Useless facts: George has not yet had a song in the top 3.
This is a great Useless Fact! I had to think about it a while, so I could respond with some appropriately Useless Statistics.
George is doing fairly well, or at least not poorly, comparatively speaking. Out of the 83 songs we have considered in this contest, only five of them were by George. Since George was never terribly prolific, we can assume this is virtually his entire catalog through 1965. The only other song we ever see of his appears on Anthology 1: "You Know What to Do" from 1964.
How did John and Paul do with their earliest songs? As I'm reading Paul's biography at the moment, it was fairly easy to look up some of these early songs. Here's what Paul says:
We used to try and persuade people that we had about a hundred songs before 'Love Me Do'. That was a slight exaggeration. It was probably more like 4 -- less than twenty anyway.
So, what were these early songs and how do they stack up? I'm not an Early Beatles scholar, but here's what I found. Please join in if you have more!
1. First song ever recorded, by themselves for themselves, never released:
In Spite Of All The Danger - by McCartney/Harrison
2. First song professionally recorded. Out of the Beatles catalog of half a dozen originals, Bert Kaempfert chose to record only this instrumental on June 22, 1961:
Cry For A Shadow - by Harrison/Lennon
The melody was all Harrison's, and as Pete best later recalled, it was created spontaneously: "Cry for a Shadow" was born during our first Hamburg tour, the result of trying to take the Mickey out of Rory storm. It was put together by George in a few minutes after Rory had called in on us during our rehearsal at the Kaiserkeller. He was telling us how much he liked the Shadows' song "Frightened City". "Can you play it?" he asked. George intentionally began to play around the Shadows' melody in a sort of counterpoint -- without Rory having the slightest suspicion he was being sent up. John joined in and I picked up the beat."
George now drops out of song-writing for 2.5 years.
3. Early McCartney songs, never released. No rating, and no way to judge their relative quality except that Paul himself chose never to release them:
- I Lost My Little Girl
- Just Fun
- Cayenne - instrumental (later appeared on Anthology 1)
- Years Roll Along
4. Early Lennon songs, never released.
- You'll Be Mine - parody (later appeared on Anthology 1)
- I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry (Over You) - later appeared on Live At The BBC
5. Early Lennon songs that were released later:
- I Call Your Name - back of "Bad to Me", released on Long Tall Sally EP. We'll rank it with Past Masters 1.
- Bad to Me - Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas took this to #1 in July '63
- One After 909 - Bounced from '63 session to resurface in '70 on LIB
6. Early McCartney songs that were released later:
- World Without Love - a #1 hit for Peter & Gordon, Paul suspected due to the Lennon-McCartney credit.
- I'll Follow the Sun - later released on "Beatles for Sale", where our forum ranked it a respectable #5
- Hold Me Tight - also held until on "Beatles for Sale", we ranked it #8
- When I'm 64 - held over until Sergeant Pepper. We'll rank it then!
7. Decca audition tape. Recorded, but songs never released by EMI:
Like Dreamers Do - McCartney
Love Of The Loved - McCartney
Hello Little Girl - Lennon
8. Pre-album performance by The Beatles at the Star-Club in Hamburg on New Year's Eve, 31 December 1962. Only two originals formed part of their show. They relied mostly on covers to get good audience response. For an analysis of this early live Beatles gig, see
http://www.geocities.com/hammodotcom/beathoven/star3.htm - Ask Me Why - Lennon - we ranked this #9
- I Saw Her Standing There - McCartney - Our forum ranked this #1 on PPM
9. Other early songs that ended up on the
Please Please Me album, 22 November 1963, and our rankings:
There's A Place - Lennon - we ranked it #4
Love Me Do - old McCartney tune that got to #17 as a hit, we ranked it #5
Do You Want To Know A Secret - Lennon, we ranked it #7
Misery - Lennon/McCartney written for Helen Shapiro, who rejected it - we ranked it 0 (no votes)
P.S. I Love You - McCartney - we gave it 0 votes
10. Here's where I consider the Beatles "broke through" as composers:
* Please Please Me - Lennon - First #1 hit, we ranked it #2
This was the impetus for the PPM album, rush-released on 22 March 1963 in the UK, and the start of Beatles' success. This is my dividing line between "early" Beatles songs. There are 25 or so (depending on how you count), which is in Paul's ballpark.
--> By the way, I'm attributing authorship of Lennon/McCartney songs based on this page:
http://www.myrsten.nu/worldnet/beatlesongs.htmThe Useless Statistics part:So, how does "early" George stack up?
Unreleased: 2 songs, 1 co-authored with McCartney and 1 on June 3, 1964 - unranked
Released, unranked: 1 song, 1961 co-authored with Lennon
Released song - Don't Bother Me - we ranked it #6
Help me fill in my gaps! Here's what I have so far, based on the above:
Early Lennon:
Unreleased: 3
Released, unranked by us: 2
Released, our average rank: 4 songs, average rank #5.5
Early McCartney:
Unreleased: 6
Released, unranked by us: 2
Released, our average rank: 5 songs, average rank #5.8
Not included above: 1 Lennon/McCartney co-authored song, our rank: 0
(I'm not sure how to average this in without dragging the solo average down)
Later statistics:
By the time we get to
Rubber Soul (which prompted the opening quotation, aren't you sorry you said anything, BM?), Lennon and McCartney have now written at least 70 songs that I know about.
George didn't get active again until
Help! (2 songs in August 1965 and 2 in December 1965).
At this point, our Top 3 list compares 83 songs, and looks like this:
Lennon: authored 35% of all songs, has 56% of the top 3 vote
McCartney: authored 24% of all songs, has 33% of the top 3 vote
Covers: comprise 24% of all songs, have 11% of the top 3 vote
Lennon/McCartney co-authorship: 11% of all songs, have 0% of the top 3 vote
Harrison: authored 6% of all songs, has 0% of the top 3 vote
It seems our forum agrees that Lennon and McCartney, as individual or primary composers, did far better than the Lennon/McCartney self-confessed "filler" songs. Out of their 58 total compositions, 16 (or 28%) ended up in the top 3. An impressive average! Out of the 20 cover songs, 2 ended up in the top 3.
Out of George's 5 songs, none so far made it to the top 3. Considering the volume of work he's up against, this isn't terribly surprising. His songs aren't most people's favorites, but they're not the worst either.
WORST SONGS, as rated by this forum per album:
Cover songs: 3 out of 6
Lennon/McCartney co-authorship: 2 out of 6
Lennon: 1 out of 6
