The Beatles Bible‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was The Beatles’ sixth British single, released with the b-side ‘You Can’t Do That’. It was written while the group were in Paris for a 19-date residency at the city’s Olympia Theatre.
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WikipediaThis is another case of a song perhaps appearing rather too low in my ranking. Can’t Buy Me Love is a McCartney song, and a massive hit single for the band in 1964, the year that Beatlemania captured the USA and much of the rest of the world. My personal view of the song has probably been coloured by overfamiliarity; as with some of the other songs of this period, I find it hard to hear it with the excitement it would have created when the sound was new.
At the time, the Beatles’ singles, in particular, had established an original sound that was their own. They always acknowledged their influences first from rock’n’roll (e.g., Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Buddy Holly) and later from soul (e.g., Ray Charles), Motown (e.g., Smokey Robinson) and US “girl groups” (e.g., the Shirelles). And while these are all detectable to different degrees, they are much clearer in their (album track and live) covers, B-sides and album “fillers”, than in the singles’ A-sides.
In common with some Motown artists (and McCartney’s wider music hall, musical theatre and classical influences), the Beatles tended to avoid clichéd chord progressions (which had been a big feature of early rock’n’roll), and on their singles of this period the chord progressions have a relentlessly positive, uplifting character. Almost “fanfare” like and quite distinctive.
Meanwhile their performances at this stage tend to be more raucous and rocky than most soul, Motown and Stax records. And though the influence of girl groups on their harmonies and call-response type vocals was undeniable, it is less obvious because the Beatles’ voices were male.
Another factor that may have influenced my rating is the quality of the production. Can’t Buy Me Love was recorded in the same session as Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand and Sie Liebt Dich at an unfamiliar studio in Paris while the Beatles were on tour.
The sound does seem a bit murkier than some of the other songs of the time.This may be attributable to the fact that the band, producer and engineers were working on a tight schedule with unfamiliar equipment; some aspects had to be “fixed” when the tapes returned to England.
It’s intriguing that the central concept of the song, i.e., “money can’t buy me love”, is like a mirror image of Money, the cover that ends the preceding album, With The Beatles i.e., “money don’t get everything it’s true, what it don’t get I can’t use”. I wonder if that provided a starting point when writing the song (see also: Please Please Me -> Thank You Girl).
Can’t Buy Me Love provides another yardstick of the Beatles’ overall quality – even though it ranks only 162/213 in my (albeit deeply flawed) ranking, it rocketed to number 1 in the USA in a Billboard Hot 100 already dominated by other Beatles singles.