108) Mary Wells – “My Guy”

With Mary Wells, Motown got serious.  Before her, Tamla/Motown operated essentially like a regional label that happened to have a few massive hits. The distinctive Motown sound had yet to be formulated.  Bluesier numbers like Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” abutted the smooth pop of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles and the bongo-harmonica stylings of Little Stevie Wonder.  But with Wells, label head Berry Gordy saw an opportunity to shape a star – and, in the process, create the template that would drive the label’s success.

Wells’s first single, the self-penned “Bye Bye Baby,” was gospel-blues by way of Jackie Wilson.  Wells’s voice was raw and throaty, her attitude defiant: “Well you took my love, threw it away/You’re gonna want my love someday/Well, bye bye, baby.” But between the single’s release in 1960 and Wells’s eventual trip to the top of the charts, Gordy buffed her persona to a fine sheen.  Despite being the same age as The Marvelettes, Wells was positioned as a mature alternative to the girl group sound. Gordy hired charm coaches to teach her poise, a practice that would continue throughout the label’s golden age.  Her voice thinned out; syllables became more clearly enunciated.  Wells’s material took a turn toward the mainstream, culminating in the light jazz motifs of “My Guy.”  In its careful melding of R&B and vocal pop, the record splits the difference between The Beatles and “Hello, Dolly!”

Like most Wells hits after “Bye Bye Baby,” the song was written and produced by Smokey Robinson.  Of the early Motown singles, Robinson’s work with The Miracles would come closest to defining the direction that the label would take.  But records like “Shop Around” and “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” despite their polished sound, have a verve that’s missing from the tightly-reined Wells singles. “My Guy” has a lot of positives going for it, not the least Wells’s precise but natural interpretation.  But “My Guy” also finds Motown working out some of the kinks of its new sound.  Gordy had intended the label to appeal to white audiences, but the Wells records sound a little too sterile, a little too eager to concede the “soul” part of the soul-pop equation.  It’s a tricky balance.  But by the time companion song “My Girl” would be released a few months later, it’s one that Motown had perfected.  7

Hit #1 on May 16, 1964; total of 2 weeks at #1
108 of 982 #1′s reviewed; 11.00% through the Hot 100

107) Louis Armstrong – “Hello, Dolly!”

“While Broadway compositions tend to become more complex – like People in Funny Girl – the bulk of U.S. listeners seem to be resigned to, and even to prefer, the slap-bang rock-’n’-roll-style trash with which they are deluged.” –Tom Prideaux, Life magazine, Aug. 7, 1964

“It may dawn on you that Hello, Dolly! is a pretty dumb-dumb show, all in all.  But what were you expecting? A Hard Day’s Night?” –Judith Crist, New York magazine, Jan. 12, 1970

That The Beatles were to fall from the top of the Hot 100 was inevitable; that they were to be replaced by Louis Armstrong was surely a relief.  Who could begrudge the legendary trumpeter and vocalist, the man who epitomized jazz, scoring his first number-one after recording for nearly half a century? With “Hello, Dolly!,” Armstrong became the oldest musician to top the Hot 100 (at 64), won his only competitive Grammy and garnered the best sales of his career. The record sparked a revival of interest in Armstrong, ultimately leading to a recognition of his place in the popular music canon.  So it’s only fitting that The Beatles were succeeded by one of the few musicians whose impact on the Twentieth century matched their own.

Also fitting: “Can’t Buy Me Love” being replaced at #1 by another ersatz jazz number.  Whereas The Beatles blended their swing influences with rock and roll, creating an exciting but familiar sound in the process, “Hello Dolly!” is markedly less adventurous, all showtune despite its dixieland brass.  After 14 weeks of The Beatles, conventional pop listeners were ready to take back the charts.  The record is all nostalgia: for the eponymous musical’s turn-of-the-century setting, for the dixieland rendered obsolete by experimental jazz (and rock), and for Armstrong’s long career as the good-time ambassador of American popular song.  Never mind that the song itself is slight and was neither written nor recorded with the intention of becoming a hit.  Hello, Dolly! composer Jerry Herman had intended “It Only Takes a Moment” to be the musical’s break-out number; Armstrong, who recorded the tune at his manager’s request, forgot “Hello, Dolly!” existed until concert audiences began requesting it.  Despite his status as a hired gun, though, there isn’t a moment on the record where Armstrong doesn’t sound completely invested, as if “Hello, Dolly!” were the equal of “Basin Street Blues” or “St. James Infirmary.”  It’s his enthusiasm and charm (“Hello, Dolly/This is Louis, Dolly”) that imbues the song with a level of likeability it probably doesn’t deserve.  After the dizzying highs of The Beatles, a showtune at#1 could have been a crash back to earth.  Instead, “Hello, Dolly!” is a small victory for a legend – one who helped make rock and roll possible. 6

Hit #1 on May 9, 1964; total of 1 week at #1
107 of 982 #1′s reviewed;10.90% through the Hot 100

106) The Beatles – “Can’t Buy Me Love”

Just over two months elapsed between February 1, 1964, when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit #1 on the Hot 100, and April 4, 1964, when “Can’t Buy Me Love” did the same.  But those nine weeks were packed with more life-changing events than most bands have in their entire careers.  The band made its legendary first three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, played Carnegie Hall and began a streak of shattering sales and chart records.  When “Can’t Buy Me Love” hit #1, all of the top five entries in the Hot 100 were Beatles songs.  The upside of American indifference to their early singles was a backlog of material ready when they finally did take off.  By the time “Can’t Buy Me Love” was finally unseated, The Beatles had been atop the Hot 100 a mindboggling 14 consecutive weeks.

The group’s fortunes were changing so suddenly that “Can’t Buy Me Love” was actually inspired by “I Want to Hold Your Hand” topping the Billboard charts.  Lyrically, “Can’t Buy Me Love” comes across like a refusal of their newly-minted success: “But I don’t care too much for money/Money can’t buy me love.”  At the same time, though, the song’s sound seeks to embrace even more listeners into the band’s ever-swelling fanbase.  The jazzy flourishes of “She Loves You” are blown wide into what is essentially a swing number played with electric guitars.  Check out the syncopation in “I don’t care too [beat] much for money” – small wonder that both Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie’s orchestra would issue covers tout de suite.  There’s R&B in the song’s twelve-bar blues structure, and country in George Harrison’s Carl Perkins-ish guitar solo.  And for the first time in any Beatles single, their trademark harmonies are absent.  Instead, Paul McCartney, the voice most ready for AM radio, takes the lead.

“Can’t Buy Me Love” is The Beatles striving to follow in the path of their idol, Elvis Presley.  Like the King, they weren’t just gunning to be the top of the rock and roll heap – they were going to rule all of pop music.  As such, “Can’t Buy Me Love” is the clearest precedent for songs like “Yesterday” and “In My Life,” which bear only tenuous links to rock.  That both of those songs would be released in 1965, just one year later, proves just how stupendously fast the group was evolving.  Even more astonishing, The Beatles would only get better.  8

Hit #1 on April 4, 1964; total of 5 weeks at #1
106 of 982 #1′s reviewed; 10.79% through the Hot 100

105) The Beatles – “She Loves You”

“She Loves You” is the Beatles song that everyone knows.  At least that was the conclusion I came to as a young Beatles fan, decades after the group had disintegrated.  Mention The Beatles to friends, and instantly “She loves you! yeah, yeah, yeah!” would be shot back in my direction, child singers’ faces scrunched up in goofiest rocker imitation.  I’d cringe a little, partly at my fourth-grade classmates’ cultural illiteracy, partly because The Greatest Band That Ever Existed had been reduced to the most inane and simplistic song in its entire catalogue.

As it turns out, it wasn’t just nine-year-old me who questioned The Beatles’ craftsmanship on this particular song.  In the August 1980 issue of Musician magazine, Paul McCartney recollects the record’s initial reception: “You’d think the response to something like ‘She Loves You’ with the Beatles would have been pretty positive.  It wasn’t. The very first week that came out it was supposed to be the worst song the Beatles had ever thought of.”  Capitol Records, the American pop music arm of The Beatles’ home label EMI, rejected the single, as it had with all of the band’s previous records.  Instead, indie label Swan released it stateside in September 1963 to no response, despite support from Dick Clark on American Bandstand.

Nevertheless, it was “She Loves You” that became one of The Beatles’ signature songs (as if there could be such a thing) and which stills stands as the band’s best-selling single in the UK.  The very features of the song that irritated the critics were the ones most attractive to a pop audience – in particular, the repetitive, minimalist chorus that had permanently embedded itself in the listener’s brain by start of the second verse.  Yet, as with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” there’s a  level of sophistication beneath the pop sheen.  Musically, the song is awash in surprising chord changes drawn from jazz rather than rock and roll, most notably the major sixth that ends the song.  Even the title of the song, in the third person instead of the first, shows the band attempting to write something different from all the “I love you” songs that came before.  In The Heart of Rock & Soul, critic Dave Marsh reads the lyrics darkly: “What Lennon sings boils down to a warning to his friend: You’d better appreciate this woman’s love, because if you don’t, I will.”  George Harrison’s lead guitar, simultaneously melodic and edgy, lends credence to this interpretation.  Even in their early days, the Fab Four were never just the chirpy Northern lads writing upbeat love songs.  Of course there was more to “She Loves You” than just that chorus.  What makes me cringe now is how long it took for me to realize it. 9

(Thanks to The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men Through Rubber Soul by Walter Everett and Here, There and Everywhere: The 100 Best Beatles Songs by Stephen Spignesi and Michael Lewis.)

Hit #1 on March 21, 1964; total of 2 weeks at #1
105 of 982 #1′s reviewed; 10.69% through the Hot 100

Liner Notes

• Dave Marsh also argues that “She Loves You” is “the first Beatles song that Bob Dylan could have sung: it’s tricky, bluesy, and well-written enough for Blonde on Blonde.” Hey, now that we’re on the subject, why don’t you check out my article on Dylan for PopMatters’s retrospective on Blood on the Tracks? (And yes, I had just as tenuous a Dylan connection prepared for “I Want to Hold Your Hand” yesterday – I just forgot to include it.)

104) The Beatles – “I Want to Hold Your Hand”

It’s unlikely that any number-one has been written about as extensively as “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”  But despite the sheer amount of this literature, nearly all of it follows a similar structure.  First, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is hailed as the triumph of “real music” (i.e., rock) over the (supposed) wanness of early ‘60s pop.  But just as quickly as the single is lauded for its revolutionary sound, it is ridiculed for its chaste subject matter.   Next to The Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and The Beatles’ own “I’d love to turn you on” just a few years later, a plea to hold a girl’s hand sounds kind of, well,  square.  Typically, this statement is accompanied by a knowing smirk or a touch of irony, maybe even a little embarrassment that the band might have had commercial aspirations and actually did want to appeal to old folks and teenage girls – maybe, even, that the band was sincere.

But whether or not the lyrics of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” are endearingly sweet or just laughably naïve is beside the point.  To borrow from Marshall McLuhan, the medium – bona fide, energetic, exhilarating rock and roll – is the message.  The innocuous lyrics are just the pink satin bow around the neck of the Rottweiler.  If you don’t think “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sounds ragged and hard-edged, listen to a few of the contemporaneous number-ones passing for rock.  Or just listen to the guitar line that opens the song, which grinds and stutters as if winding the gears on a disused machine left to rust.  But then the gears catch, and the machine springs back to life as powerful as ever.  Part of the genius of The Beatles is the way the group tempered standard pop elements with subversive touches. George Harrison’s bent guitar notes jut out amongst the handclaps, and the brightness of the sung harmonies don’t quite mask John Lennon’s fraying vocal cords.  Even the band’s famous Edwardian suits, foisted onto them by manager Brian Epstein to make them look more professional, look tougher and hipper than the cardigans or flannel suits favored by their contemporaries.

It’s difficult not to talk about “I Want to Hold Your Hand” – or really, The Beatles in general – without trucking in superlatives.  Not only is this single the number-one that’s been the most written about in general, it’s also the one I’ve written the most about, discarding countless drafts in order to get to the secret history of the song: how the U.S. charts, packed with classic Motown and girl group hits, weren’t entirely dire before The Beatles invaded and would continue to be frequently dire afterward; how the single’s success derived from reviving a classic American sound rather than from the band’s innate creativity;  how Epstein was the real force behind making the record a hit, persuading Capitol Records to spend $40,000 on mass-produced Beatle wigs and hyperbolic handbills.  (There was also an extensive defense of the song’s lyrics, which I dropped in favor of disregarding them completely.)  Yet sometimes the common wisdom is that for a reason.  “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is the kind of record that reminds you that rock can make a difference, that pop can feel new and exciting, regardless of whether the lyrics are earnest or the sound is familiar.  “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is more than a cultural touchstone – it’s simply one of the greatest pop records ever. 10

Hit #1 on February 1, 1964; total of 7 weeks at #1
104 of 982 #1′s reviewed; 10.59% through the Hot 100