In 1963, The Beatles had finally succeeded in doing what no other “foreign” band had: cracking the U.S.A. (though Beatlemania wouldn’t reach its crescendo in America until 1964 after an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show). With their debut record, Please Please Me, the quartet offered all manner of devoted promises espousing unwavering love. All the while, John Lennon was cheating on Cynthia. But that kind of caddish behavior wasn’t in line with manager Brian Epstein’s vision for the band, telling John at one point in the Hamburg days, “Look, if you really want to get in these bigger places, you’re going to have to change– stop eating on stage, stop swearing, stop smoking.” Nice girls didn’t like that sort of thing. Or even “bad” girls (the ones who put out) during this period. And The Beatles needed to appeal to what would be the entire core of the early audience (lads didn’t really get into it until the drugs got into The Beatles).
While every composition (whether covers or originals) on Please Please Me is a bathetic lie about either being the one wronged as a man or about remaining forever loyal, one of the most prime examples of even Lennon’s inability to buy in to this bullshit is “Do You Want to Know A Secret?” Long before Drake was proudly declaring being a mama’s boy on “God’s Plan,” Lennon found much of his inspiration in songwriting from his own mother, Julia, who he had a strained relationship with before she was killed in a car accident way too prematurely in her lifespan. Thus, the tune and premise behind the song came from Snow White‘s “I’m Wishing” (which Julia used to sing to him), during the scene in which the eponymous heroine asks the birds on a wishing well, “Wanna know a secret, promise not to tell?” before delving into the lyrics, “I’m wishing for the one I love to find me today.”
So Lennon had also wished and received in the form of Cynthia, though the timing of their impending nuptials was not suited to Epstein’s idea of peddling four available bachelors to the never-to-be-fulfilled fantasies of their fanbase. Thus, Lennon was instructed to keep the marriage a secret, prompting him to come up with the line for the chorus, “Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?” Indeed, the entire band was riddled with secrets, the biggest one being Epstein’s (one of many described as “the fifth Beatle”) homosexuality.
After finishing the composition for the track, Lennon decided it would a good vehicle for George Harrison, who wouldn’t write any of his own original lyrics in the band until the appropriately titled “Don’t Bother Me” was released on With the Beatles. But more than “giving George an opportunity,” Lennon likely couldn’t convincingly deliver the soliloquy, especially when taking into account the fact that during recording sessions for the track he mockingly sang, “Do you want to hold a penis?” Eventually, the answer to that question would be yes, as things did end up veering toward the homoerotic when John went on holiday in Barcelona with Brian, a scandalous move, to be sure and one that set tongues wagging–like at Paul McCartney’s twenty-first birthday party, when Bob Wooler, the DJ at the Cavern Club who had introduced The Beatles to Brian, insinuated that everyone knew what was going on between them, inciting Lennon to beat the shit out of him, later remarking, “I must have been frightened of the fag in me to get so angry.”
Yes, everyone wanted to know the secret of what had really happened on that very intimate trip in 1963. Perhaps another reason Lennon couldn’t really bring himself to contribute his voice to the song. And though Harrison was a novice in delivering vocals, it’s difficult to imagine Lennon as convincingly providing the dramatic opening lines, “You’ll never know how much I really love you/you’ll never know how much I really care,” which lead into the innocent, playful lyrics, “Listen, do you want to know a secret?/Let me whisper in your ear.” In point of fact, it’s almost as though this track is being sung from the perspective of Epstein.
Whether or not that’s latently the case, the one clear facet of “Do You Want to Know A Secret?” is that John might have actually vomited from uttering the words to it out loud, saving use of his gag reflex control for other phony baloney early work like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You.” But now and then, he could cleanse his palate of such slop with the forbidden love nature of songs like “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” or the admission to being a piece of shit on “I’m A Loser.” Confessing his “secret” of self-loathing and sexual confusion through the undercutting medium of The Beatles, which everyone was forced to listen to in those days as the band was pop, rock, blues and folk all rolled into one. Encapsulating every genre just as Elvis had without getting all warbly from too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches. But then, maybe Elvis was stuffing those down his own throat to keep from throwing up over the trite lies he spun in song form.
