All I’ve Got to Do

Due to all of the wonderful and innovative contributions that The Beatles made to music and popular culture, history often seems to forget that perhaps the very first musical/cultural phenomenon that they engendered was one that we could probably have done without: the boy band.  After all, when The Beatles first came onto the scene they were as well known for causing teen-age girls in the audience to swoon as they were for producing cutting edge, paradigm shifting music.

A description of The Beatles in their early years would also also fits the profile of bands like The New Kids on the Block, The Backstreet Boys, and N’Sync.  Good looking guys with distinct personalities?  Check.  Lots of vocal harmonies?  Check.  Catchy singles driving the sales of otherwise forgettable albums?  Check (for now, more on this in a minute).  Even the notion of referring to each of the band members by their first names seems to have originated with The Beatles.  Other than adding the token “bad boy” and swapping out dancing for actually playing musical instruments, modern-day boy bands still follow the The Beatles’ blueprint.

Of course, the reason we don’t tend to think of The Beatles in that way is that they went on to be so much more than a boy band.  And it’s not that Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road made us forget about With the Beatles – it’s that they’ve given us reason to revisit the early recordings with a sharper ear.  It turns out that the early Beatles music stands up to careful scrutiny far better than any parent in the 1960s probably could have imagined.

Which brings me to “All I’ve Got to Do” from With the Beatles (or Meet the Beatles! on this side of the Atlantic).  At a glance, this seems like one of the aforementioned throw away tracks on an album designed to showcase “All My Loving” and “Roll Over Beethoven.”  But closer examination reveals that there’s a deeper level of complexity than we might at first expect from boy band filler.

The subject of the song, for instance, seems to be pretty simple love song fare.  A closer look, though, shows that rather than being a love song, the song is actually pretty creepy.  Everything starts with a single strum of an E-aug-add9-add11 chord.  Yeah, one of those.  It’s not all that difficult to play (thankfully), but it’s an unusual chord full of tension and weirdness, which is fitting considering what is to follow.

As the first verse begins, the music is slow and sweet, seemingly a typical ballad.  The lyrics, though, reveal a man who is basically telling his woman that she’s at his beck and call, that “Whenever I want you around, yeah,/All I gotta to do/Is call you on the phone and you’ll come running home.”  His next comment that “All I gotta do/Is whisper in your ear the words you want to hear and I’ll be kissing you” seems to suggest that he’s not terribly sincere in his love for her, but that he knows how to manipulate her into giving him what he wants.

At this point both the music and the lyrics take a sudden turn.  Perhaps realizing that he’s said a bit too much, he quickly adds that he’s also at her beck and call: “And the same goes for me, whenever you want me at all I’ll be here.”  The music, too, picks up, suggesting that rather than expressing sincere love and devotion to her he’s rushing to cover up what he’s just said (he has, after all, just told us that he’s good at telling her what she wants to hear).

Following this bit of damage control, we get a repetition of the creepy first verse and subsequent fast-talking chorus (he might be a good sweet talker, but apparently he’s not too bright).  Then the song ends with a return to the chords of the first verse and a gentle humming that, to my ears, just sounds a bit smug – as if he’s just cleverly whispered what she wanted to hear and is now extremely pleased with himself and his ability to manipulate her.

It’s entirely possible that I’m just reading a bit too much into the song, but learning to play it has only made me more confident in my reading.  First, the song is in C# minor – a somewhat unusual key for a love song.  In fact, the chord progression as a whole feels a little odd.  The verses remain firmly rooted in a minor key and, during the second repetition of the song’s title eschews the expected V chord (G#) for A-minor.  All of this seems to add a level of tension that only the chorus, which modulates to a major key (A), can diffuse – just as the narrator’s fast talking diffuses the tense situation that his earlier comments have created.

My dark reading of the song, though, might just be the result of my being in a dark place as I learned the song because it is comprised almost entirely of my nemesis: barre-chords. These weren’t too bad, though, because the song uses so damned many of them – keeping my index finger in the barre position and then moving the other fingers to make the different shapes took some practice, but it’s not nearly as hard as switching between barred and open chords during a song.  In the end, I was able to get to the chords and still stay in time.  There’s quite a bit of buzzing, but that’ll go away with practice (I hope).

The song also has two guitar parts.  They both just play the same chord progression, although they don’t always use the same voicings of the chords.  The bigger difference between them is the rhythm – one provides the sharp staccato that appears throughout the song, while the other has a more standard rhythmic feel to it.  The staccato took a little while to get down because, at first, I was trying to strum then quickly use my palm to mute the strings.  Then I realized that, since I was barring all of the strings anyway, I could just let up on my left hand a bit and get the same muting effect with little effort (damned barre chords – as much as I hate them they just keep proving how useful they are).

In keeping with the spirit of my pursuit, I learned both parts but usually do the staccato part during the verses then switch to the more rhythmic strumming during the chorus as this seems to convey the shift in momentum between that is crucial to the song.  Other than my continuing battle with barre-chords this wasn’t too hard of a song to learn and getting to know such a seemingly simple song pretty intimately was a worth while experience.

Ironically, the next song on With the Beatles is “All My Loving” and it’s also the next song alphabetically, so that is what I’ll start learning next…

Lyrics – All I’ve Got to Do

Whenever I want you around, yeah.
All I gotta do,
Is call you on the phone,
And you’ll come running home,
Yeah, that’s all I gotta do.

And when I, I want to kiss you, yeah.
All I gotta do,
Is whisper in your ear
The words you long to hear,
And I’ll be kissin’ you.

And the same goes for me,
Whenever you want me at all.
I’ll be here, yes I will, whenever you call.
You just gotta call on me, yeah,
You just gotta call on me.

And when I, I want to kiss you, yeah.
All I gotta do,
Is call you on the phone,
And you’ll go come running home,
Yeah, that’s all I gotta do.

And the same goes for me,
Whenever you want me at all.
I’ll be here, yes I will, whenever you call.
You just gotta call on me, yeah,
You just gotta call on me.

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