121. Misery
A fairly unremarkable Lennon/McCartney original, but with just enough of the special sauce to sound distinctly like a Beatles song
The Beatles shattered the barrier between songwriting and performance. Rather famously, the wrote all their own hits, and therefore opened the floodgates for other full-spectrum performers.
However, it’s worth remembering that they themselves never particularly imagined that this would be an important feature of their act. Up until they signed with Brian Epstein in late 1961, the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership operated almost entirely separately from ‘The Beatles’ as a band.
John and Paul would sit down together to write songs, inscribing each one with “another Lennon/McCartney original” in Paul’s diary, but they almost never performed any of this material.
Thanks to Epstein’s pushing, they started to incorporate a few originals into their setlists. And by mid-1962, they had firmly committed to themselves to combing their talents—wanting absolutely nothing to do with the role of performing other people’s schlock, as seen in their refusal to release How Do You Do It. Still, they had a lot of material in their file drawers, and were writing more stuff every day. Some of it made it into their shows and onto their records. Many others didn’t, and were instead handed off to others.
In fact, those early years are absolutely littered with Lennon/McCartney songs that were recorded by others. Some of which are even quite good. For example, A World Without Love and Bad to Me went all the way to number one. From a Window is lovely little song. And while I wouldn’t call I’ll Be On My Way a good song exactly, it has a little bit of that peculiar chord magic that so defined John and Paul’s writing in the early days.
But even if there’s real quality in the handouts, there’s a clear division between the ones they gave out and the ones they kept.
And I think Misery really helps to illustrate the subtle-but-significant gap. Mostly because it sits right on the line. In fact, it was actually explicitly written for someone else. They were on tour with Helen Shapiro in early 1963, right in the moment when Please Please Me was breaking through to the public at large, but before they had really become an important name in the business. Shapiro’s A&R guy asked them to write her a song, and within a couple days they had Misery ready.
Except Shapiro’s people turned it down (oops). So when they went into the studio to record the remaining songs for their debut LP, it was right there on hand for them to choose.
So while this wasn’t written to be a Beatles original, it’s still notable that they did pick it, as opposed to any of the other songs in their repertoire—some of which they had been playing live already and therefore had a better handle on how to perform. So what separated this from Hello Little Girl or I’ll Be On My Way or Like Dreamers Do or Love of the Loved, or any of the others? After all, at first blush, it doesn’t feel all that different. It’s a pretty retro song—sounding a lot more like a late 50s tune than anything cutting-edge. It has that little slow introduction, which was so common at the time, but which already felt a bit dated by 1963.
Still, I think it just has that certain something that sets it apart. A restlessness, a sort of caged energy, which defines the specific Beatles sound, and which is critically missing from most of the other Lennon/McCartney tunes that got passed along to others.
Because even though Misery is a fairly corny song at its core, it has this underlying propulsive force that makes it very specifically sound like a Beatles song. Ringo’s drumming is workmanlike but rock-solid, and it plays very nicely with Paul’s bopping bass line. That establishes an essential jauntiness to the song which balances against the downbeat lyrics. It’s also got one of those definitive Beatlesy bridges. So many of the early Beatles songs are fundamentally defined by their middle eights, which don’t merely provide a counterpoint to the verse but which characterize the song in a completely new light. That’s definitely the case here, with John’s rising voice in “I’ll remember all the little things she’s done” which is counterpointed by the descending piano line that follows.
It’s not a complex song. It doesn’t reach for the heights of their biggest hits. And yet, even in small portions, you get so many of the key things that made the Beatles something fundamentally special.1