PLEASE PLEASE ME

What's this now-ancient album doing on a progressive rock website? Well, an arrow seems pretty archaic until you compare it with a basic sharp stick. In 1963 we youngsters in the USA were listening to surf music and Peter, Paul and Mary and I guess in the UK they were listening to Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan's skiffle. Pretty unexciting stuff. Then this hit the airwaves and these guys snapped our heads around so forcefully we may have all suffered mass neck injuries. Their sound, their look, their attitudes were so PROGRESSIVE that they changed the freakin' world. Of course later on down the road they would truly experiment with new directions in music and recording that would be more obviously proto prog but it's important to realize that the simple tunes included on this debut LP marked a 90 degree turn in the evolution of modern music. There were no guitar effects, a keyboard was simply an acoustic piano and drums were just skins stretched across wooden tubs. But with this band those instruments became so much more. The Beatles made progressive rock an inevitability. Just listen to the raw enthusiasm on these songs and perhaps you'll better understand the universal attraction that these fab four generated and why there will probably never be anything quite like them again.