We start with “I Feel Fine.”
Now once again, this is the American experience, my experience, with the truncated/bastardized LPs. “I Feel Fine” was on the second side of “Beatles ’65,” which, along with its successor, “Beatles VI,” corresponded with the English “Beatles For Sale,” now my favorite Beatles album. (Once again, I’m not saying the BEST, but just the one I play MOST! I could listen to “Every Little Thing” every day, and sometimes I do!)
“Beatles ’65” cemented the mania. Released for the holiday, Christmas of ’64, it had elements of darkness to go along with the short days. And “I Feel Fine” was all over the radio, it was our first exposure to feedback (at least the first we were aware of, save me the e-mails reciting musical history).
“Beatles VI” was neither fish nor fowl, which is why I didn’t buy it. With probably the worst cover of any Beatles album, its only hit was “Eight Days A Week,” which was a monster, one of my sisters bought the singles, by this time I was purely an album guy. And in the sixties no one could afford everything, so when you went to a friend’s house, you played what you did not have, and vice versa.
Now “Beatles VI” is full of covers, evidencing the band’s roots in Hamburg and the Cavern Club. But it does contain “Every Little Thing” and…”What You’re Doing.”
By this point, we all had electric guitars. And most of us had the songbook “The Golden Beatles.” We’d taken enough lessons to know the chords, if we were not yet experienced enough to know bar chords. I remember playing “What You’re Doing” having never heard it, and stunningly I got the rhythm right!
Now I never cottoned to “Yes It Is” back in the day, but with the appearance of Napster, when everything surfaced, I was exposed to Don Henley’s amazing cover, recorded live at a Bridge School Concert. You need to listen to it:
So tune in tomorrow, Tuesday, December 24th, at 7 PM East and 4 PM West.
Or catch it on a replay, or on demand on the SiriusXM app.
We’ll relive the history of what once was, Beatlemania, which was not only mania, it contained gravitas, there was no doubt in our minds that this music was gonna last…AND IT HAS!
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