There’s A Place is an Lennon-McCartney original from the Please Please Me album. It was the first song to be recorded in the 11th February 1963 session at which the bulk of the new material for the album was recorded (Love Me Do , Please Please Me and their B-sides PS I Love You and Ask Me Why had been recorded in the autumn and winter of 1962).
The Beatles BibleThe first song to be recorded at the 11 February 1963 session for The Beatles’ Please Please Me album, ‘There’s A Place’ was completed in 10 takes, plus a harmonica overdub later that afternoon.
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WikipediaAt different times, Lennon and McCartney gave different accounts of how the song was written.
‘There’s A Place’ was my attempt at a sort of Motown, black thing. It says the usual Lennon things: ‘In my mind there’s no sorrow…’ It’s all in your mind. (Lennon, Interviewed by David Sheff, 1980)
There’s A Place [was] a product of the front room at Forthlin Road; co-written, co-sung but with a bias towards being Paul’s original idea, since he was the owner of the soundtrack album of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story with the song “There’s A Place For Us” [actually titled Somewhere] which is where the title phrase came from. (Barry Miles, writing in McCartney’s authorised biography Many Years From Now).
Lennon and McCartney were not directly disputing one another’s role, and note that they do not directly contradict one another. Lennon claims an important input into the lyrics and recognizes a Motown influence. McCartney says he had the original concept and recognizes a musical theatre influence.
For what it’s worth, as a Beatles fan I think I can recognize a healthy dose of both Lennon and McCartney in the song. Of course, this is pretty subjective, but the lyrics seem quite Lennonish in their sense of vulnerability (“when I feel low”, “when I feel blue”, “there’s no time when I’m alone”). The middle eight is quite McCartneyesque both melodically and lyrically (“in my mind there’s no sorrow, don’t you know that it’s so”) and I find it plausible that the starting point could have come from Somewhere and that McCartney owned the record. The co-lead vocal is characteristic of songs that Lennon and McCartney co-wrote most intensively.
I like the song a lot. Like many songs that purportedly reference Motown, it’s quite difficult to hear the connection. Motown at the time were making pop records that deviated from the simple rock’n’roll chord progressions and placed greater emphasis on vocals and harmonies. They evidently helped inspire the Beatles to take a similar tack, but the Beatles tended not to reproduce merely reproduce specific elements. Even their Motown covers have a distinctive feel, and in their Motown-influenced original songs the process of writing, arranging and performing generally resulted in something with its own flair. Part of that may have been the melding of Motown ingredients with additional influences, in this case including the wistful concept with it’s connection to West Side Story.
The result of Lennon and McCartney’s collaboration, and the line up of the band with two guitars, bass, drums and three vocals ensure that There’s A Place sounds like the Beatles and no-one else. It probably doesn’t even need the trademark harmonica to underline it.
The Lennon-McCartney Conundrum
The mildly conflicting accounts of the authorship of There’s A Place are typical for songs credited to Lennon-McCartney. There’s a little bit of dispute about the main authorship of the song. Lennon and McCartney had agreed from the outset that all their songs would be credited to Lennon-McCartney, but in many cases their songs were written entirely by one member of the partnership, and in many more cases one individual contributed much more than the other (with the extent and importance of the additional input varying greatly between songs). Any analysis of Beatles songs has to consider who contributed what to each Lennon-McCartney track. In some cases there are detailed records and recordings and in others we only have the writers’ words to go on.
Informally, the joint credit long predated any official legal agreement: from as early as 1958 McCartney kept an exercise book with their earliest songs in it, writing “Another Lennon-McCartney Original” at the top of each page, before the song title, according to Mark Lewisohn:
From the outset, John and Paul settled on Lennon-McCartney as a partnership, with that name order. Lennon came before McCartney alphabetically, and he was almost two years older, and it was his invitation, and, surpassing any other consideration, it was simply the way of things: John always came first. While equal in terms of contribution, Paul had to accept that one of them was just a little more equal than the other. Second billing wasn’t in his Paul accepted it from his fairground hero and positively no one else. ‘We were really looking at being Rodgers and Hammerstein, and famous writing duos always had their name the same way. You didn’t hear “Hammerstein and Rodgers”, it just didn’t sound as good. So we always wanted to have people say, “Oh, that’s a Lennon-McCartney song.”’ (Mark Lewisohn, All These Years Volume One: Tune In, The last quote is from a 1990 interview with Lewisohn and Kevin Howlett .)
When the Beatles began to publish their music they made the arrangement more formal:
John and I didn’t know you could own songs. We thought they just existed in the air. We could not see how it was possible to own them. (McCartney quoted in his authorised biography, Many Years From Now, by Barry Miles)
We had a meeting with Brian Epstein, John and me. I arrived late. John and Brian had been talking. “We were thinking we ought to call the songs, Lennon and McCartney.” I said, “That’s OK, but what about McCartney and Lennon? If I write it, what about that? It sounds good, too.” They said, “OK, what we’ll do is we’ll alternate it: Lennon and McCartney, McCartney and Lennon.” Well, that didn’t happen. And I didn’t mind. It’s a good logo, like Rogers and Hammerstein. (McCartney interviewed by Alex Blimes of Esquire Magazine in 2015)
However, after the Beatles split, there was some acrimony between Lennon and McCartney and their different views of the authorship of different songs became a point of friction. Lennon gave various outspoken interviews, McCartney was more guarded. To the extent their was a PR battle, McCartney lost during the 1970s, and after Lennon was murdered in 1980, McCartney felt that Lennon was starting to be portrayed as “the One”. Recognition was (and is) important to McCartney, and he felt his role in the creative partnership was being marginalized.
The Beatles split up and we were sort of all equal. George did his record, John did his, I did mine, Ringo did his. It was as we were during the Beatles’ times. We were equal. When John got shot, aside from the pure horror of it, the lingering thing was, OK, well now John’s a martyr. A JFK. So what happened was, I started to get frustrated because people started to say, “Well, he was The Beatles.” … I understood that now there was going to be revisionism. It was going to be: John was the one.(McCartney interviewed by Alex Blimes of Esquire Magazine in 2015)
McCartney’s 1997 authorized biography with Barry Miles was, in part, an attempt to set the record straight, or rather to rebalance the scales by asserting McCartney’s role had been larger.
Neither the Lennon interviews or the McCartney book can be treated as dispassionate objective records. But on most songs they tended to agree in substance, or at least not to disagree. After their split, they may have disagreed on how much significance should be attached to different contributions, and McCartney certainly wanted (and probably still wants) more prominent recognition for songs where he unambiguously made the major contribution:
In particular cases like ‘Yesterday’, which John actually had nothing to do with, none of the other Beatles had anything to do with – I wrote it on my own, sang it on my own, they’re not on the record, nobody is even involved with it, and they didn’t mind that and I didn’t mind, nobody minded, but that’s very much mine – so I said, “Could we have ‘By Paul McCartney and John Lennon’, wouldn’t that be a good idea? And then on ‘Strawberry Fields’ we’ll have, ‘By John Lennon and Paul McCartney’. ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘John Lennon and Paul McCartney’. ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Paul McCartney and John Lennon’. Seeing as we’re breaking it up, can we do that?”
What starts to happen is, “A song by John Lennon and-“. You know how on your iPad there’s never enough room? So it’s kind of important who comes first. Late at night I was in a hotel room looking online and I happened to see this music book, which has got all the songs in it, and it was ‘Hey Jude’ by John Lennon and…” and the space ran out. There’s a poetry book, Blackbird by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.” No! He didn’t write those lyrics! So, at the risk of seeming like… I tell you what, if John was here he would definitely say that’s OK. (McCartney interviewed by Alex Blimes of Esquire Magazine in 2015)
McCartney’s position may not be unreasonable, but I suspect that avoiding this issue while they worked together may have been important for the partnership; in my view, their early decision to co-credit all their songs may have been part of their success. Being possessive and guarded about ownership is not conducive to creative collaboration, and it may have been that removing this barrier was crucial. Sometimes the best thing a collaborator can do is say: “that’s really good, don’t change a thing”, “what does that mean?”, “isn’t it a bit corny?”. Sometimes one person can have a concept, but the other delivers the words or melody, another time one person has a verse and a chorus, but the other a great idea for a middle eight. Sometimes, just a small change, some tweak to the arrangement or harmonies that, outside of a partnership, might not attract a songwriting credit, could tun a promising song into a timeless classic. These moments were absolutely fundamental for Lennon and McCartney’s success, and I think they were much easier to experience when they worked as a partnership without having to worry about who was going to get the credit. If record sales and longevity are any guide, I think the record shows that the Beatles made these creative choices better than anyone else, and one thing the rest of us can learn from it is to be less concerned about individual credit when participating in a creative team.