Your lips.  God's ears.  "From Me To You" is not one of my favorite Beatle songs.  I think this side of "Love Me Do" it's the weakest of the Beatles' singles.  Doesn't mean it's bad.  It's as breezy and catchy as it needs to be.  But it's formula, and it shows, and at this point, right after achieving their first #1 with "Please Please Me", but prior to the release yet of the LP, the band may have been feeling very gracious indeed, and this single sounds like a fan club response.  "Thank You Girl".  "If there's anything I can do...."  "With love from me to you".  There's an earnestness in the desire to keep pushing, but also a trepidation, don't want to jinx it too quick.  This single is an exhale, but with fingers crossed.

It may be an accomplishment that this anxiety isn't so evident in the confident performance itself, but manifest in other ways.  Like the discarded selection of the session, "One After 909", the old Lennon original favorite.  Lennon would much later accuse McCartney of "sabotaging" certain sessions, some kind of passive-aggressive way of vetoing ideas.  There's been a lot of speculation about exactly what he was referring to.  (The candidates include "Across the Universe", "Strawberry Fields", "Revolution", but Lennon always tended to blame McCartney for his own insecurities.)  Here, we might find a possible example, as Paul somehow lost his bass pick just prior to the "909" session, resulting in a rather sluggish effort.  And George Harrison was doing no favors with some feeble soloing.  These "One After 909" sessions, which along with the rest of the "From Me To You"/"Thank You Girl" session, has survived intact, one of the few two-track studio tapes to have done so, and it's more of an example of frustration.  "One After 909", despite having survived from Lennon's early songbook from as early as 1960, would not be a single, or even a future track for the next LP, and would only emerge as a warm nostalgic chestnut in their fading days.  But John's irritation here is remarkable.

Even though the songs themselves, "From Me To You" and "Thank You Girl", are pretty fair by objective estimate, they do go hard on the head-shaking "ooooo"s, that crucial trigger of Beatlemania frenzy.  "If there's anything I can doooo"; "and all I got to doooo".  McCartney's harmonies are still dynamic, but just wait. 

Most interesting about this session is that it is, in fact, the only Beatles single session pretty much extant from 1963 and their two-track era.  Only "I Saw Her Standing There" and "There's A Place", from the LP session, seem to have survived in their entire recording process, begining to end.  All of the other known orignal two-track studio tapes are truncated or lost or destroyed.  So with the surviving tapes of this session, we can better appreciate George Martin's production craft.  With this two-track technology -  vocals/instruments being the split - any additional overdubs would require use of an additional augmented tape.  We do have one such tape from the Please Please Me sessions which survived, showing quaint overdubs on "I Saw Her Standing There" (handclaps), "There's a Place" (extra harmonica), "Taste of Honey" (doubled vocal), "Do You Want To Know a Secret" (backing vocals).  For "From Me To You", Martin used a number of edit pieces, extra harmonica riffs on additional tapes, spliced onto the master mix.  This is pretty technical detail, but it does allow us to glimpse some tricks, some magic, for which George Martin deserves due credit, and clearly inspired further such fuss, as with his subtle varispeed keyboard additions to "Misery" and "Baby It's You". 

This may all be prelude to mourning the fact that the original two-track tapes of the next single session, "She Loves You", did not survive, as delicate-ear'd archivists have found similar evidence of such edit piece magic going on there, further supported by the young nascent engineer Geoff Emerick, in his book Here There and Everywhere, would go more into detail on that particular session.  The loss of these original two-track Beatle tapes are by far the biggest scar on the archives.  But it's even more prominent when you have, arguably, the two true Beatle seeds, the songs which were the foundation of their phenonmenon, "Twist and Shout" and "She Loves You", in the summer of 1963, that no one at EMI thought that these master tapes specifically needed to be preserved.  It boggles the goddamn mind.  And that may be why I have a unextinguishable suspicion that somebody has them tapes somewhere.  I prefer the conspiracy to the alternative desecration.

And "Twist and Shout", as if it needs to be said, is and was a "greatest hit", even though it never released as a single in Britain.  The EP under its name would remain the best selling EP for decades.  If you want to know about The Beatles, the twin-engine booster seat has "Twist and Shout" and "She Loves You" in tandem.

 

crumbsroom wrote:

For a second I thought you said "From Me To You" is one of your favorites, and I was 'we gonna have to have a little talk here'

I'm sure it's sombody's favorite, because people are crazy.

That youtube channel, Pop Goes the '60s, had people send in their top ten Beatle lists.  The host had even included "Thank You Girl" in his top ten, which....urgh.  But idiots were sending in stuff like "Cry For a Shadow" and "That Means a Lot".  I honestly don't know if they're trolling, or they think we're impressed with the deep cuts (more like obtuse cuts).  All I know is that once they tabulated everyones' lists into a master tally, "Julia" didn't even make the top 50.  So I'm just going to leave these people alone to their, I'm guessing, thoughts.

crumbsroom wrote:

It can't help but be shocking when you think of anyone wiping Beatles mastertapes at any point after their fame. It makes one think of how close we were for all of Monty Python's TV show to have fallen to a similar fate. British people, for getting such a rep for carrying the torch for the art community, sure have a tendency to be just as indifferent to the work of their creatives as Americans. But I guess this is people in charge of studios, both television and recording, and people in charge frequently don't actually give a shit of what they are actually in charge of. 

It comes from the unfortunate mentality that culture is ultimately disposable, and they fail to understand any long-term value in it.  Like "yesterday's papers".  Like how they treated silent films after the 'talkies'.  Why would anyone want to watch a TV show twice?  And true enough a lot of people feel this way.  A lot of people in the '60s treated their records horribly, not caring how they would sound in a decade, two decade's time.  A lot of people have the FOMO, and only interested in what people are currently consuming.  And we see it in these fools who have disdained physical media entirely, just like those who threw out their records when they got tape decks, and threw out their tapes when they got CDs.  It's only about the newest and brightest thing.  No long-term concern, it's just about NOW. 

Thankfully there's enough of us who do care to justify a market for reissues, even though these media companies still act kind of shocked.  Like this summer, "Wow, people are still watching Jaws".  And we keep hearing the same old crap about The Beatles, "oh, the fans are dying off and soon no one will be left to care to keep buying these box sets", and then they act all confused by the fact that a portion of the new generations of kids keep discovering them and loving them.  They were confused at the time too, always asking The Beatles, "what are you going to do after all of this is over?"  They're just losers waiting on trains.