Like Dreamers Do-Beatles Songs You Haven’t Heard
The Beatles are arguably the most popular band of all time. And yet there are still a handful of Beatles songs that the average person has never even heard of. These songs were released in strange places, or never even released until long after the band had broken up, and as a result only diehard fans know about them. So let’s take a moment to talk about the lesser-known Beatles songs and find out why they’re so seldom heard.
Like Dreamers Do
Released: On “Anthology 1”, in 1995
Writers: Paul McCartney, attributed to Lennon-McCartney
The Beatles’ failed Decca audition is an infamous moment in rock history.
In early 1962 the Beatles were already managed by Brian Epstein, but they hadn’t yet found a record label. Decca Records was interested in the group, and asked them to come to their London studio and record some songs as an audition. The Beatles recorded 15 songs, drawing from their live repertoire at the time. Decca decided they didn’t want to sign the Beatles, in part because they lived too far away from the studio, and in part because, as the infamous quote goes, “Guitar groups are on their way out”. But the session was not completely fruitless. Brian Epstein took the taped recordings and showed them to George Martin at EMI records, who signed the group later that year, and the rest is history.
What often gets overlooked in this story is the actual contents of the Decca tapes, which provide a unique snapshot of the Beatles’ Cavern Club-era sound, tailored to please a crowd. These were the songs that made up their live sets at the time. 12 of the 15 tracks were covers, showing their broad range of influences by featuring everything from contemporary rock ’n’ roll and R&B songs to old standards from film scores. Only 3 of the songs were Lennon-McCartney originals, representing their tentative first attempts at playing their own originals live.
As Paul McCartney once said in an interview:
“Like Dreamers Do’ was one of the very first songs I wrote and tried out at the Cavern. We did a weak arrangement but certain of the kids liked it because it was unique, none of the other groups did it. It was actually a bit of a joke to try your own songs… For you to write it yourself was a bit plonky, and the songs obviously weren’t that great, but I felt we really had to break through that barrier because if we never tried our own songs we’d just never have the confidence to continue writing.” -Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles(source)
The three original songs clearly show that they hadn’t quite figured out their sound yet, because none of them sound anything like the Beatles we would come to know. There’s John Lennon’s Hello Little Girl, one of the first songs he’d ever written, a simple Buddy Holly-influenced tune that had evolved from a calm slow song in their live set to a speed-up aggressive version by the time of the Decca audition. Then there is McCartney’s genuinely strange ballad Love of the Loved, which could easily be the subject of it’s own article.
And then there’s Like Dreamers Do. Another McCartney-penned song, written all the way back in 1957 or 1958, it’s the obvious standout of the 3 originals. It’s the most complex, the weirdest, and the closest to the kind of energy the Beatles would have on their studio albums.
The Decca audition featured the standard Beatles lineup at the time; Paul McCartney on bass (and vocals), George Harrison on lead guitar, John Lennon on rhythm guitar, and Pete Best on drums. Pete Best had joined the Beatles in 1960 when they went to play in Hamburg, Germany and needed a permanent drummer to go with them. He was a part of the band for two years, but the Decca tapes are some of the only high-quality recordings of him playing with the rest of the band. Later that same year, as they were being signed to EMI, Best was dismissed from the Beatles by the rest of the group, after George Martin expressed that he would like to replace him with a session drummer on the albums. Since the Decca tapes were shown to George Martin, it’s likely that Best’s drumming on them was a contributing factor to the decision that would ultimately lead to him being kicked out of the Beatles.
So how was his drumming on Like Dreamers Do? In order to talk about that, we have to dissect the whole song.
Like Dreamers Do strikes a strange middle ground between the 3 original Beatles recordings from the Decca tapes. Like Hello Little Girl, it’s got a clear rock ’n’ roll influence in it’s speed and energy. But like Love of the Loved, it’s swooping melody seems to take something from the old standards of the 20th century. George Harrison once said that the song took influence from George Gershwin’s I’ll Build A Stairway to Paradise and other Gershwin songs that Paul McCartney’s father liked.
The result of this mix of influences is a song that sounds unique, but almost nothing like the sound the Beatles would later be known for. It sounds most like their rocked-out cover of Bésame Mucho from the same audition. It’s as if Paul McCartney wrote his own 1920s song just so that it could be reimagined into a rocker.
The song starts with a jarring intro, the guitar and drums ascending threateningly until they suddenly drop us into the song proper without warning. McCartney’s vocals try to lead us into the verse, but there’s a noticeable hesitation in his voice at the beginning. The opening verse actually starts out different from the rest of the song, with the string instruments simply playing the chords as they change, until Paul sings “that I will love her”, and then with a drum fill switches us into the standard instrumentation for the rest of the verses, with the guitars spiking in on the offbeats. This is the most familiar, Beatles-like part of the song, since these little guitar stabs would become an iconic part of their sound. The bass also starts doing it’s own thing around this part of the song. Despite McCartney also being on lead vocals, the bassline is one of the more complex parts of the song, taking on a lead-guitar-like role.
The new verse format barely has time to play out before it switches into the chorus. The first part of the chorus features McCartney singing “I” like it’s three syllables long, building up to dramatic heights, and then touching down on the titular line. It would be perfectly reasonable for the chorus to end here, but instead there’s another drum fill and McCartney sings another multi-syllable “I”, this time stretching it out into an exaggerated “I-ya-ya-ya-yai” and then the chorus finally ends on him shouting “you you you” until he descends back into key for the second verse. The result of this complex chorus is that the song always feels like it’s moving, darting around from one thing to the next, with the drums and guitar and bass throwing in little riffs in-between all this constant change. Finally, the song ends on the first section of the chorus, repeating the titular line, and then a return of the intro riff.
Like Dreamers Do is remarkably complex for an early Beatles song, especially when compared to Hello Little Girl, or even the rock ’n’ roll songs they were playing at the time. The complexity allows it to work as a nice showcase for Paul McCartney’s vocal range, despite his initial nervousness on some lines. There’s a kind of endearing campiness to the way he exaggerates certain lines. Pete Best also does a pretty good job on the song, quickly switching between the different sections and tying them all together with drum fills. Altogether it’s a high energy romp of a song, even if it’s genre is a little unclear.
Lyrically, Like Dreamers Do is a silly love song. There’s a bit of a twist during the first verse where the narrator sings “I saw a girl in my dreams/And so it seems/That I will love her” only to reveal during the second line that “you” are that girl. The concept that seeing someone in your dreams meaning you must love them, instead of it being the other way around, is also a bit strange. But otherwise the most remarkable thing about the lyrics is just how hard they are to clearly understand. McCartney stretches out the syllables of many of the words, as was common in rock ’n’ roll of the time. He also pronounces “saw” as “sawr” because of his Liverpudlian accent, and even inexplicably pronounces “first” as “fur”.
Like Dreamers Do was one of their standout original songs at the time of it’s recording, but after being signed 1962 the Beatles seemed to lose interest in it, and it wasn’t chosen to be recorded for any of their albums. In 1964 the Beatles met the Applejacks, another beat group, while rehearsing for a television show. They offered to let the up-and-coming group record Like Dreamers Do, making it one of the many Lennon-McCartney songs they “gave away”. The Applejack’s version reached number 20 on the U.K. singles chart.
The Applejacks’ Like Dreamers Do keeps the same basic structure as the Beatles version, but removes the old opening riff and the change in in the first verse, and adds a completely new riff that dramatically changes the feel of the song. It’s faster, but it feels more calm. The vocals are less bombastic, lacking Paul McCartney’s exaggerated rocker impersonation. The Applejacks managed to turn the song into a safe pop-merseybeat number, but as a result it lacked some of the energy and strange charm that made the Beatles version feel so unique. Ironically, the Applejacks version was released by Decca records, the same record company who had turned down the Beatles’ and their version 2 years ago.
For many years the Applejacks version was the only officially released version of Like Dreamers Do, though bootlegged copies of the Beatles version started to appear in the late 1970s. In 1995 Anthology 1 was released, featuring 5 songs from the Decca audition, including Like Dreamers Do.
Despite finally being released, Like Dreamers Do remains fairly obscure. Perhaps that’s because it isn’t as high-quality as the later Beatles songs, or maybe it’s just because it sounds almost nothing like the Beatles as we would come to know them. But there’s something about the energy of this song that keeps me coming back to it. There’s a sense of excitement to this song that can still be heard in Please Please Me, the enthusiasm of a live band trying their hand at making recordings for the first time. Perhaps that’s why this is actually one of my favorite Beatles songs. It’s a snapshot of a band in metamorphosis, trying to distill all their influences together into a cohesive sound, trying to go from a club act to a major label, featuring a drummer who was about to be unceremoniously removed from the group as they strived to become a success. There’s something fascinating about the steps in between starting out and making it big for the first time.
Thank you for reading this article! Feel free to point out any errors and I’ll try to fix them if possible. Also feel free to suggest any Beatles songs you think I should cover here. Next month I’m thinking about covering That Means a Lot. Previous articles in this series: You Know What to Do, Old Brown Shoe, I’ll Be On My Way, You Know My Name (Look Up The Number).
