‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’: The Beatles Take America
The pop song that changed everything.
It’s February 9, 1964 and The Beatles are making their debut live appearance on US television, closing a history-making episode of The Ed Sullivan Show by storming through their first US No 1 single, the explosive pop perfection of “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” From the crashing intro, the audience’s screams are seemingly as loud as the music. Amazingly, considering the occasion, there are no signs of nerves from the band; they look in turns utterly delighted and bemused by the reaction.
Roughly a minute in, the camera pans over Ringo Starr’s drumkit and the screams somehow intensify. At this moment the show’s director allows the audience at home to see the crowd responsible for such a wild cacophony. The camera focuses on Andrea Tebbetts, a 13-year-old girl who’d traveled from Connecticut to Manhattan, for the occasion – one of the lucky 700-or-so who’d snagged tickets (50,000 had applied). Andrea looks every inch the Beatle fan; she’s wearing a pinafore, hair slides, and cat-eye glasses, chewing gum like her life depends on it. She is balling her fists, crying “Yes” repeatedly while having what appears to be an out-of-body experience.
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The few seconds she’s on screen tell us everything about the sheer excitement and impact The Beatles and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” had on the United States. But just a few months prior to this, The Beatles had such a low profile in the country that their record label, Capitol, passed on releasing their early singles. So what changed?
The Beatles had gathered such momentum at this point that Capitol could no longer ignore them. Their success and work rate was staggering – in 1963 alone, they released two albums, three standalone singles, played over 200 gigs, and hosted their own BBC radio show. The thrilling “She Loves You” was released in August in the UK and became the biggest selling single of the 60s. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” followed just 14 weeks later, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney while “She Loves You” was at the top of the charts.
Writing And Recording “I Want To Hold Your Hand”
While some might shrink under the pressure of following up a generational hit, The Beatles thrived. Their profile had been rapidly growing but “I Want To Hold Your Hand” marked the first time that Lennon and McCartney set out to write a hit single knowing the true extent of the Beatlemania phenomenon. The two men worked on the song at 57 Wimpole Street, central London, the family home of McCartney’s new beau, the actress Jane Asher. McCartney had moved into the house’s self-contained attic apartment and made full use of Asher’s mother’s music room in the basement. As with so many of their early hits, it was a truly collaborative process. “I remember when we got the chord that made the song,” Lennon told Playboy in September 1980. “We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u/ got that something…’ And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that – both playing into each other’s nose. We spent hours and hours and hours…”
McCartney agreed when interviewed for Barry Miles’ 1997 book Many Years From Now, “‘Eyeball to eyeball’ is a very good description of it. That’s exactly how it was. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was very co-written. It was our big number one; the one that would eventually break us in America.”
As they would so many times in their career, The Beatles seized their moment. On October 17, 1963, weeks after “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was written, they entered Studio Two of Abbey Road to record it, laying down 17 takes of the future smash hit, though session tapes reveal that the band had almost perfected the arrangement before the session. It was a productive day – they also recorded the single’s B-side, the melancholy doo-wop gem “This Boy,” along with a take of Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me” and “The Beatles Christmas Record,” a sweetly anarchic, knockabout message that would be sent out to fanclub members on a flexi-disc. The session was their first to use Abbey Road’s new four-track recording desk, which would go on to change the way the band recorded entirely.
“I Want To Hold Your Hand” was released on November 29 in the UK. The single had a million advance orders and reached No 1 in its second week, knocking “She Loves You” – which had been enjoying a new lease of life following The Beatles’ November 4th performance on the Royal Variety Show – off the top spot. It’s an exuberant distillation of the songs that had rocketed them to previously unimaginable levels of success; another of John and Paul’s personal pleas – “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me To You” – directly addressed at their besotted fans. While holding hands sounds innocent enough to convince parents of the band’s noble intentions, the teenagers wearing the grooves of the records thin understood the song’s lustier subtext.
Though Lennon takes the lead vocal, McCartney duets with him through virtually the whole song, shifting between doubling his bandmate’s part and providing harmony – again, underlining that closeness of collaboration. Add the exhilarating “I can’t hide” crescendos, unexpected chord changes, that ballad-like middle-eight, and the handclaps and – like so many of their early hits – “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is loaded with hooks and tricks that emphasize The Beatles’ instinctive understanding of dynamics, while showing off their abundance of natural wit and charm.
“I Want To Hold Your Hand” Goes To America
Manager Brian Epstein had visited the US with an early copy of the single prior to its UK release. Its obvious commercial appeal, along with the massive UK sales of “She Loves You” convinced Capitol to schedule a mid-January 1964 US release for “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” along with an advertising budget of $40,000 (eight times the amount previously spent on a Beatles campaign in the States). Media outlets in the US began to run news stories on Beatlemania gripping the UK, adding to the anticipation for their trip across the Atlantic.
When 15-year-old fan Marsha Albert of Silver Springs, Maryland, saw one such clip on a CBS news show, she wrote to Carrol James, a DJ on Washington radio station WWDC-AM, requesting the new Beatles single. Once James tracked a UK copy down, he invited Albert into the studio on December 17 to introduce its first play on US radio. Switchboards were quickly jammed with requests to play it again and the station happily obliged. Before long, tapes of the broadcast were being played nationwide. Capitol threatened a court order banning early plays of the single before realizing the value of such potent word of mouth publicity and brought the single release forward to December 26.
“I Want To Hold Your Hand” sold 250,000 copies in the US in its first three days and reached the top of the US Billboard chart on February 1, 1964. Within a few weeks they made chart history by occupying the top five positions in the US singles chart, as well as the top two in the album chart. In 2015, Paul McCartney remembered the moment the band found out they were No 1 in an interview with Billboard: “We were playing in Paris, an engagement at the Olympia Theatre, a famous old theater Edith Piaf played at, and we got a telegram — as you did in those days — saying, ‘Congratulations, No 1 in US charts.’ We jumped on each other’s backs. It was late at night after a show, and we just partied.”
The Beatles arrived at John F Kennedy International Airport, New York, on February 7, 1964, where they were greeted by roughly 3,000 adoring fans. Their first US jaunt may have only lasted a frenzied two weeks – taking in a clutch of live shows and TV appearances, including that Ed Sullivan Show performance, watched by a then-record 73 million – but after the visit, things would never be the same for The Beatles.
The Legacy of “I Want To Hold Your Hand”
“I Want To Hold Your Hold” was not only the springboard for unprecedented sales and adoration, it also inspired their contemporaries to forge ahead and take music to new places. “‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ really blew my mind,” said The Beach Boys’ leader Brian Wilson in 1966. “I knew we were good, but it wasn’t until The Beatles arrived that I knew we had to get going.” And though legend has it that Bob Dylan thought the band were singing “I get high” rather than “I can’t hide,” he later told NME it was his favorite of their songs, “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid… I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.” It clearly still resonates with him. Dylan also namechecked the song in 2020’s powerful, near 17-minute track “Murder Most Foul.”
From this point on, Beatles releases habitually broke new ground, in terms of composition, arrangements, and lyrics. The mysterious opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” the use of feedback on “Ticket To Ride,” the psychedelic tape loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” every last second of “Revolution No 9” – they’re all electrifying examples. And they’re just like that moment when Lennon and McCartney went eyeball to eyeball to write “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” The Beatles seized the opportunity to create something new and extraordinary. Andrea Tebbetts and the millions who screamed with her were absolutely correct to be so excited. How many times do you see the future of music unfolding right in front of you?
