The Beatles’ first British recording contract and sessions came fitfully, after great persistence from Epstein, through a comedy label. An impossibly long three months passed before Epstein heard back from George Martin, which he took as one more bad omen. Martin had simply been busy with sessions, and returned Epstein’s message to schedule a second appointment for May 1962. Lennon fumed about the missed opportunity at Decca, and played out his lingering disappointment through a telling political omission: he, McCartney, and Harrison never told Pete Best that Decca had turned them down. For all Best knew, or couldn’t be bothered to find out, the slow wheels of industry were still turning. The drummer’s freeze-out was well under way before George Martin heard Best play live.
Leaving the Beatles in Hamburg, Epstein returned from the Sutcliffe trauma in mid-April to a welcome surprise in London: Martin finally offered him an EMI recording contract on an accelerated schedule. Instead of hearing the band perform for him in person, Martin’s ears felt confident enough in his early impressions to book a studio date and take care of some paperwork along the way. This sudden reversal mystifies historians, especially since it inexplicably trips recording history forward. For a long time there was confusion about whether this “studio” session was an audition or an actual recording date, with tape rolling for a possible release. Epstein and the Beatles clearly viewed it as a professional session. Martin may have booked it as such, but probably looked at it more as an “artist test,” an engineering audition where they figured out the ideal setup and levels for instruments and vocals.1 This was customary, but parties remember these details differently. Did Martin conceal the true nature of this booking to capture the Beatles off guard, wind them up before making his commitment?
This was an unusual way of proceeding, but Martin had unusual powers. He had been made head of Parlophone in 1955, at age twenty-nine, and in those days that was quite young—especially within EMI, a company that prided itself on being even stuffier than Decca. In its lofty EMI offices in Manchester Square, Parlophone was looked on not so much as a boutique label as eccentric, an unlikely imprint to become a pop dynamo. The label was branded not with a fancy pound sign (£), as many assumed, but with a German L, for Carl Lindström, the man who founded the imprint.2
Martin had grown up in London’s Drayton Park. Unlike Lennon, he enjoyed a stable, working-class home; his father was a wood machinist. Young George taught himself the piano, and composed his first piece at the age of seven (“The Spider’s Dance”). He dreamed of piloting airplanes for the elite Royal Air Force, and settled for the Fleet Air Arm. His timing was bad: after he was commissioned in 1945, the war suddenly ended, and he spent a year as a clerk before entering the Guildhall School of Music on a veteran’s grant. There he picked up the oboe and studied orchestration, theory, and conducting, but his real education came in the recording studio. While Martin’s full biography still awaits serious scholarly attention, some highlights of his early career seem like blueprints for his later work with Lennon.
After Guildhall, he cataloged scores for the BBC for a few months in 1950 before being hired as an assistant by Parlophone’s Oscar Preuss, at age twenty-four. Parlophone also suffered bad timing: during the war, its big-label classical acts had been siphoned off by Columbia and HMV, leaving the roster lean. Even with the label’s relatively thin catalog, though, the early years at Preuss’s side exposed Martin to every mode of the era’s recording practice: from soloists to orchestras, jazz groups to children’s choirs and remote recordings in Scotland of Jimmy Shand’s country dance band using EMI’s mobile recording van. As the oddball division of Britain’s largest recording firm, Parlophone hovered one rung on EMI’s corporate ladder above its Salvation Army Band imprint, Regal Zonophone.
The hardscrabble streets of Liverpool were a long way from London’s illustrious St. John’s Wood. Previous decades saw giant composers and conductors like Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Malcolm Sargent, and Sir Thomas Beecham stroll down from their stately homes in lush Westminster to record with the London and Royal Philharmonics inside the enormous Georgian town house at 3 Abbey Road. This huge EMI building, with its humble domestic façade, dated back to 1830. Martin routinely shared recording studios there with the other subsidiaries, and the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled rooms were as likely to host the London Symphony Orchestra as they had swing bands like the Glenn Miller Orchestra or piano soloists like Arthur Rubinstein. In this rotation, Martin was the wild card. Preuss gradually handed over more and more responsibility to his able assistant, who was virtually running the label on his own by 1955. When Preuss retired in the spring of that year, Martin, at age twenty-nine, stepped in to replace him, making him the youngest label head in Britain. Martin realized that to keep the imprint afloat—and to keep himself employed—Parlophone needed to compete. While not forsaking its usual material, he carved a niche for the label through comedy and novelties.
With Preuss’s encouragement, Martin had begun exploring the possibilities of the relatively new medium of magnetic recording tape as early as 1951, when the two coproduced a recording with bandleader Jack Parnell. “The White Suit Samba,” the theme from Alec Guinness’s The Man in the White Suit (1951), utilized an electronic sound effect from the movie as a rhythmic element. Here Martin dressed the tape experiments of the French avant-garde’s musique concrète in the guise of a pop instrumental. A Peter Ustinov single followed in 1952, “Mock Mozart,” wherein Martin painstakingly overdubbed the vocals by recording on one mono tape, then playing that recording to another machine while simultaneously recording another vocal part. Repeating this process, he stacked up four harmonizing parts.
Alongside comedy, Martin recorded a number of well-known children’s records in the 1950s, including “Nellie the Elephant” and “Little Red Monkey,” and in 1953, with Peter Sellers, he attempted a children’s space-fantasy record called “Jakka and the Flying Saucers.” An ambitious production, Martin treated it with the same primitive overdubs as the Ustinov single, as well as numerous tape edits, sound effects, and variable-speed recording. The record bombed; as technical experiment, though, “Jakka” was an advance on “Mock Mozart.”
Most biographers rank Martin one of music’s luckiest producers. His background tells a more nuanced story about how preparation met opportunity. Long before he ever met Lennon’s Beatles, Martin was skilled in an emergent new medium that took the art of recording from live performance to the recording of multiple performances atop one another to create a detailed, layered production. Far from simply sticking a microphone in front of comics, or feeding radio broadcasts directly onto a master tape, Martin liked to tinker. As the EMI front office dragged its heels during the industry’s transition from direct-to-disc lacquers to analog tape, and from 78s to twelve-inch LPs and seven-inch 45s, throughout the late 1940s and early fifties, Martin dabbled with how comparatively elastic the new tape medium was. Beyond all this, Martin was not satisfied with tape editing, and often tweaked his productions with variable-speed recording and evocative effects like compression to create what he would later call “sound pictures.” Martin’s skill lay somewhere between “live-to-radio” and “performance-on-tape.”
Once Martin took over Parlophone, his recording studio increasingly resembled a workshop, a place where chasing sounds led to serendipitous accidents. To Martin’s ear, comedy presented the perfect foil for tape tricks, allowing him to incorporate outlandish production ideas to ornament scatterbrained voices and gags. Before he became a movie star, the young Peter Sellers became a partner in this pursuit, scoring hits with a skiffle parody, “Any Old Iron,” in 1957 and then with a ten-inch LP entitled The Best of Sellers in 1958.
Also in 1957, Martin issued an LP of a popular West End revue featuring Michael Flanders and Donald Swann called At the Drop of a Hat. More Sellers singles and two Sellers LPs followed in 1959 and 1960, each increasingly ambitious in scope. In 1961, Martin spent three days splicing together the tapes for an LP of another revue, Beyond the Fringe, which would launch the coming “satire boom” in British comedy. At the same time, he produced Charlie Drake’s hit “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back.” The silliness of “Boomerang,” which reached number 14, belied its sharp arrangement. The next year brought hits with Bernard Cribbins, most significantly “Right Said Fred,” and two LPs that revealed just how far Martin’s production skills had come. None of these records would have been nearly as funny without his careful attention to sonic detail, and he filed every skill into his database of tricks for his work to come.
For one of those 1962 LPs, Martin and former Goon Michael Bentine fashioned an album out of Bentine’s absurdist television show It’s a Square World, using multiple overdubs on the new four-track EMI machines, sound effects, and clever editing. The other LP contained a full-length parody of The Bridge on the River Kwai, produced during the second half of the year, when Martin began working with the Beatles. It benefited from an elaborate yet subtle production of overdubbed effects Martin constructed to bring the scenes behind the dialogue to life. (The album was ultimately renamed, nonsensically, The Bridge on the River Wye, because of a threatened lawsuit.) In an era when the British music industry was still in thrall of whatever was happening in the United States, Martin’s comedy records were the product of homegrown talent of a particularly English sensibility. Even if the rest of the industry looked down their noses at these records, they were hits, and the savvier ears in the business heard ingenuity behind the laughs.
Inside EMI, Martin was the “suit” who courted trouble. In 1956 he made a recording with the Goons called “Unchained Melody,” an elaborate parody of Les Baxter’s American hit from the movie Unchained. As was the custom, other acts quickly hopped the same train; Jimmy Young, Al Hibbler, and Liberace all had top-ten UK hits with the tune that spring. But EMI feared the Goon demolition would result in a lawsuit from the publisher and refused to release it. Incensed, Spike Milligan went to Decca, which had no problem releasing a record tied to the BBC’s most popular radio show. The label promptly scored two top-ten Goon hits: “I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas” in June and “The Ying Tong Song” in September. Lennon treasured his copy of the loopy “Ying Tong Song,” most likely bought (or pilfered) from Epstein’s Whitechapel shop.
Even on novelties Martin left his fingerprints. Ditties like John Dankworth’s “Experiments with Mice,” a top-ten hit in 1957, fused jazz with comedy. The Temperance Seven earned him his first number-one hit in 1961 with “You’re Driving Me Crazy.” Perhaps most tellingly, Martin worked with the Vipers, a skiffle outfit that rode the Donegan wave to produce successful covers of “Cumberland Gap,” a song Lennon sang with the Quarrymen, and its B side, “Maggie Mae” (the Scouser prostitute ditty immortalized by Lennon’s outburst on the Let It Be soundtrack). When Martin signed the Vipers in early 1956, he took a pass on their lead singer, Tommy Steele, who jumped to Decca and became a rock idol. While he probably regretted letting Steele slip by, Martin still squeezed hits from his band. Unlike Rowe and all the others, Martin could tell the difference between a lead singer and backup band. (Martin’s decision regarding the Beatles in this matter would be finely nuanced.)
The Vipers also scored with a non-skiffle treatment of Bobby Helm’s country song “No Other Baby,” in 1958, which featured the slap-back echo Lennon adored from the Sun-label Memphis rockabilly of Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. Another producer, like HMV’s Walter J. Ridley, might have assigned the Vipers something on the order of “The Birds and the Bees,” which Ridley chose as the surefire follow-up to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” in 1960 (with Joe Moretti’s ominous, forbidding guitar). It bombed. By contrast, the classically trained Martin had no problem letting skiffle be skiffle.
When Epstein first called from Coleman’s office, Martin was attending to singers like Matt Monro, whose “When Love Comes Along” became the follow-up to his February hit, “Softly As I Leave You” (which had reached number ten, his third top-ten hit since late 1960). Like most EMI producers, Martin’s formal office was at EMI headquarters across town in Manchester Square, where the Beatles posed for their first album cover.
In this pre-rock era, pop was an afterthought, never mind taken at all seriously. It was seen as a necessary sop to the public which helped pay for the loftier classical product, much the same way Epstein financed his jazz and classical stock at NEMS. Martin was not even a member of London’s “pop” circle, really—the hits he had came mostly from novelties—and while sturdy in terms of engineering practice, as a producer he was among the least likely men in the recording industry to be pegged a “comer.” In retrospect, it’s uncanny that the man who signed on the Beatles, and helped shape their work, had this dual background in comedy and, in BBC terms, “Light Programme” classical music. Martin’s early interest in aeronautic engineering sprouted into technical wizardry when applied to sound, while his background as an oboe player gave him a flair for winds.
For Lennon, Martin’s connection to the Goons proved compelling. But inside EMI, this comedy-classical connection was double-edged: while relatively free of the typical pop constraints, Martin didn’t enjoy pop budgets to develop talent. Then again, the whole idea of “pop development”—giving a band three or four records to find their way in the medium—barely existed. His profile gave him the freedom he needed to take a chance on just such a band as the Beatles, unproven yet promising—the kind of gamble that might pay off if the planets aligned. It’s still unclear how much attention Martin paid to the charts at the time, whether he cared where rock ’n’ roll came from or where it might be headed. He was happy for the hits, even if they didn’t buy him credibility at his own label. But he didn’t have a vision for where the music could go. Martin’s taste was probably closer to Epstein’s: that of an educated man who went home to listen to classical records, not teenage stuff or R&B or C&W. So in this context, Martin was not signing what he thought was the next huge pop act. He heard the Beatles as a regional fad that just might break wider. And he picked up on their comic edge: if they stalled, he could always steer them toward novelties.
Epstein and Martin recognized each other in ways that transcended musical taste. Martin was charmed by Epstein’s affection for the band; he seems to have capitulated more to Epstein’s charisma than to the Decca lacquers. Of course, his colleague Coleman had arranged for a publishing deal, a strong referral: if a publisher thought this band’s material had value, that was already one vote from a trusted ear.
And Epstein doubtless admired Martin’s gentlemanly bearing and BBC English. He was the kind of gentleman Epstein saw himself as: intelligent, well-spoken, courteous, officious, and yet open-minded, willing to learn, a professional in the best sense; somebody who was not just out to make a buck, but devoted to his product, who had earned a certain standing by taking care with what he put his name on. Epstein’s homework probably told him that Martin had a serious reputation in an industry where there was almost no such thing: to the EMI brass he was eccentric, but if Martin “stooped” to comedy, he had pretty much invented that market; and among sound enthusiasts it was clear he knew what he was doing. Surely Epstein would have made some calls and figured this out; at the very least he would have recognized Martin’s stable from stocking records by the Vipers, Peter Sellers, and Matt Monro. Epstein also noted Martin’s connections with the BBC.
Lennon’s relationship with Martin would be entirely professional, or as professional as trusting someone to transcribe your personal abstractions onto tape can be. As studious and disciplined a technician as Martin was, he was more an arranger and facilitator than a collaborator—to Martin’s ear, after a time Lennon didn’t need any help writing, just translating his songs into recordings. And so a creative triangle formed outside the band: between Lennon and Epstein, where the sexual currents ran hot and forbidden; and Lennon and Martin, a meeting of prodigy and sympathetic mentor.
Between Epstein and Martin, a completely civil business relationship was born—Martin’s squabbles would be with EMI, not Epstein. And it seems unlikely that Martin knew the nature of Epstein’s lopsided Beatle contracts and NEMS foibles: although he gladly took on other of Epstein’s Mersey artists (within eighteen months he recorded Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, and Cilla Black), his terms with the Beatles were on a completely different business track. Epstein had a preexisting arrangement with the Beatles; Martin saw no need for comment. That Epstein delivered Lennon to Martin must have earned him major stripes in Lennon’s mind.
Martin’s initial offer to Epstein was a huge boon for Epstein, Lennon, and the others, but posed little risk to Parlophone. As contracts go, it had all its era’s boilerplate clauses, putting all the risk on the band and leaving EMI plenty of wiggle room if their music didn’t chart. On May 9, Epstein dashed off two telegrams, the first to the band at the Star-Club:
CONGRATULATIONS BOYS. EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION. PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL.
and the second to Bill Harry at Mersey Beat:
HAVE SECURED CONTRACT FOR BEATLES TO RECORD FOR EMI ON PARLAPHONE [SIC] LABEL 1ST RECORDING DATE SET FOR JUNE 6TH
—BRIAN EPSTEIN3
It was the telegram the band had been dreaming about, and it arrived just weeks after Stuart’s death.
When he returned to Liverpool, Epstein had fires to put out. In another of the serendipitous ways in which he was perfectly suited to handle this band, the shameful underworld of homosexuality made his boys’ indiscretions seem tame. Alistair Taylor reported in his memoirs that a young girl named Jennifer, no more than seventeen, came into the NEMS offices one day with both her parents. “Our Jennifer is five months pregnant,” the mother said emphatically, “and the father is one of your Beatles—John.”
It wasn’t right, she insisted; their girl was “taken advantage of.” She would miss her exams and the family was already strapped for money. Now they had a child to plan for. Epstein’s “resolution” was a £200 payoff and a signed agreement to stay quiet. Over the years several sources close to the Beatles have testified to many such complaints—more than just a handful—few of which ever made the papers or seemed to cause anybody overt stabs of conscience.4 In Epstein’s mind it became part of the cost of running the show: his “boys” belonged to their fans, nobody else. In those days, boys would simply be boys, the birth control pill was not yet widespread, and the entertainment business had relaxed customs on such matters. They were simply looked after the way quiz shows coached their contestants or politicians wheeled out their wives in wool coats: the show was upheld at all costs, a delicate fantasy that required constant maintenance. Backstage might be depravity, but the public persona was zealously guarded. After all, it was what people wanted to believe in that was being sold, not anything that resembled reality. Few acts have been as knowing about this as the Beatles, and few agents were as well suited to pitching such a fantasy as Epstein.
Shopping a band for less than two years is now a relative honeymoon. But what looks clean and swift in retrospect seemed unending for Epstein, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Best. And while the Hamburg gig replenished the coffers and gave them perspective on how far they’d come, the cost was beyond measure: for Lennon, Sutcliffe’s death put a pall on everything. The cost of “holding it together” would be high. His character hardened, his booze bingeing became epic, his fatalism cemented. For Lennon, success became something like the opposite of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “capacity for wonder”—it was tinged with the embittered personal resolutions he made to himself in the darkest of nights, to take his revenge, to climb on top of all these deaths and conquer everything and anybody that might hold him back.
That first week in June 1962, the international news wires were jumping. At the end of May, astronaut Scott Carpenter had orbited the earth three times. Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel on May 31. An Air France charter flight, the Château de Sully, crashed when it overran its runway at Orly Airport in Paris; only two flight attendants survived amid 130 fatalities, most of them cultural and civic leaders from Atlanta, Georgia. President John F. Kennedy prepared to deliver the commencement address at West Point, and the Students for a Democratic Society would soon meet in Michigan to write the Port Huron Statement.
The morning of June 6 saw Neil Aspinall drive the Beatles in his van down to London, where they met with George Martin’s assistant Ron Richards, his engineer Norman Smith, and “button pusher” (tape operator) Chris Neal around 5 P.M. in preparation for a two-hour session in Studio 2 starting at seven. They were tired from their Star-Club dates, which ended on June 2, and had spent their two days off running down songs in afternoon Cavern rehearsals. Six months had passed since their Decca audition, and the debate about material was piqued. Lennon argued that Epstein had made them sound “soft” for Decca, and he was determined to play a tougher hand this time around. After all, he argued, Decca had passed—that proved Epstein had blundered their set list, right? (This argument followed them into the studio and their career before evolving into a larger, ongoing debate about the nature of the band’s legacy.)
“I remember Martin taking a quick look at them and leaving for tea,” remembered technical assistant Ken Townsend.5 (Others report Martin was simply out to dinner with his secretary, Judy Lockhart-Smith.) Ron Richards filled in as producer, as he did for many of Martin’s pop artists. Norman Smith, however, says he summoned Martin back to the control room when the band started “Love Me Do.” He stayed for the rest of the session.
For the hayseeds from Liverpool, problems emerged almost immediately. For starters, the Beatles’ equipment gave off a ghastly buzz, especially McCartney’s bass amp. The technicians didn’t think much of Lennon and Harrison’s guitar getups, but that bass amp was simply hopeless. While the band had tea, Townsend and Smith improvised an amp and speaker from the basement to get rid of the droning.
They taped four songs, beginning with “Besame Mucho,” with which Jet Harris was just then enjoying a hit. (According to standard EMI policy at the time, their first session tape was wiped for reuse, and only a private reel of “Besame Mucho,” discovered in 1980, has survived.)6 Harris, a former member of Cliff Richard’s Shadows, was gunning for success by covering a marginal Coasters hit from 1960 (when it peaked in the UK at number seventy). The Coasters, of course, were songwriting powerhouse Leiber and Stoller’s New York outfit, whom the Beatles adored (they also did “Searchin’,” “Youngblood,” and “Three Cool Cats”). The Coasters had sped up the pace of Jimmy Dorsey’s hit from 1944 with a touch of Nat King Cole’s version.
The Beatles, however, had a hard time taking this stuff seriously: they spanked the Coasters’ version up to a sweaty gallop. Not only were they covering a current hit, proving to Martin they could master a top-ten sound, they drilled straight into the song’s insipidness, puncturing its bathos for self-mockery. Theirs was a knowing, self-conscious arrangement that said, “We can do this stuff . . . but only by exposing its complete fraudulence!” The tempo alone snubbed convention, and it worked chiefly as comic fizz. It had the same sardonic ring as Lennon singing “Ain’t She Sweet” as a “rock” song—a hilarious surface upended by its dismissive subtext.
The other three numbers were all original, meaning Lennon and McCartney won the argument with Epstein about material. (Or did they agree on a song list with Epstein, and then veer from it out of cheek?) For this new producer, they were intent on proving themselves not just as a band but as writers, which meant they not only had confidence in their chops but belief in their muse. “Love Me Do” sprouted a soaring harmonica from Lennon, an early signature. It gave Smith a start, and this is where George Martin entered the booth (either summoned by Smith or back from dinner). Although sketchy, it caught enough of what Lennon had in mind when he wrote it. Then came “P.S. I Love You,” another original, a sticky McCartney valentine, and “Ask Me Why,” with a querulous Lennon lead. All three of these songs made giant strides beyond “Love of the Loved” and “Like Dreamers Do,” the originals they had played five months previously for Decca. Both “P.S. I Love You” and “Ask Me Why” boasted a new songwriting confidence, the latter in particular, which seesawed between playful “woo-woo-woo”s and tense silences. The distance between their Decca audition (January) and this first Parlophone session (June) could be measured by how far they had traveled as songwriters.
Martin stepped out from the control room to talk with the band before inviting them in to hear their performances. He gave them rookie coaching about their microphones and other technical matters (then as now, certain recording mics were “bidirectional,” or two-sided, in that they responded better to a sidelong angle than to a direct frontal attack). The mood was suspicious as he gave his instructions, and the haggard Beatles seemed to listen without much response. They felt patronized. Only when Martin asked if they had any comments was there a mood change. “Look, I’ve laid into you for quite a time, you haven’t responded,” Smith recalled Martin saying. “Is there anything you don’t like?” “They all looked at each other for a long while, shuffling their feet,” Smith remembered, “then George Harrison said, ‘Yeah, I don’t like your tie.’ ”7
At some point during this session, or on the telephone with Epstein shortly thereafter, Martin aired his doubts about drummer Pete Best. McCartney remembers it opening up an ensemble rift that had been interrupted by the death of Sutcliffe: “If he wasn’t up to the mark (slightly in our eyes, and definitely in the producer’s eyes) then there was no choice. But it was still very difficult. One of the most difficult things we ever had to do.”8
No further sessions were booked yet, but the contract got passed around for signatures. “What have I got to lose?” Martin remembers thinking after the session. He signed the contract and predated it June 4. The agreement called for four sides, or two double-sided 45-rpm singles, at a penny per single (not side). This included three one-year options with an increase of a quarter of a penny at the end of the first year and another halfpenny after the second (half that amount for overseas sales). If that weren’t exploitative enough, a twelve-track album would count as only six tracks. With nothing up front, it was a risk-free arrangement for Martin; and Epstein, counting himself grateful after so much disappointment, didn’t push back for better terms. If it fell within the ballpark of going industry contracts, it was still corporate theft.9
The Beatles returned to Liverpool for a week straight at the Cavern, where their “Welcome Home” gig on June 9 broke attendance records: nine hundred kids did the sardine routine in the sweltering basement to greet the band after two months away. Meanwhile, Martin had some thinking to do: which of these new songs would make the strongest debut? There were no uptempo numbers, and you can’t break a pop act with a ballad. Here was a dilemma for Lennon: he ached to feature the band as a hard-rock act but had written only softer numbers for the original material they were determined to bank. (“One After 909” had been shelved due to weak lyrics.) The Beatles were clearly a beat group, steeped in R&B, but this early decision about how to position them vexed even Martin. Something had to change. Epstein’s idea was obvious: suit them up and give teenage girls some matinee idols. Martin’s thought process was more complicated: should he lead with McCartney, who had both the golden voice and the baby face, or Lennon, who had the “big personality”? “In the end it became obvious,” he allowed. With “My Bonnie,” Epstein had urged Martin to listen beyond Tony Sheridan’s vocal to the Beatles in the background; now Martin realized he was dealing with a totality, not just a typical singer with backup group. His genius as a producer at this point boasted simplicity and taste: why choose between Lennon and McCartney when he could have both? This might have emerged eventually, but Martin’s decision here shows keen sensitivity to what his ears were telling him: the Beatles had two front men.
That first EMI session took place in the midst of hectic travel as word of mouth spread and the band’s BBC appearances gained popularity. Recording with a professional London producer, signing a major-label contract, put more than a gust in their sails. They began to taste success through a heavy daily grind, building up a national profile by slogging from town to town, wearing down the tires on Aspinall’s van: 175 miles down to Swindon and Stroud; 28 miles across to Northwich in Cheshire; 42 miles down to Rhyl; 92 miles across the Pennines to Doncaster; 164 miles south to Lydney, in Gloucestershire; and 64 miles up to Morecambe, in the north of Lancashire. The June–July schedule alone was packed with sixty-two live dates, launched with the Parlophone recording session and their second appearance on the BBC.
Two days after the band got back to Liverpool, fans hired a coach to accompany them to Manchester, where they played “Ask Me Why,” “Besame Mucho,” and “A Picture of You” for the Teenager’s Turn—Here We Go! show, broadcast on June 15. In the crowd scene that erupted in the streets outside the Playhouse Theatre, Pete Best got lost and the coach returned to Liverpool without him. It was portentous on any number of levels: an overwhelming spectacle of screams and affection that would snowball around the world over the next two years had the early and accidental side effect of leaving Best in the dust. In Liverpool, the Beatles had created a scene by digging in at the Cavern and working their fingers sore. Now, suddenly, they were far bigger in Manchester than simply a neighboring town’s favorites. Beatlemania starts here.
That summer of 1962 swept past in a blur of swift changes and half-baked decisions on a grand scale. Aunt Mimi had met Cynthia Powell, of course, but chose to remain oblivious to the extent of her relationship with John. That changed when John used some of his gigging cash to buy his girl a black fur coat she’d been eyeing at C&A Modes department store. When they brought it home with a cooked chicken for dinner at Mendips to celebrate, Mimi threw a fit about it—the same competitiveness that flared up whenever another woman captured John’s affection. Cynthia recalled:
She screamed at John that he’d spent his money on a “gangster’s moll” (even with Mimi yelling at us it was funny) and hurled first the chicken, which she grabbed from me, then a hand mirror at John. “Do you think you can butter me up with a chicken when you’ve spent all your money on this?” she screamed. “Get out.” The color drained from John’s face. “What the fuck’s the matter with you? Are you totally crazy?” he shouted. I was rooted to the spot.10
John apologized to Cynthia, saying, “All she cares about is fucking money and cats!” He rode Cyn home on the bus. This was not the first time Mimi had attacked him, Powell later wrote, but it was the “first time she’d done it in front of someone else,” and the incident left Lennon “ashamed as well as angry.” There’s a small bomb of a revelation: “It wasn’t the first time Mimi had attacked him violently.”11 John had confided in his future wife some alarming secrets about his auntie, secrets that would not emerge until long after her death: her stern will was matched by Victorian corporeal discipline. Since Mimi’s death, we’ve learned she put down John’s dog to punish him, and threw things at him in front of his fiancée, which would naturally create oceans of anger in the gentlest of souls. No wonder Judy had a tough time with her sister. The young Lennon’s tough façade was not just a social persona created for other toughs; it was a condition of his self-respect within Mimi’s four walls. Mimi’s outburst revealed yet more to Cynthia about John’s layered insecurities.
In July, Cynthia told John she was pregnant. They had never used birth control, Cynthia wrote later.
Of course we knew how babies were made and that pregnancy could be prevented, but the level of our ignorance was such that we honestly thought it would never happen to us. Until it did.
When I realized my period was late I didn’t know who to turn to. Eventually I told [her close friend] Phyl, who agreed to go with me to the doctor. The female GP I saw was frosty and patronizing. She examined me, confirmed my fears, then delivered a stern lecture on morals. I left the surgery [sic] feeling utterly bleak. What on earth had I done? I didn’t want a baby, not yet. I wanted a career, marriage and a life before children. Now I’d messed everything up.12
Crying alone at her bedsit (studio apartment), after the era’s stereotypical elderly gynecology lecture, Cynthia dreaded her mother’s forthcoming visit from Canada almost as much as she dreaded telling Lennon the news. When she finally did “pluck up all [her] courage,” she had no idea exactly how he would react—and she feared the worst. Lennon surprised her, saying, “There’s only one thing for it, Cyn. We’ll have to get married.” She pressed him to make sure it was what he wanted, and he reassured her, telling her, “I love you. I’m not going to leave you now.”13 Here is a side of Lennon’s provincial good manners and rectitude that underlay his rock ’n’ roll bluster. He could no more walk away from a pregnant girlfriend than he could confront the auntie to whom he felt so beholden. And echoes of Lennon’s own birth ring in this decision: he would be different; he would show everybody how a father should act; he wouldn’t pull an Alf and disappear.
John first told Epstein, who probably gulped hard and smiled. Then John went to Mendips, taking along his half-sister Julia for protection, knowing Mimi would be furious. “You don’t understand, Mimi. I love Cyn, I want to marry her,” Cynthia remembered John saying. But Mimi was convinced Cynthia had trapped him, and shadows cast by Judy and Alf prejudiced her strongly against what she sensed was a tired rerun.
In Lennon’s young mind, Cynthia’s pregnancy seemed less of a career threat than the trouble brewing around Pete Best. Before the band met up with George Martin again in London, they had to make a decision about their drummer. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison turned the task over to Epstein.
Pete Best roams the outer circles of Beatles literature as the unlucky sod who got left behind. Even Best’s suicide attempt in 1965 gets overshadowed by Rory Storm’s double suicide with his mother that same year—at least the Best legend pulled back from the gothic. History, as usual, tells a more complicated story. Years later, the remaining Beatles made sure that the Anthology project brought royalties, rumored in the amount of £1 million, to set up the drummer’s family for life. But at the time it happened, Best’s ousting was as much of a shock to him and his fans as it was a boon for Ringo and, more to the point, the music itself. And the deck was not even reshuffled before the band had to break a new player in to all their arrangements while threading the next needle Martin had sent from London: an execrable song demo for the band to learn called “How Do You Do It?”
The Beatles certainly didn’t replace Best to please their fans: the Mathew Street fallout was far worse than they had expected, and landed George Harrison with a black eye—an early sign of fan idolatry curdling into violence. Everyone had his motives, some of them overt, some of them covert: Epstein was quoted as saying he couldn’t take any more phone calls from Mona Best, who considered herself the band’s first manager, with exclusive rights to positioning and opinions. But there was also tension surrounding Neil Aspinall’s affair with Mona, which by then had turned his status from houseguest into full-blown home-wrecker. In Lennon’s mind, the calculus must have gone something like this: if they severed ties with Best, would the trusted Aspinall side with his lover and her son or with his mates? How could they possibly maintain good relations with Aspinall when they knew he still resided at the home of their axed drummer, the son of the club owner who had given them their first steady employment and kept on booking them at her Casbah and elsewhere until Epstein came along?
Best’s bad luck was earned: he had worked hard onstage with these players, and they had found him wanting. Lennon’s assessment is cutting: “This myth built up over the years that he was great and Paul was jealous of him because he was pretty and all that crap. They didn’t get on that much together, but it was partly because Pete was a bit slow. He was a harmless guy, but he was not quick. All of us had quick minds, but he never picked that up.”14 Such group tensions are typical when three musicians decide their fourth is weak and needs replacing: the fourth may disagree, but also may have no clue what the other three are on about; there are some musical abilities that aren’t just difficult but impossible to teach. “The reason he got into the group in the first place,” Lennon recalled, “was because we had to have a drummer to get to Hamburg. We were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer, but by the time we were back from Germany we’d trained him to keep a stick going up and down (four-in-the-bar, he couldn’t do much else.)”15 McCartney, less bluntly, remembered, “We really started to think we needed ‘the greatest drummer in Liverpool,’ and the greatest drummer in our eyes was a guy, Ringo Starr, who had changed his name before any of us, who had a beard and was grown up and was known to have a Zephyr Zodiac”—the same luxury wheels as Epstein’s.16
Besides the musicianship, there were entrenched personality differences, Harrison argued: “Pete would never hang out with us. When we finished doing the gig, Pete would go off on his own and we three would hang out together, and then when Ringo was around it was like a full unit, both on and off the stage. When there were the four of us with Ringo, it felt rocking.”17 Pete had gotten married to his girlfriend, Kathy, in the spring of 1962, and this created another wedge. Others have tried to argue that since Best was the most popular Beatle with the women, McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison took him down out of envy. This contradicts the logic of their ambition: why get rid of a popular character unless he didn’t share the same musical space? Martin wasn’t even asking them to dump Best; he had simply told them he intended to hire a stick man for studio sessions. Even Bob Wooler, a nonmusician, noted this tension between Best and the rest of the Beatles. He remembers overhearing McCartney showing Best how he wanted certain patterns played and thinking to himself, “That’s pushing it a bit.” And to Wooler, Pete had “no show about him,” even though he seemed to come alive for photo sessions.18
Mike McCartney, a drummer himself, had a better explanation—the only one that makes any sense: “I used to go home and tell Paul about Ringo who I often saw playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He certainly hadn’t Pete’s looks, but he was an amazing drummer; he went at the drums like crazy. He didn’t just hit them, he invented new sounds.”19
While Epstein dropped the bomb on Best at his NEMS offices, Lennon and McCartney headed straight to Butlins in Wales to collect Ringo. Ringo was amenable, even flattered, but had to fulfill Rory Storm’s request and finish up two more nights at the camp. “Then one day, a Wednesday,” Ringo recalled, “. . . Brian called and said, ‘Would you join the band for good?’ I wasn’t aware that it had been in the cards for a while, because I was busy playing. In fact, the guys had been talking to Brian, and George had been hustling for me.”20 To Ringo, a record contract and an acetate song demo were plunder.
Initially, Best was in such a shock at Epstein’s news that he agreed to honor their commitments for the next couple of gigs while they went after Ringo. By the evening, though, he was a no-show, and Johnny Hutchinson of the Big Three subbed for two nights. Ringo joined full-time on August 18, his first Cavern gig; Granada Television cameras from Manchester showed up on August 22 for the first and only footage of the band at the Cavern, performing a calm, authoritative “Some Other Guy” and “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey” for a show called Know the North.
Sacking a drummer and learning Martin’s choice for a first single preoccupied Lennon as he leaped into marriage. Like his parents before him, he had to sneak off and do it without Mimi’s blessing. Epstein served as best man, McCartney and Harrison giggled nervously, and Ringo was too new even to be included. Noticeably missing were Mimi, Bobby Dykins, and Lennon’s two younger half sisters, Julia and Jacqui Dykins. Although he swore John and Cynthia to secrecy, Epstein took the couple in hand and made the wedding day something more respectable than it might have been. Cynthia remembers a threatening downpour, and Paul and George pacing about awkwardly in the waiting room. “They were all alarmingly formal in black suits, white shirts and ties—the only smart outfits they had. George and Paul had made a big effort to look the part and clearly felt it was their role to support John, who was sitting between them, white-faced.” To the bride, they looked more as if they were attending a funeral. The paperwork in the registrar’s office took place as a workman roared away with his pneumatic drill in the opposite backyard. The registrar shouted the vows, and the couple had to shout back to be heard above the din.
Always the gentleman, Epstein took them all to lunch afterward in the pouring rain. Cynthia remembers his gift, something they were too naïve to ask for: an apartment. “He announced that we couldn’t possibly live in my bedsit and that he had a flat he seldom used, which we could live in for as long as we needed it. John looked at him in amazement and I was so excited by his kindness that I threw my arms around him. . . . Brian told us he used it from time to time to entertain clients and we didn’t question it. In fact, we later realized, it was his bolthole.”21
The wedding party laughed their way through the jackhammer ceremony and lunch, but the honeymoon was put on hold. That night the Beatles honored their gig in Chester, playing the Riverpark Ballroom. “At one point,” Tony Bramwell recalls, “John did say that he hadn’t really wanted to get married and felt pushed into it. (He even had another regular girlfriend he was besotted with, Ida Holly . . . not to mention a string of one-night stands).”22 Lennon’s sincere urge to do right by Cynthia, in spite of the brain trapped inside his pants, was a blip in the middle of tremendous career excitement. It lit a slow fuse that erupted almost five years later.
At first, marriage must have seemed like just another car on a train that was moving too decisively to jump off: Lennon hired a new drummer on a Thursday, and the following Friday he married his pregnant girlfriend out of a mixture of duty and honor. Epstein forced the couple to keep their nuptials under wraps lest the fans think they’d been outgrown. This was an old-school tradition of maintaining the teenage façade in pop even as babies began popping out. In practical terms, it meant harsher separation for Cynthia, especially after she had Julian, than ever before.
Lennon barely had time to focus. Now he had to deal with his new producer, George Martin, who had sent along a new song to rehearse: Mitch Murray’s “How Do You Do It?” The demo was originally pitched for Adam Faith, sung by Barry Mason, and backed by players who would become the Dave Clark Five. Martin pushed this number as the ideal debut single for a young band: a slight yet sturdy jingle featuring both lead singers in an intricate duet. But the song reeked of a hack’s cleverness (“Wish I knew how you did it to me, I’d do it to you”), which Lennon recoiled against as more of the swill rock ’n’ roll should vanquish. Amid the tides of Lennon’s emotional life, something told him that working up “How Do You Do It?” might give him leverage when pitching his own song. For at the same moment he asserted himself as group boss by firing Best and hiring Ringo, and defied his aunt Mimi by marrying Cynthia, Lennon confronted a new authority, a father figure of a producer who might yet gamble on their writing. Everything the band had worked for up to this point compelled this confrontation with George Martin: a debut single simply wouldn’t feel like theirs unless it featured original material.
For a newly signed act, this was a radical, not to say self-defeating, notion: Martin had done his homework and found his hard-luck northerners a potential hit that could have delivered them to the radio and the charts and gained them pop visibility. And “Love Me Do,” while the band’s own, was not even up to the shopworn “How Do You Do It?” To appease Martin, and strengthen their resolve, they worked up an arrangement of Murray’s song, flew to London, and rehearsed it in Abbey Road’s Studio 2 on the afternoon of September 4.
That day’s sessions were awkward and didn’t yield anything publishable. In a move that reflects poorly on Epstein, Ringo Starr’s appearance came as a complete surprise: Martin expected Best again, but had not yet booked a studio drummer. In effect, Ringo got an on-the-spot tryout. Lennon and McCartney urged Martin to hear their new arrangement of “Love Me Do,” but Martin asked for “How Do You Do It?” first, which they laid down with respectable if perfunctory punch. Many historians ridicule this Beatles take on the song as subpar, but it has plenty of spring and juice—and an even bolder subtext that screams, “We’re better than this!”
Satisfied with the band’s homework, Martin then agreed to hear the new, quicker “Love Me Do,” with Lennon’s keening harmonica. This impressed Martin enough to give it fifteen takes—fourteen more than “How Do You Do It?” He reworked the harmonica line to return at the end of each chorus, giving McCartney those title-line vocal breaks. By the end of the session Martin had a new drummer and a new song to mull over, and a stubbornly assertive songwriting team.
Martin called Epstein and for security set up another session a week later, on September 11: here an experienced producer’s gut instinct merged with skill. Martin booked a studio pro, drummer Andy White, but at the session alternated White with Starr: this way he could compare them back to back. Starr had won the Beatles’ confidence; in this session he won Martin’s. Starr gave him grief forever after.
The band hunkered down, determined to give Martin what he asked for. Starr and White traded off on drums, and Ringo picked up the tambourine for White’s takes. Two different versions hit the racks.23 But Martin’s insistence on getting it right, combined with Lennon and McCartney’s belief in their own material, gives these September 11 takes of “Love Me Do” an ambition that outstrips the song’s flimsy construction. The song has one recurring smarmy moment, lit by its songwriters’ bouncing vocal on the word “plea—ea—ea—ease” setting up a delicious silence. They caught a heady Everly Brothers echo in that bounce, and a new idea took shape: a smooth, nuanced harmony atop a firm, propulsive beat—a new twist on C&W crossed with R&B.
The structure of “Love Me Do” became a metaphor for all the innocence and yearning the Beatles held out for pop. It lived on as a slight yet enigmatic entrance for their career. They pulled it off by digging a shared promise from the song that far outcharmed its delicate frame, or that of any hack tune that blared anonymity. The ears that confronted this single, without any other evidence, heard enough in this sound to point toward a future that suddenly sounded unpredictable, like the beginning of a new mystery plot, bolder than anything British rockers had yet imagined for themselves. The message blared defiance: “We play our own material, just like Buddy Holly!” This gave the name “Beatles” distinct rock ’n’ roll heroics, a reach that held out a brash new confidence in the music, both its British claims on the Presley, Cochrane, Vincent, Berry, and Perkins records that had illuminated their lives, and the explosive new possibilities that suddenly leapt from the simplest of beats. That enticing silence just before the title phrase hinted at untold thrills to come, a lover’s pause before a blissful first kiss.
Epstein ordered boxes and boxes of the single for his shop, hanging on every chart to watch its ascent. George Harrison remembered that hearing it for the first time on the radio “sent me shivery all over. It was the best buzz of all time. We knew it was going to be on Radio Luxembourg at something like 7:30 on Thursday night. I was in my house in Speke and we all listened in. That was great, but after having got to 17, I don’t recall what happened to it . . . but what it meant was that the next time we went to EMI, they were more friendly: ‘Oh, hello lads. Come in.’ ”24
The week “Love Me Do” hit number seventeen, they bused back to London to record the follow-up: a Roy Orbison–style lament they had sped up as “Please Please Me,” done in eighteen takes on November 26. Now the ensemble entered a new space: Ringo suddenly seemed inseparable from the others, and while this new song built on another Lennon harmonica solo and a soaring vocal duet, the tempo hit gusts of pure bliss, especially on the repeated “Please” in the refrain, when McCartney leapt toward a deliriously high harmony.
Mersey Beat columnist Alan Smith attended the session and was bowled over by the band’s progress. “It has everything, from the hypnotic harmonica sound that came over so well in ‘Love Me Do’ to the kind of tune you can remember after one hearing,” he wrote in the January issue.25 “This time the harmonica sounds much bolder, too. It almost jumps out at you. And in the background, there’s the solid, insistent beat, defying you not to get up and dance.” The number still soars on rhythmic poetry—bouncing melodies rest atop fluid meters, like a thought caught in a slipstream. Lennon spoke frankly to Smith about the song’s impetus: “I tried to make it as simple as possible. Some of the stuff I’ve written has been a bit way out, but we did this one strictly for the hit parade. Now we’re keeping our fingers crossed.”26
Smith also quoted George Martin as saying the group resembled “ ‘a male Shirelles,’ ” the girl group whose songs the Beatles already had mastered in their set lists (“Baby, It’s You,” “Mama Said,” and “Boys”). Perhaps Martin’s ear knew more about rock than his accent let on. This intimacy Lennon and McCartney hinted at in their vocal harmonies suggested an enticing idea about the rapture between band and audience. As his confidence in the band grew, Martin determined to follow them up to their home turf. Perhaps Epstein was right: you had to hear them at the Cavern to get the full impact of their sound.
“I’m thinking of recording their first LP at the Cavern,” Martin said, “but obviously I’m going to have to come to see the club before I make a decision. If we can’t get the right sound we might do the recording somewhere else in Liverpool, or bring an invited audience into the studio in London. They’ve told me they work better in front of an audience.” This “Please Please Me” session included several takes of “Ask Me Why,” and another Lennon-McCartney original, “Tip of My Tongue,” which they shelved and gave to Tommy Quickly the following summer. (The Beatles’ attempts at this number appear to have been lost.) This meant the second single could also sport two Lennon-McCartney songs, with no hint of a fallback on “outside” material.
“Please Please Me” sounded less like a follow-up to “Love Me Do” than a career fuse getting lit. Press quotes started pouring in: in the New Musical Express, Keith Fordyce gushed about the record’s “beat, vigour and vitality,”27 and the material took on that wondrous effect of motivating listeners to run out and buy the record. EMI, true to its staid reputation, gave the record a “no plug” (read: no support) rating, even though it flew out of stores. The label committed to “two plugs per week for three weeks on Radio Lux,” reported Sean O’Mahoney, who went on to publish the Beatles Fan Club Monthly. By comparison, the Shadows got seven plugs a week. “Epstein threatened to take all his business away from EMI, so eventually somebody said ‘yes.’ ”28 At their own record company, Epstein was still pushing irresistible material up a hill.
Martin now recommended a business associate to Epstein to improve their publishing arrangements: Dick James. James had started out as a singer, and written a couple of songs with Martin. After an early deal for “Love Me Do” with the firm Ardmore and Beechwood, Epstein sought more aggressive presence for his songwriting team. An acetate of “Please Please Me” persuaded James to take on Lennon and McCartney, and when he played the song over the phone for a contact at Thank Your Lucky Stars, Epstein left his office with a TV booking for January 1963. This was just the type of publishing action Epstein sought. James soon set up a new company, Northern Songs, to handle the Lennon and McCartney catalog, and Epstein granted James the then standard 50 percent royalty rate. The other half was split between NEMS, Lennon, and McCartney in lieu of Epstein’s management commission.29
After finally getting some traction with recordings, and watching “Love Me Do” make the charts, Epstein insisted the act meet all their previous obligations, even if it meant two gigs in a single day and hustling back from Wales for a Cavern lunch set. This meant more and more slogging even as they began to hear themselves on the radio almost daily. With “Please Please Me” in the can, Martin and Epstein knew they had a hit single at the ready, and an album needed scheduling amid a relentless performance calendar. December saw them mime “Love Me Do” and either “P.S. I Love You” or “Twist and Shout” for three decisive TV broadcasts, first from Bristol, Somerset, then London (ITV’s Tuesday Rendezvous), and then Granada’s People and Places, which beamed their surging confidence to their largest audiences yet. The Beatles surfed on a moment that caught an inexplicable serendipity between band, material, and audience. Playing “Love Me Do” after nailing “Please Please Me,” the knowing glances they gave one another got bolstered by the increasing authority in their ensemble—had rock ’n’ roll suddenly turned so irresistible so quickly?
Martin traveled up from London to catch the band at the Cavern on December 12, a year after Decca’s Mike Smith had made the trip. But he decided against recording them there, because the space was too tight for the players, let alone engineers, and the acoustics were decidedly unworkable.
The next week, celebrating their second-year win topping the Mersey Beat poll, they played a regular gig at Birkenhead and then raced back to the Cavern at four in the morning for an all-night blowout thrown by Bill Harry. This all led to an anticlimactic final run of thirteen nights to close out 1962 back at the Star-Club in Hamburg, with the ghost of Sutcliffe haunting their return; they honored the engagement despite all their momentum back home. The pay was decent, 750DM (£67) per man per week, but they resented the grind, and another agent might have weaseled them out of it somehow. On their home turf their music had finally busted loose; in Hamburg they were a big deal playing yesterday’s rooms.
Tapes of these Hamburg gigs, recorded off a single microphone hanging over the stage, only came to light in the late 1970s, when Allan Williams shopped them for release after years in local musician Ted “Kingsize” Taylor’s collection.30 The Beatles never approved publication, as much for the patchy, unsympathetic fidelity as for the uneven performances. But the tapes reveal many ongoing developments in the Beatles’ progress, including Ringo’s assimilation into their ensemble, Harrison’s rockabilly verve, and some stray songs that never found release in any other form. When the tapes actually deliver several songs in a row, without choppy breaks, the pacing has a sloppy geniality; the band yaps at the audience and trades inside jokes between songs, with the bedraggled insouciance Epstein had tried to sift from their Cavern shows.
At some points, botched lyrics drive songs right into the ditch: a game attempt at “Road Runner” simply stops before erupting into a magnificent “Hippy Hippy Shake,” which comes to an abrupt finish only to erupt again, as if they can’t help themselves. Having too much fun in Hamburg sounds like a good excuse to conquer the world, or at least grab the brass ring within their reach and swing for a good long time. There are moments, especially atop Chuck Berry’s “Talking ’Bout You” and “Little Queenie,” Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big,” and a new Lennon-McCartney number, “I Saw Her Standing There,” where the world sounds tantalizingly theirs, so sure is their mastery of unhinged rock ’n’ roll. Elsewhere, they blend right in with an audience determined to get trashed. It’s an off-night with clues to how they mined later greatness.
For one of these sets, bouncer Horst Fascher and his waiter brother, Fred, lead off singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and “Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So,” Lennon and McCartney vocal platforms by turn. Then the band lights up “I Saw Her Standing There,” complete with Lennon’s lower harmonies and Ringo’s tom-tom swirls, and the number sounds finished down to the most particular detail, from the way they hit their trademark “ooh”s to the closing kicks. It has the uncanny feel of an original that might turn into a standard. Starr jacks their ensemble up several notches: each song section gets heightened definition, from corners and transitions to several jokey cutoffs. It’s hard to imagine Best giving this number all it deserves.
Lennon and McCartney cast such long shadows in Beatle history, it’s striking to hear how prominently Harrison sings and plays throughout these sets. His Carl Perkins rockabilly numbers, “Nothin’ Shakin’ (but the Leaves on the Trees),” “Matchbox,” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” have a more frenetic pace and feel than any of the BBC or EMI takes, raising the question as to whether his talent ever translated well at all in the studio. Even singing the midtempo “Matchbox,” which became a Ringo number, Harrison dominates the band as both singer and guitarist. He ambles around through the lyrics like he’s taking Old Paint out for a trot, and his solo digs into the grooves like a rusty spur. Overall, Harrison’s guitar work has more fluidity than it does on some early recordings, especially on “Long Tall Sally.” Everywhere, his guitar stings and sails, goads the ensemble into taking reckless rhythmic risks. When he sings as he plays in “Roll Over Beethoven,” he spits the curl to ride waves of ambition. If you came to this music unaware, you might not count Harrison out as a third front man. There’s a chemistry between him and Starr here that unfolds in the way the guitar overtakes McCartney in Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” and Ringo leaps into the mix as if Harrison’s the hand and he’s the happy puppet. This juices McCartney to crank up the final verse into a tirade.
The many and various vocal harmonies from the stage cement the Beatle band ideal, embedded in both guitar and voice. The McCartney ballads prove he always was a bit too fond of sentimentality—“Falling in Love Again,” the Marlene Dietrich staple, works only because he fakes such a winning lyric. Three versions of “A Taste of Honey” exist, all mimeograph copies of one another, each with full-throated commitment from the lead and backup vocalists. Perhaps the cost of such literal sincerity helped them cut loose more on faster numbers; perhaps McCartney really thinks the song has some charm only he can squeeze out. Or perhaps it was a crowd favorite, an easy way to win girls, something they did without thinking. Every bar band has numbers they can relax through as a mental break. When McCartney turned to “Till There Was You,” Lennon minced his sincerity into hash, answering every doe-eyed line with a riposte (“He never saw them at all/Wonderful roses . . .”). The harmonies get all the more impressive when you realize how faintly they could hear themselves.
Several stray songs reveal abiding affinities and lost chances. Lennon sings “Where Have You Been,” another Arthur Alexander number, to make you wish they had at least done it for the BBC. “Your Feet’s Too Big” finds McCartney doing Fats Waller in a beguiling example of garage-band compression. Waller defined himself by his heft at the keys; his piano anchored his recordings with lofty twitters and growling chuckles. Mounting the number onstage with only guitars takes nerve; what comes through is not just the band’s maniacal belief that such translations can work but how quickly they’re forgotten amid the delirium.
Several other numbers give off palpable heat, almost enough to forgive the poor sound. This final Hamburg stint, their fifth, may have yanked them backward to where they had paid their dues, but the momentum in these numbers propels them forward, into a future that starts to approximate the music’s capacity for meaningful thrills. Lennon turns in Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” another BBC highlight, and “Talking ’Bout You,” which drops from their set shortly after this. These grooves have the inexplicable primacy of later studio recordings like “Money,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” and “I’m Down.” This is the sound Lennon spoke of when he proclaimed, “There was nobody to touch us in Britain.” It doubled as the sound of a nation on the verge of renewal, clawing its way back from war, looking to pop-culture youth for a new image of itself.