I Wanna Be Your Man

The liner notes for the album With the Beatles written by Tony Barrow state, "Observing the tremendous audience response that Ringo has been getting whenever he sings Boys, John and Paul put their heads together to pen a special new number for their fierce-voiced drumming man.  The result is a real raver entitled I Wanna Be Your Man."

While McCartney had begun writing the song with Ringo in mind, a chance meeting between John and Paul with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard prompted Lennon to finish the song by adding the simple chorus and giving it to the Rolling Stones.  It was this encounter that spurred Mick and Keith to begin writing their own material.  And, while the Stones did record a bluesy version of the song (featuring a great bottleneck guitar part by Brian Jones) and release it as their second single, the Beatles went ahead with their original plan and recorded it as well, opting for a rousing rock arrangement with Ringo as the lead vocalist.

They wasted no time, in fact.  September 11th, 1963, the day after they offered the song to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles recorded a single take.  They returned to the number the following day, laying down takes two through seven before achieving the master.  On September 30th, producer George Martin overdubbed a Hammond organ part, though it required six more takes for him to get it to his own satisfaction.  On October 3rd, Ringo double-tracked his vocal and added maracas to the track, bringing the recording to take fifteen.

The song sits smack in the middle of side two on the UK album With the Beatles.  In the US, the song appeared on the Capitol album Meet the Beatles!  Among the additional releases of the song, the first was on the collection Rock and Roll Music in 1976.  Live at the BBC gives us a great studio take from February 1964 recorded for the program From Us to You, which has a four-bar introduction.  Anthology 1 presents a version recorded for the April 1964 TV special Around the Beatles.  And I have a bootleg of a live performance from the Olympia Theatre in Paris in June of 1965.

Though I Wanna Be Your Man initially replaced Boys as Ringo's vocal spotlight in concert, the two songs would alternate in the set list from time to time, with Honey Don't and Act Naturally occasionally thrown in for good measure.  But it was I Wanna Be Your Man that had the distinction of being performed at the group's final concert in 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.