The Road to London The Road to LondonFor a man who prized great recordings and traded in the hits of the day, it seems odd that Brian Epstein had never set foot inside of a record company. There had never before been incentive—nor, for that matter, invitation—for a representative of NEMS to go to the source. To a record company, NEMS was merely another of its accounts, and while it was a luminous one—the North Star, so to speak, in the galaxy of provincial retail outlets—all business with merchants was conducted through distributors located in Manchester. The London offices—the labels themselves—were reserved for the talent, a word construed to describe not only singers and musicians but also the A&R staff, producers, publicists, and marketing flacks.
Tony Barrow was hardly older than twenty when Brian Epstein strode into his office. A graduate of the Merchant Taylors’ School just outside of Liverpool, in Crosby, he went into the record business in 1957 at the unlikely age of seventeen, writing a review column that appeared weekly in the Echo. Pop music was a complete mystery to the newspaper’s editors in those days; the idiom and its slang weren’t serious enough to warrant their hard-hitting brand of journalism. Barrow not only spoke the language, he could write pretty decent copy. But while the Echo deeded precious space to “a schoolboy,” it refused to admit as much in print, insisting instead that his column appear under the nom de plume “Disker.”
In one of those wonderful ironies that cater to legend, Disker became Brian Epstein’s oracle. Each week, before placing the NEMS record order, Brian consulted the column for tips about upcoming releases, and thanks to the generosity of Disker’s insight, he cashed in on many a hit that might otherwise have slipped past him. Disker was his trusty link to the trade, and therefore it was to the visionary Disker he wrote in December 1961 about his exciting new venture. “I have this fabulous group called the Beatles,” the letter began. “Will you write about them in the Echo?”
By this time, Barrow had moved to London, where he was working for Decca, churning out sleeve copy for the backside of album covers. “I was still writing the Disker column,” he recalls, “and was offended by Brian’s misconception of it. ‘Don’t you read the column?’ I wrote back rather stiffly. ‘I don’t write about local bands.’ ” Dismissively, he referred Brian to another Echo columnist—a lackluster “diarist,” or feature writer, named, quite coincidentally, George Harrison—but doubted that anything would come of it. Still, he ended his response on an upbeat note: “Keep me posted, because the moment they’ve got a record, I’ll certainly do something on it.”
A week later Brian turned up in London on the doorstep of his one and only Decca contact. He had come on short notice, he explained, to pick Tony Barrow’s brain and to wade ever so gently into the deep waters of the record business.
Decca Records, located in a stately stone mansion just off the Albert Embankment across from the Tate Gallery, presented an imposing image of a multinational company. But if Brian imagined partaking in the hushed tones of business conducted at high-polished board tables under glittering chandeliers, he was sorely mistaken. Barrow was stationed in a rather depressing annex across a side road, overlooking the backyard of a fire station. The office was a shabby, paneled cubicle of a room with a few posters on the wall, a double desk he shared with an Indian typist, and a tiny window through which they watched the neighboring firemen practice running out their hoses. It was difficult for Brian to find a seat in the clutter. Everywhere there were boxes surrounded by massive piles of unfolded, unlaminated record sleeves, called “flats ”—mostly overruns of South Pacific, which had been Decca’s biggest seller for years, and the latest Elvis Presley release, whose sales were in free fall and which, as a result, they had in excess.
Brian launched into his sales pitch about the Beatles, tossing out his “bigger than Elvis” knuckleball. Such hyperbole was still a novelty in the record business, but even so, Barrow couldn’t have been less interested. He was, however, charmed by Brian himself, whom he typed as “instantly impressive” and not at all “like the typical agent of the era.” It was essentially painless to indulge the “charismatic” man sitting across the desk from him for a few minutes.
Brian opened his briefcase and produced an acetate of the band. “I put it on the player,” Barrow recalls, “and heard the very exciting atmosphere of the Cavern—lots of screaming, chanting, and a steady bunk-bunk-bunk in the background, with a few errant falsetto notes mixed in—and that was about it.” Voices were impossible to decipher, to say nothing of songs.
Brian apologized for the awful quality. “I’ve taken it from the soundtrack of a Grenada television documentary about the Cavern,” he explained disingenuously. (It wasn’t until 1966, when Paul McCartney asked Barrow to hold up a cheap tape-recorder microphone to the loudspeakers, during the Beatles’ final concert at Candlestick Park, that Brian admitted he’d used the same technique to make the acetate.) Not that better sound would have made any difference. If Brian had brought something special, Barrow would have run it across to the A&R department, but from all evidence so far, the Beatles had nothing going for them.
As Brian was packing up to leave, he said, “Well, I’m in the midst [of] trying to arrange an audition with Decca.” Barrow asked who was acting as his go-between and Epstein mentioned Selecta, the local Decca distribution company in the Northwest. Barrow waited until Brian had left, then called Sidney Beecher-Stevens, who ran the label’s sales department, and described his meeting with the record-shop owner. “Epstein… Epstein…?” Beecher-Stevens wracked his brain for a connection. “Sorry, never heard of him. They must be pretty small.” When Barrow explained that it was NEMS, he could hear the huff on the other end of the phone. “Oh, they’re one of our biggest customers! Yes, yes, the band has to have an audition.”
A week later, just days before Christmas, Mike Smith, one of Decca’s young “bright lights,” turned up in Liverpool to catch the Beatles at the Cavern. Right off the bat, Brian was “very taken” with Smith, who wasn’t at all the kind of record-label hotshot he’d expected. A tall, slim East Londoner with slicked-back black hair, Mike was outgoing and polite and didn’t lord his position over them. Moreover, Brian could tell from observing Mike that “he liked the boys.” He didn’t stiffen up or attempt to remain poker-faced at their show; his expression flashed excitement from ear to ear. It hit all the right notes.
After a rousing lunchtime session, Mike went across Mathew Street to the Grapes, where he and the Beatles hoisted a few pints and promised to meet up again for the evening performance. Then Brian and Alistair Taylor took him out to eat at Peacock’s, in order to gauge the extent of his interest. “Right,” Smith said without any ado, “we’ve got to have them down for a bash in the studio at once. Let’s see what they can do.”
That was all Brian needed to hear. Alistair Taylor would never forget how his boss’s face turned beet-red. “He was barely able to contain his excitement—and it bled right through any presumption of coolness. We dropped Mike off at the Adelphi Hotel, then went straight back to Peacock’s and had a few too many gin and tonics to celebrate. Brian was in a splendid mood. He felt this was it. This was the break that would vindicate him.”
If Brian needed any vindication, it was not so much for his taking up with the Beatles as it was for the unlikely time he’d scheduled their Decca audition—January 1, 1962, a day not suitable even for singing in the shower. As a result, New Year’s Eve parties were out of the question; both John and Paul had been looking forward to celebrating with their girls, Cynthia and Dot, with whom things were growing progressively serious, but the appointment required they travel to London that night, a long, difficult trip that was discouraging from the get-go. Dot Rhone recalls the boys’ “ill humor” at what should have otherwise been an extremely joyous occasion for the Beatles. They celebrated the New Year over drinks early that afternoon and were on the road to London well before nightfall.
It had already begun snowing before they left Liverpool. Neil Aspinall drove the old Commer van through the wintry squall, an unsteady ride under optimal circumstances, with the four Beatles crammed clumsily in the back among the stack of loose, shifting equipment. The roads, dusted with fresh powder, wound circuitously south. Crawling and lurching along what was then the major motor route—the ponderous A5—they often spent long, frustrating stretches stuck behind long-distance trucks that heaved like elephants up the hillside to Carthage. At Birmingham, where the roads zigzagged through isolated farmland, they went east, following lonely roads that were rutted and in this weather largely impassable—not even divided highways—and then down, down, down through the outskirts to London.
The trip took nine hours. The Beatles were cold and grumpy upon their arrival at a hotel in Russell Square, and when someone suggested that they hoist a few in relief, there wasn’t a man among them who was inclined to protest.
It was late when they got to bed—and “very late” the next morning when they arrived at Decca Studios, in the north of London. Brian, who had come down by train on his own, was pacing figure eights in the corridor, furious with them. “He was frothing at the mouth,” Pete Best recalled. “I’d never seen him as angry as that.” John, in defiance, told him to “bugger off.” To make matters worse, Mike Smith hadn’t arrived. He’d been out late at a party and wandered in at a leisurely pace, a good hour late, which only wound up Epstein into a tighter knot.
Everyone was on edge. The guys were sleepy, hungover, nervous. To make matters worse, the studios were “freezing cold”; they hadn’t been used between Christmas and New Year. The Beatles, “ill at ease,” were left bumping about, waiting for a skeleton crew to set up inside the control booth.
History has held Brian Epstein largely responsible for the selection of songs performed at the audition. “[He] believed that the way to impress Mike Smith was not by John and Paul’s original songs,” Philip Norman concludes in Shout!, “but by their imaginative, sometimes eccentric arrangements of standards.” In cloudy hindsight, even John blamed Brian for picking “all these weird novelty things” that were “O.K. for the lads at the Cavern… but don’t mean a thing when you do them cold in a recording studio for people who don’t know the group.” To some extent, this is true. The standards no doubt pleased Brian, who regarded them as legitimate crowd-pleasers, but while he may have weighed in with his opinion, the decision of what to play was left entirely to the Beatles.
In fact, they’d taken a cue from Mike Smith, who encouraged the band to “play the whole spectrum of music” he’d heard at the Cavern. “We thought hard about the material we were going to play at the audition,” recalled Pete. And even though in hindsight Paul dismissed it as a “fairly silly repertoire,” the set they chose was significant principally because it indicated the band’s versatility and was an accurate cross section of their material.
The flip side was a lack of consistency. The fifteen songs wander from genre to genre, like a minstrel looking for a crowd. “Till There Was You,” “The Sheik of Araby,” “September in the Rain,” and “Besame Mucho” were the kind of corny, melodramatic standards that young British bands continued to sprinkle throughout their sets as concessions to the naysayers of rock ’n roll; eight other songs covered an array of pop records they’d been performing over the years—“Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” “Memphis,” “Money,” “Searchin’,” “Sure to Fall,” “Three Cool Cats,” “To Know Her Is to Love Her,” and “Take Good Care of My Baby,” the latter of which had just been a number one hit for Bobby Vee and was included late in the process at George’s insistence; and finally there were three Lennon-McCartney originals: “Hello Little Girl,” one of their earliest compositions, “Like Dreamers Do” (which incidentally would reach the charts in 1964 on a record by the Applejacks that was produced by Mike Smith), and the future Cilla Black hit “Love of the Loved.”
The songs hardly mattered, however; their performance was flat across the board. There is none of the spark, the exuberant personality, that characterize all future Beatles recordings. In fact, the soaring vocals so familiar to generations of fans sound halting in some places, too deliberate in others. Paul certainly was off his game; he repeatedly reached for notes that were well within his range and experienced some fluttering in his voice that sounded like nerves. John lost his way momentarily in the middle of “Memphis.” And Pete’s leaden drumming produced the same expression in every song, be it a ballad or an all-out rocker.
John knew right off that the performance was not up to par. While he held his tongue at the time, he later confided to a friend that their style was cramped by too many “pretty” numbers. “We should have rocked like mad in there and shown what we’re like when we’re roused.”
Nevertheless, optimism ran high. The band felt their work had been “productive.” And as far as they could tell, Mike Smith seemed elated. He flashed them a rousing thumbs-up sign from the control booth and, afterward, threw them an unexpected compliment. “Can’t see any problems—you should record,” he imparted. “I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks.”
“You should record!” The three magic words hung in the air for everyone to savor. The Beatles practically floated out of the studio on a cushion of pure exhilaration. Over a celebratory lunch, hosted by their new and ecstatic manager, the Liverpudlians toasted the New Year and all its promise in grand tradition. Brian surprised them by ordering a bottle of wine, a touch that, in most of their families, was reserved for funerals. Clinking glasses, they howled with delight over the prospect of a brilliant future. “What a great way to start 1962,” someone proposed at an opportune moment, “right from day one. Here were go!”
Immediately after returning from London, there was good news—and bad.
On January 4, Mersey Beat announced the results of its first popularity poll and, to no one’s surprise, the Beatles came out on top of the list. “No doubt about it, they were the best group in Liverpool,” says the paper’s editor—and the band’s longtime friend—Bill Harry. But the contest hadn’t come off as squarely as anticipated. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes actually got more votes, but whether out of fairness, loyalty, or good judgment, Harry had doctored the final results when, during the tally, he suspected Rory had filled out hundreds of his own ballots. Little did he know that the Beatles had done the same thing. In any case, it was official: their supremacy was announced in bold type just inches below Mersey Beat’s innocuous banner. And the next day it was rubber-stamped by the release of “My Bonnie,” at long last, on Polydor’s English label.
Brian had spent almost two weeks trying to force a proper release. Alistair Taylor overheard the effort that went into it as he passed his office four or five times a day and heard Brian frantically pleading the band’s case. “He was always on the phone to Polydor, insisting, ‘Something is happening here! [NEMS has] to import this on your German label, which is ridiculous. You ought to have a listen.’ At first, they just told him to get knotted, but after so much persistence they finally gave in.”
On January 5 the record arrived and the Beatles were now—officially—recording stars. Immediately, Brian shot off copies of “My Bonnie”—now correctly labeled by “Tony Sheridan and the Beatles”—to all the London record labels, requesting an audition for the band. Meanwhile, his tiny Whitechapel office, once devoted entirely to updating the NEMS stock, had been converted into Beatles Central, his own role now suggestive of a full-time press agent. “It became hard, right off the bat, for Brian to juggle his growing responsibilities,” says Peter Brown, who often picked up the slack out of consideration for his friend. By now, Brian was more interested in artist management than retailing. As the Beatles required more attention, he began to offload NEMS business matters to assistants and other underlings—or just ignore them, the effect of which was not lost on the exacting Harry Epstein. “Whatever you do,” Brian pleaded with Alistair Taylor, “don’t tell Daddy about any of this. If he comes in, just make up some story.”
The instructions Brian had given the Beatles about arriving at a show on time, not smoking or swearing onstage, doing tightly programmed sets, and bowing were having a residual effect on their image. He could see it, even at the Cavern, where they fought the grungy ambience. They were making strides, but there was a long way to go yet. Lunchtime shows were still too disorganized. Guitarist Colin Manley, who had hung on to his day job, used to take an extended lunch hour in order to catch their act and remembers marveling at the “anarchy” that rumbled through their set. “Nine times out of ten, when they kicked off the show, George hadn’t even arrived. He’d have been out late the night before or his bus wasn’t on time. Occasionally, I’d have to get up and play a couple songs until he showed. And if Lennon broke a string, he’d have Paul do a song while he put on a new one, going dwoiiiiiinnng dwoiiiiinnng [winding the string] right through the vocals. Nothing they did was polished.”
And attitude was a tough nut to crack. Onstage, the Beatles continued to take requests shouted from the audience, acknowledging them with a rude remark designed to get a laugh. Sometimes, however, it got out of control. John, more than anyone, had trouble knowing where to draw the line, often saying things just to be contrary. When he was in a foul mood—or drunk—he could terrorize people with a cutting remark, abusing fans verbally. “Shut yer fucking yap!” It wasn’t unusual for him to unleash a string of obscenities at a visitor to the Cavern or snarl at a backstage guest, then dedicate a song to his victim.
Brian was smart enough to realize that John couldn’t be tamed. In that respect, he avoided issuing ultimatums that might provoke a confrontation. But he tried to head off certain situations before they backfired. One thing particularly troubling was John’s trail of personal effects. They were littered across the city—letters, articles, poems, notebooks, drawings, and pictures in which he’d held nothing back. He may have been a loose cannon onstage, but many of these items weren’t fit for public consumption. The most incriminating stuff was a packet of “rude photos” from Hamburg he’d given to Bill Harry for use in upcoming issues of Mersey Beat. Nothing that was scandalous, but rather off-color: pictures of Paul in the bathroom, John with a toilet seat around his neck. Not long after Brian got involved with the band, Bill Harry recalls, “John rushed into the office and said, ‘Brian insists I’ve got to get them back—the pictures, everything you’ve got. I must take it all with me now.’ It wasn’t enough to change their image; he was getting rid of the evidence as well.”
Another lingering sore spot remained the girlfriends. Brian considered it unprofessional that Cynthia Powell and Dot Rhone turned up at each gig, and he was aghast, not to mention annoyed, when each time, inevitably, they got up together to dance. It was too distracting for the boys. Performing was work, he argued, not a social outing. What’s more, the presence of steady girlfriends might turn off the female fans who entertained fantasies about their favorite Beatle (to say nothing of Brian’s own fantasies). A new decree was handed down: Cyn and Dot were no longer welcome—no longer allowed—at Beatles shows. John and Paul were instructed to inform their respective girlfriends.
Dot, already insecure and self-contained, was crestfallen when Paul delivered the news. “It seemed cruel and unnecessary,” she says. “We always stayed out of their way, never interfered in anything they did.” On more than one occasion, she recalls, they arrived at a show with the boys, were deposited in a corner, and ignored until it was time to leave. That was all right by them. Even after gigs, at the Jacaranda or one of their other haunts, they sat for hours, just listening to the boys talk among themselves, absolutely silent. They never, except on rare occasions, contributed to the conversation. “We were completely subservient.” Their reward was simply going to the gigs—watching their boyfriends play and basking in the glow.
Dot had already gone against her better judgment, “stealing Preludin and Purple Hearts for the band” from her new job, working at a pharmacy. But disobeying Paul’s wishes was out of the question. Cynthia, on the other hand, learned how to blend into the crowd. At shows, John would stash her in a seat at the back of the hall, where she watched like any other punter.
The events of January 1962 had convinced the Beatles that their attention should be focused solely on their careers.
They began by finally signing an official management contract with Brian, which had been in the works for over a month.* It was a modified boilerplate agreement, tying the four musicians to Epstein for a period of six years and at a rate of 20 percent of their earnings. Brian had originally asked for 25 percent, a sum refused by the Beatles, who considered it too exorbitant a chunk. He accepted the lower figure without further negotiation, perhaps owing to an unexpected savings of 2.5 percent. A month earlier, overcome with gratitude by Alistair Taylor’s noble allegiance, he offered the loyal record salesman what amounted to a finder’s fee, 2.5 percent of the Beatles, which Taylor had politely—but foolishly—declined.
At the signing, Brian repeated his foremost goal: to nail down a legitimate recording contract for the Beatles. Even before the Decca session, as early as December 7, 1961, he had been in touch with labels, submitting “My Bonnie” in lieu of an audition. Upbeat and sturdy, the record cut the right groove, but it was basically a Tony Sheridan showcase; it gave even professional ears too little to go on as far as the Beatles were concerned. To Brian’s disappointment, the A&R managers didn’t take long to underscore that point. On the fourteenth, he received the band’s first rejection from no less a tone-setter than EMI, the titan of British labels. “Whilst we appreciate the talents of this group,” wrote Ron White, the company’s general manager, “we feel that we have sufficient groups of this type at the present time under contract and that it would not be advisable for us to sign any further contract of this nature….” While not a stinging rebuke—the kind that dismisses a band as a pack of hopeless amateurs—it certainly wasn’t the endorsement they were looking for.
Meanwhile, Decca wasn’t exactly beating down the door. The Beatles hadn’t heard from Mike Smith following their seemingly triumphant New Year’s Day audition and assumed he was deluged with work as a result of the long holiday season. In fact, Smith had made up his mind to sign the Beatles while they were still in the studio, but he had to run it by his boss.
Unfortunately, Decca’s A&R chief was in New York on business and didn’t return until the middle of the month.
The role of tastemaker was an unlikely one for Dick Rowe. Like his father and grandfather before him, he had spent most of his life as a stockbroker in service to Decca’s chairman, Sir Edward Lewis. The sole pleasure in a livelihood otherwise tedious and unfulfilling was his “amazing record collection,” most of whose gems had actually been obtained through the black market. Word of his unconventional musical knowledge spread through the firm, and Sir Edward staggered an unsuspecting Rowe by asking him to run Decca.
Rowe rose rapidly through the A&R department, serving as one of Decca’s early in-house producers. By the mid-1950s, he had assembled an impressive roster of pop artists, gleaned from his opportune signing of Tommy Steele. Anthony Newley, Billy Fury, and Marty Wilde all reaped glory from Rowe’s workmanlike productions, as, later, would Van Morrison (“Here Comes the Night”) and Englebert Humperdinck (“Release Me”). He worked with dozens of significant acts, including the Rolling Stones, over his career. Nevertheless, he would always be linked, albeit ignominiously, for his mishandling of the Beatles.
At the time, the thorn in Rowe’s side was Decca’s budget, the subject of his recent meetings in the States. A&R expenditures, he noted, were in danger of exploding. So when Mike Smith bounded into his office that Monday morning, delirious with enthusiasm for two new groups he just had to sign, Rowe tightened the company belt. “No, Mike, it’s impossible,” he told him. “They can’t both be sensational. You choose the one that you think is right.”
Rowe’s generosity was actually self-serving. He’d listened to both auditions—the Beatles and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes—on his own and agreed with Smith’s eventual choice. The nod went to the Tremeloes, hands down. Their audition was better, they had that identifiable “Decca sound,” and perhaps most significant, they lived in Mike Smith’s neighborhood in Dagenham, which put them a neat twenty minutes from the studio, as opposed to their northern counterparts. “Liverpool could have been in Greenland to us then,” Rowe recalled years later.
Decca held off on giving Epstein the news. The company had never dealt in this manner with one of its retail accounts, especially one with billings as significant as NEMS’. Lest it risk injuring a profitable relationship, Decca decided to string him along for a while, in the hope that he’d either lose interest in this hobby or just go away.
Despite the delay, Brian allowed himself a cautious confidence. The Beatles had done their part, they’d delivered a respectable demo, and with NEMS’ influence firmly behind them, there was every reason to expect a deal to materialize. It was only a matter of time, he reasoned. And yet, a creeping frustration began to take hold. “He had very substantial accounts with these companies and yet he couldn’t seem to pull any strings,” Peter Brown recalls. It was this lack of respect that stung the most. For Brian, it meant one thing: humiliation, a reaction that resonated back to his school days and the army. “He was furious. He thought he was being treated like everybody else and felt he deserved more attention.”
With EMI out of the picture and Decca mysteriously on hold, Brian turned up the heat at the two other major English labels, Pye and Philips. He began commuting to London in earnest, dropping off copies of the Decca audition tape at whatever office he could squeeze a foot in the door. Alistair Taylor had connections at Pye and, with some gentle arm-twisting, got the Beatles’ tape to Les Cox, the label’s head of A&R. Cox and Tony Hatch, one of Pye’s in-house producers, gave it a cursory listen and “thought it was awful.” Still, Taylor urged them to see the band perform. But nothing doing. As far as London was concerned, Liverpool was off the musical radar screen.
After Pye’s rejection of the Beatles, Philips also passed, leaving few options remaining for a deal. It would be another year before the influence of independent labels, so prevalent in the United States, surfaced in Great Britain. For the time being, there were only the four majors—EMI, Decca, Pye, and Philips—with which to do business in London, as well as EMI’s two subsidiaries, Columbia and HMV, which had also passed.
By February, Brian’s anxiety had reached a critical stage. He continued to reassure the Beatles that their recording career was inevitable, but to friends he admitted that it was beginning to look bleak. “It appears that we are cursed as far as record companies are concerned,” he complained bitterly to Peter Brown. “Either that, or [the labels] are just too tone-deaf to recognize a hit group—in which case we are definitely doomed.”
Decca especially perplexed him. Mike Smith had shown such optimism and seemed to enjoy the Beatles’ company. A deal there seemed like a fait accompli. Now, he sensed they were giving him the brush-off.
Exasperated, Brian tried to force Decca’s hand. After leaving a string of curt messages with the receptionist, he finally heard from Dick Rowe on February 1. Rowe apologized for the delay in returning Brian’s calls and confessed embarrassment. The Beatles, he reported, failed to stir much enthusiasm at the label. “The people at Decca didn’t like the boys’ sound,” he explained. More to the point: “Groups with guitars are on the way out.” To make such a claim credible, he pointed to the new crop of vocalists now popular in the States—Bobby Vee, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Darin, Dion. “Besides, they sound too much like the Shadows.”
Even to a square like Brian, this argument rang false. Desperate to salvage a deal, he begged Rowe for a few minutes of his time and arranged to meet him the following week at Decca’s offices in London.
In the meantime, Rowe decided to safeguard himself against the likelihood of an unreasonable Brian Epstein: he’d audition the Beatles himself. Without telling anyone, Rowe took the train to Liverpool on Saturday, February 3, with the intention of catching the band at the Cavern. His objective was simple: he’d get a good look at this group, without any buildup or hype. That way, no one would be able to claim that Decca hadn’t jumped through hoops for Epstein.
It was “pissing with rain” when he arrived in Liverpool, the city besieged by a typical winter storm, the kind whose blustery winds and rawness bit through every stitch of one’s clothing deep into the skin. Rowe’s mood was as foul as the weather by the time he stepped out in front of the Cavern. One glance at the scene churned up further shudders of indignation. Mathew Street was straight out of Dickens: remote, squalid, creepy. The entrance to the Cavern was packed with kids forcing their way like animals into the tiny club. Standing alone in the dark, shivering in the downpour, Rowe smoked a cigarette and weighed his options. “You couldn’t get in, and what with the rain outside, I was getting drenched,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh sod it,’ and I walked away.”
Thus, Rowe let the most popular band in history slip through his fingers.
To insulate himself against the Beatles’ headstrong manager, Rowe had recruited Sidney Beecher-Stevens to join them for lunch in a private dining room at Decca House, where, without beating around the bush, he delivered a polite but final rejection. Brian seethed with indignation. It was clear the end had come; the expectations fanned by the productive recording session were dashed. Brian was convinced that he and the Beatles had been slighted and strung along by Decca. At one point during lunch, voices were raised. Struggling to recover his composure, Brian announced quite pompously that they were making the mistake of their careers. Now Rowe had heard enough. He had been listening to this babble about “the Beatles’ potential” for over an hour. Through clenched teeth, he offered Brian a piece of advice: “You have a good record business in Liverpool, Mr. Epstein. Stick to that.”
Brian left Decca House “completely shattered.” He had failed to deliver what he had promised. Even more unsettling was the absence of options. He was out of places to shop the Beatles. Against the backdrop of failure, Brian reached out to a London acquaintance for some constructive advice. The previous year he had gone to a retail record management seminar in Hamburg, where he’d hit it off with a young man named Bob Boast. At first, they seemed like an improbable pair, but the more the two men talked, the more a rapport developed between them. They both liked the same kind of music, were devoted to their jobs, and possessed the same direct, earnest attitude toward record sales. Boast managed the tony HMV record store, and Brian dropped in on him as a measure of last resort.
Boast listened to the Beatles’ Decca tapes without much enthusiasm. There was no way he could help, other than to suggest that Brian convert several of the songs to discs, which, in the future, would allow A&R men to hear only the highlights, the killer songs, without having to wade through everything else. Right away, that suggestion made excellent sense. One flight above the record store was a studio where acetates could be cut while Brian waited. This, too, proved providential, inasmuch as Jim Foy, the engineer on duty, happened to listen and liked what he heard. When Brian bragged that his favorite songs were written by the Beatles themselves, Foy introduced him to Sid Coleman, the general manager of Ardmore & Beechwood, who expressed interest in acquiring the publishing rights. The offer was significant principally because it corroborated Brian’s impression of the Beatles as viable talents. It was not, he recognized, the kind of deal dangled to many groups without a record in the marketplace. Intrigued, Brian promised to explore it, but at the moment, he explained, a recording contract was more crucial to his agenda. Coleman, eager to pursue matters, volunteered to help. No extraordinary effort was necessary, he assured Brian—everything was all in the family; HMV and Ardmore & Beechwood happened to share the same corporate parent, EMI. “Now, who hasn’t [already] got a group in EMI?” he speculated aloud, running his finger down a list of company telephone extensions. “Let me see, Norrie’s got the Shadows….” On and on Coleman went, puzzling over a chore in which he seemed to match the entire roster to their respective in-house producers. The label and its affiliates were inundated with pop acts whose lineups bore too close a resemblance to the Beatles. None of the producers on the list were likely to take on a project that duplicated an act already under contract, and each had his own respectable share.
Except for one.
Coleman’s finger lingered over the name, a wild card, and not even that—more like a shot in the dark. He must have felt uneasy at the prospect of taking such a shot; it had “misfire” written all over it. No doubt he deliberated over how Brian Epstein would react at the end of yet another hopeless audition. It would be easy to judge Coleman’s assistance as inappropriate, a waste of time. He was savvy enough to know that if there was any value in these Beatles, such a miscue might scare off Epstein or, worse, steer him to a competitor. Still, it seemed like the only alternative. There was no one else at the label likely to give him the time of day. So, without any more debate, Coleman picked up the phone and called George Martin.
Even before he had become famous, George Martin had the aura. He was a tall man, well over six feet, with a fine head of thick, wavy, swept-back hair and dramatic features: a wide, helmet-shaped forehead; long, sloping jawline; liquid blue eyes; and an afterglow of masculine beauty that filled out and crystallized with age. He also conducted himself with such natural deference that every gesture seemed informed by a graciousness and decency beyond him. Nevertheless, for all Martin’s personal poetry, at EMI he was something of a joke.
From the moment he arrived at the record company, in 1950, George answered his EMI telephone with the punch line: Parlophone. The label, once a vital German imprint, had dwindled in stature to the extent that it existed primarily as a repository for EMI’s most insignificant acts. In a company loaded with up-and-coming stars, Parlophone was lit by baroque ensembles, light orchestras, dance bands, and obscure music hall luminaries whose commercial prospects were as dim as their material. HMV and Columbia got the heavy hitters licensed from their American affiliates; even when EMI bought Capitol Records in 1956, its artists landed everywhere but Parlophone, which was insular and self-contained. “It was the bastard child of the recording industry,” says a musician familiar with the scene, “kept locked away in the clock tower and treated with disdain.”
Martin inherited Parlophone’s reins in 1955 and, for a brief period, continued along much in the same timeworn tradition, flogging such pedestrian artists as Jimmy Shand, Jim Dale, Humphrey Lyttelton, Ron Goodwin, and “a lot of traditional Scottish bands that actually sold themselves.” With the upswing of pop, it became increasingly clear that if Parlophone was ever to be productive again—and not just productive, but vital—Martin would have “to do something” bold to forge a distinct and profitable identity using material that fell “between the cracks” at other labels, or risk increased alienation from within the corporate hierarchy.
Most A&R men would have studied the competition and staked a similar claim. But for whatever reason, George Martin demurred. He had spent most of his life in thrall of serious music—and serious musicians. He had studied piano and oboe in earnest at London’s Guildhall School of Music, idolized Rachmaninoff and Ravel, swooned over Cole Porter, befriended Sidney Torch and Johnny Dankworth. Clearly, pop music was out of his register.
Rather than leap the scales, Martin pitched a note no one else had struck and one loaded with gold. Comedy was enormously popular in England and relatively cheap to record; there were no musicians to pay, no arrangements to write, no copyrights to secure. Of course, comedy didn’t present the creative challenge of a Mozart serenade. Nor was it studded with finely crafted highlights like the intricate phrasing of a Dankworth Seven record or the lushly produced orchestrations of Eve Boswell. But the payoffs were handsome. Martin scored a smash with At the Drop of a Hat, a two-man show starring Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, which sold steadily for more than twenty-five years. That was followed by the hugely innovative, and every bit as lucrative, Beyond the Fringe. It’s irreverent cast—Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore—cracked the whole silly scene open, sparking a “satirical movement” among the highbrow university crowd. They also gave George Martin purchase on a genre that rang up untold sales points at EMI.
If the Fringe gang gave Martin cachet, Peter Sellers put him over the top. Sellers was a comic phenomenon—a mimic and impressionist and master of the ad-lib, the verbal grenade which had taken on a cultural but dubious significance. Young people especially, such as John Lennon, considered Sellers an icon because of his brilliant eccentricity and outrageous offbeat humor. And somehow George Martin managed to capture all of that on tape. Martin and Sellers made a series of records over the years—some alone, others with Spike Milligan, even ensemble pieces with the entire Goon squad (Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe)—that transformed Parlophone’s position at EMI. “We had gone from being known as a sad little company to making a mint of money,” says Ron Richards, Parlophone’s “song plugger” at the time.
But while providing the label with substantial security, comedy alone wasn’t enough to satisfy Martin. He was a musician; it was in his blood. And though there were some marginal contemporary singers on the roster, what Martin lusted after, what he determined would raise Parlophone’s jokey image, was a legitimate pop act, the same kind of hit pop act that fueled every other label in the marketplace. The closest it had come was a single called “Who Could Be Bluer,” by Jerry Lordan, who went on to write the Shadows’ biggest hits. It bulleted to the Top Ten for a week or two, whetting Parlophone’s appetite for pop. But when it came down to the nitty-gritty, Lordan wasn’t a rallying force; he was too sedate to cause much of a sensation. And Shane Fenton, whose voice was “so soft the engineers had enormous difficulty getting it on tape,” eventually “ran out of steam.”
Ron Richards says, “George was desperate to get something off the ground in the pop department.” It “humiliated him” the way Parlophone got upstaged by its sister labels, so much so that when Sid Coleman phoned about a promising group he’d heard—so promising, in fact, that they’d already been turned down by EMI—Martin agreed to book a meeting on Tuesday, February 13, 1962, with their manager, Brian Epstein.
Each time Brian returned empty-handed from London, the Beatles had listened without grumbling. But with the passes piling up, the Beatles’ patience had worn thin. Only a few weeks before, Brian had assured them that the Decca deal was all but cinched. Now, over a long, tense dinner, he scrambled to account for its startling demise, stuttering over the details like a deeply rutted record. At one point in the strained encounter, John, still smarting about the audition tape repertoire, warned him “not to be so clever.” The silence that followed was brittle. The hostility in the exchange was impossible to ignore. Brian sat there, looking awkward and embarrassed, until finally John, having made his point, snapped: “Right. Try Embassy.” That had broken the ice. Embassy was Woolworth’s in-house label, devoted to novelty and children’s records. Everyone, including Brian, appreciated the absurdity of his remark and especially how deftly John had wielded it as a tension breaker.
Nevertheless, the incident brought to the surface the resentment that was brewing. The Beatles felt they had done their share; in addition to jacking up their show several notches, they had reshaped their act to suit Brian’s specifications. It was his turn to be tested. They expected some results.
Brian reminded them about an upcoming audition in Manchester for the BBC dance show Teenager’s Turn and several other promotions that carried his imprimatur. Most were harmless schemes designed to boost the band’s image, but one, at a club in Southport, stirred some dormant internal strife. Ron Appleby, who promoted the show, recalled an incident that would soon have far-reaching repercussions. “Brian Epstein decided that everyone who came into the dance before eight [o’clock] would be given a photograph of the Beatles.” It was a nice incentive, although an unusual practice for a Liverpool dance, and it went over in a big way before taking an unforeseen turn. “The girls were ripping up the photograph and sticking the picture of Pete Best onto their jumpers.”
No one, especially Pete, had counted on that happening. He was “embarrassed” by the attention, but it wasn’t an isolated incident. “Almost since he joined the band, Pete was the most popular Beatle,” says Bill Harry, expressing a view shared by many early fans. “He was certainly the best-looking among them, and the girls used to go bananas over him.” This phenomenon was nothing new. Best had immense stage presence. Unlike the other Beatles, who mugged shamelessly for the girls, Pete, unsmiling, ignored the crowd, attacking the drums with his long muscular arms, which only heightened his mystique.
One can only imagine how much resentment and envy that stirred, especially in Paul, who was sensitive to being upstaged. He’d already gotten bent out of shape by the way Stuart Sutcliffe used to steal the limelight. Now suddenly Pete was crawling up his back. “If one of the others got more applause, Paul would notice and be on him like lightning,” recalls Bob Wooler, whose own behavior did nothing to tone down the jealousy. Wooler had worked out a little rap he delivered at the end of a band’s set to introduce individual musicians. A poster for The Outlaw he’d seen described Jane Russell as being “mean, moody, and magnificent,” which Wooler borrowed and applied to Pete Best. “He was the only Beatle I mentioned by name every time, and it sparked enmity between them—especially with McCartney.”
Every day at the Cavern, whether intentionally or not, Wooler twisted the knife. “And on the drums, our very own Jeff Chandler,” he’d intone over an orgasm of shrieks. “Mean, moody, and magnificent… Mr. Pete Best!” Paul would seethe as he listened to the swell of female approval, although he didn’t need a cheering section to know that he was being overshadowed. To him, the implications were all too clear: if this was allowed to continue unchecked, Pete would wind up the Beatles’ heartthrob. “That had always been Paul’s role,” says Bill Harry. “He always promoted the girl fans. He’d stop and talk to them, take their requests, be friendly. Now, unintentionally, Pete had cut into his territory.”
Paul must have known it wouldn’t be difficult to rally the other Beatles against Pete. Privately, they all grumbled their discontent about the way he murdered the backbeat. He was too much of what drummers call “a bricklayer” to suit their interests, too hamfisted, an unimaginative musician. What’s more, he was always the odd man out. Whenever the band went out together after a gig, Pete either clammed up or left early. In a spirit that demanded the battle cry “All for one and one for all,” it made him seem aloof and distant.
For the time being, however, Paul kept any resentment to himself. This was a fight that, for a lot of reasons, didn’t seem worth picking. The Beatles were on a roll; it would have been foolish to upset the momentum. And as they knew only too well, drummers—no matter how detached or heavy-handed—were still at a premium in Liverpool.
On February 5 Pete called in sick a few hours before a prearranged gig at the Cavern. His timing couldn’t have been worse. Not only were the Beatles due to play a lunchtime session, but they were also booked for an evening performance at the Kingsway Club, in Southport, where their fee had swollen to £18. No one wanted to give that up; they’d take too great a hit. A few phone calls later, the Beatles determined that their buddies, the Hurricanes, happened to have a rare day off and were willing to loan out their drummer—Ringo Starr.
For Pete Best, it was the beginning of the end.
On February 13, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to make good, Brian doubled back to London for his interview with George Martin. Although officially a label chief, Martin preferred a more relaxed approach in his dealings with hopeful, young managers, most of whom consulted him with great humility.
Brian was leaving nothing to chance as he strode into the Parlophone office on Manchester Square all charged up about the Beatles. He turned up the juice, describing the band as “brilliant” and proclaiming, in no uncertain terms, that “they were going to conquer the world.” That took real nerve, inasmuch as Sid Coleman had already explained to Martin how the Beatles had “been completely rejected by everybody, absolutely everybody in the country.” Brian may have suspected as much. Nevertheless, he plowed ahead in a manner Martin interpreted as “blind faith,” painting Liverpool as an untapped rock ’n roll mecca in which these Beatles reigned supreme. Martin, who thought he “had seen it all before,” found it gallingly outrageous when Brian fell back on an old drama-school trick. “He… expressed surprise that I hadn’t heard of [the Beatles],” Martin wrote in his autobiography. Brian arched an eyebrow, leaned back presumptuously, and donned a look of disbelief. It was a desperate tactic, and one that might have earned him the boot from a busier record executive, but Martin was charmed by such “unswerving devotion…. I kind of inwardly laughed” and forgave Brian for what he recognized as “a big hype.”
One thing Brian couldn’t hustle, however, was Martin’s ears. It didn’t take them long into a preview of the Decca tapes to determine that the Beatles weren’t worth more effort. Martin considered them to be “a rather unpromising group,” with tired material. Even the original songs, which Epstein had gone on about quite glowingly, were “very mediocre” in his opinion. But something in the vocalists’ delivery raised his antennae a few inches. Paul’s voice proved rather enjoyable, and “a certain roughness”—obviously John’s contribution—pleased him.
When the tape ended, Martin had to decide: bite or pass. It was too difficult. He remained on the fence; there wasn’t enough to go on—either way. Issuing a pass would have been simple enough, but what if he was wrong? What if there was more to this backwater band than a surface listen allowed? It wouldn’t serve him to make a snap decision. “You know, I really can’t judge it, on what you’re playing me here,” he recalled telling Brian. “It’s interesting, but I can’t offer you any kind of deal on this basis. I must see them and meet them. Bring them down to London and I’ll work with them in the studio.”
Another audition. Brian tried not to let his disappointment show. He had hoped to return to Liverpool with more positive news, but this slim overture would have to do. Unfortunately, it meant replaying the trip they had made to Decca, which had been hard on everyone involved, as well as his underwriting it, picking up hotels and expenses to the tune of several hundred pounds.
Money, however, was never an issue. According to Alistair Taylor, “Brian’s investment in the band had become quite substantial, without much return. In fact, it was growing more uncertain that he would ever recoup money from the Beatles.” But if he was having second thoughts about this undertaking, he never said so, and he certainly never complained. “Brian was too captivated by the whole experience, too into it,” says Peter Brown. He was caught up in what he perceived to be the exciting world of show business. And, as those close to him realized, he was drawn into the fantasy of rock ’n roll, intent on exploring its shadowy, rebellious, slightly amoral demimonde. By February, he was taking amphetamines. Initially, he blamed it on the gigs—it was the only way he could stay up that late—and to some extent that is true. But the crazy nights out with the Beatles, the pressures at NEMS, the anxieties of London, the desires he may have felt—the roller coaster of highs and lows—all required some form of self-abuse. Preludin was the easy answer. They were in plentiful supply, and the Beatles took them. It was a subtle, if reckless, way for him to fit in. “Brian didn’t want to go to gigs dressed as Mr. Epstein from NEMS,” says Peter Brown. “He didn’t want to look like a prick in a suit, so he put on a turtleneck and a leather jacket to seem more like the boys.” Bill Harry even recalls him at the Cavern one night, “with his hair combed forward, looking completely ridiculous.” He was experimenting, looking for ways to square himself with the Beatles, to square himself with himself.
One thing he refused to share, however, was his sexual identity. The subject had never come up and Brian was loath to raise it. The military discharge, the brush with the police—not to mention the stigma attached to such unspeakable behavior—had already shaken his trust in confiding in anyone who wasn’t like-minded. There is no telling how he thought the Beatles would deal with the truth, but he was unsure enough not to try it out on them. In any case, they suspected as much from the start. “We’d heard Brian was queer,” Paul recalled, although this remark is disingenuous, at best. As Peter Brown recalls, the Beatles were never confused about Brian’s homosexuality. “They always knew he was a queen from the other side of the tracks. It was something they would tease him about.”
John could be especially tough on Brian, if not downright cruel. One night during the disc interlude at the Cavern, Brian stopped backstage, as he often did, to visit with the band. Instantly, Bob Wooler knew rough weather was brewing by the tart look on John’s face and the way he was slumped in his seat. It was a comportment the deejay recognized all too well, an ornery prestrike effect, forewarning that someone, unexpectedly, was about to get the royal treatment. The cloud burst, Wooler recalls, when John crooked one side of his mouth to reflect aloud: “I see that new Dirk Bogarde film is at the Odeon.” More than an observation, it was a cue for someone else in the room to respond: “Which one is that?” To which John replied: “Victim. It’s all about those fucking queers.”
But however hypocritical it sounds, while the Beatles entertained themselves regularly at Brian’s expense, they wouldn’t permit it from outsiders—ever. Ian Sharp, one of John’s art school chums, found out the hard way when he made an off-color remark about Brian during an afternoon bull session at the Kardomah Café. “Within forty-eight hours” Sharp had a letter from Brian’s solicitors demanding a formal apology. Frightened by its implications, Sharp shot back a response full of regret and penitence, thinking that was the end of the matter. But there was one final condition. “I was told by Paul, consequently, that I was never to make any contact with [the Beatles] at all.” It was punctuated by “Sorry about that, mate. See you.” Much to Sharp’s surprise, the Beatles were faithful to the letter of Brian’s wish. Except for a wave when they passed in a car, he says, “that was the very last time I saw them.”