fpw Wrote:The Beatles’ “She Loves You” had its initial US release in September of 1963 and flopped so badly it never made it to my radio. By contrast, when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released 3 months later, it sold 750,000 copies in the first three days (New York City alone was selling 10,000 copies an hour). Demand was so great that Capitol had to pay its record rivals Columbia and RCA to press extra copies for them.

Despite all that, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was not a hit with me. I was drumming in my own garage band then, accompanying the likes of “Walk Don’t’ Run,” “Rawhide,” “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and other instrumentals, and developing an ear for what I liked and why I liked it. The melody of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” didn’t gab me and I thought the lyrics were hokey. My younger sister, however, was an instant fan. Soon the twelve tracks on Meet the Beatles were echoing incessantly through our house. Though they didn’t make me a fan, some of the songs grew on me.

I finally heard “She Loves You” upon its re-release in March of ’64 when it zoomed to number one on the charts.

Ba-dum-ba-dum (on the floor tom)
She loves you yeah-yeah-yeah!
She loves you yeah-yeah-yeah!
She loves you yeah-yeah-yeah-YAAAAAH!

Whoa! That last YAAAAAH! What was that?

As I said, I was a drummer. I hadn’t taken up guitar yet. I didn’t know chords and such. But I knew what I liked and I liked that YAAAAAH! I couldn’t remember ever hearing anybody sing something like that.

So I listened – really listened – to the rest of the song, wanting to hear it again. But alas, although they sang yeah! plenty of times, no YAAAAAH!...until the very end: an extended, echoey YAAAAAH! to close out the song.

Yes! I loved everything about the song – the tempo, the harmonies, the way the drummer switched from the hi-hat to the floor tom on the choruses, its overall exuberance. It made me happy. But I especially loved that YAAAAAH!

“She Loves You” wasn’t on either of my sister’s albums (she had Introducing the Beatles on the Vee-Jay label by then too) so I went out and bought the single and played it over and over to hear that strange YAAAAAH! I began listening more closely to the albums and appreciating the way these guys put their songs together.

Then they released the buoyant, contagious “Can’t Buy Me Love” followed by “A Hard Day’s Night” with its clang of an opening chord that no one on the whole bloody planet had ever heard before and I became thoroughly and permanently hooked.

But the tipping point had been that YAAAAAH! on “She Loves You.” What made it so special? I later learned it’s a G-major-6 chord and it almost didn’t make it into the song (or so I’m told).

Apparently on the initial “She Loves You” mix, that last yeah! had John, Paul, and George harmonizing to a simple G-major chord, singing G-B-D. But George Harrison wasn’t happy with finishing the song that way. He petitioned their producer, George Martin, to let him go back and overdub an E note above the basic three. Martin didn’t like the idea but finally relented. As a result, the G-B-D yeah! became a G-B-D-E YAAAAAH!

And not only made the song as far as this listener was concerned, but led him to become a Beatles fan.

Like they say, it’s the little things.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.