From The Hedgehog Review, March 27:
Six decades ago this month—on March 22, 1963—the British record label Parlophone released Please Please Me, the Beatles’ first LP. In commemoration, the New York Review of Books has re-run a 1968 appreciation of the band by Ned Rorem, the genre-shifting classical composer. Rorem characterized the Beatles’ emergence as “one of the most healthy events in music since 1950.”
Besides its title track, Please Please Me encompasses thirteen songs, including “Twist and Shout,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” a two-chord oddity that Ian MacDonald, author of The New Shostakovich as well as a song-by-song analysis of the Beatles’ oeuvre, Revolution in the Head, called “extraordinarily raw by the standards of its time, standing out from the tame fare offered on the Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg like a bare brick wall in a suburban sitting-room.” Two singles from the album were released in America in mid-’63 by a Chicago blues and R&B label, Vee-Jay, but failed to break into the Billboard Hot 100. ...
....MUCH MORE
