brink of the subtonic, being constantly pulled down to D natural. The dynamics of this bring in excitement throughout the verse which is emphasised by the extensive perfect harmonies of the chorus – that is, perfect in both the musical and the aesthetic sense. The chorus also introduces a natural seventh (D#) after the series of consistently flattened ones.
Naturally, the song went down a storm during the group’s live gigs. The second of two BBC performances recorded in front of an audience, for Easy Beat in October 1963, was released on Live At The BBC. For comparison, a studio version, recorded just over a month earlier for Saturday Club, appears on Live At The BBC Volume 2. One of their longer songs – on the album, only ‘Anna’ is longer – when played live it would reportedly go on for up to ten minutes.
‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which was called ‘Seventeen’ throughout the recording and mixing process, was the second of two tracks recorded in the morning of the day’s session. Initially, two full takes were recorded (take 2 is on The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963), followed by three so-called edit pieces. Two of these edit pieces were of the instrumental break, complete with over-the-top whooping and yelling, and one was of the song’s ending. George Martin obviously envisaged livening up one of the full takes by cutting in the edit pieces. However, he then decided to try one more take of the full song. Three aborted takes followed, with Paul concerned they were taking it too fast, and John fluffing a lyric or two.
The following take, the ninth, was the last to be recorded and ended the morning session. Paul, obviously irritated with the problems they were having, launched take 9 with a cracking, high-energy count-in. Towards the end of the afternoon session, handclaps were overdubbed onto the first and last takes. However, after all of that effort, when it came to mixing the album on 25 February, George Martin decided take 1 was best, with no edits added, but with the overdubbed handclaps. Nonetheless, he had the brilliant idea of editing Paul’s go-gettem take 9 count-in onto the start of take 1, and this is therefore the recording that he gifted to posterity. Take 9, with its count-in intact, can be heard as a bonus track on the 1995 ‘Free As A Bird’ single.
By using such a powerful song as a “mere” album track – albeit an opener for side one of their debut LP – the Beatles took this early opportunity to stake their claim as a songwriting force to be reckoned with.