Today, Fifty Years Ago…
… the Beatles recorded their first album:
Please Please Me
which in this country nobody wanted to release prudishly reading the title as a request for giving head…
Recorded on 11 February it was released on March 22, 1963 in the UK. An edited version (see above) was released in the US later that year, and retitled Introducing the Beatles.
Songs in this album included:
- Anna
- Ask Me Why
- Baby its You
- Boy
- Chains
- Do you want to know a Secret?
- I Saw her Standing there
- Love me Do
- Misery
- Please Please Me
- PS I Love You
- A Taste of Honey
- Theres a Place
- Twist and Shout
“Love Me Do” made the Top Twenty for one week late in 1962 then vanished from the charts. Manager Brian Epstein personally bought 10,000 copies, to give the band a hit; he didn’t realize that they would have to sell that many every week, to stay in the charts. Industry people caught on quickly, and it nearly ruined the band’s credibility. The album included their first two singles, plus the B-sides (though “Love Me Do” was an alternate take).
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“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
…and then they changed the world! For a time I even earned a living selling their records (among others) with Capitol here in Canuckland. Still great. Thanks eh.
P.S. Neglected to mention that Mac still tours to packed arenas and won a Grammy last night. Beatlemania lives!