The Beatles song initially written by Carole King
When the 1960s revolution got underway, no one could match the sound of The Beatles. While the British Invasion spat out many artists who tried their hand at making their renditions of Chuck Berry and Little Richard tracks, the Fab Four felt like a singular entity whenever they came onscreen or played onstage, making songs that had no actual lineage. Although John Lennon and Paul McCartney followed their muse throughout their prime, they were just as likely to pull from American songwriters.
As the duo started, they were already given their rock and roll education from American artists. Whenever they played in clubs across England, the band often descended upon music shops to learn every song by Chuck Berry and Little Richard so they would have enough material to play onstage every night.
While Lennon and McCartney were always proud to display their love for their idols, one of their more unsung heroes came from the old school of songwriting. Long before ‘The Nerk Twins’ had started making waves, the pop sound of the 1960s was being defined by the duo of Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Working out of New York, the duo created some of the most legendary songs of the era, including the heartbreaking sounds of tracks like ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’.
In interviews, The Beatles also claimed to love the work that they heard out of that scene. When talking about their aspirations as a duo, Lennon and McCartney would later say that they wanted to be the British equivalent of Goffin and King, writing songs that were more about the melody than the energy behind it.
Even though the group considered Goffin and King their musical heroes, they only performed any of their compositions once on record. Looking to capture the feeling of their live shows, the band’s debut, Please Please Me, featured many different covers, some of which would become iconic for The Beatles’ renditions like ‘Twist and Shout’.
While the band offered a few surprises, like their version of the track ‘A Taste of Honey’ from the Broadway show of the same name, George Harrison made his vocal debut on the song ‘Chains’, made famous by The Cookies. Even though it bore the Goffin/King label, it wouldn’t be one of their most imaginative compositions, with Harrison singing about crushing on a certain girl in the crowd but being tied down with his girlfriend back home.
Despite being the only Goffin/King song on the record, that didn’t stop the band from covering more of their work on the live stage, trying their hand at tracks like ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Baby’ and ‘Don’t Ever Change’, each of which would turn up on their live anthology Live at the BBC. As Lennon and McCartney started writing more pieces together, they began to walk in the footsteps of the American songwriting duo.
Like Goffin and King, the pair would create songs that would be throwaways reserved for other artists, like ‘Bad To Me’ by Billy Kramer and the Dakotas, and keep more imaginative work like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ for themselves. While Carole King wouldn’t blossom as a solo artist until years later, her penchant for massive hooks was influencing the giants of rock music before she stepped in front of the microphone.