It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “I Feel Fine” by The Beatles
December 30, 1964
“I Feel Fine” by The Beatles
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100, December 26, 1964 – January 15, 1965
#1 on the Record Retailer Singles Chart (UK), December 10, 1964 – January 13, 1965
As this column bids farewell to 1964, it only makes sense to end with the band who defined the year more than any other. The Beatles earned their first US #1 hit with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on February 1; they’d remain at the top of the singles charts continuously until May, and reappear three times more at the #1 slot before the year was out. The group made their first American TV appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February (breaking Nielsen viewership records) and premiered their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night, in August. During the course of 1964, the Beatles topped the album charts for a total of 30 weeks and the singles chart for 18 weeks (19 if you include Peter & Gordon’s “A World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition). So powerful was the phenomenon of Beatlemania that its effects rippled out to other UK rock and pop artists, launching the British Invasion in America.
Much of the year, however, the United States spent making up for lost time. The Beatles had already scored their first British hit over a year before making headway in the US, and had been steadily recording and releasing material in their homeland all the while. This abundance of music helped feed the fire of Beatlemania in America, giving fans plenty of material to seek out and preventing burnout from endless repetitions of a handful of songs. US labels released six LPs worth of Beatles music in 1964 alone, compared with only two (A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale) in the United Kingdom. At one point in April 1964, the band held 14 of the of the slots in the Hot 100 — a feat only possible due the the backlog of material available.
By the end of 1964, however, the Americans had finally cleared out the vaults and caught up with the Beatles’ active recording schedule. The first of the band’s singles to be released (roughly) simultaneously in both the US and the UK was the jazzy, peppy “I Feel Fine,” which topped both countries’ singles charts from December 1964 through January 1965. The Beatles’ creative growth spurt was advancing at an unusually rapid pace; think of the leaps in sophistication between “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You,” and “A Hard Day’s Night,” all recorded within the span of less than two years. “I Feel Fine” continues this trend, expanding the group’s sonic palette to include guitar feedback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTr8h4MkSYw
The Beatles weren’t the first rock group to experiment with the effects of this electric “mistake” — the Kinks, the Who, and the Yardbirds were all exploring it in a live setting around this time — but they were one of the first to put it on record, and definitely the first to apply it to a hit single. “I Feel Fine” opens with a blast of feedback, less a shriek than a gentle hum, followed (if you listen closely) by what sounds like a cough and a hint of background chatter. These studio sounds add a novel texture to the record and play into the band’s prankish sense of humor, while also acting as a major power move. Only the biggest band in the world could open a song with a bit of audio “garbage” and score a #1 hit.
The feedback intro may get all the attention, but the song itself also hints at creative explorations to come. On the surface, “I Feel Fine” is fairly typical of the Beatles’ previous hits: simple, chipper lyrics; an uptempo beat; and a polished-R&B bent, in this case borrowing heavily from Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step” and Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.” But Ringo Starr’s “Latin”-style drumming points to a growing degree of musical sophistication, while George Harrison’s rockabilly picking style points to the folkier directions the band would explore a few months later on Help! and Rubber Soul. “I Feel Fine,” then, can be thought of as the beginning of the Beatles’ middle period: an era of bright, catchy melodies, with occasional detours into sonic experimentation.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
