IN 1959 THE EMI BRASS had renewed George’s contract without hesitation, given the great strides that he had made since his promotion. While he was happy to receive a new three-year contract for £2,700 per annum, he would have gladly accepted slightly less for the opportunity to earn royalties from his artists’ sales receipts, thus giving him a stake in the overall success of his growing and increasingly prosperous stable. EMI’s refusal to even so much as consider the notion of the most rudimentary kind of profit sharing was taking its toll on the Parlophone head’s psyche. “Frustration has many fathers, but few children, among them bitterness, anger and resentment,” he later wrote. “Those had come to be the unhappy ingredients of my feelings towards EMI.” Yet for George, “it was not simply a straightforward question of my wanting more cash. I wanted participation, profit-sharing. I reckoned that, if I was going to devote my life to building up something which wasn’t mine, I deserved some form of commission.” When he inked his latest contract, which included a seventy-five-pound annual raise, thoughts about Oscar Preuss must still have been heavy in George’s mind—his mentor had died on Christmas Eve in 1958, only three years into his retirement. George eulogized Oscar in New Musical Express (NME), remarking with admiration that “he invariably adopted the most rebellious tactics.” For George, adopting “rebellious tactics” had clearly served as a guiding principle and arguably one of the key aspects in his revitalization of Parlophone. In only a few short years, Martin had bested Preuss’s efforts to improve the third label’s standing among the EMI Group, and he was hungry to do even more. Although royalties for A&R men had become routine business practices in the United States by this time, the EMI Group was having none of it, much to George’s abiding chagrin. He harbored strong suspicions by this time that his counterparts at EMI and in Great Britain in general were supplementing their base salaries by various unethical means, and he vaguely minded any of his competitors succeeding where he couldn’t on an inherently uneven playing field.1
As George signed his 1959 contract, he was fully aware of how much more driven he had become since assuming the mantle of Parlophone’s leadership. He was unapologetically ambitious, and he remained perpetually unsatisfied with his inability to land “the big one”—to score a truly world-breaking hit record. To his mind, such an achievement was only possible for Parlophone—and for him as a much-respected A&R man—with a surefire pop sensation. “The comedy records had been fine, and had begun to put Parlophone on the map,” he admitted. “But I was looking, with something close to desperation, for an act from the pop world. I was frankly jealous of the seemingly easy success other people were having with such acts, in particular Norrie Paramor, my opposite number on Columbia, whose artist Cliff Richard was on an apparently automatic ride to stardom.” George’s envy was easy to understand. Born Harry Webb, Richard charted an incredible seventeen straight top 5 hits in the early 1960s. At the time, George used to joke that Norrie and Cliff were so successful that they could have taken “God Save the Queen” to the top of the charts. Indeed, it is impossible to overstate the sense of rivalry that George felt with Norrie, nearly twelve years George’s senior and the über-bestselling A&R manager for EMI’s Columbia imprint. But George was even more frustrated by his own inability to land an enduring act. To his mind, making pop records was decidedly less complex than producing comedy work. “It seemed to me that all that was needed, in producing [pop music], was a good song—whereas with comedy records, every one was a major production.” George didn’t merely crave a hitmaker; he wanted an easier genre to pursue than comedy records, which were “hard work. You had to get the right material, right script, right artists, and so on.” Every new comedy album required “a completely new set of ideas each time,” while pop artists simply sold whatever they managed to record. “What I wanted was a ‘fireproof’ act like that.”2
In fact, for the past several years, he had been on an abiding search for the next “fireproof” wunderkind to turn the pop world upside down. And, in his own way, he had already come tantalizingly close on a few noteworthy occasions. As it happened, he had been pursuing an elusive hitmaker during the very same years in which he had been righting Parlophone’s ship on the back of his successful comedy releases. Back in April 1955, shortly before his promotion to label head, George had signed the Southlanders, a London rhythm-and-blues act, to one of EMI’s industry-standard penny-per-record-sold contracts—the kind of contract that held very little risk for the record company and, save for an unexpected bonanza, little in the way of promise for the next would-be Elvis Presley. A transplanted vocal group from Jamaica, the Southlanders seemed to fit the bill. Hoping to capture the “American” sound for a British marketplace that hungered for anything that sounded like it hailed from the United States, George invited the Southlanders to Abbey Road, where they hastily recorded a cover version of the Penguins’ smash hit “Earth Angel.” Although he managed to coax a serviceable, smooth-as-silk recording out of the Jamaican group, George’s production of “Earth Angel” lacked that certain something, and it hit the charts with a resounding thud. His gimmicky effort to capitalize on the Penguins’ American hit not only was a misfire but also left him wide open to making similar errors in professional judgment in the future. Yet at the same time, George was occasionally rewarded for such maneuvers. A case in point occurred in January 1956, when he saw his Parlophone recording of Edna Savage’s “Arrivederci Darling” land at number nineteen scarcely a month after Anne Shelton had cracked the top 20 for HMV, Parlophone’s rival EMI label, with her own rendition. In 1958 George managed to find success with such tactics yet again—this time, with TV funnyman Charlie Drake’s cover version of “Splish Splash,” which had been a mammoth hit for Bobby Darin. Cowritten by Darin and American DJ “Murray the K” Kaufman, “Splish Splash” charted at number seven in Martin and Drake’s hands. But as history would show, George wouldn’t always be so lucky when it came to straddling the ethical line between being an astute businessman and an opportunist.
At this juncture, George attempted to rebrand Parlophone through a series of different innovations, including his concept for “Do It Yourself” discs. A forerunner of karaoke, Do It Yourself discs consisted of orchestrations of popular hits without lead vocals. In George’s estimation, consumers would buy the discs, complete with lyric sheets, and sing the songs themselves with their friends in the comfort of their own living rooms. The unflappable Ron Goodwin recorded George’s orchestrations with the Parlophone Pops Orchestra. While NME lauded Parlophone’s Do It Yourself discs as George’s “brainchild,” the novelty only produced a handful of unsuccessful records in instrumental recordings of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and Doris Day’s “Que Sera Sera.” With the Do It Yourself discs quickly fading into history, George turned to the children’s marketplace, for which he launched records by one Nellie the Elephant, voiced by Mandy Miller, as well as a comedy record with Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes singing the novelty track “You Gotta Go Oww!” He tried his hand at yet another comedy number with Libby Morris’s minor British hit “When Liberace Winked at Me.” Continuing this wave of eclecticism, he supervised Bert Weedon’s guitar-tinged theme for the ITV hit game show The $64,000 Question, while later positioning Parlophone for unrealized holiday sales with Benny Lee’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Santa Claus.” At one juncture, he even brought Sidney Harrison, his fairy godfather, into the studio to record an EP titled Sidney Harrison Shows You How. A reference to Harrison’s short-lived BBC program How to Play the Piano—which aired in 1950, around the same time that Harrison brought young Martin into Preuss’s orbit—the disc featured a standout track in the august piano teacher’s performance of Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor. But still, as ever, the real hits seemed to elude the young Parlophone head as he attempted to right his foundering label.3
Never one to be daunted, in September 1956 George followed up on a tip from Daily Mirror columnist Noel Whitcomb about a new pop combo called the Vipers Skiffle Group. With Whitcomb in tow, Martin caught up with the band at the 2i’s Coffee Bar in Soho. The Vipers were at the vanguard of the skiffle craze that had been overtaking the British Isles throughout the summer of 1956. A ragtag musical genre with roots in jazz, blues, and folk, skiffle was commonly played on makeshift instruments such as old washboards and homemade stand-up basses, with the occasional acoustic guitar and drum kit thrown in, depending on their availability. To George’s mind, “skiffle was a harbinger of what was to come, three guitars bashing away, although they were acoustic.” As it happened, George was only marginally impressed with the Vipers’ Cockney lead singer Tommy Hicks. “He had a bright, smiling face and all the right movements, but I didn’t think he sang or played the guitar particularly well,” he later wrote. While he didn’t have much use for the singer, Martin was partial to Hicks’s band. After inking the Vipers to one of EMI’s penny-per-record deals, George enjoyed the dubious honor of being the first A&R man to sign a skiffle band in an era dominated by Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” and little else. On October 4, he invited the Vipers down to Number 2 at Abbey Road, where the band recorded their plucky brand of homespun coffee-bar fare. While the results of their partnership with the Parlophone head were less than inspiring, they loved working with him. As guitarist Wally Whyton recalled, “George Martin was amazing. We were a fairly eccentric bunch and thought we were Jack the Lads. Every night the 2i’s was packed out and everybody wanted to see the Vipers, so we were full of our own importance, but George was an absolute gentleman, a toff. He never got fazed if we fell off stools, or were late, or didn’t have the money to get home.”4
As it happened, the Vipers came out of the gate with a bang, scoring a top 10 UK hit with “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O”—a variation of the old standard “Sail Away Ladies.” Two more singles releases managed to crack the top 30, including “Cumberland Gap” and “Streamline Train.” But things took a turn for the worse after their next single—“Maggie May,” a traditional folk tune about a Liverpool prostitute—was banned by the BBC for its sexually suggestive content. In 1958 George recorded the Vipers’ performance of “No Other Baby,” popularized by Dickie Bishop and the Sidekicks the previous year. But by then, the Viper’s momentum had faded, and in spite of a well-timed dose of BBC publicity, “No Other Baby” failed to chart and their work with George faded almost immediately into obscurity. For Martin, the unkindest blow of all occurred shortly thereafter when Hicks refashioned himself as Tommy Steele and was signed by Decca’s A&R team, led by industry stalwart—for the time being, at least—Dick Rowe. In his own way, Steele emerged as Great Britain’s first bona fide rock ’n’ roll sensation. How could George have missed the surefire hit when it had been right there, singing and dancing under his very nose on that fateful night at the 2i’s?5
In 1957 George thought that he’d finally discovered the rock ’n’ roller he’d been looking for—“my own answer to Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele,” he later quipped. And for the briefest of times, it looked as if he were right. Like the rest of the nation, George had seen Jim Dale on the BBC’s Six-Five Special, a rock ’n’ roll television revue. On the strength of his appearance, Martin signed Dale to a penny contract, and they promptly recorded “Piccadilly Line”—a takeoff on Lonnie Donegan’s skiffle hit “Rock Island Line”—which failed to chart. To Martin’s great delight, Dale’s follow-up single, a cover version of “Be My Girl,” debuted on the singles charts in October 1957, eventually reaching as high as the number-two spot. Martin was elated and ready to ride the crest of Dale’s career. But their partnership would prove to be short lived. A movie version of the Six-Five Special was in the offing, and Dale’s agent glimpsed a future for him as a comedic actor. For his part, George was crestfallen. Dale’s manager “exerted a Svengali-like influence over him,” Martin remembered. “He had him tied up in more knots than I could count.”6
Flushed nevertheless with the excitement of having come painfully close to topping the charts, George returned to New York City for the first time since 1944, when, as a member of the Fleet Air Arm, he had seen Cab Calloway on Broadway. Here he was, some fourteen years hence, as Parlophone head and working for the vaunted EMI Group. He was anxious to visit American recording studios and learn more about their production efforts. He also planned to make his way to the West Coast to meet with representatives from Capitol Records. His only interaction with the EMI subsidiary by this juncture had been the rerelease of a Parlophone single titled “Skiffling Strings.” Credited to Ron Goodwin and His Orchestra, “Skiffling Strings” was George’s creation. While the Vipers had been unsuccessful as a Parlophone artist, George opted to make a skiffle record with the “zinging string sound” of an orchestral arrangement. To his delight, “Skiffling Strings” managed to generate solid airplay and sales on the home front. When the opportunity to release the track in the United States emerged, Capitol Records chose, rather surprisingly, to market the song to an American audience, albeit under a new title, “Swinging Sweethearts.” By this time, Capitol had established a long-standing reputation for turning down releases from the parent company, typically arguing, as always, that British acts were unable to tap into the “American” sound. “Swinging Sweethearts” managed to buck the trend, becoming an American top 20 hit and bolstering George’s confidence in the process.7
After touching down in the States and going on an impromptu drinking tour with Capitol rep Roland Freiborghaus, George barely recognized the New York City of his war years. To his eye, it had become “very tawdry.” The romantic images in his mind’s eye from his late teenage years had been replaced with an enduring image that he witnessed in a souvenir shop: “There was a plaster statue of Jesus Christ with outspread arms, and right next to him there was a condiment set in the shape of a naked woman with her legs bent, her removable breasts being pepper and salt, respectively.” While he may have been bemused by the images’ stark juxtaposition, his American visit proved to be revelatory in terms of his professional outlook. During his West Coast swing, George finally laid eyes on the famous Capitol Records Tower, the thirteen-story Hollywood building designed to simulate a stack of records. While he chuckled at the tower’s outlandish display of American chutzpah, he was bowled over when he had the opportunity to sit in on a Frank Sinatra recording session at the famed Studio C in Capitol Tower. Produced by Val Valentino, the session included such luminaries as Voyle Gilmore, the senior producer at Capitol who had invited George to attend the evening’s proceedings, and Billy May, the orchestral conductor. George watched in awe as Frank Sinatra, with girlfriend Lauren Bacall in tow, completed five master tracks across a four-hour session that evening for his Come Fly with Me album. “Sinatra impressed me enormously,” Martin later recalled. “When he arrived, he knew just what he was going to do.” Martin simply couldn’t get over Sinatra’s professionalism and efficiency. “It was terrific,” he wrote years later.8
While he was captivated by Sinatra’s “ultra-professional” attitude, Martin was even more excited by the prospect of working with the caliber of equipment that he had seen at Studio C. For one thing, he noted that the condenser microphones being deployed in Studio C had limiters and compressors in order to ensure the purest, brightest possible sound. But even more impressively, Sinatra’s album was being recorded for a stereo release. In 1958 in Great Britain, stereo recordings were reserved almost exclusively for classical artists, not pop artists. But in the United States, it was a different story altogether. “American recordings were made on Ampex three-track half-inch tape,” George discovered. “Val spread the orchestra over the two outside tracks as a stereo pair, mixing there and then as they recorded. He put the voice on the center track, so that during playback the voice was good and loud and Frank liked what he heard. But the three-track system also afforded Val the opportunity of altering the relationship between the voice and the backing at a later stage—after Frank had left—which would have been impossible with our two-track stereo” back at Abbey Road. Needless to say, George “thought it was a wonderful technique.” The setup at Capitol Studios confirmed his long-held suspicions that EMI was operating in the technological dark ages of the recording industry.
George was accompanied on his trip to California by EMI engineer Peter Bown, who was enthralled by the American deployment of the Fairchild limiter, the compressor that assists studio personnel in decreasing the dynamic range between the loudest and quietest aspects of an audio signal. It was Bown’s “first experience with the Fairchild limiter, which we still use to this day,” the engineer later recalled. “We didn’t have them at Abbey Road, we had nothing like that, so we weren’t able to make records that were so dynamic. I came back from America telling everybody in England, ‘We’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to re-equip the studio, because without it, we’re not going to make any good records, ever.’” When he returned to London, George wasted little time in proffering a list of recommendations, which EMI readily accepted but, as history would demonstrate, took many years to implement.9
Years later, George would recall his summer 1958 visit to Capitol Studios for yet another reason. Although Old Blue Eyes had been the picture of professionalism throughout the session and very nice to Martin on the only occasion when they met, the evening ended in a “blazing row” between Sinatra and Gilmore. Martin had noticed the way Gilmore had cozied up to the crooner throughout the session, dropping sycophantic remarks like “Great singer! Great team!” At the end of the night, Gilmore nervously presented Sinatra with the artwork for Come Fly with Me, which featured a painting of the singer donning a fedora hat. “In the background, was an airplane, and very prominent on the plane, almost as big as Frank’s name, was the logo ‘TWA.’ Frank took one look at it and called Gilmore every name under the sun. He knew that Capitol had done a deal with TWA, and he walked out in a terrible huff, dragging Lauren Bacall after him.” As with the other members of the session crew, Martin could only stand by in stunned disbelief as Sinatra traipsed out of the studio. “The cover was unchanged upon release,” Martin recalled. “Soon afterwards, he started his own label, Reprise, with Warner Brothers. That was the incident that triggered it—I was there.” Martin would never forget witnessing Sinatra’s disgust at Capitol for selling him out to accommodate their commercial interests with TWA—how Old Blue Eyes’ unparalleled professionalism so quickly crumbled in the face of what he believed to be his own record label’s betrayal of one of its most lucrative artists.10
As with Sinatra’s unremitting string of successes, Come Fly with Me soared to the upper reaches of the American LP charts in 1958, but it would be a few more years before Martin managed to land his first legitimate number-one hit. He had toiled for years in an effort to land a pop smash to rival the success of the great Columbia artists who routinely topped the charts. It may have been this very same sense of fervor that landed him in hot water in the summer of 1960, when he ignored his own well-honed sense of decorum and yen for originality to become, if only briefly, a bottom-feeder in an industry that would do absolutely anything, that would jump on the first available bandwagon, to net sales units. Having seemingly forgotten about his experiences some years back with “Earth Angel,” George couldn’t fend off his sense of professional envy when he heard the ersatz strains of the American smash hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” by sixteen-year-old Brian Hyland. Released in June 1960 by the independent Kapp Records, the novelty song would turn over more than a million copies stateside within months of its release. As the British recording industry struggled to keep up with their behemoth American counterparts, A&R men back on the sceptered isle latched onto the latest American gimmicks with unchecked gusto. In July 1960, that A&R man was George Martin. According to the July 1 issue of NME, Martin first heard Hyland’s record on a Friday, concocted his own arrangement the next day, and recorded a cover version with eighteen-year-old Paul Hanford on Sunday. Within five days, Parlophone’s recording was in English stores, where it competed directly with Hyland’s American original, which Decca had released in Great Britain on Kapp’s behalf. Suddenly, EMI and Decca were at war in the record outlets, with Parlophone playing up the stakes with an advertisement lauding Hanford’s cover as “THE version of the new teenage novelty number.” A front-page NME ad featured a photo of the clean-cut heartthrob, who was later depicted in a publicity photo strolling along Regent Street with a model wearing a polka-dot bikini.11
While George was merely engaging in the same kind of copycat behavior that his A&R peers had sunk to time and time again over the years to keep pace with a rapidly evolving industry, his zeal for keeping up had resulted in a terrible lapse in judgment. Indeed, in this case he had simply sunk too far given that Hanford’s version of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” was nearly identical to Hyland’s American bubblegum hit. Accusing George of “piracy,” Melody Maker stoked the fires of plagiarism allegations in the industry trade pages and challenged the Parlophone head to a televised debate with DJ Pete Murray on BBC TV’s fledgling pop music program Juke Box Jury. During the debate, Murray questioned Martin’s ethics and described his work with Hanford as “a shameful waste of his widely acknowledged skill.” George continued the rancor after the program, admitting his disgust with his copycat recording and the reasons that had driven him to do it in the first place. “No A&R man worth his salt likes copying,” he wrote, but at the same time “he is paid to produce financially successful records. British artists must ‘cover’ or be forced out of business. We are competing against the Americans on unequal terms.” To George’s mind, British megaliths like EMI and Decca were shackled to a strangely eclectic marketplace—the very same sales base that had afforded him the opportunity to score hits with comedy troupes and other unusual artists—and a dearth of talent. While Hanford’s version of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” failed to chart, Hyland’s original scored a top 10 British hit. Ironically, George’s production of the song enjoyed top 10 showings, via EMI’s international licensing agreements, in Sweden, Portugal, the Philippines, South Africa, and New Zealand. In Mexico, it even managed to top the charts, giving George—in perhaps the most dubious manner possible—his first number-one song.12
While he may have understandably preferred to ignore the place of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” among his A&R output—it receives no mention in any of his three book-length autobiographical works—George had learned a lesson that would have far-reaching consequences across his career. Yet as far as he was concerned, the song that finally secured the top spot for him in the UK was “You’re Driving Me Crazy” by the Temperance Seven. It was May 1961, and the thirty-five-year-old Parlophone head had much to be thankful for on the professional and personal fronts in spite of the Hanford fiasco. Through a spate of hit comedy records, George had engineered the label’s long road to recovery—so much so, in fact, that rumors about putting Parlophone in mothballs had all but faded at EMI House. Perhaps even more significantly, the zany humor of such label stalwarts as Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan had lent Parlophone a sense of identity in the industry, an aspect that it sorely lacked before George’s promotion.
Although he would later characterize his marriage as being perpetually under siege because of Sheena’s purported agoraphobia and the long shadow of his mother’s untimely death, by 1961 George was the proud and doting father of daughter Alexis and son Gregory, born on January 21, 1957, whom he and Sheena lovingly called Poggy. Diagnosed at six months old with epilepsy, three-year-old Gregory can be seen on home movies as he frolics with Tumpy in the backyard at Hatfield and later as he played in the surf with his sister by the seaside in Lee-on-Solent, just west of Portsmouth, the provincial home of longtime family friends Joan and Graham Fisher. Filled with silliness and laughter, these home movies find George seemingly enjoying his marriage of “defiance” with Sheena. Having initially recoiled at the idea of living in suburbia, Sheena had come to cherish her life in Hatfield, where she and her children had made friends in the budding neighborhood.13
By July 1961, George could bask in the confidence of having righted Parlophone’s sinking ship under challenging internal conditions at EMI—and having done so with his zany cast of strays and oddball musicians and comedians. He must have been rightly pleased when he was asked to contribute a column to Eminews, the company’s in-house journal, on the life of a recording manager. Titled “You Know, It’s Really Quite a Funny Job,” George’s feature story attempted to account for the many hats that he wore as Parlophone head, including running a label, discovering and signing new talent, and making records. “Don’t let me give you the impression that it is one long, glorious tour through show business. It embraces a great deal of tedious work and thought, and sometimes unpleasant actions. I remember a very famous bandleader walking out of our studios once because I had criticized the playing of his bass player.” With a clear sense of self-satisfaction, George goes on to note, for the record, that only a few weeks later, the bandleader fired that same bass player. Indeed, if George had an Achilles’ heel, the understandable need to see his artistic instincts confirmed—and in public, no less—was it. But by this juncture, he had also learned that there was no substitute for coming into the orbit of as many artists as possible—and with an open mind. “There is no set rule for the uncovering of talent,” he wrote, “you just keep your ears to the ground (when you’re not recording, of course!) and hear as many new people as you can.”14
That same month, the Temperance Seven played the Cavern Club, a jazz dive in a dank basement in faraway Liverpool. Supported by the Saints Jazz Band, the Temperance Seven took the stage with their usual eccentricities in full flower. With the bandmates dressed like funeral directors, the lead singer sang through an echo-laden megaphone while the drummer kept time with an oversized bass drum with coconuts and a tiny cymbal affixed atop the frame. That night, they performed “You’re Driving Me Crazy” in fine style, along with their second single, “Pasadena,” also produced by George, which was cruising its way up the British charts at the time. It would top out in the number-four spot. Riding their unexpected wave of success, the band even played the vaunted London Palladium that incredible summer.15
But for all of the personal and professional gratification that seemed to be at George’s fingertips, landing his first bona fide number-one hit had felt like a dubious accomplishment for him. He was thrilled, of course, with the prospect of finally having achieved a long-held goal. But he was also extremely conscious of the fact that the Temperance Seven weren’t even a pop act, much less an honest-to-goodness rock ’n’ roll group. No, they were a fairly traditional jazz band. Despite their penchant for wearing spats and Edwardian frock coats, they were top-rate musicians, one and all. “You’re Driving Me Crazy” had been produced in George’s usual workmanlike fashion. “They played in a very authentic style of the 1920s,” he later wrote, “and their musical mainstay was Alan Cooper, known affectionately as ‘Hooter.’ He was a genuine eccentric, who played various kinds of woodwind and was a master of the idiom. The vocalist was Paul McDowell, who sang through a megaphone, and in order to help the realistic feel of the recording, I grouped them all ’round one mike.” George had recorded “You’re Driving Me Crazy” in Number 2 back in February. By the week of April Fools’ Day, it had broken into the NME charts, although nobody really gave it a chance. Nobody except for George, that is.16
Despite a healthy spate of skepticism from the EMI brass, George had trusted his intuition and released the record by the band with the funny-sounding name in spite of the company’s usual coterie of naysayers. As for the Temperance Seven, “They all drank like fishes,” George fondly recalled, “and of course there were nine of them in the band; hence the name.” But all good humor aside, he felt deflated that a traditional jazz act was behind his first chart-topper. “This group was all that could be expected of me,” he lamented. When he received word that “You’re Driving Me Crazy” had topped the singles charts, George was away in Cambridge with his mobile production unit. To celebrate the occasion, he went out to dinner with Ron Richards, his assistant A&R man; Shirley Spence, a Parlophone staffer; and Judy, the longtime assistant whom he had met on that very first morning back at Abbey Road in 1950.17
As his closest friends and colleagues toasted the chart-topping success of “You’re Driving Me Crazy” that evening in Cambridge, George’s thoughts might have understandably drifted back to the previous year, when his zeal to land a pop hit had gotten the best of him, as evinced by the “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” incident that had landed him an embarrassing appearance on television. All in all, the same man who regularly confessed to being “squarish” still didn’t quite feel like he belonged, that he didn’t quite fit in with the business in which he wanted to not only assimilate but also truly succeed. Make no mistake about it: George was ambitious in every sense of the word. He knew that he had the talent, the drive, and the energy to make it among the industry’s top A&R men–cum–producers. George had finally had his taste of the top spot. Sure it was a traditional jazz tune and hardly the stuff of American rock ’n’ roll, but it had topped the charts nonetheless. And there was simply no doubt about it: he was hungry for more. Yet by the early summer of 1961, as the whimsical strains of “You’re Driving Me Crazy” played on the British airwaves, other forces that had been gathering around George’s life for the past several years began to come to the fore. His world was about to change dramatically—and in more ways than one.