Twist and Shout

The manager of the Beatles, Brian Epstein, stood nervously in the wings at the Royal Command Performance on November 4th, 1963.  Things were going very well so far.  Paul McCartney had just gotten a nice laugh with his Sophie Tucker joke before singing the crowd-pleaser Till There Was You.  Only one more number remained, but John Lennon would be handling the introduction, and he had threatened to drop an F-bomb when addressing the royal box.  All of Epstein's carefully planned work on behalf of the group's unprecedented success could be undone in one fell swoop.

The moment came.  "For our last number, I'd like to ask your help," John began.  "Would the people in the cheap seats clap your hands?"  A nice laugh from the audience.  "And the rest of you, if you'd just rattle your jewelry?"  A big laugh, applause, and the Beatles launched into the rousing Twist and Shout.  Backstage, Epstein heaved a sigh of relief.

There is no question that Twist and Shout looms large in the career of the Beatles.  The song had been a hit record for the Isley Brothers in the USA in 1962.  It did not do well in England, however, but the Beatles soon discovered it and added it to their stage act, where it quickly became popular with their fans in both Liverpool and Hamburg.  The Star Club tapes from December of 1962 contain a high energy performance of the song played before a raucous crowd. 

The group's official recording of Twist and Shout from February 11th, 1963 is legendary in its own right.  They had spent the entire day recording the bulk of their first album Please Please Me, but one more number was necessary to complete the task.  John had started off the day with a sore throat, and he had little left at 10 pm, but he gargled with milk (!), stripped to the waist and prepared to give it a go.  What you hear on the record is that one brilliant take.  They did attempt a second take, but producer George Martin reports that John's voice was gone by that point.

Martin placed the song at the end of the LP, realizing that it could not be topped.  When American label Vee Jay Records obtained the rights to the material, it wisely kept the same running order for the album Introducing...the Beatles.  Once Beatlemania took hold in the US, Vee Jay flooded the market with numerous releases, a few of them on the subsidiary label Tollie Records.  Among these was Twist and Shout, issued on March 2nd, 1964, with There's a Place as the B-side.  Amazingly, this single shot all the way up to number two on the Billboard chart.

In the UK, Parlophone had also issued Twist and Shout as the title track of the group's first EP in July of '63.  This release not only topped the EP chart, but it went all the way to number two on the singles chart, as well, and it remains the biggest selling EP in British history.  

One additional US release occurred in March of 1965 when Capitol re-issued most of the songs previously available only on the Vee Jay and Tollie labels on an album called The Early Beatles.  Twist and Shout curiously sits in the second slot right after Love Me Do, not exactly the most effective use of sequencing.

But the Beatles themselves knew how to use the song effectively in concert.  For the most part, it either opened or closed their performances.  For example, it opened their third weekly appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.  When they returned to the States in the summer of '64, the song most notably opened the Hollywood Bowl concert recorded by Capitol Records as a potential live album.  That idea was scrapped, but Capitol used a brief excerpt of Twist and Shout from the top of that show on the money-grabbing two-record documentary album The Beatles' Story, released in November of 1964.

By 1965, the song was still opening their stage act, though in a truncated one-verse version.  This can be heard on bootlegs of their Paris concert in June of that year, as well as on The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, with the 1977 album utilizing the opening of their 1965 return appearance at that storied venue.  By the end of '65, the song was finally retired from the set list.

The boys played the song many times on British TV, as well as on BBC Radio.  The collection On Air - Live at the BBC Volume 2 contains one of those radio performances from their program Pop Go the Beatles in the summer of 1963.  And the video collection 1+ features a black and white clip from the Granada television program Scene at 6:30 showing the group in black turtleneck sweaters miming to the original recording.

Other post career releases of Twist and Shout include its distinction as being the first track on the 1976 compilation Rock and Roll Music.  And the entire Royal Command Performance incident described at the top of this blog entry can be heard on Anthology 1, including the corny house orchestra's playing of Twist and Shout after the Beatles have finished.