Alex Hendler – Please, Please Me (2012)

 

Simply put, Alex Hendler’s evocative and celebratory fact-based fiction e-book Please Please Me salutes and brings into focus a day in the life of the Beatles that was anything but simple. But that particular Monday, February 11, 1963, turned out to be much more than that. Though the fab foursome were in the midst of their first nation-wide package tour — as low men on the promo posters — British success and surging sales of the pure pop confection “Please Please Me” called for a need to strike while the vinyl’s hot.

So, with the group’s embryonic legends looking to loom large, producer George Martin and manager Brian Epstein struck — hoping to hit pay dirt; the race to the toppermost by the poppermost (to paraphrase and mangle John’s clarion call to action)! The group was ushered into the studio to record their debut album, also titled Please Please Me, in a marathon frenzy that Hendler deftly and vividly conveys in a well-structured narrative.

The Beatles had a hard day’s night ahead of them to turn out ten songs, an amount roughly equivalent to the number of years between albums from some of today’s artists. For the most part, however, this was road-tested material that included covers of songs written by, for example, Brill Building alumni Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Burt Bacharach with Hal David. But more than that, the album — refreshingly raucous and raw — would showcase such Lennon-McCartney originals as the title song, “Love Me Do,” and “I Saw Her Standing There.”

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