This is, after all, the band that Jim Morrison claimed that the Doors aspired to be when they started. – Daniel Bromfield Love – Love (1966)įor a band that few outside of those with a deep interest in ‘60s psychedelia recall, Love had quite the impact in their time. At its best, Please Please Me convinces us that what was to come, and the profound impact it would have on pop music and culture in later decades wasn’t an evolution of this music but an elaboration. But to view this as a formative portrait of an embryonic band would be a mistake the Beatles were already miles ahead of their peers. Listening to this album in 1963 it’d be hard to predict how far into uncharted territory the Beatles’ caprices would take them. This is, above all else, a very good record by a very good band, adept at both covers and originals, with a cerebral approach that proved they wanted to make more than just good rock music. While later Beatles albums have calcified into irrefutable facts whose greatness is a burden to us all, it’s easy on Please Please Me to see these “laughing freemen,” as Timothy Leary called them, as lads: beer-drinkers from Liverpool who’d been forged in the Hamburg crucible into something formidable. It’s easy to see why Lennon would be drawn to “Anna (Go To Him):” the conflict between the ocean of hurt in his mind and his understanding that the right thing to do would be to let his girl walk away makes it as turbulent an angry-young-man song as any he wrote. These Beatles were already a fearsome band with an encyclopedic knowledge of the pop of the day, which is why the covers rub elbows with the best originals: they’ve internalized them and understand what makes them good songs. The math checks out: it has “Please Please Me,” “Love Me Do,” and ‘Twist and Shout,” and, well, a lot of people like “I Saw Her Standing There.” “There’s a Place” is one of their most underrated songs, an early entry in the self-loathing Lennon canon that takes the piss out of songs like Sondheim’s “Somewhere” where idealists dream of a place at the end of the road (for Lennon, the dream is the end of the road). This is one of the stronger Beatles albums. – Nathan Stevens The Beatles – Please Please Me (1963) And, more importantly, the ripples cascading out from this one perfect soul record are still reverberating today. Hell, even Robert Plant owed something to the lustful energy James smacked into “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Though James never reached the heights of At Last! again, it’s arguable that no one else did either. What she had was flexibility, transforming from a righteous priestess of romance and wrath one moment, then a tender, helping hand the next.Īt Last! ended up being her summit, but how could it not be? It reshaped what soul could be for a whole decade and encouraged a sort of wonderful opulence that would even sneak into the funk and disco of the ‘70s, wishing to find that same musical ecstasy that James seem to casually exude. And move over Otis, when James hits the top notes on “All I Could Do Was Cry,” nobody was matching that unrestricted blast of emotional fury in this or any other planet. “A Sunday Kind of Love” could have fully indulged in its lounging verses, but James dragged the whole orchestra up with her to her own emotional highs. But, really, that was every song on At Last! that held that sort of overwhelming quality. What in the world were you supposed to do in 1961, turning on the radio and hearing the butter smooth flow of “At Last” flow out of your speakers? Probably just sit back and bask in the glory of that Gershwin backdrop bowing in the presence of James’ voice, bouncing between delightful lovey-doveyness and unbridled strength, both extremes needed just to accent how much love there was in the song. But she had something just as undeniable, if harder to define. Etta James didn’t have the technical perfection of Ella Fitzgerald, the sheer Olympian power of Aretha Franklin or the pain-filled beauty of Nina Simone. In the American soul canon, there are a handful of voices that hold supernatural abilities. Together we can debate whether the first thought was the best thought-and wonder why everybody forgot about The Doors. Starting with the tumultuous ‘60s, Spectrum Culture staff will size up the greatest debut albums of all time. Did your favorite band emerge from the womb fully formed or did its sound take years to develop and perfect? For some musicians, lightning strikes as soon as the first album comes together.
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