The Complexity of "I Want To Hold Your Hand"

Walter Everett

I'm reading the textbook The Foundations of Rock: From “Blue Suede Shoes” to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by musicologist Walter Everett. It's a rundown on everything you would ever want to know about every pop or rock record from 1955 to the early 1970s. Everything, that is, that has to do with the music itself — its sound, its instrumentation, its recording techniques, etc. etc. etc.

Everett has this to say about "I Want To Hold Your Hand," which was the very first Beatles #1 record in the United States:

... subtlety appears in the arrangement of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (January 1964). For clarity’s sake, we’ll refer here specifically to the stereo mix that appears on the Past Masters, Vol. 1 compact disc. Let’s examine the instrumental texture channel by channel, moving from the left side of the stereo image, through the center, to the right. On the left is the basic rhythm track, with Ringo Starr’s drums, Paul McCartney’s bass, and John Lennon’s rhythm guitar. The drums feature several highly energetic loud crash cymbal strikes in the intro, and then move to a backbeat pattern in the verse (0:08+) (“Oh, yeah, I’ll tell you somethin’ . . .”), with a loud ride accompaniment and notable fills (as at 0:20–0:22). McCartney’s Höfner bass moves from rapidly repeated notes in the intro to a pattern of mostly roots in the verse/refrain, in what’s called (because of its notation) a dotted rhythm: ONE—(2)—and—Three—four—ONE—(2)—and—Three—(4)—and. Lennon, whose three-quarter-length Rickenbacker is run through a compression circuit so heavy it sounds like an organ, plays a boogie pattern in the intro and rhythmic chords in the verse. Overdubs appear in the center, where handclaps add a very busy backbeat, (1)—two—and—(3)—and—four, to the verse and Harrison adds a short bass line at 0:10–0:11 and 0:17–0:18 to mark an unexpected chord change. The right channel is devoted to Harrison’s lead guitar track, played on a hollow-body Gretsch Country Gentleman. Many different techniques are demonstrated here, including crying slides of single notes (0:11), rising slides of full chords (0:27, 0:49), and slow arpeggiations of chords in the bridge (0:51+). Also in the bridge, drums drop the ride cymbal and move to the hi-hat for hits repeated every half beat, eight to the bar. Uncharacteristically, McCartney’s bass thickens the low texture with double stops (0:58–1:03). An edit tacks onto the right channel a final I chord from a Gibson acoustic-electric guitar. Instruments are mined for power even as the lyrics attempt to coax with grace.

My intention here is not to confound the reader with too much "inside information." Rather, it's to illustrate that even early Beatles recordings were, under George Martin's guiding hand as producer, full of masterful complexity and subtlety!