When the euphoric roar of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” first hit the airwaves, America was still paralyzed by the Kennedy assassination. Beatles songs had been sent across the Atlantic before, but no English rock ‘n’ roll band had even remotely gotten their foot in the door.
The Beatles and manager Brian Epstein had vowed not to visit the US until they reached number one on the American charts. After “I Want To Hold Your Hand” this requirement was met. “Fortunately, we only had a vague vision and not a realistic idea of America,” Paul McCartney told ROLLING STONE in 1987. “Otherwise we would have had our pants full.”
Each element of the song is a hook in itself
The single was most Americans’ first exposure to Lennon and McCartney’s compositions, who wrote the song with Paul’s then-girlfriend Jane Asher playing the piano. “I still remember the moment,” Lennon later said, “when we hit the chord change that defines the song. We were like, Oh, you-uu/Got that someting’ and suddenly Paul plays that chord. I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it.’ All the songs from that phase were actually written the same way: we pushed the elements to each other.”
The song “was the culmination of the first phase of their development,” according to producer George Martin. “When they started doing stuff like ‘Love Me Do’, they stole a lot from other songs. It wasn’t until they realized they could write their own songs that the door to better songs was thrown open.”
The number’s concentrated energy is driven by a crisp rhythm that is so intricate that many cover bands fail miserably at replaying it. Lennon and McCartney’s voices alternate constantly between monophony and harmony singing, every element of the song is a hook in itself, from Lennon’s blasting riffs to Harrison’s guitar intermezzi to the syncopated clapping.
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With pre-orders of a million copies, I Want To Hold Your Hand was released in England at the end of November, knocking She Loves You off the top of the charts. And when a teenager persuaded an American radio DJ to present the imported single, the record ran hot there too – assuming they could find one of the rare imports. Due to an early release, the US single was released the day after Christmas – and was already number one on February 1st.
On February 9th, The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show – and attracted 70 million viewers to the television, a record for the time.
But not only teenagers, also established cultural figures were carried away by Beatlemania. When Allen Ginsberg first heard “I Want To Hold Your Hand” in a club, he spontaneously started dancing. Leonard Bernstein drew parallels to other artists: “I fell in love with the music of the Beatles, with the Schubert-like flow of musical ideas, but also with this ‘fuck you’ coolness with which they appear as the four horsemen of our apocalypse. “
Bob Dylan foresaw great things for the Beatles: “They pointed out the direction in which the development of music had to move.”