95. Tell Me Why

An exemplary song from the height of Beatlemania

One thing I’ve thought about a lot over the years is which songs are the most exemplary from each period of the Beatles’ career. Not the best, not the most iconic. But the ones which you could play in order to demonstrate the feeling and experience of that particular slice of time.

I think Tell Me Why might be the exemplary early-period Beatles song. It doesn’t have the incredible compositional skill of something like She Loves You. But that’s precisely why it fits the bill so perfectly. Because you generally can’t use the best work from a period as an example of the period. You need to use something that is excellent but which occupies the middle rather than the impossible extreme. And I think that’s Tell Me Why. It’s nothing special, exactly. John himself described it as a filler track, a “work song,” the sort of thing they just knocked out to meet a deadline. They clearly didn’t consider this a world shaker they way they did some of their more iconic material.

But the relentless pressure to produce more content to fit the demands of the execs is also one of the key defining features of the early Beatles. And because they were so impossibly in tune with one another at this time, even their ‘filler’ tracks often ended up being something really special.

You can trace that back to Hamburg, the first time they truly gelled, which was driven primarily by the impossible demands placed on them. They were playing six, seven, often eight hours a night, every night, for months. The obligation to simply survive forced them to grow exponentially. To become the greatest band in the world:

In seven weeks at the Indra, the Beatles had clocked up 205 stage hours—the equivalent of 136 ninety-minute shows at home. They were transformed. The spark was now a flame. Confidence, charisma, dynamism and fantastic unpredictability exploded from them. There was no one else like them, not in Hamburg, not in Liverpool, not anywhere in the world. The Hurricanes, marginally but decisively older, were instantly exposed as first-generation rock and rollers, blown away in their matching ties and handkerchiefs.¹

Tell Me Why embodies that principle. Written to spec, to meet the demand for some more upbeat songs for the film, it basically only exists because outside forces demanded it. But instead of sounding tired and stretched, it sounds fresh and effortless. And that was the defining genius of this period.

Lyrically, it’s pretty simple, though it importantly has that edge of anger and self-doubt that works as the counterweight to the ecstatic tone. Musically, it wears its influences pretty heavy on the sleeve. It’s effectively just a doo-wop song, sped up to match the style of all those girl-groups that they so admired. But it’s also very distinctively a Beatles song. Almost emphatically so. And the primary thing that establishes that fact is its incredible kinetic energy. It’s the sound of a rolling train plowing through at top speed. The sound of Hercules unchained, now freed from all constraint and hindrance, ready to heave a boulder across the whole length of the known world. Of a man who is desperate, truly desperate to express his pain.

So much of what makes it work is in Ringo’s drumming. And I think that’s actually why this feels like the epitome of this portion of the Beatles career. Because for all of their skill at songwriting, their harmonies, their voices…the thing that makes them sound like the Beatles is the steady drumming which allows everything to, somehow, fit together perfectly. The unshowy but perfect beat. The little drum fills to shift the register as you transition out of a bridge. The punctuated bursts of energy that allows the song to scaffold its way to higher and higher reaches.

Put it all together. The drumming, the harmonies, the nice little guitar flourishes, and it’s just a perfect concoction, and a perfect way to illustrate the scope of what it was like to listen to the Beatles in this period.

1. Lewisohn, Tune In, chapter 17, “A Cellarful of Oiks”