The Conservative Party’s Harold Macmillan came to power as prime minister in 1957 by proclaiming, “You’ve never had it so good.” The average UK income was finally on the rise, and discretionary spending began to pump up the economy. By 1963, this optimism hid its customary blind spots: Britain’s balance of payments, propped up in the past by tributary products from its former colonies, still led to wage freezes in 1961, which cost Conservatives substantially in the 1962 parliamentary election. Panicking, Macmillan flushed out his cabinet that July by sacking eight junior ministers—“the night of long knives.” (If only he had sacked John Profumo . . . )
Musically, Britain’s charts leaned heavily on American product. Exceptions proved this rule: Cliff Richard and the Shadows stole space from predominant Yankee acts like Roy Orbison, Del Shannon, and Ray Charles. Tellingly, the Temperance Seven, George Martin’s stiff, 1920s-style jazz outfit, found success briefly as beat groups readied their onslaught—the type of last-gasp popularity that tipped off how irrefutably passé trad jazz had become.
Rising fortunes suddenly brought about enormous cultural flux, shifting the tectonic plates between public and private life that had been in place since the Victorian era. London had spent the early stretch of Macmillan’s term consumed by the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial at the Old Bailey courthouse. D. H. Lawrence’s novel had been banned in Britain since its private publication in 1928, but had sold widely with the naughty bits chopped out. Prosecuting the new Obscene Publications Act, solicitor Mervyn Griffith-Jones became one of those unbearably bewigged foghorns of propriety. The outrage over “frank” depictions of sexuality in fiction seemed simply farcical to many; the defendant, Penguin Books, sold two million copies of the novel in the ensuing months. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Beatle scholar Jonathan Gould points out how D. H. Lawrence’s characters prefigure John Osborne’s “angry young man” sensibility, which packed mid-fifties West End theaters:1 Lawrence’s plot revolved around a genteel lady who beds down with her gamekeeper—a servant named Oliver Mellors. The court case labored on about what people were flocking to see and read.
Now, as 1963 began, the same prosperity fueled a juicy political scandal, the worst news for politicians since the Suez crisis in 1956. The story began with the arrest of a young black Jamaican named John Edgecombe, who in December had fired shots into the Wimpole Mews front door of a wealthy London doctor, Stephen Ward. There, twenty-year-old Christine Keeler was visiting her friend Mandy Rice-Davies, who happened to be living with Ward, which was racy enough; Edgecombe’s shots were part of a love triangle between Keeler and another Jamaican lover named Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon. If this had been the extent of it, it would have made for a racially charged blip on the inside pages. But once it hit the news, a Sunday Mirror check for £1,000 inspired Keeler to talk, and the story unraveled from there. Keeler boasted of a 1961 affair with John Profumo, Macmillan’s secretary of state for war, then married to a former movie star, Valerie Hobson. Keeler also let it drop that she had attended some of Ward’s wild orgies, complete with marijuana, for an elite set of socialites at Lord Astor’s estate, Cliveden. Roll over Lady Chatterley.
This was scandalous not just because Keeler was an unrepentant “showgirl”2 or because Ward’s scene underlined all those clichés about the decadence of the rich, but because Keeler had also been dallying with a Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov, at the same time she was seeing Profumo.3 Keeler’s account of all this spooled out later beneath Lewis Morley’s coolly seductive front-page photograph of her posing naked on a designer chair, camouflaging her breasts, seducing viewers into questioning their own “proprieties” in one of the era’s iconic images. Her expression mixed pride of notoriety with contempt for her exploiters—in her victimless eyes, the whole thing was simply luscious. Lennon would draw a cartoon of Keeler for his first book, In His Own Write, and included a cryptic pun on her name in a salutation at the end of “A Letter”: “We hope this fires you keeler . . .”4 To Lennon, Keeler might as well have been transplanted from Hamburg, a service worker to the ruling class.
Keeler’s Mirror gaze stared down Macmillan’s Tory government as an emblem of corruption. The scandal sold many, many newspapers, and laid waste not just to Profumo but to the entire Conservative administration. Called before a House of Commons inquiry in March 1963, Profumo held that there was “no impropriety whatsoever,” but by June he had recanted his perjury, and in July he resigned, with many calling for Macmillan’s resignation as well.
Suddenly, “You’ve never had it so good” boomeranged with irony. After a summer of sensational revelations that rocked Parliament, Macmillan looked more and more as if he didn’t know about things he should have and hadn’t acted swiftly enough to control the damage. He stepped aside at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool that October, and the Labour Party won the next general election.
Sparked by this upheaval, Beatlemania’s entrance on the scene played like a comic-relief valve to political cynicism; the band’s ascent was woven into the Profumo scandal as if mapped out by a clever screenwriter. At the beginning of 1963, the Beatles had not yet entered the top ten or appeared on BBC television; by the end of the year they were a runaway phenomenon, dominating all the British charts, newspapers, and radio with two long-playing albums and a barrage of singles, each one better than the last, that turned them into pop Olympians. That fall they consolidated their success on national television, first on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a cornerstone of the British entertainment establishment, and then on the telecast of the annual Royal Variety Performance, in front of the old guard’s prim and dignified Queen Elizabeth II.
By autumn, of course, this was simply Buckingham Palace’s way of hitching its wagon to the runaway train of adoration and mayhem that followed Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr wherever they went. Although Epstein didn’t receive the royal invitation until August, by that point the ruling powers simply genuflected to fate. It was quickly understood, even by the older generation, that whatever you made of these Beatles, this act transcended show business and created the kind of heat even royals ought to rub up against. These political and cultural gusts vied with one another so that it was quickly hard to distinguish between teen screams and tabloid headers; the band’s immense symbolic aura quickly turned into cultural semaphore for England’s modern era. “This isn’t show business,” Lennon told his quickie Love Me Do! biographer, Michael Braun, that season, “this is something else.”5
As if there were any doubt, the Royal Variety Performance went beyond established show-biz blessing in Britain: it conferred surpassing, supercelebrity status. The hypocrisy of the ruling class had reached such heights that the Beatles seemed not just a necessary tonic but an all-conquering elixir. With their winning comic charisma and clear disdain for show business as usual, it was almost as if the Beatles led the way out of a public crisis, relegating Profumo to the tawdry clichés of political potboilers, with an unmistakable subtext: “What do you expect from a bunch of . . . stuffed shirts?” There are very few examples in pop-culture history where the establishment and the radical agents of change shook hands so eagerly. The British government needed a distraction even more than the Beatles needed joke material. Right from the beginning, there was a very self-conscious aspect to Beatlemania that held up this collision of past and future—and there was very little question who the winner was. It made the band’s cultural sovereignty both swift and absolute; and at key moments, like his Royal Variety Performance “rattle your jewelry” quip, Lennon’s smirk summed up its attitude.
Getting swept up in such a pop explosion is disorienting, even if you’ve been working as hard and waiting as long as the Beatles. The most appealing thing about their breakthrough, and the most important thing they had internalized by the time they landed in New York in February 1964, was a steadfast yet charismatic nonchalance about the mania. Their ambivalence about show business only made the act more tempting. To understand the scale of this breakthrough, bear in mind how northerners were held in even lower esteem by ruling-class Londoners than Tennessee boys were by the New York elite.
The term “Beatlemania” didn’t enter the Fleet Street lexicon until the fall; but beginning in May 1963, all the papers charted the phenomenon as the world’s most hard-bitten cynics swooned in unison. Beatlemania was even better than a scandal: an episodic rags-to-riches story about a slap-happy band of northern rubes whose energy and ideas announced a postwar boom. As rich as the Beatles were in musical terms, they may have been even richer in this symbolic sense: as an umbrella metaphor for youth, change, dynamism, aggression, lust, passion, and healthy irreverence. Each successive Beatles record became synonymous with this new national spirit, a souvenir of how good things might still get. Before they became “imaginary Americans,” in literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s enchanted phrase, the Beatles were intensely British, not just an emblem of the national spirit but its economic stimulant.6
The playfulness they brought to fame was more than appealing; it was probably the only sane reaction to an audience hyped up beyond all imagining. If the Profumo affair sponged off Lady Chatterley fumes, Beatlemania had a distinctly American-influenced, forward-looking twist. Even before they broke stateside, the Beatles trumped that sovereign American export known as celebrity: here was Valentino- and Sinatra- and Presley-style hero worship cranked up a few notches, multiplied by four; and it quickly shot Lennon’s life soaring into a parallel universe of celebrity privilege and detachment, as far from ordinary as Alice was through the looking glass. Surprising even themselves, the Beatles had a knack for it—they made all the chaos seem like the tail of a cultural comet. Even in the beginning, they behaved as if their centering the culture’s vortex wasn’t just inevitable but richly deserved; and the more their records stormed the charts, the less audacious that seemed. More than a few commentators dismissed them as a passing fad, which only fed their determination to outlive their own hype. And all of this fed the “meta” aspect of Beatlemania, where everybody was not only experiencing its hurricane force but talking about it, analyzing it, aware of it as a unique moment in cultural history.
By the time the Americans jumped aboard, the band’s momentum had made their act irresistible. As cultural critic Greil Marcus put it, “Excitement wasn’t in the air, it was the air.”7 When this 1963 storm whooshed into America in 1964, it gained speed and intensity as it crossed the Atlantic. After a youth spent in thrall to rock ’n’ roll culture, which sprang from Elvis Presley winning over black audiences in the Memphis Beale Street clubs, getting the United States to catch up to them—with music forged on the crucible of American racism—was an irony Lennon savored.
As 1963 began, the Beatles returned from their hangdog New Year’s Eve gig in Hamburg only to slog anticlimactically north again to Scotland on January 2 for a five-day tour. After a storm canceled their opening gig in Keith, Banffshire, Lennon flew home for a few hours with his pregnant wife, returning the next morning for the gig in Elgin, Morayshire. This was the first time the band had been this far north since backing Johnny Gentle in 1960; and for all the gains they had made in the fall, there were still major questions chasing them as they pressed on. Now that Lennon and McCartney were writing songs Dick James would publish, their material was quickly in demand: Epstein wanted numbers for Billy J. Kramer, the Liverpool singer he’d plopped in front of a Manchester band, the Dakotas. Lennon and McCartney passed along “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” and eventually “Bad to Me,” “I’ll Keep You Satisfied,” and “From a Window,” an early draft of Lennon’s “No Reply” narrative. Kramer tracked “Secret” and another Lennon/McCartney number, “I’ll Be on My Way,” in March. Epstein’s ambitions had grown with his band’s: as a retailer, he intuited how the Beatle tide could lift other Merseyside boats. (Many years later, Kramer remembered Lennon’s apology demo for “Secret”: “After he played the song, he apologized and said he’d looked all over the building for an empty room and this was the only place he could find. Then a toilet flushed.”)8
Television would be the final push for their next single, and Epstein and the Beatles all knew it could mean the difference between a hit and a lost opportunity. After finishing the short tour, on January 8, they visited Scottish Television in Glasgow to mime “Please Please Me” for local broadcast, a warmup for some UK appearances in the coming weeks that would break the song wide open. On January 13 the Beatles were in Birmingham for their first Thank Your Lucky Stars appearance, and Andrew Loog Oldham caught the rehearsal.9 A shark who was not easily impressed, he described the scene as it unfolded:
Watching in the wings, I was spellbound by a new British group making their first appearance on national television. . . . I can clearly recall the buzz of watching them rehearse. They weren’t that different in appearance from the other acts—they were all wearing suits and ties. What was unusual was their attitude: they exuded a “Fuck you, we’re good and we know it” attitude. You normally didn’t see that in an act making its first TV appearance.
In Oldham’s mind, the Beatles’ music and personal presence seemed both “omniscient and naïve” and gave off something “hypnotic and life-giving.” The act reminded him of Bob Dylan, the young American singer he’d met during a brief BBC appearance the previous year.10 “I realized these sixties were not only happening to me,” Oldham thought. He was particularly impressed with Epstein, who wore an immaculate overcoat with a paisley scarf and hired Oldham on the spot. “Maybe they did need somebody pounding the pavements for them in . . . London,” Oldham writes, “which he pronounced like a man getting rid of phlegm in his throat or a stone from his shoe.”11
Oldham was known in London circles as a comer, a brash stylist with game who literally knocked on everybody’s door asking for work. He had bounced around the fashion industry and found pop music managers positively Neanderthal. The Beatles fleshed out his mission to bring the flash and daring of fashion into pop. Epstein was just a couple of steps ahead of him. “When you sat down with Brian,” Oldham recalled, echoing many descriptions of this manager’s maniac faith in his act, “you knew you were dealing with a man who had a vision for the Beatles and nobody was going to get in the way of that vision. He was convinced that eventually everybody was going to agree with him. That gave him the power to make people listen.” Oldham noted how Epstein’s polished persona enveloped his whole enterprise: “That he was somewhat to the manor born gave him both a self-assurance and an entrée with the stubbornly middle-class label managers he had to deal with.” Epstein’s personal luster and the Beatles’ musical daring fed off each other. Simply standing to watch his “boys” at Thank Your Lucky Stars, Epstein’s belief in them seemed to permeate the room. “In those early days,” Oldham wrote, “Brian’s presence, the Beatles’ irreverence and their mutual pleasure all conveniently merged.”12
The first week in February the Beatles went out on a package tour as a supporting act to Helen Shapiro, then promoting her top-forty hit “Queen for Tonight.” “I had a huge crush on John,” Shapiro remembered, “but I was only sixteen! He treated me like a little sister.”13 The previous spring, Shapiro had starred in director Richard Lester’s It’s Trad, Dad, singing her top-ten hit “Let’s Talk About Love.” Lester’s film took place in a television studio and now screens like a working draft of A Hard Day’s Night, with Shapiro performing alongside Chubby Checker, Del Shannon, Gene Vincent, and others. Lennon and McCartney saw opportunity: they offered her a new song, “Misery,” which she turned down. No matter, as George Harrison recalled: “That tour was when we first did the Moss Empire circuit, the biggest gigs that there were in England at the time, other than the Palladium. We were quite happy with that.”14
The Shapiro tour began in Bradford, Yorkshire, and continued on to Doncaster, with a short break for two Cavern gigs: headlining an all-night “Rhythm and Blues Marathon” on February 3 and their last lunchtime slot the next day. Epstein had interspersed January’s live gigs with TV appearances on People and Places and the BBC radio’s Light Programme’s Here We Go, and more work on the BBC’s Saturday Club and The Talent Spot and Radio Luxembourg’s Friday Spectacular. All this activity sharpened their ensemble for the big day: their first album recording session, which came right after finishing the first five-night leg of the Shapiro dates. They briefly dropped out of the tour after the February 9 show in Sunderland, Durham, to make the 275-mile, five-hour drive down to London for a good night’s rest.
They arrived at the EMI studios on the morning of February 11 to deliver the “live” album they had discussed with George Martin. He had heard them at the Cavern, knew what they could do, and decided to simply roll tape. “Let’s record every song you’ve got,” he told them. “Come down to the studios and we’ll just whistle through them in a day.” They started around eleven, finished ten hours later, and Martin grabbed his “live” album for EMI.15 Historians have stressed the mad rush of this session as if it were somehow unusual, but it simply stacked two three-hour sessions into a single day, and the Beatles stretched things out. If absolutely necessary, a producer could bring singers or guitarists back in to redo a part or two, but live-to-tape was the standard.
The goal was simply to record the best parts of their live show, which the Beatles had been doing sometimes twice a day on stages a hundred miles apart. And Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison had been chomping at the bit for this opportunity since forever, from their “That’ll Be the Day” demo in Percy Phillips’s living room as Quarrymen to their Decca audition on New Year’s Day of 1962. Thirteen months later, standing still in a studio suddenly held out new promise, as well as aesthetic appeal—the chance to listen to one another more closely as they played.
Lennon was shaking off a bad cold, nursing tea, milk, cigs, and Zubes cough lozenges throughout the day to soothe his aching throat; you can hear his threadbare vocal cords straining to reach notes, as if a live wire were shorting out his larynx. The long Hamburg nights color the attitude in the sound: tired, yes; game, absolutely. They opened with ten takes of “There’s a Place,” then nine of “Seventeen” (which became “I Saw Her Standing There”).
The first myth to puncture about this session is that it was a slapdash affair. “We told them we were having a break,” engineer Richard Langham told Mark Lewisohn, “but they said they would like to stay on and rehearse. So while George, Norman [Smith] and I went round the corner to the Heroes of Alma pub for a pie and pint they stayed, drinking milk. When we came back they’d been playing right through. We couldn’t believe it. We had never seen a group work right through their lunch break before.”16
Dogged persistence yielded effortless spontaneity; this kind of focus made it all sound easy. After lunch came seven takes of “A Taste of Honey,” eight of “Do You Want to Know a Secret?,” overdubs on “There’s a Place” and “Seventeen,” and eleven takes of “Misery.” After dinner they continued with thirteen takes of “Hold Me Tight,” three of “Anna (Go to Him),” one of “Boys,” four of “Chains,” and three of “Baby It’s You.” To finish, a group huddle settled on one of their Cavern staples, “Twist and Shout,” of which they chose the first of two takes.
These session details unveil previously hidden priorities. They believed in “There’s a Place” enough to pour out ten takes of it first thing in the morning, only to return for three more overdubs later that afternoon. Building on the flirtatious silences that dimpled “Love Me Do” and “Ask Me Why,” this number began with a tricky stop-time vocal duet at the top of each verse, like a musical double take—an exquisite pirouette that lifted the entire song with a giant wink. This gesture had both daring and fragility, and seeded one of the most beguiling aspects of their music as a whole: those mercurial Lennon-and-McCartney vocal duets, which suspended increasingly quixotic promises, musical flights soaring into emotional koans. The narrative space Lennon and McCartney retreat to is the singer’s mind (“and there’s no time”), the imaginal realm where romance rides waves of idealism. In song, this riddle spins out as a metaphor for rock ’n’ roll’s ideal state, where melody transcends its backbeat and joy doubles down. After so much gigging and pressing on despite hard luck, this music chases down smiles toward sweet arrival.
So a one-day session yielded ten of the fourteen tracks for the band’s debut with “Hold Me Tight” getting held for the next record. Workmanlike time pressures yielded a well-sequenced set of tracks. Since recording “Please Please Me,” they had written “Seventeen”—“I Saw Her Standing There”—which Martin would surely have jumped on as a single if he’d known about it. You can hear them start to purr in this song, as if the songwriting begins to catch up with their vivid, roomy ensemble. The most obvious hook was the flatted-sixth chord on the final word of “I’ll never dance with another . . . Oh!”—which tickles the title phrase right out of its skin at each repetition. The song quickly got singled out as the perfect album opener, a short fuse triggering an indefatigable originality. This was the song they had been trying to write ever since Martin sent “Love Me Do” back for a rewrite the previous June. Lennon rewrote McCartney’s opening lines from “Well she was just seventeen . . . She was no beauty queen” to the infinitely more suggestive and expansive “. . . You know . . . what I mean,” injecting a pause like a lump in the throat. To set off your debut album with an original number that nodded knowingly toward Chuck Berry’s narrative swagger launched a sequence of thrilling proportions. And by the end of side one, the album introduced the entire band through lead vocals (Paul with “Standing There,” John with “Misery,” George with the Cookies’ “Chains,” Ringo with the Shirelles’ “Boys,” a number he had done with the Hurricanes). The era’s typical pop album put hit singles at the top of side one and slid downward from there. The Beatles’ unerring confidence withheld their hit single as the opening track for side two, boldly holding back even stronger original material to sustain a long-playing album. Along the way, they handed off “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” to George for a droll dash of inscrutability. The sequence alone on this debut album sent grandiose conceptual signals. As much thought had been put into sequencing as song choice—and they had been stewing about song choice ever since that dreadful first day of 1962 at Decca.
As a closer they might have picked any number of their slew of covers: “Long Tall Sally,” “Money,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” “That’ll Be the Day” (sentimental favorite), or “Johnny B. Goode,” all of which they had learned to close with in Hamburg. Lennon’s choice on “Twist and Shout” creates a giant tipping point: with a throat so sore others noticed the blood staining the milk in his bottle, he could easily have handed off closing vocal duties to Paul (“Long Tall Sally” was more dynamite in reserve). But “Twist and Shout” shows just how hard Lennon had fought over material behind the scenes, and how determined he was not to make the Decca mistakes that had held the promise of this session so far in the distance.
“Twist and Shout” is one of those pregnant microcosms of rock ’n’ roll; like “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen or “Wild Thing” by the Troggs, it binds together forces at play in the sound that ridicule simplicity. Bert Berns (aka Bert Russell) and Phil Medley wrote the number for the Top Notes, who recorded it with Phil Spector on an Atlantic session in 1961 and then vanished. Enter Cincinatti’s Isley Brothers, looking to tailgate on Chubby Checker’s 1960 “Twist” craze, itself a cover of a B-side by the saucy Hank Ballard and his Midnighters (“Work With Me Annie”). Checker never escaped the Twist: after the original hit returned to the number one slot in early 1962, he turned in “Let’s Twist Again (Like We Did Last Summer),” “Slow Twistin’,” and “Teach Me to Twist” through 1962, the same year he married Miss World Catharina Lodders and starred in Twist Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Twist.
But Checker himself seemed incidental to the Twist’s life force; as a black, his talent was Teflon (“[He] sounded uncannily, on record, like a white man imitating a black man,” wrote Jonathan Gould.)17 His first Twist song had set off an early pop explosion, a portent of Beatlemania that began as a dance, morphed quickly into a metaphor for an attitude less stodgy than swing, and then into a worldview, smirking at the establishment through mainstream coverage in Esquire and Time. Joey Dee and the Starlighters became the house band at the Peppermint Lounge in Midtown Manhattan on the crest of their “Peppermint Twist,” a massive hit in early 1962. Dell comics followed with a comic-book series. If “Camelot” was JFK’s official Broadway theme music, “The Twist” cued his “secret” mobster-moll and movie-star trysts.
British listeners never knew the Isleys’ number until the summer of 1963—the Beatles copped it from Radio Luxembourg, on the Wand label import. (In one of many reversals, the Beatles’ album track launched the Isley Brothers single in Britain.) The Isleys, a gospel trio retooling doo-wop, were following up their modest RCA hit “Shout (Part I),” which reached number forty-seven in September of 1959 and reappeared at number ninety-four in March 1962. A song’s reappearance like that means the audience clamors for more. The obvious move was to jump onto that Top Notes song, which had tried to siphon more gas out of the Twist. Since Berns and Medley had simply merged “Twist” with “Shout” using the “La Bamba” template, the Isleys rushed to cover it as a way of tailgating their previous hit: it worked, breaking into the top twenty in June 1962.18
The Isleys’ arrangement dramatizes how punctual and stylized black acts needed to be in those days. After dumping the original’s awkward bridge, the Isleys simply added a cornball horn-and-handclaps arrangement, broken up with a standard-issue rave-up to work the crowd—if you didn’t know it was the same band, you’d swear it was a cynical takeoff of their own “Shout!” Few listening to the original Top Notes track would have predicted its ultimate success; it was a tightly wound cultural conundrum, a white-penned novelty piggybacking on a rip-off of another novelty, one of those miraculous mistakes that mutates from obscurity into a cultural virus.
Who knows what Lennon heard in Ronnie Isley’s lead vocal on “Twist and Shout”—but he must have heard an opening, an idea about freedom that cried out for a tougher, leaner beat. The Beatles’ attack alone carried symbolic force: as a garage band, they filtered the Isleys’ high-tone horns and handclaps down into guitars and vocals alone, which turned the entire project into an ideal of self-sufficiency, a sound that said, “This thing will cut water if we trim its sails.” Where the Isley Brothers kicked Berns and Medley’s sketch into a song, the Beatles both compressed it and fleshed it out, turning it into a much larger idea. When you listened to this new band cover the track, the Isley Brothers version suddenly sounded both quaint and pregnant: Ronnie’s wriggling lead rang out all the more pronounced for the square frame it had to squirm through. Everybody hearing the Beatles do this song heard faint echoes of the Isley Brothers in their heads, and the marvel lay in how the Beatles conquered the track without patronizing their models. The Isleys’ arrangement wore pressed shirts, cuff links, and polished shoes; the Beatles sound wore leather. They also did the Isley Brothers’ “Shout!,” of course, the gospel sing-along with Lennon hurling expletives into its coda (“We’re fookin’ shoutin’ now!”)19 But in both songs, the racial politics in the music didn’t disappear so much as turn metaphorical—the Brits pouncing on this style escaped cynicism and landed on the far side of beatific. In “Twist and Shout,” Lennon made the Isley Brothers’ sexual subtext overt, lacing a cynical play on Chubby Checker’s “Twist” with irony and subterfuge.
The final layer of Lennon’s daring may be his boldest stroke, and yet to most of us it’s still nearly invisible. Instead of straining to copy black vocal mannerisms, Lennon dumped them, acted as if they weren’t crucial. That whole moptops-in-suits pose may have been coy, but it didn’t begin to suggest the carnality Lennon leaned into here, somehow sidestepping the white envy of black virility that spooked most American parents. Compared with Mick Jagger, say, Lennon had no hangups about sounding completely white, even when pitting himself against the black standard. Only a Brit could have pulled the carnal thread from this song’s distracting racial knots, revealing it as something beyond a white author piggybacking on a Twist novelty for a black gospel act.
The Beatles’ signature, those mounting vocal rave-ups, did something more than intensify the song. By rewinding its spring each time, they coiled up before setting things off just a hair beyond listeners’ expectations, and this incomprehensible delay yanked everything up again for another swell of feeling. Those escalating “Oh”s, stacked one by one, piling up Beatle upon Beatle into the final refrains the way they used to leapfrog over one another on the Reeperbahn, held back the energy like a human dam, until it spilled over into Lennon’s gusher lead (“Shake it up baby now . . .”). After goading the others steadily for the song’s first half, Lennon rode this bronco of a band while lashing it from above for one last victory-lap verse before it lunged to an exhausted finish. On top of all the takes they had given “There’s a Place” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” Lennon somehow hoisted the entire day’s work up beyond euphoria, to a place where greatness winks at every challenge. On this recording of “Twist and Shout,” the Beatles lay claim to a defining irony: fearsome originality wrought from somebody else’s pile of junk.
The LP session in the can, the band rejoined the Shapiro tour, mimed “Please Please Me” for Thank Your Lucky Stars on February 17, and sat back down to write: “From Me to You” and “She Loves You” popped out of them in the back of a coach. “We weren’t taking ourselves seriously,” Lennon remembered, “just fooling about on the guitar. . . . I think the first line [of ‘From Me to You’] was mine and we took it from there.” Only after toying with all those “me”s and “you”s did Lennon pick up a copy of New Musical Express to see how they were doing on the charts: “Then I realized—we’d got the inspiration from reading a copy on the coach. Paul and I had been talking about one of the letters in the ‘From You to Us’ column.”20
The last night of the tour, March 3 in Stoke-on-Trent, they yielded to public demand that they close the show’s first half. All the television and radio exposure had paid off; “Please Please Me” hit number one the next week. The force of its breakthrough quickened the cultural pulse, and the pace of their travels. Oldham had stood at the back of the stalls with Epstein at one of these Shapiro tour shows, nursing some prescient realizations. A “tangible sense of mad hysteria” began rising up through the crowd, he remembered, and when the Beatles appeared, something new opened up, a sound Oldham could only call “the roar of the whole world”:
The noise that night hit me emotionally, like a blow to the chest. The audience that evening expressed something beyond repressed adolescent sexuality. The noise they made was the sound of the future. Even though I hadn’t seen the world, I heard the whole world screaming. The power of the Beatles touched and changed minds and bodies all over the world. I didn’t see it—I heard and felt it.21
When Oldham looked over at Epstein, they both had tears in their eyes.
On March 5, in between gigs at St. Helens and Manchester, the Beatles laid down three more songs: “From Me to You,” “Thank You Girl,” and, finally, “One After 909” (which stayed in the vault). Already, in the spring of 1963, the studio was becoming a refuge where they greeted familiar faces and got some actual work done—collecting themselves to pursue musical ideas.
And they never seemed short of ideas. “From Me to You” sneers confidently at the very conventions it’s built upon (the unison vocals that unravel into harmony with each line, those perfectly placed “woo”s that greet each return of the verse). “Thank You Girl” rings out like the mirror image of “Misery,” so overwrought in its happy-to-hook-up that it verges on irony—and just where it starts to go overboard, it caves in to pleasure. And “One After 909” is an enduring puzzle; a great throwaway when it was cut, it never came to light until the dismal Let It Be sessions in January 1969, when it revived all their best ensemble impulses. (Apparently, Lennon was never happy with its stupid-inspired lyric—“Then I find . . . I got the number wrong!”—its most endearing quality.)
This sudden jolt of new material airlifted the Beatles right out of Liverpool: they had played six Cavern gigs in January, three in February, and exactly none in March. This had the strange effect of increasing the town’s visibility on England’s map even as its favorite sons outgrew their testing ground. When Bob Wooler announced that “Please Please Me” had hit number one, an awful hush fell over the Cavern audience. The world had suddenly snatched them away from their hometown listeners: a jam-packed final August appearance would be their last. To this day, Liverpool’s pride in the band gets tangled up with loss.
Epstein had always had his eye on the larger scene, and many long-term ambitions. He quickly diversified his holdings. After “Love Me Do,” he expanded his NEMS roster with Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, the Fourmost, Cilla Black, and Tommy Quickly. Not all found success, but those that did were often propelled by Lennon/McCartney material, which literally swarmed the British charts in 1963. Even not counting the Beatles, these acts scored a total of forty-five weeks on Record Retailer’s top-ten charts. In all, Epstein’s office handled eighty-five top-ten records for the year.
On April 14 Lennon met Del Shannon, the Michigan singer with the enormous range who had won a huge British audience with his 1961 debut song, “Runaway.” He joined the Thank Your Lucky Stars TV taping on a bill with the Dave Clark Five and did a double take when he heard the Beatles’ material. He promised Lennon he’d record “From Me to You” when he got back to America. (Shannon’s rather subdued version reached the U.S. top one hundred later that summer.) After the show, Lennon headed up to a Richmond club called the Crawdaddy with Andrew Loog Oldham to catch a new band, the Rolling Stones. Like Oldham before him, Lennon did his own double take: “They’re like what we used to be before Brian ponced us up,” he exclaimed. “I’m in the wrong band!”22
On April 8, the day the Beatles performed in Portsmouth, Hampshire, John Charles Julian Lennon was born at Liverpool’s Sefton General Hospital. Like his own father, Lennon was away when his son was born, traveling back to London for a radio interview and an evening performance. This was only the most immediate signal that fatherhood had failed to change his priorities. He visited wife and child the next day before dashing off again—this time to Birkenhead, and then a Good Friday return to the Cavern for an eight-hour “Rhythm and Blues Marathon.”
In a cruel replay of Julia’s own isolation with John, Lennon didn’t see Cynthia or Julian again until June. During John’s travels, Cyn’s mother, Lillian, flew back from Canada to help with the baby. The three of them moved in together with Mimi at Mendips. This spoke well enough of Mimi, but compounded family ironies: the woman who had refused to attend her nephew’s wedding now took in his wife and son as he pursued rock ’n’ roll stardom. Naturally, Cynthia quickly rediscovered Mimi’s “sharp tongue,” which she often aimed at Julian, “a screamer.” When Cynthia went out, Mimi often stashed the baby in his pram in the garden so as not to bother her paying lodgers.23
For all the cultural shifts embedded in Lennon’s music, his own personal history repeated itself. His runaway career became one with his callousness toward his new family, which doubled as passive aggression at husband- and fatherhood. Seeing as his own experience was no better, he seems not to have dwelt much on Cynthia’s plight. On April 28, Paul, George, and Ringo went off together for a holiday in Santa Cruz, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Serenely contemptuous of Lennon’s situation, a lusty pop star with a perfect family front, Epstein booked a separate holiday for the two of them—the homosexual manager and the new father—in Spain.
By singling Lennon out for a private vacation that spring, on the crest of the band’s first number-one single, Epstein tensed up a political knot at the band’s center. During a BBC profile of Epstein produced in 2003, McCartney said he was convinced Lennon went along to send Eppy the signal that he, John, was the leader of this band, the one with a direct pipeline to their manager.24 There was enough at stake to force this relationship, which both parties described as “intense,” into being a success.
But very few acts talk about their managers in the terms Lennon did: “It was very intense—but it was never consummated.” And in retrospect, this trip looks simply bizarre. Consider Epstein’s motives: here was a businessman taking his brash young bandleader off to a hotel three weeks after his first son was born and expecting everybody, even Lennon’s wife, to look the other way—after all, he had provided lodging for the couple all during her pregnancy (in his Falkner Street “bolthole”). He was just beginning to see the fruits of almost eighteen months of toil: recognition was beginning to pour in, and suddenly his management office was flush with cash. So the invitation has a whiff of manipulative guilt, as if he could depend on whisking John away: “I put you lot up when you got married,” he seems to have bargained. “Stash your wife and kid and run off with me on holiday.” His staff had doubled, and his menagerie of acts now included Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four, Cilla Black, and the Big Three—and Lennon was half of the songwriting partnership whose material he was tapping for all of them.
It wasn’t just that Epstein knew he had leverage on the young couple; it was that he used it with such selfish disregard. And why was Lennon so compliant? Surely, even at the time, many must have sensed his huge ambivalence about marriage, let alone fatherhood. There are numerous testimonies to his open womanizing in this period, in both England and Spain. And what did the hyperaware Lennon think when he flew off with Epstein—that people wouldn’t suspect a personal encounter of some kind? Could his bluster and rising popularity quell such talk?
Young people have been known to make just such miscalculations, and Epstein had a track record for emotional jackpots. For Cynthia, the very shock of the news of John’s holiday inhibited protest, which tells you something about her inner, psychological twinset: don’t question the men, especially about their business. And her very complacency fueled Lennon’s lechery—he would need a much tougher woman to keep him in line. Was this a new mother’s trauma, postpartum depression, or simple denial—or all three? Cynthia’s demureness reflects the growing tumult around the Beatles’ career and how suddenly it altered everybody’s daily life. Cynthia barely felt “married” to Lennon as it was, keeping her status secret according to Epstein’s rules, giving birth without John there to support her. She nursed her colicky newborn at her in-law’s, listening to Lennon’s voice overtake pop radio while newspapers chased the Beatles’ every move and zealous fans and photographers inhibited her own.
Epstein booked a suite at the Avenida Palace in Barcelona. Lennon seems to have opened up to very few people about the holiday, and Yoko Ono has never answered questions about it. But in 1991, Christopher Munch devoted an entire film script to the incident, called The Hours and Times, with a slaphappy performance by Ian Hart that gets at both Lennon’s sexual confusion and his blinding faith in the music. The Hours and Times catches the spirit of Epstein’s loneliness and Lennon’s faux worldliness, if not the particulars. When Lennon does broach the subject of their (mutual?) attraction, it only accents the discomfort: “I enjoy hearing about your conquests—this lorry driver, that docker,” he says. “Yes, well, that’s all very well,” Epstein replies, “but it’s when it comes closer to home—I just don’t know what to say when that happens.”25 Munch has Lennon invite a stewardess back to the hotel, “pulling a bird” to mock Epstein. But Munch throws a curveball: “Their union is consummated not by sex but by dancing to her prized new Little Richard single. It’s a delicious denouement,” wrote Richard Harrington in the Washington Post. The dance scene is the most liberating moment of the film.26
Two closer-to-home accounts tell of this trip, one from Lennon’s close friend Pete Shotton and the other from Alistair Taylor. The two versions are similar enough to seem plausible. Shotton’s account has the sharp pang of honesty to it; Epstein’s come-on to Lennon was a mixture of dread and devotion. “Eppy just kept on and on at me,” John told Shotton, “until one night I finally just pulled me trousers down and said to him: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Brian, just stick it up me fucking arse then.’ ” But Epstein surprised him by saying, “I don’t do that kind of thing. That’s not what I like to do.’ ” Instead, Epstein said, he simply wanted to touch John, “and so I let him toss me off.”27 This is more than Lennon told Taylor, who kept whatever confidences Epstein may have told him a secret:
[Lennon] told me afterwards in one of our frankest heart-to-hearts that Brian never seriously did proposition him. He had teased Brian about the young men he kept gazing at and the odd ones who had found their way to his room. Brian had joked to John about the women who hurled themselves at him. “If he’d asked me, I probably would have done anything he wanted. I was so much in awe of Brian then I’d have tried a night of vice-versa. But he never wanted me like that. Sure, I took the mickey a bit and pretended to lead him on. But we both knew we were joking. He wanted a pal he could have a laugh with and someone he could teach about life. I thought his bum boys were creeps and Brian knew that. Even completely out of my head, I couldn’t shag a bloke. And I certainly couldn’t lie there and let one shag me. Even a nice guy like Brian. To be honest, the thought of it turns me over.”28
Both these quotes have the feel of truth to them; this is what Lennon might have told each of these people, at different times, while still guarding other secrets. The full truth of the matter, only Lennon and Epstein knew for sure.
Epstein could be manipulative, but he arranged things in order for Lennon to ridicule him—it gave him a jolt. Between cajoling him about his “nancy boys,” Lennon would sneak off for quickies with waitresses and dance-dates with a bravado that seemed to overimpress Epstein—which was likely Lennon’s motive. “She was friendly,” Lennon would report. From Lennon’s side, this is adolescent fiddling; “pulling birds” with Epstein displayed the same kind of gamesmanship as playing “king of the mountain” with the other Beatles. Making Epstein blush had already become gruesome sport, and the sexual humiliation coloring such scenes toys with something more menacing. Lennon looked up to Epstein, but needed to prove himself superior, and rub Epstein’s nose in his covert life. Humiliating his manager also spilled over into Freudian revenge. And Epstein’s enjoyment of Lennon, even at the cost of his self-respect, reveals something desperate, even debasing, about his own desires—not just obsessing after something he couldn’t have, but reveling in its rebuke each time Lennon told of a new conquest. In their codependent dance of mutual manipulation, Lennon rewarded Eppy with shame.
Both Shotton’s and Taylor’s accounts came after Lennon’s death in 1980, and both seem plausible given the quotes each principal gave while he was alive. Where Pauline Sutcliffe suggests that Lennon had been intimate with her brother, she underlines it as speculation. Everybody who knew them together at art school and in Hamburg claims they were unusually close; but doesn’t it make sense for the young Lennon to be unusually close to one of his first and best adult friends, somebody who mediated and played out the intimate tension of his relationship with McCartney? By 1970, at least, Lennon had confessed to so many blasphemous secrets in interviews it’s hard to imagine he would have felt shy about a homosexual encounter. The Beatles may have called their Let It Be director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a “fag” behind his back; but by the early 1970s, when he moved to New York City—perhaps with Yoko Ono as his moral guide—Lennon lent his name to all manner of gay rights causes and would have known the power any of his own homosexual experiences might have had in left-wing circles. In his early thirties, he would have had numerous conversations with peers who had experimented with alternative sexualities and been nonetheless manly for it. If there was an encounter, it was probably as Shotton described or as Munch portrays—a fumbling to express affection that was just out of reach.
The more provocative signals Lennon was sending by going away with Eppy were to his wife and his band. Cynthia, shell-shocked from childbirth and hounded by fans, barely registered Eppy’s maneuvers; McCartney, Harrison, and Starr were probably suspicious of Lennon’s power play, if not feeling outright ditched. Lennon returned with a song, “Bad to Me,” not up to Beatle snuff, which he finished with McCartney and dumped on Billy J. Kramer for a left-field hit that summer. After snubbing Epstein on holiday, he snubbed him again with a subpar song.
In May, the Beatles played the Liverpool boxing stadium on a bill with Gene Vincent in between Cavern gigs, and then joined the Roy Orbison tour with Duane Eddy, Ben E. King, and the Four Seasons, who all had dropped out by the end. Orbison had started out in Wink, Texas, recorded “Ooby Dooby” at Sun Records in Memphis back in 1956, and gone on to write “Claudette” in Nashville for the Everly Brothers. But his early 1960s singles on the Monument label were surging operatic melodramas that cast him as a gloriously doomed loner in shades: “Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel),” which Orbison originally wrote for Presley, followed by “Running Scared,” “Crying,” and finally that spring’s “In Dreams,” an avalanche of self-pity redeemed by his epic resolve. The British embraced Orbison as a demigod the way they had Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly: as one of their own, as if his heroic insecurity made him a royal subject. But by the end of this tour, even the mighty Orbison bowed to Beatlemania: screams for “Please Please Me” began to win the nightly battle, and by the last week Orbison let the Beatles close the show. With seven years behind him in the business, as both performer and writer, Orbison befriended the inquisitive young Beatles, admiring their ravenous curiosity almost as much as their music. “You can’t measure success,” Lennon would later say, “but if you could, then the minute I knew we’d been successful was when Roy Orbison asked us if he could record two of our songs.”29
The Lennon-Epstein trip to Spain remained “quiet” until June, when it surfaced at Paul McCartney’s twenty-first birthday party on June 20. With their debut album in the middle of its thirty-week reign at the top, the Beatles held court as musical kingpins at a relative’s home in Huyton to slip the fans who already hung around their houses. Billy J. Kramer remembers the liquor flowing, and Lennon getting pissed, literally and figuratively.
“So, Lennon, how was your honeymoon?” Bob Wooler cracked, meaning Spain, publicly humiliating the top dog in the salty Scouse manner. The Cavern compere, whom Lennon once introduced to Epstein as his “father,” knew just which Lennon scabs to pick. Beside himself at Wooler’s innuendo, Lennon began pelting the smaller man with punches, to the point where Kramer and the Fourmost’s Billy Hatton had to pull him off. Wooler lay bruised and bleeding on the lawn as Lennon shouted and glowered. Somebody piled Wooler into a car and took him to a hospital emergency room.
“It wasn’t nice,” Kramer emphasized many years later. “[John] was, uh, very abusive and told me how I was fuck-all,” Kramer said. “And I’ll tell you the truth, I had a very good relationship with John. . . . I mean, the next time I saw him after that incident there, he came around to shake hands and apologize. And he said, you know, he was fucking pissed.”30
And Wooler’s remark inflamed something far scarier in Lennon than simple homophobia. By this point, chatter about Epstein’s designs on John whisked throughout Liverpool, and the strict macho code required a public brawl at any hint of homosexuality. As the leader of this volcanically successful band, this newly married, renowned womanizer feared the damage to his growing reputation more urgently than ever—especially if it came from someone as close as Wooler. If he could pound it down somehow, perhaps he could frighten away the very idea of it. Somewhere inside, Lennon also pummeled at Alf, his own father, who abandoned him and his mother back in 1940.
Wooler got stitched up, and the next day Lennon made amends through Epstein’s NEMS office in the form of a £250 payoff and a note of apology. (This was fifty pounds more than what Epstein handed out to the parents of pregnant fans.) The scene, with its echoes of Lennon’s lashing out at Sutcliffe in Hamburg, reminded everybody of the terrifying darkness that seeped from Lennon when he drank, complete with memory lapses and remorse. London’s Daily Mirror ran an item on the scuffle, which included Lennon’s public apology. No other Merseysiders commanded such coverage.
This tabloid coverage, and the transaction finessed through Brian Epstein, signaled a new machinery to Lennon’s persona, whose blackout violence could not be kept from the world any longer. His only tack was to overcompensate. Even his wedding smells of loss, the shotgun cliché: his compulsion to do right in this situation brooked only narrow choices. To the world, the hell-bent mop top concealed a grief-ridden adolescent, sublimated for years at great emotional cost behind a bipolar muse.