The Beatles recorded this song on January 29, 1964 in Paris, France. It is the only English-language Beatles track that the Beatles themselves recorded in a studio outside the United Kingdom (UK or England). This was the group’s third consecutive number-one song, after “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (the 1st at #1) and “She Loves You (the #2 at #1). The song went #1 on April 4th, 1964, on which day the Beatles held the top five spots – a record that has not been achieved by any other band. It is the fifth song on Side 2 of the Beatles’ third album, A Hard Day’s Night, released in the U.S. on June 26, 1964.
What is the song?
You got it. The song is . . . “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
It has a secret, as many Beatles songs do or think they do – at least for me, and I’ve been listening to the song since it first came out. It has a secret that fundamentally alters and corrects (in the ears of some) Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.
Listen with me. (I’ll let you play the song on YouTube, as you read on. Just open another window, paste and listen to www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMwZsFKIXa8 or click here to listen to “Can’t Buy Me Love”)
Here are the last four verses of the song, as they are written – listen carefully to the choruses.
Say you don’t need no diamond ring and I’ll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can’t buy
I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love
Owww
Can’t buy me love, everybody tells me so
Can’t buy me love, no no no, no
Say you don’t need no diamond rings and I’ll be satisfied
Tell me that you want those kinds of things that money just can’t buy
I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love
Can’t buy me love, love
Can’t buy me love
Do you hear it? John and Paul are singing a different chorus, and here it is – for the first time (that I am aware of) revealed and made public. I’ve highlighted the changed word.
Say you don’t need no diamond ring and I’ll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can’t buy
I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love
Owww
Puppy love, everybody tells me so
Puppy love, no no no, no
Say you don’t need no diamond rings and I’ll be satisfied
Tell me that you want those kinds of things that money just can’t buy
I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love
Puppy love, love
Puppy love
The Beatles are not singing “Can’t buy me love,” they’re singing “Puppy love.” Listen again. I’m sure you can hear it. Until the lyrics were examined, I never knew it to be anything else. And, this is very cool and very scientific.
Those fun-singing boys from Liverpool figured out what was missing from Sir Isaac Newton’s presentation of gravity, and they used the formula they were best at to express the missing factor for the world to hear in their song.
On the trail the other day, I saw what I’d heard all those years. A little puppy was walking with her mistress. Everyone stopped and was drawn to the cute little doggie. They couldn’t resist the clumsy cuddly ball of fur. Normally very proper adults bent down and reached out to touch and pet and scratch and say doggie words that they would never utter in public otherwise. There was a crowd and more were being drawn in as I watched. The whole mass of people, with arms and legs sticking out, was sort of attached and sticking to the penumbra that surrounded that adorable little puppy. I could hardly squeeze past. Why would I want to? It was puppy love at work and was it ever working.
Then it hit me. Newton had seen the apple but he’d missed the puppy. It isn’t just the mass of an object that attracts another object. It’s the object’s mass and its puppy-love factor. Clearly, the little dog I was observing had the attractive power of a small planet. How else could all those people be attracted to and stick to that cute little doggie pooh? Normally they’d be flying off and running and jogging down the trail “as dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly.” Not now, now they were all captured, stuck and contained by the massive attractive force of that cutsie smallish canine.
I knew then that Newton’s formula must be adjusted, and here it is.
Fpl=G((mp+mpl)x(mpa)/(r)x(r))
In the revised formula, Fpl is the measure of the gravitational attractive force between two objects with the new component for puppy love (or pl), G is the gravitational constant, mp is the mass of the puppy (negligible), to which you have to add the mass of puppy love (mpl, which is an enormous number), mpa is the mass of the puppy admirer (not much), and r is the distance between puppy and the admirer (very little indeed). When you put these together, I think you can see how important puppy love is and what an impact it has on those around it.
The Beatles saw it. There’s nothing like puppy love. You can’t buy it – don’t even think it. That’s why it’s puppy love. Sing it with me,
Puppy love, love
Puppy love
Now, maybe the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will see their mistake and modify the definition of planet to let that cute little Pluto back in.
Go puppy power,
Grandpa Jim