Broken Record

A friend, now long dead, once told me that when the Beatles were putting the finishing touches on their second album, they found themselves one track short. So Paul McCartney suggested recording “Besame Mucho.” The way my friend recounted it, when Paul suggested including this innocuous little ball of hot-tamale flapdoodle on the album—a song the Fab Four had played at their Decca Records audition—John Lennon flew into a rage and threatened to quit the band. This was presumably because Lennon deemed the tune, written in 1941 by a love-smitten 25-year-old Mexican girl, to be totally uncool and sad and pathetic. Cooler heads prevailed and “Besame Mucho” was scotched in favor of “Till There Was You,” a saccharine, infinitely lamer, ballad from The Music Man.

Carlo Hermann / AFP / Getty Images / Newscom

For whatever the reason, the decision to record the treacly show tune, which provided the first warning of the Brobdingnagian sappiness that lurked in the recesses of Sir Paul’s soul, and to ditch the ethnic chestnut, placated Lennon. The rest, as we know, is history.

Partly out of deference to my long-dead friend, but mostly because I love this story, I have never bothered to find out if it is true. Lennon’s drawing a line in the sand regarding “Besame Mucho” has always struck me as both principled and sagacious; Lennon, who had probably played the song literally thousands of times during the Beatles’ formative years in Hamburg, trembled before the song’s Promethean corniness, and felt that its cloying, hyperbolic cutie-pie quality and general ethnic inanity might make the Beatles look silly, grounding their flight to the stars before they even got off the runway. 

I agree. To this day, I can think of no single song that will prompt me to exit a restaurant, a subway car, a relationship, or a society faster than “Besame Mucho.” Not a one. Usually, I leave on the dead run.