A Touch of the Barnum & Bailey A Touch of the Barnum & BaileyRingo’s Liverpool debut on August 19, 1962, did nothing to tickle the ears of the pop music world or rocket the Beatles to stardom. Only later, in retrospect, would it achieve mythic status. No one was affected by the situation more than Ringo. He’d heard the fan outcry in the days leading up to the Cavern gig. The dance halls and cafés had been full of it—and the schools, too, where there was a wave of adulation for Pete. Even in the record shops there was constant debate and grumbling. An hour before going on, Ringo ducked into the White Star for a remedial pint and collapsed at a table with the Blue Jeans. They knew he was “petrified.” Even his appearance—a little goatee and straight, slicked-back hair—bespoke an uneasiness, like someone who was one step ahead of the law. “We felt sorry for him because he was so nervous,” Ray Ennis recalls.
Most of those who attended the show shared Colin Manley’s reaction: “I felt sorry for the lads. The crowd was so worked up over Pete’s sacking that no one would let them play.” “From the time the doors opened,” Wooler recalled, “the crowd was chanting, ‘Pete forever. Ringo—never!’ We were prepared for a disturbance.” And from the moment the Beatles took the stage, angry shouts punctuated the music: “Where’s Pete?” “Traitors!” “We want Pete!” Others supported the change. Eventually, both factions began jawing at each other, glaring, pointing fingers. “Up with Ringo!” “Pete is Best!” Ringo, half-obscured behind the drums, grew “extremely more nervous” with each outburst.
Be that as it may, none of the other Beatles seemed to notice. And considering the circumstances, Ringo held his own. He adapted perfectly to the Beatles’ raw, assertive style, powering up the tempo without letting it drown out the key ensemble energy. Probably nobody appreciated that more than Paul, whose lovely bass runs had been strangled by Pete’s heavy hand, whereas Ringo complemented them, giving Paul a “very solid beat” to work with. “Ringo didn’t try and direct the beat,” says Adrian Barber, “but you could always rely on it.” He brought order to an otherwise fitful rhythm section; there was an economy to his playing that kept the drums from running away with the beat. During one particularly tense moment onstage George warned some hecklers to “shut yer yaps.” Later, when he stepped out of the bandroom into a crowded dark passage, someone lurched forward and head-butted him under the eye, giving him a tremendous shiner. George took it in stride, but Brian Epstein, worked up to a near-hysterical pitch, ordered the Cavern’s heavyweight doorman, Paddy Delaney, to escort the band upstairs to safety.
That week in 1962 also marked upheaval in the Beatles’ personal lives. Without much warning, Paul ended his two-and-a-half-year relationship with Dot Rhone. It came as a shock, inasmuch as “it had all been settled,” according to Dot, that they “were going to get married and [she] was going to move in with [the McCartneys].” She already had the ring, the gold band from Hamburg; he’d taken out a marriage license. Paul’s aunt Jin had even given Dot a crash course in “domestic lessons,” explaining how to make the bed, do the laundry, shop for groceries, prepare dinner. But in July, with her pregnancy only three months along, Dot miscarried. The tragedy brought to the surface problems that had been brewing for half a year. Now there was no baby—and considerably less of Paul. All through the spring she’d felt “his feelings cool off.” With him suddenly free of obligation, it was only a matter of time before they turned bitterly frigid, and a few weeks later he announced that it was over between them.
The split came at an awkward time. Four days after Ringo’s Cavern debut, John and Cynthia got married in a civil ceremony at the stern worn-brick registry office on Mount Pleasant. It was, in the words of Cynthia, “a bizarre affair,” not only because of its dreary ambience but also for the fact that it was carried out on a shoestring and without any foreseeable plan. No photographer took pictures; no flowers arrived for the bride. Fortunately, Brian sent a car for Cynthia, who’d spent the morning smartening herself in a purple-and-white-check suit over the white blouse Astrid Kirchherr had given her. It had rained steadily since dawn, and the weather wreaked havoc on the bride, especially her hair, which she had done up in intricate French plaits. Aside from Brian, Cynthia’s brother Tony and his wife, Marjorie, only the Beatles, in matching black suits, attended (but not Ringo, who “was never even told” about it). Predictably, John’s aunt Mimi refused to attend. John had waited until the last minute to spring the news on her, seeking to obtain at least the appearance of understanding, then suffered her outrage.
John was sober—he was not about to risk the wrath of his fetching wife-to-be—but he might as well have drank, considering the attack of giggles that ruffled through the ceremony. No one, aside from the Puritan Brian, could keep a straight face. The registrar, a twitchy, provincial man with florid cheeks and bloodshot eyes, fought a conspiracy of jackhammers from a construction site just outside the building. Every time he posed a question to either John or Cynthia, the drills rattled back, drowning them out, until the preposterous circumstances proved too hilarious to contain.
After Brian treated everyone to a celebratory lunch—at Reece’s, coincidentally, the same place John’s parents, as well as Ringo’s, celebrated after their respective weddings—he presented the bride and groom with an extraordinary gift: the keys to his secret furnished flat on Falkner Street, a few bocks from the art college. It was a modest little place, with one bedroom and a small walled-in garden, that he used occasionally as “a fucking pad” but primarily as a place to crash after late-night gigs so that he could sleep until noon and avoid his parents. In any event, it was a godsend to John and Cynthia, who wanted desperately—who needed desperately—to live on their own. After lunch, they moved their things into the flat, which was already decorated by Brian’s graceful hand. Cynthia’s mother, who had visited but returned to Canada a few days before the wedding, bought them a secondhand red rug, matching lamps, and a miscellany of cookware. And even Mimi, who everyone predicted would come around in time, provided a coffee table with a hammered-copper top.
To John and Cynthia it was a vaunted refuge, a jewel box of their own, where they could settle down to married life. But as friends came and went unannounced and the tidings gradually wore down on their first day together, that life slipped back into familiar routine. “We actually did a gig that night,” George recalled, noting how it put the final twist on an otherwise surreal day. The Beatles sped off to Chester, where not a word of John’s marriage was mentioned, while Cynthia stayed home, alone, to unpack. Amid crates of clothes and pooled belongings, thinking about life with a musician, Cynthia formulated a theory she kept to herself. “I was the only one thinking about the future,” she remembered musing, “… because I knew what I was in for.”
Many wonderful performing groups promptly fell apart in the studio. Making a record was an exacting process, not at all the loose, spontaneous joyride that galvanized a band onstage. The atmosphere, as a rule, was predominantly tense. Artists were contractually required to record three songs in as many hours. There was no audience to play off of, no outside energy or stimulus; it all took place in a vacuum, under the hard gaze of a demanding producer—Bruce Welch of the Shadows likened the role to that of God—which many artists found too “intimidating.” As a creative experience, recording was plodding and intricate, especially at Abbey Road, where much of the process was reduced to a technical exercise. There was a “very strong engineering discipline” observed at the studio, prescribed times for recording, even a strict dress code among the ranks of personnel. “We all wore white lab coats when we worked,” recalls longtime Abbey Road technician Alan Brown—“we,” in this case, being anyone relegated to the control booths. Apprentices wore brown coats, the cleaning staff blue; only balance engineers were permitted to remove their jackets, and then only while setting up equipment. It was a finely drawn tradition; every aspect was scrutinized from above. According to Geoff Emerick, who engineered many of the Beatles’ sessions, “You had to polish your shoes, [be]cause if management saw you with dirty shoes, you were in trouble.” Most work was conducted in a rather austere bubble of silence. There was “a right time to speak to artists, and a right time not to.” Above all else, as every British subject was aware, you “had to know your place.”
Fortunately, the Beatles let it all roll off their backs. They took naturally to the studio environment, oblivious to most of the guidelines that kept the staff on edge. Of course, this wasn’t their first session; nevertheless, its significance was deeply felt, so they showed up on time for their 2:30 P.M. rehearsal. They even wore the suits they had broken out for John’s wedding.
“They didn’t seem at all nervous,” says Ron Richards, who conducted the three-hour rehearsal on September 4, in Studio Three. “They already knew their way around and had done enough work on their own so that we didn’t have to sit and arrange every note for them.” Richards, who shunned that kind of hand-holding, was a good match for the Beatles. He worked very fast and knew his way around pop music to such an extent that he covered for his “blissfully unaware” boss. Later, Richards would strike gold on his own, producing the Hollies, so it is no surprise that with the Beatles he focused on their vocal blend and harmonies. “It was obvious, right away, that they had their own sound. At that time, few groups came in with anything unique or identifiable, but the way they sang and played set them immediately apart.” Norman Smith, who engineered the session, heard it, too, and decided to capture as much of it as he could by opening the microphones and letting the sound bleed so that it took on more of a live—that is, less slickly produced—quality. It was a risky move coming out of such a steady, well-grounded program, but ultimately it showed off the Beatles in a way that best suited them.
That afternoon the Beatles rehearsed six songs, from which they selected two to record later that evening—“Love Me Do” and the catchy but lightweight “How Do You Do It,” a song Martin had selected for them, certain it would be a hit. “Love Me Do” was a concession to the band, who practically begged Martin to consider their own material. Up until then, most British pop groups recorded what was put in front of them by their producers—songs written by polished professionals that reflected an overall image the label had in mind for them. Parlophone’s view of the Beatles was as performers, not songwriters. Besides, George Martin so far hadn’t heard “any evidence of what was to come in the way of songwriting.” Of their demos, the only songs that stood out were “P.S. I Love You”* and possibly “Love Me Do.” “I thought it might have made a good ‘B’ side,” Martin recalled, referring to “Love Me Do,” but he wasn’t giving them any more than that.
Martin was determined that the Beatles’ first single would be “How Do You Do It.” It had formula written all over it and was, indeed, the kind of song that might have passed muster with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who remained the industry standard. But the Beatles had shied away from the Shadows’ image since they first formed the band. Yes, they’d modeled themselves on more refined vocalists like the Everly Brothers, Bobby Vee, and Roy Orbison, but other influences, as well as their own developing sound, had sharpened their edge—and their perspective. Recording a song like “How Do You Do It” ran contrary to everything they stood for. The song embarrassed them. Demoralized, they complained to Brian Epstein and asked him to intercede with Martin on their behalf. But Brian didn’t want to make waves. “Do it!” he insisted. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. Do it!”
Martin recorded the song with them later that evening, along with “Love Me Do,” which required fifteen takes and was pressed onto an acetate for the producer’s review. Much to his credit—and displaying a quality that marked his entire relationship with the Beatles—Martin kept an open mind. The Beatles were dead set against releasing “How Do You Do It.” They argued: “We just don’t want this kind of song. It’s a different thing we’re going for… something new.” Their vehemence forced Martin to reconsider “Love Me Do,” and after listening to it again, he agreed to see it their way—for now.
As it turned out, Ringo was the problem. The next day Martin and Ron Richards listened repeatedly to the acetate and determined from the playback that it lacked drive. Paul has since observed that “Ringo at that point was not that steady on time,” and to Norman Smith’s ear, “he didn’t have quite enough push.” The drums were too muddy, not as precise as the situation demanded. “Ringo had a lot more zest to his drumming than Pete,” Richards recalls, “and I knew he’d be able to handle recording—in time. But we had a record to make and I needed someone who could deliver exactly what the song required on every take.”
That afternoon Martin and Richards walked down Oxford Street, discussing how to handle it. Richards had already put in a call to Kenny Clair, “probably the top session drummer at the time… who was a brilliant player and could do anything.” His background was big band, as opposed to rock ’n roll, but as far as recording went, he would solve their immediate problem. Martin, however, was already thinking ahead. The Beatles had put a bug into his ear about image, and he was concerned that the first record should lay it all on the line. “He knew how important it was to establish their identity,” Richards says, “so we kept walking and talked about what to call them—Paul McCartney and the Beatles, or John Lennon and the Beatles.” Martin felt they needed a leader out front, like Cliff and the Shadows. Paul could handle that; he was “the pretty boy” and more outgoing, whereas “John was the down-to-earth type” and the sharp wit. That could also work to the band’s advantage, they decided. It was a tough choice. Paul… John? John… Paul? “It went on like that, back and forth, as we continued along Oxford Street,” Richards says. Nothing emerged from their various proposed scenarios to sway things one way or the other. Each boy had enough star power to carry the group. And yet, a move like that might serve to fracture the beautiful balance they seemed to have found. The band’s personality was pretty much intact—and a very important part of their appeal. There were no apparent power struggles. Besides, Martin mused, maybe the Beatles were right. Maybe this was something new and different that didn’t fall into the same tired mold. “And when we got to the end, we knew it was perfect the way it was.”
A week later, on September 11, the Beatles returned to Abbey Road and recorded another version of “Love Me Do.” Ringo was stunned and “devastated” upon learning that a session drummer had been brought in to replace him. Kenny Clair was unavailable, but Ron Richards had booked another big band veteran, thirty-two-year-old Andy White, who performed with Vic Lewis’s orchestra and had worked on numerous Parlophone sessions. “I knew he could play the beat I was looking for,” says Richards, who invited Ringo to join him upstairs in the sound booth during the session.
Ringo was not pacified. When Richards asked him to play tambourine and maracas on the track, he complied “but he was not pleased.” The song was hardly what anyone would consider difficult. There was no tricky time signature, no intricate pattern. “It didn’t call for any drumnastics,” as Bob Wooler assessed it, nothing Ringo couldn’t handle in his sleep. Still, he stepped aside, silently seething, and let the trained ears prevail.
The result was a success. The Beatles cut “Love Me Do,” featuring a nifty harmonica riff by John, and its flip side, “P.S. I Love You,” in a little under two hours, with Ron Richards at the helm. George Martin, who had been preoccupied with his secretary, returned at the end of the session while the band was lumbering through a version of “Please Please Me.” From what he could hear, it still lacked conviction. The song was slow—Martin called it “much too dreary”—patterned, as it was, on Roy Orbison’s haunting delivery of “Only the Lonely.” John tinkered with the vocal, roughing it up a bit, making it more bluesy and aggressive, but no matter what they tried, it never got off the ground. Most producers would have ditched the song at that point and instructed the band to move on. And perhaps if Richards had continued as point man, that might have been its fate. But Martin heard whatever it was that inspired the Beatles to pursue the song in the first place. In fact, it was “obvious” to him how to rescue “Please Please Me.” Rather than cast it aside, he suggested they pick up the tempo and “work out some tight harmonies.” They could “have another go at it” the next time they were in the studio.
September was particularly hot that year. Thanks to the North Atlantic Drift and its entourage of warm winds, the normally pleasant nights remained uncomfortably sticky throughout the month. Clumps of soggy Irish moss, garbage, and dead fish collected in oily pools around the docks, cooking during the day and unleashing a black, marshy stench that by nightfall closed around one’s mouth and tasted of the ripe sea. Few places in Liverpool enjoyed the luxury of air-conditioning. The Cavern, especially, was a sweatbox, and by eight o’clock, with two hundred teenagers whipping themselves into a frenzy in the smoke-filled, airless cellar, body heat vaporized on the ceiling and streamed down the walls until the floors were puddled in slime. Every so often a wilted dancer would keel over, sometimes unnoticed until the music stopped, and have to be carried up the stairs, to recover in the street. Or tempers would overheat, with the inevitable punch-up that would follow. How the club avoided an outbreak of malaria is anyone’s guess.
Somehow, the Beatles never complained. Not even when Brian demanded they wear the new mohair suits he’d picked out to spruce up their “undesirable” image. All his energies went into grooming the Beatles for stardom, and now with a record coming out and the need to “open doors” in places that frowned on black leather, he decided they should dress for success, even at the Cavern, where the attire that September was decidedly receding. Later, John would mark the suits as a turning point in the band’s eventual climb, noting that from the moment they put them on, they’d more or less sold out to the showbiz establishment. He’d blame the outfits on Paul, who, he said, caved in all too willingly to that kind of pretense, but at the time, all of the Beatles complied—and quite “gladly,” as George noted—believing in the long run that it would broaden their appeal.
To the Beatles’ fans, suits were a very big deal—leather jackets, black T-shirts, and dark jeans had been their trademark. Brian had tipped off Bob Wooler about the new outfits, and the exuberant disc jockey played it for all it was worth. “Hey, listen, Cavernites,” he teased a lunchtime crowd on the day of their forthcoming show, “the next time the Beatles appear on this stage they’ll be wearing their brand-new suits. Now, this is going to be a revelation! We’ve never seen them in suits before, so be sure to be here for the unveiling.” Even Wooler admits that “there was a touch of the Barnum and Bailey in this,” but it was too good to resist. Even Ray McFall, the Cavern’s huffy owner, caught the fever and ordered the ceiling covered in a new coat of white emulsion paint to celebrate the momentous event.
That night happened to be a scorcher. It had rained earlier in the day, and moisture hung in the thick air like clotted cream, none of which deterred an overly large crowd from descending into the Cavern right on schedule. It seemed like “an extra two hundred kids turned out” to check out the young emperors’ new clothes—and they weren’t disappointed. The Beatles looked resplendent and, in their manager’s eyes, finally like proper entertainers. They “actually glowed” as they took the stage, slightly embarrassed in front of the hometown crowd, but not enough to diminish their obvious pride. Unfortunately, that mood didn’t last very long. No one had taken into account what heat did to new paint, and as the temperature climbed, water condensed on the ceiling and ultimately the emulsion dripped, splattering their new clothes.
It was Brian, not the Beatles, who emerged from the episode enraged. Convinced that the Liverpool scene was run with the maximum ineptitude, he began to see catastrophe in every piece of business outside of his control. The only solution was to take matters into his own hands, beginning with the release of “Love Me Do,” which would not, under any circumstances, be left to chance. Thanks to NEMS, Brian had an insider’s knowledge of how record companies operated. Most threw a dozen new records out there each week in the hope that one of them caught fire. The Beatles weren’t a priority of EMI’s, but they were his priority. And he intended to do everything in his power to ensure that they got the best shot.
First on Brian’s crowded agenda was publicity. Drawing on the previous contacts he had made, Brian touched base once again with Tony Barrow, who was still working for Decca, and notified him that the Beatles’ debut record would finally appear in a month. “He’d been picking my brains on the phone from Liverpool for almost a year,” Barrow recalls, “relying on my relationships with guys at NME [New Musical Express] and Melody Maker.” Now Brian wanted Barrow to work for him, doing independent PR from behind his desk, of all things, at a rival record label. On the face of it, the proposal appeared dicey, but Barrow replied that he saw no conflict as long as it didn’t require him to pound the pavement at the music trades. To avoid the appearance of impropriety, Barrow enlisted Andrew Loog Oldham, a “flamboyant” eighteen-year-old hustler “with an attitude,” to cover the press while he concentrated on writing releases. “I put together the original press manual on the Beatles, along with some biography on each of them that Brian intended to send out to the media,” says Barrow.
The stuff Barrow turned out was dry as toast, rewrites of the fluff spun out by the girls who ran the Beatles Fan Club. (“John… likes the colour black, steak and chips and jelly… and dislikes—thick heads and traditional jazz.” “Paul… favours black polo necked sweaters, suits, leather and suede.” “George… enjoys egg and chips, Carl Perkins and Eartha Kitt, and wants nothing more than to retire with lots of money.”) Brian wasn’t fooled. “He suggested the whole thing be written with more of an edge,” Barrow says, “harder, more colorful, punchier stuff about each boy.” To draw attention to the unusual spelling of the band’s name, he insisted they include an apocryphal story of John’s about an odd man descending with a flaming pie delivering the news that they shall forevermore be Beatles—with an a. “Then he pushed me to do a review of the record, right up front in the press kit, under the name Disker of the Liverpool Echo.” Initially, Barrow refused on the grounds that it smelled bad, not to mention the vaguest whiff of dishonesty, but for enough money, it was easy to rationalize. Says Barrow: “I was a hack being paid a fee to do some writing. And, after all, I was impressed with ‘Love Me Do.’ ” Eventually, Brian decided to blanket the media with these press kits to supplement EMI’s beleaguered in-house staff.
The next challenge was airplay. “It was a hell of a job trying to get ‘Love Me Do’ on the radio,” recalls Ron Richards, who moonlighted as Parlophone’s promotion man. “At that time, there weren’t many programs on the BBC where you could get a pop record played.” The most obvious show was a Sunday morning countdown of the charts, one of the top-rated shows, which all labels courted. Richards was friendly with its producer, Ron Belchier, who promised to give the Beatles a special listen. But when Richards called back for a reaction, he was told, “No, they’re too amateurish for me.” Richards was understandably dejected. He knew that without significant BBC airplay, the Beatles didn’t stand a chance. There was no other reasonable way to effect a breakout (or to launch them).
The disappointment must have been evident in his voice, because Belchier took pity and recommended that Ron try a new show—its name long since forgotten—that the Beeb was starting on Saturday mornings to showcase young groups. Richards immediately sent over a demo (the label misidentified Paul’s writing credit as McArtney, which was corrected on the eventual release) and won a precious slot in the rotation. “They promised to play it,” he remembers, “and it felt like we’d won the lottery.”
But they still had to convince Radio Luxembourg. It was the only station that played pop nonstop, with a signal beamed directly into London’s teenage market. To ply goodwill, EMI flew its tastemakers to Luxembourg twice a year, in order to wine and dine the station’s deejays and play the new lineup. “Then, we came back [to the U.K.],” scoffs a promo man, “and they forgot about our records and played somebody else’s.”
When “Love Me Do” appeared, on October 5, it received only scant attention on the station. For one thing, there was too much competition from abroad: “Sheila,” by Tommy Roe; Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” (which had been cowritten by Carole King, whose own single, “It Might as Well Rain Until September,” was running up the charts); Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart”; the 4 Seasons’ debut smash, “Sherry”; “Let’s Dance,” by Chris Montez; as well as new records by Elvis, Ray Charles, Neil Sedaka, and Del Shannon. But while “Love Me Do” had a nice little pop groove to it, reinforced by John’s portentous bluesy harmonica intro (fashioned after the one Delbert McClinton played on “Hey! Baby”), its stripped-down lyric and molasses-paced beat, which quite needlessly jolts to a standstill at the end of the break, failed to convey the bold energy the Beatles personally felt toward rock ’n roll. It didn’t give disk jockeys anything to sink their teeth into. There was the flood of competing British releases to consider, which left hardly any opening for new artists, much less the Beatles. Even Parlophone was chagrined by the apparent lack of effort coming from its parent, EMI, and further annoyed by the meager two thousand records that were initially issued, the standard pressing at the time for new, unproven artists. Despite its seeming lack of interest, however, EMI did buy time for the Beatles to appear on the October 12 segment of Radio Luxembourg’s The Friday Spectacular, a kind of live studio party that featured new releases, which it hoped would at least stir some interest in the record.
For a time it appeared to be an uphill battle. Tony Barrow played “Love Me Do” for London’s top deejay, Jimmy Saville—later an intimate friend of the Beatles, but back then a force to reckon with—who was “unimpressed.” The same response occurred when the boys polled around for reaction on their own. Dot Rhone, who had rented the basement flat below John and Cynthia, recalls being invited upstairs one night in early October and being asked by John to phone Radio Luxembourg to request “Love Me Do.” Dot didn’t mind doing the favor. John had shown enormous sympathy following her breakup with Paul, going so far as to give her the rent sometimes when she was short. There was no problem getting a deejay on the phone, nor responding that it was “fantastic” when he asked her personal opinion of the song. But her heart skipped when, out of the blue, the deejay confessed he “wasn’t at all that thrilled with it.” It startled Dot, and it must have shown on her face, because as soon as she hung up, John sneered: “He didn’t like it, did he?”
Nevertheless, the record flew out of the stores in Liverpool, especially at NEMS, where it was promoted as though Elvis had put in a personal appearance there. Hundreds were sold in the week following its release, though there was no danger of its ever going out of stock. “Love Me Do” reached a respectable if unspectacular number on the British charts, thanks, in large part, to those heavy sales in the North. “Brian bought boxes and boxes of ‘Love Me Do,’ ” recalls Alistair Taylor. “Later, when it came onto the charts, he bought several thousand more, hoping to push it higher and draw more attention to it, but after a while we realized that it could only go so far.”
The Beatles, however, were headed to the toppermost of the poppermost.
With hardly any time to catch their breath, the Beatles kept another appointment at Abbey Road, on November 26, to undertake a follow-up to “Love Me Do.” Despite the fact that the record had stalled, there wasn’t much financially at stake from the label’s standpoint. “EMI never gave us any budget,” says Ron Richards. “We’d decide to record an artist and simply set up studio time.” Nevertheless, George Martin preferred to oversee the session himself. Initially, the label chief may have shown ambivalent faith in the Beatles, but he had seen and heard enough to fire up his optimism. What’s more, he suspected the label had a real shot at breaking this band, especially considering a secret weapon: “How Do You Do It.” Martin remained convinced that the song was a hit; after the Beatles retooled their previous version, he believed, they could ride its coattails to stardom.
But once inside the studio, the band almost immediately began hustling Martin to record a song of their own. Exasperated, Martin grew peevish with their defiance and snapped: “When you can write material as good as this, then I’ll record it.”
Such a rebuke would have silenced most bands, but the Beatles saw it as an opportunity. They reminded Martin about “Please Please Me,” a version of which was already in the can. “We’ve revamped it,” they explained, angling for a chance to convince him of its merits. Gradually, their persistence and endearing Scouse charm wore down Martin’s defenses, and once more, to his credit, the producer relented.
Without hesitation, they ran through a take of the song that incorporated all of Martin’s suggestions. It was no longer dreary or overblown; the Roy Orbison influence had been carefully pared away. In fact, it bore hardly any resemblance to the demo they had cut with Ron Richards eight weeks earlier. Martin “knew right away” he had something special on his hands, but he checked his enthusiasm, suggesting instead that they give it a try together to see what turned up. It was a huge concession. It meant he was once more shelving “How Do You Do It” to take a flier on an unpolished Lennon and McCartney song.
“Please Please Me” may have been unpolished, but not unexceptional. Only a sigh longer than two minutes, it rocked the lofty studio like a small explosion, its beat unleashed to startling intensity: a bass throbbing faster than an accelerated heartbeat, a cascading harmonica riff as joyful as birdsong, a lead vocal that drives like a sports car with a hole in its muffler, harmonies that soar and clutch each other for dear life, a convulsion of “c’mons” that churns up tension and desire. Throughout, the song sends spikes of exclamation and falsetto raging through the lyric. Not since Little Richard had vocals raged so viscerally in a pop song.
“Please Please Me” was the world’s real introduction to the Beatles. It was a stark concentration of the band’s emerging sound—catchy melodies, clever lyrics, seamless three-part harmonies, nimble instrumentation, and dynamic chords dropped into patterns that transformed a tired form. John’s vocal is about as raw and rough-edged as anything to come out of the British pop scene—and distinctive. He makes no effort to sound boyish or cute; there is an aggression in his voice, a tenacity loaded with innuendo that digs right into the suggestive lyric. Paul’s bass lines are already synthesizing elements of a dramatic style, accenting the standard runs with sudden shifts of phrasing and hiccups that later revolutionized the form. The way his bass and George’s guitar recoil from the four “c’mons” sounds almost as if they are being jerked away from the melody. And Ringo forever dispels any notion of his ineffectiveness in the recording process by providing a precise, sharply dealt backbeat, which cuts loose at the end of the song, with a crisp, machine-gun burst of percussion.
Critics tend to credit “I Saw Her Standing There” and “All My Loving” with setting off the initial blast of Beatlemania, but “Please Please Me” was the spark that lit its fuse. It was a rejection of all the sugarcoated pop that had clogged the British charts for more than five years. In its place, the Beatles had assembled fragments of their favorite American hits, borrowing from the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran, and Buddy Holly, and given the resulting mosaic a bold personal touch.
One can only imagine what George Martin felt when listening to the playback. A man schooled in the formalities of classical music, it must have rattled his bones to hear the track he had just produced. It was so far outside the parameters of his own taste, not to mention what colleagues considered to be well beyond his grasp. Martin was an old-school music man. He believed in good, carefully structured songwriting, tight arrangements, very controlled orchestration, and pitch-perfect acoustics—all of which resonated in the cracks of “Please Please Me,” but with a remarkable new vibrancy. “Please Please Me” rocked! Martin knew it the moment he heard the tape. Grinning, he looked up over the console and exclaimed: “Gentlemen, you’ve just made your first number one record.”
Yet the Beatles didn’t feel like stars. In part, of course, this was because they were virtually unknown outside of Liverpool. The surrounding cities—places like Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham—nurtured their own hometown pop heroes who had built a loyal following in much the same way the Beatles had done at the Cavern. Promoting a Liverpool band in Manchester was like asking the United fans there to root for the Anfield soccer team. Even the French could expect to be shown more courtesy. If “Love Me Do” managed to explode, then the Beatles could march through distant clubs on their own terms; but until that happened, they were more or less restricted to playing gigs closer to home.
Still, there were plenty to go around, and throughout the fall of 1962 Brian made sure their collective dance card was filled. He worked furiously to keep them busy and in front of as many kids as possible, believing that exposure, more than anything, would contribute to their success. “He spent all day on the phone, booking the gigs himself,” says Frieda Kelly, whose desk sat in an alcove outside Brian’s office door. “The second he hung up on one person, he was already dialing another.” Often, unable to endure an indecisive promoter, he toggled between two lines, juggling dates and deals like a harried stockbroker. “He was a very impatient man. Everything had to be done by his clock. And if he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he pushed harder and harder.”
And more steadily. There weren’t enough hours in the day; there weren’t enough days in the week. As time wore on, Brian devoted only cursory attention to NEMS, laying off most of the administrative responsibilities onto his brother, Clive. Even when the store closed at midday on Wednesdays, he stayed rooted to his desk, his assistants working the phones and typewriters, going at a breakneck pace. No one took time off.
Because he remained so insecure, Brian often accepted offers for the band that fell way beneath their current stature—ridiculous gigs at cinemas, floral halls, and jive hives—to keep up the appearance of surplus bookings. These were interspersed with enough big shows to keep the money respectable, but eventually Brian sought a bigger share of the pie. Ballrooms and arenas guaranteed larger paydays, which gave him another idea about upping the ante.
In preparation, he met promoter Sam Leach at the Kardomah Café and proposed what he thought was an intriguing deal. The objective, he explained, was to book the Beatles onto shows headlined by established stars; that way, he could command a larger fee and, at the same time, link the Beatles to popular recording artists. All he needed was the proper venue. Locally, there was only the Tower Ballroom, a massive hall that Leach had locked up under contract every weekend throughout the year. “I will book big names and we’ll do it together,” Brian said. “How does that sound?”
To most ears, it would have sounded crazy. But Leach was thinking ahead. Convinced that the Beatles were on the verge of stardom, he thought: “If I do this, we might do other things together.” Secretly, he’d always wanted to manage the Beatles; perhaps this would lead to some kind of cooperative arrangement. Besides, he’d started a little independent label, Troubadour Records, which in June 1961 had released a single by Gerry and the Pacemakers; even though the Beatles already had a Parlophone contract, their record might bomb and he could wind up holding an option on their next effort. So instead of dismissing Brian’s offer out of hand, Sam said: “All right then, Brian. I’ll do it. Fifty-fifty.”
It was more than gracious, but Brian balked. Dismissively, he explained, as if lecturing an employee: “That would be impossible. I’m in [business] with Clive, who is a part of NEMS. We’ll have to share a third each.” Leach, predictably, refused to budge, at which point Brian stood up to leave. “You’ve made a very big mistake,” he warned, his voice barely above a whisper.
Leach went directly to John, who wrenched a few leftover dates out of Brian. But, as usual, financial hijinks followed. “Sam had a habit of not paying groups,” says Bob Wooler. “There was always an excuse. But he’d charm them, [saying]: ‘I’ll book you next time, and you can rest assured there will be a double fee.’ ”
Brian had heard that one once too often and finally pulled the plug minutes before the Beatles were due to go onstage at the Tower. “This meant war,” Leach recalled. “The Beatles were now finished there, and without them, so was I. That forced me to book bigger attractions to compensate.” Desperate, Leach called Don Arden, a notoriously hard-assed promoter who toured fading American stars around Europe, and begged for one of his Little Richard dates. Banking on big advance ticket sales, he promised Arden £350, “to be paid in cash before [Little Richard] goes on.” Arden promised to shoot off a contract, but before he could get it in the mail, Brian Epstein offered £500. Money, money, money—Arden couldn’t resist. Meanwhile, Leach had papered Liverpool with advertisements for the show: SAM PRESENTS LITTLE RICHARD AT THE TOWER! “Even before the Beatles exploded, Brian viewed himself as an impresario,” says Peter Brown. “There was always that infatuation with presenting someone, and with concerts he could do it in an area that expanded his control and influence.”
As Brian saw it, the local concert business seemed rightfully his. He understood its simple mechanics, had the financial wherewithal to promote successful shows, knew the bands, knew whose records sold, had ties to the press. And he viewed Liverpool’s existing gang of promoters with undisguised scorn.
No longer was Brian Epstein seeking cover in the shadows. Now he was vying to take over the scene. The soft-spoken record-shop owner who pleaded rock ’n roll ignorance was gone. That persona had been replaced by a vigorous, opinionated businessman who began to view himself as a power broker.
Brian printed posters and hiked ticket prices to an “unheard-of twelve and six,” according to Sam Leach, to ensure a tidy profit. In fact, the show was so successful that he took another date, this time at the classy Empire Theatre, on Sunday, October 28, for which he doubled the advertising budget. And in every case the Beatles’ name appeared in the same type size—and was given the same prominence—as Little Richard’s. Fans, watching in awe, concluded that “the Beatles had really hit the big time.” Sitting in the audience that evening, Frieda Kelly says she grew melancholy. “When I saw them on the stage of the Empire, I knew they were no longer ours.”
Immediately following the Little Richard shows, the entire entourage left for Hamburg, where the Beatles fulfilled an outstanding obligation at their old haunt, the Star-Club. When they returned, on November 14, things cranked into high gear. Without time to recharge, the band made a beeline for London, where two days later they performed for another intimate audience of teenagers on a show that went out over Radio Luxembourg. Tony Barrow, who had never seen them perform, marveled at the spell they seemed to cast over the room at EMI headquarters. Standing near the side of a makeshift stage, in an office that had been specially converted to simulate a club atmosphere, he was unprepared for the audience reaction as the Beatles were introduced.
Muriel Young, the show’s host, announced: “I’m going to bring on a new band now who’ve just got their first record into the charts, and their names are John, Paul…”
“Immediately,” Barrow recalls, “the kids started screaming.” This caught him by surprise. “I’d never experienced anything like it before. The Beatles, at this time, were basically unknown. But if this bunch of kids in London had gotten as far as finding out the individual band members’ names, then it was a phenomenon of some kind, which, to me, was extremely significant.”
What provoked such a reaction? It is difficult to say. “Love Me Do” had received only scant airplay so far, not enough to spark a popular groundswell. Barrow suspects the APPLAUSE! sign had little to do with it, either, judging from the look on the kids’ faces. “They were genuinely excited,” he says. “They knew the song; they knew about the band. It had to be spontaneous, to some extent. But if you ask me, that special Beatles mystique was already at work.” At the time, such a phenomenon was unknown, even puzzling. This was London, after all, not the provinces. Bands didn’t simply wander into the city and take it by storm. But the jungle drums were already beating through cultural channels. Word of mouth traveled from town to town, from city to city, via teenagers who had seen the Beatles on the cinema circuit.
“Everyone had said, ‘You’ll never make [it], coming from Liverpool,’ ” Paul remembered. When, in late 1962, Bill Harry wrote an article about the vibrant Liverpool music scene in Mersey Beat, beseeching record-company moguls in London to “take a look up North,” not a single A&R man responded.
Others knew the score. Alistair Taylor, who left NEMS that November to work in London for Pye Records, knew from the moment Brian signed the Beatles that they were his ticket south. Says Tony Bramwell, then a NEMS office boy, “No one ever mentioned London, but it was understood we’d eventually be going there. Brian had a plan; he wanted to be Larry Parnes and swim in a big pond.” Everything would be in-house: “His own press officer, booking agent, television liaison—we’d all be under his thumb,” says Tony Barrow. “It was unheard-of.”
Brian certainly made no secret of his intention to dismiss the publishing firm Ardmore & Beechwood, who, according to George Martin, “did virtually nothing about getting [“Love Me Do”] played.” It incensed Brian that their professional managers, or song pluggers, couldn’t point to five or ten outlets they’d helped persuade to play the Beatles. Not even a single ad was placed by them in any of the music papers. Why should he add another Lennon-McCartney song to their catalogue? He could have done as well with “Love Me Do” on his own, without giving away the publisher’s share of the royalties.
George Martin provided the names of three alternatives—all of whom, he promised, “won’t rip you off.” The first one Brian went to see on the list was Dick James.
Calling Dick James a publisher was like calling Brian an impresario. A former big band singer with a gregarious, music hall personality and ever-present smile, James, who was forty-four, had been in business for himself for only a year, and with very little to show for it. There were no major hits in his portfolio and only a handful of potential standouts. But what he lacked in assets, he made up for in connections. Although James was no longer a performer, he claimed a wide network of show-business friends left over from his moderately successful run as a recording artist. In the mid-1950s, he’d enjoyed a string of popular hits—most notably “Tenderly” and the theme song to TV’s Robin Hood, both of which had been produced by George Martin. Dick and George had stayed in touch throughout the years. James had spent a decade toiling for various London music publishers, resolutely sending their demos to Parlophone for Martin’s consideration. “How Do You Do It” represented his biggest break to date, and he was crestfallen when he learned the Beatles had rejected it.
James, whose cubbyhole office was on Charing Cross Road in the heart of London’s music district, hadn’t been floored by the impact of “Love Me Do.” Though it placed at forty-nine on the Record Mirror Top 100 chart, he considered the tune nothing more than “a riff” and consequently had no expectations as far as any other songs written by the northern writers who were responsible for it. Still, he was curious to hear what appealed to an act that had the nerve to reject his own hottest prospect.
As luck would have it, Brian had brought along an acetate of “Please Please Me,” and as soon as James heard it he knew: it was better than “How Do You Do It.” Infinitely better—a smash. Without hesitating, he offered to publish it. Two months earlier Brian might have jumped at the chance, but with each successive professional experience, he grew more skeptical and restrained. What, he demanded bluntly, did Dick James intend to bring to the table? How would he contribute to the record’s promotion?
As the story goes, James swallowed his answer. Instead, he immediately picked up the phone and called Philip Jones, who produced a new prime-time television show called Thank Your Lucky Stars. Giving the performance of his career, Dick James instructed Jones to listen to “a guaranteed future hit,” then held the receiver up to a speaker blaring “Please Please Me.” Incredibly enough, Jones heard enough to interest him and, with the publisher urging him on, agreed to present the Beatles on an upcoming show.
Brian Epstein was stunned. Next to Juke Box Jury, this was the most influential spot on television that a recording artist could hope for. It meant national exposure, something EMI hadn’t produced with all its supposed firepower. Nothing like this had been offered to him before.
Brian and Dick James did everything but jump into each others’ arms. The wily James had already formulated a deal. Instead of the usual song-by-song arrangement favored by many British publishers—including EMI’s deal with the Beatles—James had something novel up his sleeve. According to George Martin, “Dick said, ‘Why don’t we sign… their future writing to a company which the Beatles would partly own?’ ” On the surface, it seemed like a magnanimous—and radical—offer. Most publishers got 50 percent of an artist’s performance royalties in addition to a cut of the sheet-music sales. (“By today’s terms,” Martin says, “if you accepted that, you’d be considered an idiot.”) James suggested creating a separate company—Northern Songs—that would publish all Lennon-McCartney songs and be administered by Dick James Music. Of this new venture, royalties would be split evenly (instead of James taking the standard 100 percent of the publishing rights and 50 percent of the writers’ royalties), albeit with a 10 percent fee taken off the top by Dick James Music. “Brian thought it was wonderful,” Martin recalled. And without hesitation, he recommended it to John and Paul.
Forty years later, Paul McCartney, in nearly every reminiscence, goes out of his way to curse the Northern Songs pact as “a slave deal”—and worse. He believes they were bamboozled out of the rights to their songs and, ultimately, untold millions of dollars, saying: “Dick James’s entire empire was built on our backs.” But at the time, it must have sounded like a sweetheart of an offer. When they were asked if they wanted to read the agreement, John and Paul declined. It called for Northern Songs to acquire Lenmac Enterprises, a holding company set up in April by Brian that owned fifty-nine Lennon-McCartney songs. Under the terms of the agreement, John and Paul were obligated to write only six songs per year for the next four years. During that time, however, they would add an extraordinary hundred new copyrights to the catalogue, each one a classic that would never again be under their control.