I mentioned back on 'How Do You Do It' how the Merseysound was not something that appealed to me in any great measure. There's always something about the shift away from direct rock and roll rebellion to an English holiday camp type of presentation that irritated, that in many ways seemed a step back to an almost pre-war past in tone instead of building towards the future. Of course, a lot of the bands did use the era as a springboard to better things - none more than The Beatles - but on the whole it's a Liverpool-centric era that I'll not be too sorry to see the back of.Very much a product of this movement, 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' dances precariously on the head of a pin for my affections, bringing out as it does the worst traits of the genre yet also the best of The Beatles to counter it. Taking the negatives first, the very title is a good place to start; 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' smacks of a polite tweeness, an English reserve that's keen to pander to an audience a world apart from the worldly wise twentysomethings singing it (it's interesting to compare it with the American slang of the 'I Wanna Be Your Man' single they wrote for the Rolling Stones that same year) and sexual shenanigans inherent in the very phrase 'rock and roll'. Hitched up to a main theme that skips out with the cutesy familiarity of a nursery rhyme then you have a recipe for an oversugared dish that even Freddy Garrity would have passed up as being too childish.
But then The Beatles, being The Beatles, pull a rabbit out of the hat in the form of the bridge "And when I touch you I feel happy inside" diversion that takes the song out of the nursery and into more grown up territory where the mere touch of a body sparks an electrical thrill that gives life to the would be hand holder like Michelangelo's God reaching out to jump start Adam with his finger on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It makes the hand holding a selfish, quasi sexual one (of course, it would have helped my thesis enormously if Lennon had actually been singing "I get high" instead of "I can't hide", but you can't have everything) and it's a diversion off the road more travelled that gives 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' its colour - you couldn't imagine Freddy Garrity pulling that off without making it sound cornball.
And even that simpleton tune has its own secrets; behind the soft gooey caramel of the basic melody is a hard nut centre of a rumbling garage guitar riff that provides a firm spine for Lennon and McCartney to implore "Oh please, say to me you'll let me be your man. And please, say to me you'll let me hold your hand" over. Trite yes, but delivered with a shrill shot of energy ("I want to hold your haaaAAaaAAnd") that's positively orgasmic, making the final score Merseysound 1, The Beatles 4.
It has become fashionable to knock 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' as merely a 'pop song'. And when I say 'become fashionable' I mean since about 1966. The title doesn't help. It doesn't sit well with a rock audience clamouring to 'get down to it'. It's about as far from having sex as asking a girl 'can I sit next to you?'. Which brings me to my first point. Why does a 'rock' audience accept Bon Scott from AC/DC asking 'Can I Sit Next To You Gir1?" but not The Beatles asking to hold hands? Is it simply because AC/DC look like a bunch of thugs and sing with a certain amount of menace? Does that make it acceptable for a rock audience? Is 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' 'uncool' because The Beatles look 'cute' and sing less menacingly? Similar, 'first base' requests, yet a rock audience can accept one but not so much the other.
ReplyDeleteBut there is so much more to 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' beyond the title of the song, which leads me to my second point. The excitement generated by the opening stacato chord sequence just grabs the listener by the throat and demands attention. The way 'hand' is sung, be it 'I want to hold your HAND'.... or 'I want to hold your haaaAAnnAAnnd', it lifts the emotions above what would have been expected just reading the words. And when the song slows down for 'and when I touch you I feel happy...' it lulls the listener into almost a dreamy state before blasting back with the orgasmic climb of 'I can't hide... I can't hide... I can't HIIIIIIIDDDDEEE'. A rollercoaster of emotions that make 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' much more than a mere 'pop song'.
But there is one more point I'd like to make. It is the subtleties and the not-so-subtleties that lift this song even further up the appreciation scale. It may be titled 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' but that is just to appease the purists who hold the English language as a sacred cow. There is a distinct clipping of the words and it is sung in a kind of American twang. 'I wannna hold your han'....'An wen R tuch you R fill hap-pear... insigh'... And of course 'R gair high'. They absolutely slaughter the English language to grand affect, something that usually sits quite well with the 'rock set'. Then there are the hand claps that feature throughout the song but were never used in concert, giving the song some extra zing. But the coup-de-gras of subtleties is the whispered 'something' following the line 'tell you something' the second time it is sung. It is barely audable. It's just put there because they wanted it there. A little hidden gem for the listener to discover.
All in all, a blockbuster song which deserves more respect than it usually recieves.
I think Bon Scott by his very reputation delivers his question with as much innuendo as the wolf in Grandma's nightclothes asking Little Red Riding Hood to come closer to the bed so he can see her. Sitting next to her might be the first thing on Bon's mind, but it ain't the last and there's going to be more going on after the song has finished which I don't get from The Beatles song. They were too clean cut for that at that stage, and McCartney could never hope to sing with Bon's laviscousness anyway; Lennon could have, but I don't think he ever did.
ReplyDeleteGrace Slick (when interviewed for a Beatles documentary) once commented "Of course you don't want to hold her hand, you wanna dick her", but I think she's wrong on that; Slick was speaking from an American, post 1966 viewpoint, not from the point of view of the early days of the first wave of Britpop. Lennon and McCartney DO in fact sound like they want nothing more than that first touch of skin on skin, it's all they need to feel "happy inside" and it makes the song far more a closed circle than the AC/DC track and far more innocent.
I agree about the vocal twang' - they have to sing 'wanna' because if they pronounced the 't' then there'd be nothing to bounce into 'hold' off. But there's a politeness about the very action being sung about that NEEDS that specific wording of the title - to have called it 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' would have been as ludicrous as the Ramones singing 'I Want To Be Sedated'. But I think it's the wrapping it up in such niceties combined with the boys' obvious good intentions that makes it more pop than rock, but there's no reason why a pop song can't be cool.