Welcome to November. I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but on October 31 we had flurries that actually became blizzard-like for about 10 minutes during the afternoon with strong winds and the snow blowing sideways across the front of the house.
I hope that’s not a taste of what this winter will be like.
On October 5, 1962, a single called “Love Me Do” hit record stores in England.
It was the debut 45 by the Beatles – though, at the time, that name didn’t mean much to many English fans outside of Manchester and their native Liverpool. (The band’s frequent performances at the Star Club in Hamburg had already won them a devoted following in Germany, however.) The song was a surprise hit, rising to Number 17 on one of the many weekly charts around the U.K., a strong enough showing to convince EMI they had made a smart bet in signing the Beatles.
Paul McCartney began writing “Love Me Do” a few years earlier, in 1958, when he was playing hooky from school at age 16. Soon afterwards, he sat down with John Lennon to flesh it out. “It was completely co-written,” McCartney later said. “It might have been my original idea, but some of them really were 50-50s, and I think that one was. It was just Lennon and McCartney sitting down without either of us having a particularly original idea.”
Lennon had a slightly different recollection of events. “‘Love Me Do’ is Paul’s song,” he said in 1980. “Let me think. I might have helped with the middle eight, but I couldn’t swear to it. I do know he had the song around, in Hamburg, even, way, way before we were songwriters.”
The Beatles, as we all know, went on to become the biggest and most influential rock ‘n’ roll band of all time. Their catalogue of hits included “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “All You Need is Love,” “Get Back,” “Yesterday,” “Eight Days A Week,” “Cant’ Buy Me Love,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Twist and Shout,” “Help,” “A Hard’s Day Night,” “Penny Lane,” and their masterpiece watershed album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
They wrote and recorded all of that, and much, much more, from October 1962 to April 1970—just 7 years—when they broke up and went their separate ways. They were all still in their twenties.
Now, 61 years after they released their first single, and long after both John Lennon (1980) and George Harrison (2001) died, comes a new song featuring all of The Beatles.
The song started as a demo that John had recorded and that Yoko Ono had given to George. But whereas they were able to record “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love” from similar cassette demos, “Now And Then” presented a bigger challenge because they couldn’t separate John’s voice from the piano he played on while recording the demo.
After giving it a few tries, they gave up.
It wasn’t until Peter Jackson developed the software to separate vocals, voices and instruments during the creation of the documentary, “Get Back,” that an opportunity presented itself to complete “Now And Then.” They had John’s voice, George’s guitar and backing vocals, and Paul and Ringo took the pieces and added their parts including bass, drums, vocals, and some strings.
What they produced is a meloncholy, down beat tune. Yet with John’s soulful vocals and the harmonies added by Paul and George, it sounds like … The Beatles.
It’s astonishing that more than a generation later, the surviving half of the band were able to perform, once more, with their missing bandmates.
According to Paul McCartney, this is the last Beatles song. There are no more recordings. It truly is The End.
Have a good weekend.
