My 13 Favorite Early Beatles Songs

Part 1 - Back When I Personally Discovered the Beatles

Mar 01, 2023

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It was the mid-1970s and I was on a family visit back to Northern Kentucky. My family had moved away from NKY a few years earlier to Silver Spring, Maryland, so a visit to NKY was like a vacation for me and my brothers. We got to go visit all of our relatives—my grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins on one side of the family and my grandma and aunts and an uncle on the other. At this point in the trip, we were visiting my grandparents’ home, and I was exploring their basement, which was large, and under the entirety of their ranch house. It was mostly unfinished back then with the exception of a corner on the far end where my youngest uncles (who were twins born in the 1950s) had built a hangout room for themselves.

To get to the room you had to advance through the dark spaces of the basement and grab at pull-strings of the overhead bulb light receptacles, which sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. The room was dark, musty, dusty and a little creepy. There was another overhead pull-string light inside the room, and I think an old lamp with an orange-brown, nappy lampshade that did its best to filter the hazy light from an old lightbulb. The room had not been used for a long time, probably since my uncles’ latter teenaged years. I seem to recall on this particular occasion when entering the room, that there were cobwebs hanging down everywhere from the ceiling. My uncles had pursued degrees in science, and their interest was evidenced in the room on the bookshelves with various jars, one of which contained a shark embryo. The walls had posters, but the one I recall most vividly was a particularly scary close up of a man with Halloween makeup on, hanging by a noose. I later found out that this was Alice Cooper, but at the time I could not understand why my uncles would want such a picture up on their walls.

Their record player was an old console unit. On this occasion, I opened it to see a record already on the carousel. Beatles ’65 it read. I tried the power, and sure enough, the old system came alive. I applied the needle to the record, and the first song, “No Reply” started playing. I was an instant fan.

Now, I had heard of the Beatles before this as my dad had mentioned them as being a great band, especially in comparison with the Monkees. He was not a rock-and-roll fan himself and owned none of their music as he preferred classical and jazz. So, with his general recommendation in mind, and as Beatles ’65 played, I went through my uncles’ records and found a few more Beatles albums and .45 singles. If I remember correctly, they also had Sgt. Peppers, Abbey Road, and the White Album. (Abbey Road had some girl’s name scrawled on the cover.) I don’t remember all the singles they had, but the songs that I played that day from these were “Help!,” “Day Tripper” and “I’m Down,” and I liked the humorous tone of that last one.

As a fairly clean-cut boy myself (at least for 1970s standards), I was more drawn to the group’s early look as exemplified by the cover of Beatles ’65. For my then tastes, I disliked their slovenly clothing and facial hair-laden faces in the later albums I reviewed. That and the mostly simplistic, innocent and youthful content of their early albums attracted my interest. This was likely because it was closer to the Monkees’ sound. And quickly, I realized how much better it was and had actually inspired the creation and music of the Monkees. Thus I was able to become a Beatles fan in a fairly chronological order to their release of music. And to this day, I like the Beatles in all the periods of their output.

Now to me it seemed like I had discovered the Beatles all by myself via an ancient, forgotten place. That they had broken up in 1969 seemed to me then as the long, dead past in 1976. No one spoke about the Beatles at school, and I didn’t really listen closely to the radio at that time. I felt like I could have been the only fan left in the world. I ran upstairs with an album in my hands, and catching my uncle at a weak moment, he let me take the Beatles records home with us.

One of the distinctions between a great group and others less so was whether I liked their albums in their entirety. And that certainly was the case, more or less, with each Beatles record I listened to. However, if pressed to give my list of favorites of their early songs, I would give the following list:

All My Loving

Do You Want to Know a Secret?

No Reply

I’ll Be Back

She’s a Woman

Day Tripper

I Feel Fine

If I Fell

And I Love Her

Yes It Is

Help!

You've Got To Hide Your Love Away

Ticket To Ride

I soon learned that I was not alone as a fan of the Beatles. We found them alive and well in record shops, and over time, my brothers and I bought our own copies of the American versions of the Beatles’ albums, adding to our small collection of their records.

In my next posts, I’ll come back with a survey of their middle and late periods as I discovered them.