I Want to Hold Your Hand

"I Want to Hold Your Hand" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Recorded on 17 October 1963 and released on 29 November 1963 in the United Kingdom, it was the first Beatles record to be made using four-track recording equipment.


US picture sleeve

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Promotion and release


Gold record awarded to the Beatles by the RIAA to commemorate one million sales of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (Museum of Style Icons, Ireland)

In the United Kingdom, "She Loves You" (released in August) shot back to the number-one position in November following blanket media coverage of the Beatles (described as Beatlemania). Mark Lewisohn later wrote: "'She Loves You' had already sold an industry-boggling three-quarters of a million before these fresh converts were pushing it into seven figures. And at this very moment, just four weeks before Christmas, with everyone connected to the music and relevant retail industries already lying prone in paroxysms of unimaginable delight, EMI pulled the trigger and released 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. And then it was bloody pandemonium."

On 29 November 1963, Parlophone Records released "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in the UK, with "This Boy" as the single's B-side. Demand had been building for quite a while, as evidenced by the one million advance orders for the single. When it was finally released, the response was phenomenal. A week after it entered the British charts, on 14 December 1963, it knocked "She Loves You" off the top spot, the first instance of an act taking over from itself at number one in British history, and it clung to the top spot for five weeks. It stayed in the charts for another 15 weeks and made a one-week return to the charts on 16 May 1964. Beatlemania was peaking at that time; during the same period, the Beatles set a record by occupying the top two positions on both the album and single charts in the UK.[citation needed]

EMI and Brian Epstein finally convinced American label Capitol Records, a subsidiary of EMI, that the Beatles could make an impact in the US, leading to the release of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" with "I Saw Her Standing There" on the B-side as a single on 26 December 1963. Capitol had previously resisted issuing Beatle recordings in the US. This resulted in the relatively modest Vee-Jay and Swan labels releasing the group's earlier Parlophone counterparts in the US. Seizing the opportunity, Epstein demanded US$40,000 from Capitol to promote the single (the most the Beatles had ever previously spent on an advertising campaign was US$5,000). The single had actually been intended for release in mid-January 1964, coinciding with the planned appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. However, a fourteen-year-old fan of the Beatles, Marsha Albert, wanted to hear the Beatles on the radio earlier. Later she said:

It wasn't so much what I had seen, it's what I had heard. They had a scene where they played a clip of "She Loves You" and I thought it was a great song ... I wrote that I thought the Beatles would be really popular here, and if [deejay Carroll James] could get one of their records, that would really be great.

James was the DJ for WWDC, a radio station in Washington, DC. Eventually, he decided to pursue Albert's suggestion. He asked the station's promotion director to get British Overseas Airways Corporation to ship in a copy of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from Britain. Albert related what happened next: "Carroll James called me up the day he got the record and said, 'If you can get down here by 5 o'clock, we'll let you introduce it.'" Albert managed to get to the station in time and introduced the record with: "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beatles singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'."

The song proved to be a huge hit, a surprise for the station since they catered mainly to a more staid audience, which would typically be expecting songs from singers such as Andy Williams or Bobby Vinton instead of rock and roll. James took to playing the song repeatedly on the station, often turning it down in the middle to make the declaration, "This is a Carroll James exclusive", to avoid theft of the song by other stations.

Capitol threatened to seek a court order banning airplay of "I Want to Hold Your Hand", which was already being spread by James to a couple of DJs in Chicago and St. Louis. James and WWDC ignored the threat, and Capitol concluded that they could take advantage of the publicity, releasing the single two weeks ahead of schedule on 26 December.

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