There's a Place

Pictured here is a shot of the group at an appearance to promote their first album Please Please Me.  (I love the early lettering on Ringo's drum kit, especially the corny antennae on the letter B.)  While much of that album fulfilled producer George Martin's concept of a recreation of the band's stage act recorded live in the studio, a few of the songs on it were brand new originals, unknown to their fans at the time.  And, on the day set aside to record pretty much all of that album, February 11th, 1963, they began not with one of the many cover songs from their setlist, but with the new composition There's a Place.

It required ten takes to arrive at the master, mostly because George had trouble getting the timing of his guitar riff just right.  The band then moved on to work on a few other tracks before returning to There's a Place late in the afternoon.  It had been decided that John would play the same riff on harmonica at three points in the arrangement.  Thus, while George's guitar part is still audible, John's harmonica is much more prominent in the final mix of the song.  The last of three overdubs proved to be the keeper, and the song was complete. 

Lennon and McCartney's initial enthusiasm for the composition seems to have tempered, and the song wound up in the next to last position on the album.  In the US, Vee Jay Records placed the song in the exact same position on the album Introducing...the Beatles.  However, when Beatlemania broke in America, There's a Place was chosen for release on a single on Tollie Records, as the B-side to Twist and Shout, and it actually made the Billboard chart, peaking at number seventy-four.  The song's only other appearance was on the British EP Twist and Shout.  It was not released by Capitol Records during the group's career, not even on the album The Early Beatles.  It finally surfaced on the US version of the album Rarities in 1980.

The band reportedly added the song to their stage act, but the only known performances of it were for BBC Radio, all three of them recorded in the space of a month in the summer of 1963.  The first and third of these were for editions of Pop Go the Beatles, while the second was for the program Easy Beat.  The third and final performance can be heard on the collection On Air - Live at the BBC Volume 2.  John does not play harmonica, so we actually get to hear George playing the song's riff in the clear.  The band's singing and playing is sharp and tight; overall, it is one of the finest recordings they made for the BBC.  And it is probably the last time they ever performed the song.

Much has been made of the fact that Lennon was writing about retreating into his mind this early on, even before Brian Wilson wrote about retreating into his room.  It is actually not very far removed from the love songs that Lennon and McCartney were beginning to craft with astonishing ease at the time, but it certainly contains the seeds of things to come in only a few short years.