NOT CONTENT TO REST ON HIS LAURELS, George had begun pressing “the boys,” as he called them, taking after Brian, to keep producing new material. Having won Big George’s hard-earned respect for their original compositions, John and Paul were only too happy to oblige. On Tuesday, March 5, 1963—nearly three weeks before their first long-player would hit the stores—Martin and the Beatles returned to Abbey Road to try their hand at three Lennon-McCartney compositions, “From Me to You,” “Thank You Girl,” and “The One After 909.” With Smith as balance engineer and Langham as second engineer, Martin recorded seven takes of “From Me to You,” which had been inspired by a regular column that McCartney had seen in NME titled From You to Us. Initially, the Beatles had intended to begin the song with a guitar solo, but after hearing their original arrangement, Martin had other things in mind. As Ron Richards later recalled, “The Beatles had marvelous ears when it came to writing and arranging their material. But George had real taste—and an innate sense of what worked.” To George’s ears, the song’s opening chorus was the hook. He recommended that Lennon and McCartney sing the song’s opening motto—“da-da-da da-da-dun-dun-da”—to which the A&R man overdubbed a harmonica part by Lennon. Disc cutter Malcolm Davies helpfully loaned him a harmonica, later recalling that “artists never came to the cuts in those days but John popped up to see me because he wanted to borrow my harmonica, thinking it might make a better sound. He brought it back a little later saying that it tasted like a sack of potatoes!”1
For George, continuing the Beatles’ harmonica sound with “From Me to You” was more than a mere creative decision. To his mind, it was invaluable in building their audience from “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” through their most recent effort. “It was an identifiable sound of the Beatles on those first singles,” he later wrote. They were self-consciously drawing on Lennon’s expertise as a “blues harmonica player.” As George recalled, John played a “diatonic harmonica, one with no black notes. He had a number of different harmonicas tuned to different keys”—when he wasn’t borrowing a mouth harp off Abbey Road’s disc cutter, that is. Having made short work of “From Me to You,” George and the band shifted their sights toward another new tune called “Thank You Girl,” which went under the working title “Thank You Little Girl.” Interestingly, Ringo had struggled to bring the closing drum fill to fruition, losing the beat in the process. Rather than rerecord the entire song, George deployed an edit piece in which the Beatles tried their hand at capturing the offending section. The edit was then spliced seamlessly into the master tape to save time. After completing the song in thirteen takes, they adjourned until an evening session in which they tackled “The One After 909,” one of Lennon and McCartney’s oldest compositions. They had also intended to try their luck with “What Goes On,” another early songwriting effort, although they had run out of time at this point. But the real highlight that day was “From Me to You,” which George had helped to transform into a hit with a few tiny but vastly significant alterations. By now, George had adopted a very particular and economical approach to working with the band. “I would meet them in the studio to hear a new number,” he later recalled. “I would perch myself on a high stool and John and Paul would stand around me with their acoustic guitars and play and sing it—usually without Ringo or George, unless George joined in the harmony. Then I would make suggestions to improve it, and we’d try it again. That’s what is known in the business as a ‘head arrangement.’”2
After so many years of toil, George had found his mettle at last. He understood his role in a very narrow sense, in comparison with his early days as an A&R man when he functioned as a sort of jack-of-all-trades with no real sense of direction. He still carried out a wide variety of duties, but now he saw himself in a larger, supervisory sense. And it wasn’t always terribly creative, he later recalled, as “there wasn’t much arranging to do. My function as a producer was not what it is today. After all, I was a mixture of many things. I was an executive running a record label. I was organizing the artists and the repertoire. And on top of that, I actually supervised the recording sessions, looking after what both the engineer and the artist were doing. Certainly I would manipulate the record to the way I wanted it, but there was no arrangement in the sense of orchestration. They were four musicians—three guitarists and a drummer—and my role was to make sure that they made a concise, commercial statement.” With “From Me to You,” the Beatles’ “concise, commercial statement” saw them fairly easily score their second chart-topping single. In contrast with the previous number-one single and album, though, “From Me to You” was a blistering success. At this point, George and the band had clearly captured a new sound, a new urgency in British pop that even outpaced the press. An NME critic admitted that “From Me to You” had “plenty of sparkle” but ultimately concluded, “I don’t rate the tune as being anything like as good as on the last two discs from the group.” The Beatles’ national audience clearly saw things differently, as the song exploded onto the charts, opening in the number-six position and selling an astonishing two hundred thousand copies during its first week of release. Things were shifting in George’s world, and his professional success was mounting at an astonishing rate.3
The release of “From Me to You” also saw George’s not-so-subtle maneuvering of Brian and the Beatles toward Dick James Music finally come to fruition. The “From Me to You” backed with “Thank You Girl” single marked the first appearance of Northern Songs, which had been incorporated on February 22, 1963. Originally intended to be called “Northern Music” in deference to the bandmates’ North Country roots, Northern Songs was finally selected after the principals learned that “Northern Music” was already in use. Northern Songs was split fifty-fifty between Dick James Music and NEMS, which included Epstein’s interests along with Lennon and McCartney as the band’s primary composers. When he first set up the deal, James went so far as to invite Martin to participate as well. As George later recalled, “Dick also offered me a share in Northern Songs, but I couldn’t accept, as an employee of EMI, which was engaging the Beatles and Northern Songs. I would have had conflicting interests.” To his great credit, the band’s producer had “no regrets” about turning James’s offer down in spite of how incredibly lucrative Northern Songs would turn out to be. “It wouldn’t have been right,” George later wrote.4
As it happened, the Northern Songs agreement may not have been right in more ways than one. According to NEMS employee Peter Brown, Brian and the bandmates held little understanding of the significance and value of music publishing. As Brown later remarked, “It was very much let’s get what we can get—any deal would be a good deal, just the fact that we actually had a deal.” Moreover, “as I understand it,” Brown recalled, “Brian sat them down and told them what the structure of the deal was and they said fine.” As events would transpire, Lennon and McCartney’s agreement with Dick James Music would emerge as one of the most vexing subplots in the story of the Beatles. In retrospect, Brown imputed James with enacting “a clever deal” that succeeded in seeing the Beatles’ manager “sign over to Dick James 50 percent of Lennon and McCartney’s publishing fees for nothing.” Years later, McCartney would attribute his easy compliance to sheer ignorance. “John and I didn’t know you could own songs,” he remarked. “We thought they just existed in the air. We could not see how it was possible to own them. We could see owning a house, a guitar or a car, they were physical objects. But a song, not being a physical object, we couldn’t see how it was possible to have a copyright in it. And therefore, with great glee, publishers saw us coming.” While the likes of Epstein and McCartney may have been suckered by James’s deal, it is hard to believe that Martin, an industry veteran who had signed hundreds of Parlophone acts with their own attendant publishing interests, didn’t know better. But of course, he may have had his own blinders on during this period, for he was also one of James’s clients.5
But by this comparatively early stage, the Beatles were hardly George’s only beat band under contract. Through Brian’s Liverpool connections, George and Parlophone had gone from being pop music’s lonely outpost to becoming the go-to label for cutting-edge rock. Up first was Gerry and the Pacemakers, the band that Brian had managed since 1962 and the very same Liverpool act that George had seen back in December at the Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead. In Brian’s description, “Gerry Marsden was one of the biggest stars in Liverpool, with a smile as wide as he was short, a huge generous personality and a fascinating voice, full of melody and feeling.” For George, Gerry and the Pacemakers seemed like the perfect vehicle for “How Do You Do It,” the Mitch Murray–penned tune that the Beatles had rejected the previous September. On January 22, 1963, George produced Gerry and the Pacemakers covering “How Do You Do It” at Abbey Road. For George, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version was proof positive regarding his initial belief in the song during the previous summer. In short order, the tune made its way to the top of the British charts. “Gerry recorded it, and it went to number one,” George later recalled. “But in that was a little personal vindication of my faith in the song.” The idea of confirming his pop instincts was of personal and professional significance to George, and it was a sentiment that he would find himself returning to several times across his career. For a time, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “How Do You Do It” held its own atop the British hit parade until it was unseated by “From Me to You,” thus rewarding George with three number-one hits in the new year—and it was barely springtime. Their next two singles releases would top the charts as well, affording Gerry and the Pacemakers the distinction of being the only British act to see their first three releases achieve number-one status. After their second single, “I Like It,” topped the charts with George’s production, the Parlophone head recorded their cover version of the classic “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Recorded on July 2, 1963, at Abbey Road, the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune from Carousel marked one of George’s favorite non-Beatles recordings during this period. He was always fond of Gerry’s rendition of the American standard. “He always got a great reaction from audiences when he performed it,” George later wrote, “and it was Brian’s idea to record it. For the first time, I backed Gerry with a large string orchestra, which was a great departure for him. He had been a very jolly rock-and-roll star, doing little two-beat songs, and suddenly here was this big ballad with which his voice could hardly cope. All the same, I think it was largely that record which was responsible for the song becoming the universal football crowd song it is today.”6
As with Gerry and the Pacemakers, George found chart-topping success with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, yet another Liverpool act in Brian’s stable. By this point, George had developed a strong working relationship with Brian, whom he also regarded as a close personal friend. “I was totally caught up in the excitement of it all, and Brian Epstein was working ’round the clock,” George remembered. “Naturally, we had to spend a lot of time together, and we became firm friends. I remember his telling me, ‘We’re going to have a tremendous partnership, George. With you recording my acts, we’re unbeatable.’” The Beatles’ manager felt that he had a knack for recognizing talent, but he held no illusions that he understood the record industry in the same way that the Parlophone head did. As Brian observed, “I believe I know a hit when I hear one, but George Martin knows the record industry infinitely better than I ever could; and because George has been at it for some time, he has an innate sense of the public mood.” Brian’s words proved to be true as ever during George’s association with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, although the A&R man found Kramer’s voice to be lacking. “Billy was certainly a very good-looking boy,” George later reflected, “but when I listened to him I was forced to the conclusion that his was not the greatest voice in the world.” Although George attempted to quell Brian’s interest in Billy’s act, the Beatles’ manager persisted in his support for the Liverpool singer, and George reluctantly pressed forward. For his initial recordings with Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, George selected two Lennon-McCartney originals, including “Do You Want to Know a Secret” from the Beatles’ Please Please Me album and “I’ll Be on My Way,” which the Beatles performed on a single occasion during an appearance at the BBC’s Paris Theatre in London. To George’s mind, “Do You Want to Know a Secret” had hit potential. “In those days we had a policy that anything the Beatles recorded as an album title was not issued by them as a single, and vice versa,” George later recalled. “The song had been on the Please Please Me album (we’d obviously made an exception in the case of ‘Please Please Me’ itself, to cash in on their new popularity), and the Beatles didn’t want to issue it as a single. In any case, they could already see the advantage of having their songs covered by other people, and since it suited Billy down to the ground, we decided to make it with him.”7
But he still had to deal with the matter of Billy’s lack of vocal prowess, forcing George to devise a means for alternately capturing and disguising his voice in the studio. “I decided the only way I could ever make a hit out of him was always to double-track his voice—in other words, to record the song once and then have him sing it a second time, following his own voice,” George wrote. Yet in some moments, even George’s deployment of double-tracking failed to improve Billy’s vocal performance on his Parlophone recordings. With Billy’s basic track in hand, George resorted to his trusty windup piano technique in order to camouflage Billy’s vocals. Recording his piano part at half speed and then doubling the tempo afforded George’s instrument with a kind of harpsichord effect. “Where there was any offending phrase from the Kramer tonsils,” George later recalled, “I put in a bit of this piano and mixed it a bit louder. For the inquisitive, I may add that I didn’t pay myself for these pieces of gratuitous musicianship, since I reckoned that if I did so, I would be getting money that a musician should be getting.” But it was more than that, of course: George’s ego still clearly stung from his treatment by Len Wood a year earlier when the Parlophone head requested an aboveboard financial stake in his artists’ recordings. To do anything less would have put him in the same class as Norrie Paramor, whom he found to be ethically reprehensible. It was an issue that George would have to forestall—at least for the time being.8
Issued on April 26, 1963, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas’ cover version of “Do You Want to Know a Secret” shot straight to number one, proving that George and the Beatles’ magic was truly portable by this point. Indeed, even in other artists’ hands, Lennon-McCartney compositions were commercially viable. And with George’s superlative A&R instincts, even their lesser material could be hit worthy. As Billy later remarked, “Nobody was more amazed than me when it [“Do You Want to Know a Secret”] turned out to be a big hit.” Four months later, George and Billy were back at Abbey Road recording “Bad to Me,” another Lennon-McCartney original. With Paul McCartney observing from the control room, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas made short work of “Bad to Me.” After “Do You Want to Know a Secret” and “Bad to Me” topped the British charts, George couldn’t help thinking that “the process was starting to seem almost inevitable.” By this point, Brian was convinced that George possessed a truly magic touch in the studio—that he could turn any act into a bona fide star. “Brian was a great ego booster,” George later remarked. “He brought me these artists and expected me to make hits with them—and when I did, he wasn’t at all surprised. I was. Though I couldn’t perform what these musicians were doing, I had a formula in the studio, a way of getting the sounds. And though I was a virgin as far as rock and roll was concerned, I quickly immersed myself in it. The Beatles taught me a lot.”9
While Brian had plenty of Liverpool acts waiting in the wings for George to audition, the Parlophone head happily turned his attention back to the Beatles. The boys had been crisscrossing the country, playing one show after another, until midsummer, when they finally rejoined George at Abbey Road for a truly watershed moment on Monday, July 1, 1963. By this time, the Beatles had begun booking their sessions under the pseudonym the Dakotas in reference to Billy J. Kramer’s backing group. As their fame grew by leaps and bounds, they had little choice but to try to conceal their movements. As Geoff Emerick later recalled, by mid-1963 “there always seemed to be at least a hundred girls camped outside the studio in hopes of seeing one or more of the group dash to or from their cars. How they knew when the Beatles were due to come in was a complete mystery to us,” he added, “but clearly the fans had some kind of network.”10
As it happened, the band’s growing number of British fans had no idea what their idols had in store for them next. There was very little, if any, notion about the Beatles in the United States either, where NME’s Chris Hutchins published an international dispatch titled “From Liverpool?—You’re a Hit” in vaunted Billboard magazine on June 29, 1963. While Hutchins doesn’t call out the Beatles by name, he makes certain to highlight the phenomenon that they were just beginning to unleash in their homeland. “The British popular disk market is currently undergoing a sensational period with groups from one city—Liverpool—taking it in turns to top the chart. Sales of their records are abnormally high at a time when the industry is undergoing a sleepy period,” Hutchins wrote. He took special note of “Parlophone recording manager George Martin,” who “scored an unprecedented achievement here when he lodged disks by the three biggest groups in the Nos. 1, 2, and 3 slots. Now he has set the entire month of July aside for marathon sessions with those groups to wax several singles and an album with each.”11
Of course, Martin had been working with one unnamed group in particular who were on the verge of blowing their fame wide open across the British Isles. Lennon and McCartney had begun composing their latest song, “She Loves You,” in a Newcastle-upon-Tyne hotel room on June 26, and within a matter of days it was in Martin’s hands. As George later recalled, “I was sitting in my usual place on a high stool in Studio 2 when John and Paul first ran through the song on their acoustic guitars, George joining in on the choruses. I thought it was great but was intrigued by the final chord, an odd sort of major sixth, with George doing the sixth and John and Paul the third and fifths, like a Glenn Miller arrangement.” For Martin, the concluding chord structure seemed jarring, not unlike the original version of “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” and he suggested that they reconsider the arrangement. But the Beatles weren’t having it this time. As McCartney later recalled, “Occasionally, we’d overrule George Martin, like on ‘She Loves You,’ we end on a sixth chord, a very jazzy sort of thing. And he said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that! A sixth chord? It’s too jazzy.’ We just said, ‘No, it’s a great hook, we’ve got to do it.’” For his part, Norman Smith had seen the lyrics in advance and was duly unimpressed. “I thought ‘Oh my God, what a lyric! This is going to be one that I do not like.’ But when they started to sing it—bang, wow, terrific, I was up at the mixer jogging around.” By this point, Smith had come to adore his working life among the Liverpool Scousers who had given him pause only the previous summer. “We all got on so well,” he later recalled. “They used to call me ‘Normal’ and, occasionally, ‘2dBs Smith’ because on a few occasions I would ask one of them to turn his guitar amplifier down a couple of decibels.”12
Sitting up in the control booth with Martin and Smith, young Geoff Emerick had a ringside seat as the Beatles recorded what would emerge as one of the most successful singles in British history. As Emerick observed the proceedings, Smith made dramatic changes in recording the Beatles’ sound. As he and Martin worked on “She Loves You,” Smith deployed a compressor, an electronic device that reduces the dynamic range between the loudest and softest signals. In so doing, Smith allowed Martin to capture the sound of the bass and drums independently of each other as opposed to being compressed together. Moreover, Smith positioned an overhead microphone over Ringo Starr’s drums in order to create “a more prominent, driving rhythm sound,” in Emerick’s words. As a result, “both the bass and drums are brighter and more ‘present’ than in previous Beatles records.”13
The nature of the Beatles’ sound had been an ongoing issue with the bandmates, who hungered for a decidedly more “American” quality to their output—especially in terms of undergirding their work with a general ambience of loudness. As Martin later recalled, “I did succeed in getting some of that loudness onto the early Beatles records, but I wanted more, much more. And the boys were snapping at my heels. They could hear the difference in the US imports just as well as I could. ‘Why can’t we get it like that, George?’ they would chorus. ‘We want it like that!’” Smith’s efforts to position the microphones in such a way as to enhance the group’s sound were clearly making a difference by this juncture, but as far as Martin was concerned, it wasn’t nearly enough. He was determined to imbue the Beatles’ records with a bigger, bolder, more robust sound. “Getting maximum volume out of those grooves became my major preoccupation. I used to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. Volume! That great sound!” But of course, his motives involved more than mere aesthetics or simply attempting to please the bandmates’ dreams for a more forceful sound that would bowl over their audiences like those American imports they cherished. No, it was much more than that. George wanted a Beatles sound that would drive fans right from their transistor radios into the record shops. “You, the listener, would hear it over the radio for the first time,” he later wrote, “and it would knock your socks off. Out you would go to the record store and buy it. That’s the business.” It was the business, in short, of creating maximum volume.14
As it happened, the Beatles’ new and “brighter” sound served as the perfect palette for “She Loves You,” which, like “Please Please Me” and “From Me to You” before it, benefited from the song’s arresting opening phrases. Clearly, Lennon and McCartney were evolving quickly under Martin’s tutelage into songsmiths with an ear for infectious pop hooks. Slated for release on August 23, “She Loves You” exploded into being with a chorus, one of George’s favorite musical conceits, introducing the listener to the Beatles’ vocal catchphrase, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” that would soon see millions of Britons singing along with sheer glee. Having recorded the band’s latest single in a matter of hours on July 1, George was anxious to get to work on the Beatles’ next long-player. “Brian Epstein and I worked out a plan,” he later recalled, “in which we tried—not always successfully—to release a new Beatles single every three months and two albums a year. I was always saying to the Beatles, ‘I want another hit, come on, give me another hit,’ and they always responded.” While “She Loves You” would be waiting in the wings for the time being, Brian had been busying himself making plans to consolidate the Beatles’ fame outside of Great Britain. A few days later, on July 5, Brian had signed a landmark deal on the Beatles’ behalf to undertake a 1964 Australian tour.15
Wasting little time, the Beatles set to work on July 18 and began recording material for their follow-up LP to Please Please Me, which was still holding its own atop the British LP charts. As they had done with their initial concept for their debut album, they approached their new long-player with the notion of capturing the material associated with their contemporary set list, which, as with the group’s early days in Liverpool and Hamburg, consisted of a range of American rhythm-and-blues hits and pop standards. And that’s exactly where George and the Beatles started during their first, lengthy Thursday night session in Number 2. As the initial song that they recorded for the new LP, the group’s cover version of Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me” featured John on, arguably, his most powerful lead vocal to date. With Martin’s Steinway piano propelling the melody, the Beatles captured the song in only eleven takes—seven of them complete—before just as quickly turning their attention toward “Money (That’s What I Want),” Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford’s Motown composition, which the group landed in an economical seven takes, along with a piano edit piece by Martin. Next up was a cover version of “Devil in Her Heart”—refashioned after the Donays’ 1961 hit “Devil in His Heart”—with Harrison taking lead vocals and Starr on maracas. After completing the song in three takes and a handful of overdubs, the band concluded the evening with several stabs at the Broadway standard “Till There Was You,” a McCartney favorite from Meredith Wilson’s hit 1957 show The Music Man. Performed in the style of Peggy Lee, the Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You” would remain unfinished for the time being, as Martin and the bandmates were unsatisfied with any of the takes. For Martin, it was a whirlwind session, to be sure, but there was already a different spirit in the air, a confidence and maturity to the band’s sound in comparison to their work back in February on Please Please Me. Later, listening to the playbacks of those initial recordings for the group’s new LP, Emerick could hear it, too. “As I sat in the control room listening to the tracks,” he later wrote, “I was amazed at how much the Beatles had improved since their debut album, in terms of both their musicianship and their singing.”16
Twelve days later, George and the band continued their sporadic work on the new LP, with morning and evening sessions separated by the Beatles’ appearance across town at the Playhouse Theatre for BBC radio’s Saturday Club program. The proceedings began with yet another cover version—in this case, a cover of the Marvelettes’ hit single “Please Mr. Postman” with John taking lead vocals and nailing the song in nine takes. And that’s when the Beatles unveiled “It Won’t Be Long,” the first of two remarkable new Lennon-McCartney contributions on the day. As Paul later recalled, the idea for the song emanated from John, although both of them enjoyed the idea of injecting their lyrics with “plays on words and onomatopoeia.” With “It Won’t Be Long,” the songwriters created an intentional “double meaning” through the juxtaposition of “be long” and “belong”—phrases that highlight the differences between the passage of time and romantic commitment. When they brought the song into the studio that day, the group managed to crank out ten takes of “It Won’t Be Long” before heading to the Playhouse Theatre. For Martin, the song had been a revelation, finding the Beatles matching, if not expanding on, the power that they had revealed earlier in the month with “She Loves You,” which would not be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world for several more weeks. To Martin’s ears, “It Won’t Be Long” exploded into being like a kind of rock ’n’ roll “pot-boiler,” as Lennon exchanged a call-and-response chorus of “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” with McCartney and Harrison, echoing their catchphrase from “She Loves You.” After returning from their stint on BBC radio—where they rehearsed and recorded six tunes—the Beatles abruptly shifted gears into a remake of “Money (That’s What I Want)” in seven takes before returning to “Till There Was You.” For the latter remake, Starr eschewed the drums for a subtler bongo part. Recorded in five takes and the only song on the eventual album without any overdubs, “Till There Was You” was distinguished by Harrison’s adept Spanish-inflected solo on a nylon-stringed José Ramírez classical guitar.17
As the band’s incredible day’s work continued onward into the evening, Harrison handled lead vocals on a cover version of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” which the group had been treating since their Quarry Men days in the late 1950s. At this point, the Beatles returned to “It Won’t Be Long,” which they brought to fruition after twenty-three takes since the day had begun. And that’s when their efforts on that incredible Tuesday reached ever higher still, as they unveiled the second Lennon-McCartney original, “All My Loving.” Written by Paul during the band’s tour with Roy Orbison the previous May, “All My Loving” marked a rare moment when the Beatle had “written the words first. I never wrote words first, it was always some kind of accompaniment. I’ve hardly ever done it since either.” While the composition had begun as “a little country and western song,” “All My Loving” had quickly morphed into a spirited rock number about the joys of romantic reunion. Recorded in its entirety in eleven takes with three overdubs, “All My Loving” was marked by Martin’s deft recommendation that McCartney double-track his lead vocal, lending his voice deeper, more powerful tones and textures. As the Beatles put away their instruments that night, Martin had completed one of the most astonishing spate of sessions in his career. His chief creative vehicle had eclipsed their earlier heights in a single day, completing several new songs—and two stunning originals—with great economy and finesse. For George and the boys, July 30, 1963, was yet another watershed moment in a career that was already swimming with them. Only one year earlier, the Beatles had struggled back in Liverpool to wrap their minds around “How Do You Do It.” And they had done so in a callow effort to please the Parlophone head’s now passé approach to a business model that they were well on their way to rewriting right in front of him.18
After that incredible day at Abbey Road, the Beatles would hit the circuit yet again, winding their way across England from one ballroom to another throughout August and into the early days of September. In the meantime, George continued to work with Brian’s ever-growing stable of beat bands. Up first was the Fourmost, a Liverpool act that Brian had signed to a management contract in late June. Years later, the band would remember their artists’ test with George for their credulity at the time. As Dave Lovelady recalled, “We wanted to impress George Martin and show him that we were a cut above the other Liverpool groups. We began our audition with ‘Happy Talk’ from South Pacific. George Martin looked at us in disbelief and said, ‘You do realize that you’re playing the wrong notes.’” Not long afterward, the Parlophone head had signed them as well, giving them ready access to a number of Lennon-McCartney originals. By this time, it was well known that they held the best numbers back for the Beatles, but John and Paul’s songwriting brand was already well on its way to becoming a household name in England. Produced by George, the Fourmost’s debut single was a cover version of Lennon and McCartney’s “Hello Little Girl,” one of the compositions on the Beatles’ acetate that Brian had played for George at their first meeting in February 1962. The song came into the Fourmost’s hands after lead singer Brian O’Hara “asked John Lennon if he’d got anything, and he did a tape for me. He says, ‘I wrote this one while I was sitting on the toilet,’ and then sings ‘Hello Little Girl’ with just his guitar for accompaniment.”19
After the single’s release on August 30, the Fourmost enjoyed an auspicious start with “Hello Little Girl,” which reached the number-nine position on the British charts. The Fourmost’s sophomore effort, a recording of Lennon and McCartney’s “I’m in Love,” made its way into the top 20. By this point, it was as if Brian and George could do no wrong. The Liverpool manager seemed to have an endless stream of Merseyside bands at his disposal, and George quickly ushered them into the studio, where he would produce their recordings in breakneck fashion and hurry them into the record stores, where they would be greeted by a music-buying public with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for beat music.
And that was when Brian foisted a young singer named Priscilla White on the A&R head. White was one of the Cavern’s loyal “cave dwellers”—Beatles fans who had grown up right along with the band in the sweaty basement venue. White was also, Martin feared, a “setback” in terms of their apparently unstoppable progress as British rock ’n’ roll impresarios. Working under the professional name of Cilla Black, she reminded George of Billy J. Kramer. Indeed, “For me, she was even more of a problem child than Billy had been,” George later recalled. Years later, Black remembered her first meeting with the Parlophone head with a special fondness. It was on a Sunday evening, and “George’s office was littered with record sleeves, brown box files and piles of sheet music, and nowhere near as grand as I’d expected,” she later wrote. “I was very impressed with George, though. He was a tall, thin, elegant beanpole of a man, and Brian had told me in the taxi that he had a magnificent ear for music, a great sense of style, and a brilliant reputation as an arranger, composer and oboist. After just a few minutes breaking the ice, I could tell that George had a really sincere attitude towards Mersey sound music and, over a cup of coffee and some tasty ginger biscuits, I also discovered that he produced the Goons for the radio, as well as the great Peter Sellers.” After completing the introductions with Brian and Cilla, George took the young singer into the studio, where she auditioned with “Get a Shot of Rhythm ’n’ Blues.” At first, Cilla had trouble reading the A&R man’s demeanor. Had she succeeded or failed at earning her big break in London, that “wicked city” in the south in Cilla’s words? “George didn’t say much during that audition,” she recalled, “but I couldn’t help noticing that his attitude was becoming reassuringly different—much more smiley, relaxed, and open. He also walked Brian and me to the lift, and, young though I was, I realized this was significant. Managers at BICC [British Insulated Calendar Cables, where she worked] in Liverpool only did that for people they respected or considered important.” While Cilla had passed the audition and earned a Parlophone recording contract, it turned out that the A&R head still wasn’t quite sure about how to proceed with the newest member of Brian’s stable.20
“Although she had a good, if thin, voice,” George later recalled, “she was a rock-and-roll screecher in the true Cavern tradition, with a piercing nasal sound. That was all right in itself, but finding songs for her was clearly going to be very difficult.” Needing fresh material to move her career forward and keep Brian’s stable purring, George turned to John and Paul to provide Cilla with a repertoire. He recognized that “the Beatles by this time were bubbling over with enthusiasm for their own works—and rightly so. We had opened the vent, the oil had started gushing up, and the well, which I had originally thought might soon dry up, simply kept on producing more and more.” By this time, Cilla had taken to singing one of their older tunes during her Cavern appearances, an original Lennon-McCartney number from the Beatles’ failed Decca audition titled “Love of the Loved.” For George, this seemed like as good as any place to start, so he brought Cilla down to Abbey Road to record “Love of the Loved,” for which he had composed a special arrangement for trumpets. And for the first time in many months, George and Brian came up short. “It didn’t sell well at all,” George later recalled. “It was not a number one.” Indeed, it landed at number thirty-five, which, after the succession of smash hits that George and Brian had steered toward the British charts, seemed like an abysmal failure. For Cilla, the session with George at Abbey Road had been no easy process, as the singer later recalled. “It was the first time I’d faced ‘real’ musicians, playing from real sheet music, and I was so disappointed!” she wrote. “What I wanted from the backing group was a really good club band sound—a Cavern sound—but it seemed I could whistle for it. George had his own ideas. Feeling very small and more jittery than I’d ever felt before, I didn’t enjoy a single moment of that session. Every time I sang ‘thurr’ instead of ‘there,’ George kept pulling me up. ‘That word sounds much too Liverpudlian,’ he kept saying.” All in all, it took fifteen takes for Cilla to properly eradicate the Scouse from her singing voice. With his own class-conscious baggage, George was keenly aware of the need for Cilla to sound as cosmopolitan as possible on her debut record. But in the end, all of his good-natured coaching hardly mattered, as Cilla had entered the British charts with a middling thud.21
Like George, Brian had been flummoxed by Cilla’s fruitless debut. Tireless in his efforts to extol the talents of his stable, Brian traveled to the United States to attempt to generate American interest in his clientele. By this point, he and George were positively irate over the treatment of their chart-topping British artists—namely, the Beatles—at the hands of Capitol Records, EMI’s vaunted American subsidiary. And for the first time, George was able to connect a name with the wholesale rejection of his Parlophone artists. That man was Capitol’s international A&R representative Dave E. Dexter Jr. In June 1962, as the Beatles met Martin for the first time, Dexter was the subject of a memo from Capitol president Alan W. Livingston, who ordered his staff to submit all imported music for the A&R rep’s consideration and approval. As it turned out, Dexter didn’t appreciate rock ’n’ roll, which he had once described as “juvenile and maddeningly repetitive” in an internal memo. As it happened, Dexter’s musical tastes ran towards the likes of Peggy Lee, Nat “King” Cole, and Stan Kenton. American fans of beat music simply didn’t have a chance.22
By the time that the Beatles began topping the charts in early 1963, Dexter passed on releasing “Please Please Me,” quickly followed by “From Me to You,” which he pronounced as being “stone-cold dead in the U.S. marketplace.” By the time that Martin had begun working with Cilla Black, Dexter had passed on “She Loves You,” too. But “Brian Epstein and I refused to leave the matter there,” George later recalled. “We took the view that if Capitol didn’t want them, we’d send them somewhere else.” With the assistance of Transglobal Music, a New York licensing agency, EMI placed “She Loves You” with Vee-Jay Records, a tiny label based in Chicago. As George later remarked, the single ultimately “didn’t sell well, but at least it did something, and at least we had a record on the American market. ‘For God’s sake, do something about this,’ we said [to Capitol Records]. ‘These boys are breaking it, and they’re going to be fantastic throughout the world. So for heaven’s sake, latch onto them.’” While Capitol continued to stonewall the Beatles, Transglobal had managed to license the contents of the Please Please Me album with Vee-Jay, who held the long-player in abeyance with no official release date in sight.23
While Brian failed to make any headway on behalf of his stable during his visit to the United States, he didn’t come back empty handed, returning with a composition called “Anyone Who Had a Heart” from American songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. “I absolutely flipped,” George remembered. “I thought it was marvelous. ‘Brian,’ I said, ‘what a lovely song. Thank you so much for bringing it over.’” George’s first impulse was to record the song with Shirley Bassey, a veteran Welsh singer with EMI’s Columbia imprint whom George was itching to see into the next phase of her career. But Brian had other things in mind, hoping that George would record the song with Cilla. As it happened, George didn’t take kindly to the idea right away, as he harbored doubts about the song’s appropriateness for the young singer. As Cilla later recalled, “Brian told me later that George had said, ‘I very much doubt that Cilla’s ready for an emotional piece like this.’ But Eppy stood firm and it was me, not Shirley, who recorded the song.”24
Strangely, after having achieved one hit after another with Brian’s artists for the balance of 1963, George was gun-shy about recording a follow-up to “Love of the Loved” with Cilla. And it wasn’t just her inexperience that concerned him. George was equally uncertain about his own ability to bring the composition to fruition. In particular, he felt that his trumpet arrangement may have been subpar. “I wasn’t then known as an orchestrator,” he reasoned, “and with others around who had big reputations it would have been cheeky of me to assert myself too much. So I brought in Johnny Pearson, who did a marvelous score for the song.” With George up in the control room, Cilla finally succeeded in recording “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” and it became a number-one hit in early 1964, making her a star on the British music scene. No one was more surprised than Cilla herself, who later wrote, “When I first heard the song I liked it a lot and wanted to record it, but I didn’t rate it as a chart-topper. Recording it was a piece of cake. We had what must have been a 48-piece orchestra, the biggest I’d ever worked with, and during the recording, I did feel there was some ‘magic’ for me in the song.” All of a sudden, George’s work on “Love of the Loved” had been redeemed by the sweet joy of success. Years later, Cilla recalled the moment that Brian gave her the news. “I’ve just got the latest retail figures,” he informed her. “‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ is selling nearly a hundred thousand copies a day, and you’re the first girl since Helen Shapiro to be number one in the British charts.”25
But Cilla’s record was not without controversy, with charges of plagiarism that hearkened back to George’s dismal experiences with Paul Hanford’s cover version of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” Several months prior to the release of Cilla’s version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” Dionne Warwick’s American recording had resulted in a top 10 hit. After Cilla’s version topped the British charts, George learned that Warwick “was furious because we had pinched her version. Well, yes and no. Most songs have something inherent about the way they’re done which is in itself an arrangement. What Johnny did was to retain that part, which was absolutely right for the song, and then orchestrate it.” In sharp contrast with the charges of plagiarism that he had endured over “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” he refused to accept Warwick’s arguments that Black’s version was a nearly note-for-note theft—even down to a moment when the American singer fumbled one of the original lyrics, which Cilla dutifully replicated in George’s recording. “The two records sounded similar,” George later admitted, “but I am sure that ours was better than the American one. Certainly from an orchestral point of view we had a much better sound, and it deserved to be number one.”26
While he had thrown up his hands back in 1960, declaring on Juke Box Jury that “we are competing against the Americans on unequal terms,” he no longer seemed to care now that he was a producer with a golden touch. Now, only a few years later, the only thing that mattered was the work itself, and George was overbrimming with confidence that, more often than not, his was indeed the better work. Even during that incredible year, he still managed to find the time to record Parlophone stalwarts like Ron Goodwin, Matt Monro, and Jimmy Shand. Yearning for new talent, George even dispatched Ron Richards to head out for the North Country, where he discovered an obscure band called the Hollies in—somewhat naturally in those Mersey-sound days—the Cavern Club. In short order, the band recorded a pair of cover versions of Coasters tunes, including the Hollies’ debut record “(Ain’t That) Just Like Me,” which landed at number twenty-five, followed by “Searchin’,” which bubbled just under the top 10. In a matter of months, they would finally reach number eight with a cover version of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay.”
With the Beatles as the label’s undeniable mainstay and a host of other acts churning out regular hits, Parlophone had truly made it, no longer simply playing third fiddle to Columbia and HMV. For the first time, they were the EMI Group’s indisputable pacesetters. But with the Friday, August 23, release of “She Loves You”—the song that had lain in wait since the first steamy days of July—the Beatles blew everything up all over again. In what seemed like no time at all, Britons were singing “yeah, yeah, yeah!” with unchecked abandon. During the previous month, as Len Wood studied the manufacturing orders for the “She Loves You” backed with “I’ll Get You” single, EMI’s managing director balked at the number of pressings. “The marketing manager set the advance order at 350,000, which was an extraordinary number in those days,” Wood later recalled. “I told him I thought it was way too high, but he stood his ground and eventually I agreed to 250,000.” As events would have it, Wood’s estimation had rather dramatically missed the mark. Within just eleven days of its release, the single had sold an astonishing five hundred thousand copies and would occupy the top spot on the charts on two separate occasions as “She Loves You” ruled the airwaves across much of the fall. Not too long afterward, “She Loves You” notched sales in excess of a million copies on its way to becoming the United Kingdom’s bestselling single of the decade. With this incredible backdrop, the Beatles finally resumed work on their second, as-of-yet-untitled album on Wednesday, September 11, 1963. With Martin up in the booth and with Smith and Langham by his side, the Beatles began working on “I Wanna Be Your Man,” a new Lennon-McCartney song written expressly to showcase Starr. Only the day before, John and Paul had offered the composition to the Rolling Stones, who planned to record it as their second single. After one take, the Beatles turned their attention to two additional new songs, including “Little Child,” which they attempted for two takes, followed by “All I’ve Got to Do,” which they completed in fourteen takes. The group’s banner day at Abbey Road resumed after a dinner break, when they tried out yet another new composition, “Not a Second Time.” As with “Little Child” and “All I’ve Got to Do,” it was written primarily by Lennon, who was clearly on a roll. After recording five takes, Martin double-tracked Lennon’s voice before overdubbing his own piano part as well. The Beatles ended the evening by taking a stab at Harrison’s writing debut with “Don’t Bother Me,” which, after seven takes, they abandoned for the night.27
Martin and the bandmates resumed work on their new LP the next day, marking the first time in months that they managed to find themselves at Abbey Road, and not out on the ballroom circuit, on two consecutive nights. When the Beatles settled down to business that afternoon, they recorded nine more takes of “Hold Me Tight,” which Martin had put aside after their whirlwind February 11 session. After taking a short break, they resumed work on Harrison’s “Don’t Bother Me,” although Martin found himself increasingly dissatisfied with the distortion that Lennon had been achieving on his rhythm guitar part. Studio outtakes find Martin asking Smith about deploying other means to attain the “dark” sound that Harrison aspired for with his song. “Can we have a compressor on this guitar, Norman? We might try to get a sort of organ sound.” With the compressor effect in place, “Don’t Bother Me” came together over nine additional takes and an overdub with Paul on claves, Ringo rapping an Arabian bongo, and John on tambourine.28
Afterward, they resumed work on “Little Child,” with Paul overdubbing a piano part and John on harmonica. After six more attempts at “I Wanna Be Your Man,” Martin and the band closed up Abbey Road for the night, having finished five songs in the space of two days. By the end of the month as the bandmates took a much-needed break from the road, Martin gathered his team back at the studio to work on the material that they had amassed in September. With Smith and Emerick sharing the control booth, Martin made two attempts at overdubbing piano parts on “Money (That’s What I Want)” and Hammond organ on “I Wanna Be Your Man.” For the rest of the workday, they held a mixing session to complete the Beatles’ latest batch of tunes. Years later, Emerick would look back on these sessions, remembering how he would imagine himself in Smith’s shoes as the band’s balance engineer. “My contribution to those mixes may have been minimal—all I was doing was changing tape reels and starting and stopping the tape machines—but I was learning a lot from watching Norman,” Emerick recalled. “I knew enough not to make comments during the session, but I do remember thinking things like ‘I hope Norman lifts the guitar solo up’; ‘I hope he rides the vocal here.’ I was already starting to imagine how I would engineer the sessions myself, given the chance.”29
But before George and the other EMI staffers managed to see the bandmates again back at 3 Abbey Road, yet another seismic shift occurred in the Beatles’ lives—the kind of all-out reshuffling of the deck that had taken them from being North Country unknowns to the toast of British pop music. Amazing as it now seems in retrospect, they were about to become even bigger still. On the evening of Sunday, October 13, they played a four-song set on Val Parnell’s popular ITV variety show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, in front of an ecstatic television audience of some fifteen million Britons. After the Beatles performed “From Me to You,” “I’ll Get You,” “She Loves You,” and “Twist and Shout” inside the theater, the mayhem shifted into the night, where two thousand ecstatic fans gathered on Oxford Street. “Screaming girls launched themselves against the police—sending helmets flying and constables reeling,” according to the Daily Herald. But the Daily Mirror scooped the world the very next morning, boldly proclaiming the rise of BEATLEMANIA! across the United Kingdom.30