Kings of the Jungle Kings of the JungleIt was at this pivotal moment that the Beatles influenced an event that was to shape the pop music scene for decades to come.
The day after returning from vacation—before hitting the road again, with Roy Orbison—a promoter enlisted George Harrison to judge a talent show, the Lancashire and Cheshire Beat Group Contest, at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall. It was one of many such shows that summer designed to flush promising young talent out into the open. Thanks to the Beatles’ riotous success, record labels were hot on the prowl for amateur jive bands, and local contests like this one provided excellent showcases throughout Britain. Liverpool proved especially attractive to high-ranking A&R men, convinced that the local water supply had been spiked with something, some rare gene-smashing agent that produced a mongrel breed of rock ’n roll act geared to make young girls swoon.
Anyone who could carry a tune turned out for the contest. The prize was the brass ring: a contract with Decca Records. And on hand to present it to the winner, none other than “the man who turned down the Beatles,” Decca’s president, Dick Rowe.
Rowe and his aides arrived at Lime Street Station as dusk fell on May 10, to be greeted by the ever-gracious Brian Epstein, who guided them past the Adelphi Hotel and up the hill to Hope Street, where a crowd thronged the Philharmonic steps. Inside, Rowe somehow got seated next to George, of all people, and as the show wore on, the two men chatted amiably about the music business. “I… told him how I’d really had my backside kicked over turning the Beatles down,” Rowe recalled years later, and as it was water under the bridge, George laughed it off good-naturedly.
Flashing a winning smile, Rowe prodded George to point out the groups he considered the most talented of the lot. George did not reply for a long moment, waiting for a wave of applause to die down. Then he said: “As a matter of fact, we heard a great group down in London called the Rolling Stones. They’re almost as good as our Roadrunners.” Rowe instantly lost interest in what was happening onstage, and less than halfway through the contest he got up and left without saying good-bye. He took the next train back to London, picked up his wife, and drove directly to see the band that had captured George’s attention.
The Rolling Stones. It was only a month earlier that the Beatles had first laid eyes on them. Following the taping of Thank Your Lucky Stars, an experimental filmmaker and part-time jazz promoter named Giorgio Gomelsky had approached the Beatles in Twickenham, with the intention of making a documentary film about them. Brian, who was already fantasizing about Hollywood, gave him a polite brush-off. Nevertheless, Gomelsky invited the boys to hear a great “full-bodied R&B” band playing at the Crawdaddy Club, which he ran in a room behind the Station Hotel in Richmond, later that night.
Although largely ignored by the trad-jazz-obsessed Soho “mods” who flocked to the Flamingo, the Crawdaddy Club was one of the linchpins of the rapidly changing pop music scene. It still catered to the stalwarts each Monday with Johnny Dankworth’s cool quintet, but on Sundays it featured the Dave Hunt Band, fronted by their wild-ass singer, Ray Davies. Gradually, however, R&B muscled its way in, led there by a rash of white British teenagers whose sole ambition was to imitate urban American Negro blues heroes. Georgie Fame, John Mayall, Herbie Goins, and Chris Farlowe were among the small group of British missionaries who had already brought the new gospel to the London club scene. Hip to the trend, Gomelsky booked the ragtag Stones in February for the relatively generous fee of £1 per musician and watched jubilantly as they proceeded to set the Crawdaddy on fire.
The Beatles had been hearing the buzz for some time. After dinner Neil Aspinall drove them to the club, only three miles from the TV studio, where they quite unexpectedly came upon a tumultuous scene. The place was mobbed with a wild and woolly bunch, mostly art students from the Kingston College of Technology. “It was a real rave,” George remembered. The audience shouted across the din and screamed and danced on tables. At one end of the room, a cluster of couples demonstrated the Shake, which was catching on all over the country. Many of the kids stripped off their shirts to compensate for the almost palpable wall of heat. The Beatles heard right away what a “great sound” the band was making. “The beat the Stones laid down was so solid it shook off the walls and seemed to move right inside your head.”
Led by the talented but unstable Brian Jones, whose intensity generated a potent charisma, the Rolling Stones pumped out ambitious versions of grassroots R&B. They bounced effortlessly between Bo Diddley, Billy Boy Arnold, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed classics, backlit by dueling red and blue spotlights that seemed to accent the appropriate mood. The Beatles, dressed in identical knee-length suede coats, stood in the back of the club for the remainder of the set, grooving on the vibe. There was, according to Ringo, an instant attraction. “Keith and Brian—wow!” he recalled years later. “They just had presence.” Moreover, those two had chops: both boys did nothing all day but sit around a grubby, infested flat, working on riffs and alternating on leads until they could intuit what the other was about to do. John, Paul, and George certainly identified with that. Mick Jagger, the vocalist, seemed more than stylish playing the maracas. Everything sounded just right, and John couldn’t help feeling that they were “doing things a little bit more radical” than the Beatles.
Later that night, as the two bands talked until dawn, none of the musicians could have dreamed of the incredible fame that awaited them or the cultural revolution brewing in Britain. But there were already signs of a musical undertow that was pulling uniquely talented and expressive youths into the onrushing tide of change.
In London even the most die-hard mods—next-generation beatniks who took their name from modernist and were devoted to modern jazz and existentialism—were clambering aboard the rock ’n roll bandwagon, stumbling from scruffy basement clubs under the influence of R&B. They gorged on Sartre, Magritte, Buñuel, and Man Ray during the day, but at night, in sweaty clubs like the Flamingo and the Scene, the intellectualism gave way to John Lee Hooker, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, and Solomon Burke. Besides the Beatles and eventually the Stones, inroads were being made by the Yardbirds (featuring Eric Clapton), the Pretty Things, Long John Baldry, and Zoot Money, among others. And everywhere the momentum was building. By mid-1963, caught up in the red-hot flush of the nascent underground club life, these and other artists had begun to reverse the force of colonial rock ’n roll in Great Britain.
Despite the impact of Merseyside bands and the movement’s roots in a working-class sensibility, London still remained ground zero in terms of an exciting creative base. Bands were forced to rely on the record companies, whose magnetic force drew talent south to the capital, not only from Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds but from across the country. If you wanted to be a rock ’n roller, there was only one place to be, where it was all happening—London.
Brian had already gleaned as much from his endless excursions there. The combination of business contacts, abundant culture, wonderful restaurants, and especially anonymity—the ability for him to live however he pleased—was a powerful incentive to spur a move south. In such an unrestrained, stimulating environment, Brian could easily flourish. But he feared that such a move would distance him from the honeypot—from Liverpool—which to date was the source of all his “artistes.” There were still plenty of young Merseyside acts that were ripe for the picking, but knowing how Scousers frowned on pretense, he suspected a London address might well scare them off. Meanwhile, his absence would allow others—outsiders—to horn in on the action, which would be a major tactical error. Thus, he decided to begin laying the foundation for a London-based firm, a company that would handle everything in-house—personal management, booking agency, public relations, the works—whose operation he would guide from afar.
On May 1, 1963, Tony Barrow opened Brian Epstein’s first London office, a seedy little one-and-a-half-room affair above a pornographic bookshop on Monmouth Street. Its previous tenant, Joe “Mr. Piano” Henderson, had been a colleague of Dick James, and the space impressed Barrow as “a cozy little setup, complete with casting couch and subdued lighting.” The largest of the rooms showcased a superb custom-made desk, with a cocktail cabinet built into the front of it, stocked with hand-cut crystal and a soda siphon. On Brian’s instructions, Barrow installed cheap draw blinds and half a dozen plastic potted plants, which he spaced along the windowsills; by the building’s entrance, he nailed up a plaque that read: NEMS ENTERPRISES—PRESS OFFICE—UPSTAIRS.
The place was in full swing by the time Brian arrived back from holiday, on May 10. “From Me to You” was holding strong at number one; Billy J. had his cover of “Do You Want to Know a Secret” right behind it, at number two; “How Do You Do It” was sliding off the charts, but Gerry and the Pacemakers had a bang-up follow-up, “I Like It,” all ready to go. Barrow had never seen such a run of luck, and it was all due to the Beatles. The fan mail alone presented a somewhat alarming body of evidence, further proof of what lay ahead. Complete strangers wrote to thank the Beatles for their music and to pledge undying loyalty, thousands of letters pouring in every week—bundles, cartons, sacks of it, including autograph requests, love letters, stuffed animals, pictures, and extremely intimate queries. “They wanted to know the ins and outs of a dog’s dinner,” recalls Frieda Kelly.
The Beatles also got mail at their homes, the addresses no secret to a determined fan. Most of the parents handled it with facility—and delight. “Louise Harrison was excellent,” Frieda Kelly remembers. “She answered every letter—by hand! I’d supply her with a five hundred-pack of handout photographs, envelopes, compliment slips, stamps, or she’d bring the whole load back completed and I’d frank it.”
Jim McCartney, too, attacked Paul’s stacks of letters with the dedication of a press agent. He and Mike diligently sorted through the exuberant requests, providing whatever they could in terms of a “personal” response from Paul. Occasionally, on his daily trek to the Pegasus Pub, Jim dropped off excess bundles of fan mail with Shelagh Johnson, a local schoolgirl who volunteered to help out. When the volume got unwieldy, Johnson recalls, she enlisted a girlfriend, Pat Riley, to help collect the fan mail at Forthlin Road.
From John, on the other hand, there was rarely any effort. Cynthia, already overburdened, was practically cross-eyed from caring for her new son, and Mimi dismissed fan mail as “utter nonsense,” discarding most if it with the trash. Humble, unassuming Ringo had other fish to fry. When it came to the mail, he was predictably befuddled. As Frieda Kelly recalls: “Ritchie came in [the office] one day and asked politely if I would do his mail. I told him he must be joking. ‘Get your mum and dad to do it. All the other parents do.’ But he just stood there pathetically and said, ‘Me mum doesn’t know what to put. Anyway, I don’t get a lot.’ I felt so sorry for him, so I said, ‘All right, bring it in, but just this once.’ The next day he came in with one of those small poly bags that tights come in—that was all his mail, stuffed inside. Paul got two feet of mail, but Ritchie only had that small sack, with ten letters in it.”
As an emergency measure, Tony Barrow stemmed the flow of mail to Kelly by splitting the fan club—which had already grown to forty thousand members in England alone—in two: a northern division, which Frieda relocated to the NEMS office in Liverpool, and a southern division housed at Monmouth Street. Barrow also invented a national secretary, “Anne Collingham,” to act as a diversion and to whom fans could write. “It was actually an act of mercy,” he recalls. “An outfit of northern teenagers was shouldering responsibilities better suited to a multinational corporation. We were flying by the seat of our pants, and it was all I could do to keep things afloat—until we could figure out what came next.”
To everyone’s surprise, it was the press that turned up. Pop music was still an anomaly to the London newspaper establishment, which shunned any coverage of the scene. Even the show-business editors remained skeptical that pop stars had worthwhile appeal or that readers would care about this feeble and superficial genre. Tony Barrow, to his credit, didn’t flinch from the task. But instead of knocking his head against the wall trying to pitch uninterested London papers, he relied on his strength in the provinces, where support was fairly strong. “Few record companies ever dealt with anything called the Sheffield Star or the Birmingham Post or the Manchester [Evening] News or the Liverpool Echo,” Barrow recalls. “I’d put the four of them on the phone to these provincial editors—one right after the next,” says Barrow, “and the lads just came alive. They were such naturals.” Most subjects they dealt with were as dry as British toast, but again and again the Beatles fired off perfect ad-libs, playing off one another, cutting up. Their timing was absolutely remarkable. If Tony hadn’t known better, he’d have thought it was rehearsed.
Right off the bat, Paul took charge of an interview’s ebb and flow. A slick and tactful diplomat, he knew instinctively just how to deal with every journalist, turning on the charm, humility, wit, sincerity, deference, enthusiasm, flattery—whatever the situation called for. A note strategically placed by the phone allowed Paul to address a reporter by name, as if they were old chums. For instance, to a question about tour dates, he’d respond, “I’m glad you brought that up, Graham” or “Russell” or “Dibbs” or “Monty.” If the interview was with a paper from, say, Wolverhampton, Paul might mention how much he liked the town gardens or another of its prized attractions. Listening to him pour it on, one could swear he had been there only yesterday. He was as smooth as silk. And he came loaded with statistics; without the luxury of notes, he rattled off the group’s chart listings and upcoming tour dates with pinpoint accuracy.
When he was satisfied that the reporter had been properly softened up, Paul passed the phone to the other Beatles, who did their respective parts: Ringo shared his feelings about joining the band in midstream, George talked music, and John provided color, offering witty recollections about life on the road.
The role of media darlings was a new one for the Beatles. Like most teenage bands, they had spent most of their professional life onstage, bashing out rock ’n roll songs. In front of an audience, they were extroverts, exuding confidence and control. No one said anything about being articulate—or quotable. This was quite a departure for four young, unworldly, largely unsophisticated Scousers, but they rose to the occasion with remarkable flair.
Such finesse made Barrow’s job that much easier. All he had to do was to ply the Beatles with cigarettes and “tumblers of scotch and Coke,” both of which they consumed with almost superhuman appetites. “I thought I was the world’s worst chain-smoker until I went to work with this lot!” Tony marveled. They went through hundreds of cigarettes each day, lighting new ones off the smoldering end of the last. Ashtrays overflowed with stubby butts; smoke as thick as marmalade filled the room. And he learned to top up their tumblers “without waiting for the broad hints.”
In those days, before rock ’n rollers were regarded—or regarded themselves—as “serious musicians,” most interview questions were barely a notch above inane. Reporters asked the Beatles about their families and their favorite foods; whether they preferred blondes, brunettes, or redheads; what they planned to do after music ran its course. With the Beatles, nothing was off-limits—except for questions about John’s marriage.
Cynthia paid dearly for this. Forced to deny her marriage—even her name—to anyone who asked, she skulked around Liverpool as a sort of nonperson, leading what she referred to as an “undercover existence.” Out of necessity as well as obedience, she kept a low profile, never wore a wedding band, walked her son at odd hours, rarely attended gigs. When John showed up at home, they carefully avoided going out together in public.
“For up to eighteen months after the birth of Julian Lennon, we were denying that John was married, let alone that he had a son,” recalls Tony Barrow. At first, the press was totally indifferent—and stupefyingly compliant. At the time, if a personality asked reporters politely not to reveal a personal matter, they didn’t reveal it! A wanton tabloid mentality had not yet wracked the British press; journalists weren’t obsessed with exposing an icon’s private life, nor was there an audience slavering for it. Nothing better demonstrates the cozy relationship between the Beatles and the press than an interview that Judith Simons, of the Daily Express, conducted with the boys later that fall. “We still can’t mention your marriage, can we, John?” she inquired as a matter of record. As the band undoubtedly knew, the request for her silence would be readily granted.
There were some who didn’t know, but they too were easily dealt with. One journalist visiting NEMS “browsed through the pile of NEMS singles beside the office stereo and eventually reached the Beatles’ Please Please Me album.” On the back sleeve, beside John Lennon’s name and after the words rhythm guitar, someone had penned in the word married. Barrow instantly recognized the handwriting as John’s. He needed to think fast. Married? It must have been one of the flighty typists, he speculated aloud, who fantasized about marrying John and, well, wrote it as some ludicrous form of wish fulfillment. Preposterously, the writer bought the whole story and moved on to examine other records in the stack.
Throughout May and early June, the Beatles appeared on the air with astounding frequency—just about every five days—which practically made them a household name in the country. Nothing mattered as much to them as being as successful as the pop stars—such as Del Shannon and Roy Orbison—with whom they performed. But the momentum of their acclaim seemed to stop at the British shores. Their first U.S. release, “Please Please Me,” had gone nowhere. Even by Paul’s account, it was “a flop.” Vee-Jay’s perfunctory efforts at promotion produced more frustration than airplay. Now there were indications from abroad that “From Me to You” might fare the same. It was issued by Vee-Jay on May 27, 1963, and picked up glowing reviews in the music trades (Cash Box pounced on it as its “Pick of the Week”), but the Ewart Abner Las Vegas fiasco had drained the record company of funds, leaving it empty-handed as far as promotion went.
In the meantime, the Beatles continued to reap the profits of their runaway British success—though nowhere as much as their label.
About the time “Please Please Me” had hit number one, George Martin began to feel guilty that he’d hornswoggled the Beatles. Brian had been so desperate when he first came to Parlophone that he would have taken anything in exchange for a contract. At the end of the Beatles’ first full year, should EMI deem to pick up their option, they were contractually guaranteed a 25 percent raise that would kick in at the start of each successive option year. That might have seemed generous on paper, but at a quarter of a penny per disc, it was worse than beggarly, considering this was a group larding EMI’s vaults. Martin knew it; he thought “it was patently unfair.” So as option time approached, he talked to L. G. Wood about doubling the Beatles’ royalty immediately. Wood approved, provided that the Beatles agreed to another five-year option—at which point Martin balked. “No, you don’t understand,” he explained, “I don’t want to ask for anything [in return].” He wanted to give it to the Beatles unconditionally, to reward them for their dramatic success.
Little did Martin realize what a tempest he’d uncorked. Although dependent on recording artists, EMI operated much like the Crown, gazing down on its subjects like a benevolent patron while tolerating no impertinence. The company functioned with royal prerogative; what it gave artists wasn’t negotiable, especially on the whim of an employee. Raising the royalty rate without getting something in return? Unthinkable! In EMI’s eyes, George Martin had committed an act of effrontery so egregious as to be unpardonable. “From that moment on, I was considered a traitor within EMI,” Martin recalled. But in the end, Martin’s determined efforts made a difference. The day after “From Me to You” was released in America, Parlophone exercised its option, extending the Beatles’ contract for another year, and increased the group’s royalty from one penny to two pennies.
Along with every rapid-fire achievement, the new contract gave the Beatles definite cause to celebrate. But there wasn’t a moment to spare: every day was booked with a concert, a TV appearance, or some long-standing PR obligation that could not be broken. Finally, on June 18, 1963, following a few scheduled dates in the North, the Beatles pulled the plug and threw a party on the occasion of Paul’s twenty-first birthday. It was originally going to be held in the garden at Forthlin Road, but because of the Beatles’ sweeping success—and the threat of huge crowds of slightly hysterical fans determined to crash the gates—it was rerouted to Paul’s aunt Jin Harris’s house, across the Mersey in Huyton, where a lovely back garden assured them of privacy.
It was the perfect night for a party: fair and balmy. Summer was coming on strong and the trees surrounding the property were dubbed in a new patchy growth of green. The brilliant northern sky was filled with almost as many stars as had arrived bearing gifts: Gerry Marsden, Billy J. Kramer, the Fourmost, random members of the Merseybeats, the Searchers, the Remo Four, and the Hurricanes, and perhaps starriest of all—the Shadows, all the way from London, sans Cliff Richard, who was off making a movie. Brian arrived alone, as did Bob Wooler, and other old Liverpool chums showed up. The guests pressed under a large striped tent filled with food and flowers, and spilled out onto the lawn. Glasses clinked, toasts were made, and the babble of conversation was especially joyful and raucous.
As the night wore on, it was clear that John was descending into a black funk that radiated hostility. Perhaps all the attention focused on Paul was more than he could tolerate. In the past John never fared well for long when not reaping his share of the spotlight. He’d consumed a staggering amount of alcohol, gulping down drink after drink, and he wove through the midst of the crowd, getting continuously drunker and meaner, his vocabulary sinking deeper into obscenity.
Sometime after ten o’clock Pete Shotton went in search of the bathroom while John plunged back into the crowd. John, who remembered being “out of my mind with drink,” elbowed past Bob Wooler, who was also “sinking a fair bit of booze.” For all his cozy rapport with the bands, Wooler could also be remarkably glib. Bill Harry says, “Bob has a sarcastic note in his voice that often rubs people the wrong way, and the way he talked to John that night set John off.”
There are various accounts of exactly what was said, but no one disagrees that Wooler made a snide reference to John’s vacation with Brian Epstein—something on the order of “Oh, John and Brian’s just come back from their honeymoon in Spain.”* Impulsively, without warning, John leaped on Wooler, beating him viciously with “tightly closed fists.” When that didn’t do enough damage, he grabbed a garden shovel that was left in the yard and whacked Bob once or twice with the handle. According to one observer, “Bob was holding his hands to his face and John was kicking all the skin off his fingers.” In a more lucid moment, John recalled: “I was beating the shit out of him, hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, ‘I can kill this guy.’ ”
It took two big men—the Fourmost’s bass player, Billy Hatton, and Billy J. Kramer, who had just arrived late, on the heels of a gig—to haul John off Wooler and hold him down. “He was completely out of it,” Kramer recalls, “like someone who’d gone mad.” Pete Shotton returned in time to drag John away, into the garden, while others called an ambulance for the injured and badly shaken Wooler. (Wooler suffered a broken nose, a cracked collarbone, and three broken ribs.)
Before long, however, John went on another drunken rampage. While Cynthia watched in horror, he accosted a girl and grabbed her by the breast, refusing to let go. Once again Billy J. stepped in, pulling them apart. According to Kramer: “He was flailing his arms, screaming, ‘You’re nothing, Kramer—you’re fuck-all! We’re the greatest band.’ And he was getting aggressive. So I showed him my fist and said, ‘I’ll fucking KO you if you don’t shut up.’ ”
Kramer, who was a much bigger man than John, hustled him out to the curb, where he endeavored to subdue John and calm down Cynthia, who “was freaking out,” until a taxi arrived to take them home.
Before the dust even settled, Bob Wooler made a beeline for Rex Makin’s office. “He arrived with a black eye and a swollen nose,” Makin recalls, “and instructed me to claim damages from Lennon.” Normally, a situation like this put a lawyer in an awkward position. As Brian’s—and thereby John’s—solicitor, it presented a clear conflict of interest. But the ever-resourceful Makin wasn’t troubled by such issues. “I merely rang Brian up and I acted for everybody,” he says smugly. “For my trouble,” says Wooler, “I got two hundred pounds and a rather halfhearted apology from John.”
A few days after the party, Tony Barrow received a call from Don Short, the pesky entertainment flack for the Daily Mirror, who was nosing around about a punch-up involving the Beatles. Barrow did everything he could to play it down, but when other papers also got wind of it, he was forced to make a statement. “I first called John in Liverpool to get his side of the story,” Barrow recalls, “but he was absolutely belligerent. His response was ‘So fucking what? That bastard called me a bloody queer. He got what he deserved.’ ” Barrow would learn to endure these passing storms, but at the time he sensed a professional disaster looming and moved to head it off. On his instructions, John was ordered away from the phone, while Barrow, fielding all calls, “put a mighty big spin” on the incident. The Mirror went to press on June 21 with an eye-catching headline splashed across the back page: BEATLE IN BRAWL—SORRY I SOCKED YOU:
Guitarist John Lennon, twenty-two-year-old leader of the Beatles pop group, said last night: “Why did I have to go and punch my best friend? I was so high I didn’t realize what I was doing.” Then he sent off a telegram apologizing to twenty-nine-year-old Liverpool rock show compère and disc jockey Bob Wooler… who said: “I don’t know why he did it. I have been a friend of the Beatles for a long time. I have often compèred shows where they have appeared. I am terribly upset about this, physically as well as mentally.”
John Lennon said: “Bob is the last person in the world I would want to have a fight with. I can only hope he realizes that I was too far gone to know what I was doing.”
In fact, neither Wooler nor John ever spoke for the record. The quotes in the copy were the handiwork of Tony Barrow. For better or worse, the Beatles had finally bagged their first national press article.
Only hours after Paul’s birthday party, the Beatles returned to the road for the busy summer season ahead, “racing up and down the country,” playing a solid block of one-nighters. Delirious Beatles fans carried on with an intensity never before experienced. They wanted more than music. They wanted contact with the Beatles, wanted to get at them, touch them. Fans thrashed themselves into a frenzy, screamed and cried uncontrollably, leaped from balconies onto the stage, threw themselves in front of the group’s van—and worse. In the North, a reporter watched nervously as “girls were plucked from the front row in a state of collapse.” The next week a group of teenage boys suffered dehydration after hiding in a hotel room for seven hours just to shake their heroes’ hands.
Even the Beatles weren’t safe from the mayhem. Fans ripped at their clothes for souvenirs, stripped antennae and mirrors from their cars, hurled precious gifts at them. In Blackpool on July 21, prior to a Sunday afternoon concert at the Queen’s Theatre, police abandoned their efforts to disperse a mob of “nearly five thousand fans” thronging the stage door and wisely decided to detour the Beatles’ arrival. The boys had to climb a scaffolding in a nearby yard and cross the roofs of adjoining buildings until they could be lowered into a ceiling loft above the stage.
It was becoming evident to keen observers that these demonstrations of adulation transcended mere popularity and stardom. Roy Orbison was popular, Cliff Richard was a full-fledged star, but neither encountered the manic emotional display, the tearing passion, that surrounded the Beatles. This was something more. It was hard for people to put a finger on it. The hysteria was primitive and overtly sexual. Certainly there had been some of the same response to Elvis, and before him, Johnnie Ray and Frank Sinatra, but nothing so aggressive, nothing that ranged to this extreme. Publicly, the Beatles laughed it off, but it was no joking matter. Their homes were invaded, their privacy shattered. Everywhere they went, either alone or with family and friends, fans accosted them “like persistent termites,” demanding autographs and pictures. “There was no longer any question of the Beatles appearing in a club or, indeed, anywhere in direct contact with their public,” writes George Melly in Revolt Into Style. “They had become a four-headed Orpheus. They would have been torn to pieces by the teenage Furies.”
While everyone debated the merits of the phenomenon, one aspect went unchallenged: the Beatles had set the stagnant British music scene on fire. Kids across the country were totally caught up in the excitement, gobbling up records and concert tickets at an unprecedented clip. Rock ’n roll—British rock ’n roll—became the major topic of conversation: who was coming out with a new record, what they sounded like, where they were playing, how hot they looked. Everyone wanted to be up-to-date, on top of the scene. Meanwhile, the American stars who had dominated for years began fading from the fore. Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, and Elvis continued to sell, but nowhere near as strongly as their British counterparts. “Wave the Union Jack!” New Musical Express advocated in a July issue, noting that “not a single American record has topped the Charts this… year—something which has never happened before in the 11 years since the top table was introduced!”
The record labels tore through the clubs in Liverpool, signing everyone in sight, and the subsequent proliferation of releases was dizzying indeed. In a span of two months, Decca announced singles by the Dennisons (“Come On Be My Girl”), Beryl Marsden (“I Know”), and Lee Curtis and the All Stars (“Let’s Stomp”), featuring Pete Best on drums; Pye issued Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four (“Lies”), the Searchers (“Sweets for My Sweet”), and the Undertakers (“Everybody Loves a Lover”); Fontana released Earl Preston and the TTs (“I Know Something”), Howie Casey and the Seniors (“The Boll Weevil Song”), and the Merseybeats (“It’s Love That Really Counts); HMV put out the first Swinging Blue Jeans record (“Too Late Now”); and Oriole released a single by Faron’s Flamingoes (“See If She Cares”), signed Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to a contract, and, in case anyone missed the point, prepared two compilation albums titled This Is Merseybeat, volumes one and two, featuring sixteen northern rock ’n roll bands.
In June Polydor began releasing sides from the 1961 sessions with Tony Sheridan in Hamburg—only this time crediting the band as the Beatles, as opposed to the original Beat Boys. It was inevitable that the session would come back to haunt them, but not even the Beatles expected it to crack the charts, which it did immediately following its debut. “It’s terrible,” John complained to a reporter for Melody Maker, objecting to the quality of the record and the circumstances of its release, but both refused to go away. EMI was particularly stung by the situation. After finally breaking the Beatles, it seemed unjust that a competing disc would surface to confuse record buyers.
To staunch a potential backlash, EMI countered by issuing an EP—or extended-play single—with “Twist and Shout,” “A Taste of Honey,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” and “There’s a Place.” No one had an inkling if such a concept would meet with enthusiasm, considering that all four songs were already on the Please Please Me album. But it hit the stores on July 15 and by the end of the weekend had sold an astonishing 150,000 copies, with back orders for 40,000 more. Come August, it became the first EP ever to enter the Top Ten.
Dozens of dates were booked in East Kent and Bournemouth through the summer, interspersed with tours of Jersey and Wales. Meanwhile, John and Paul were busy writing “Bad to Me” for Billy J. Kramer, as well as “Hello Little Girl” for the Fourmost, another NEMS act, which George Martin agreed to produce for Parlophone. Brian also signed a rambunctious teenager named Tommy Quigley who had been working an act locally with his twin sister, Pat. Following a welcome Parnesian name change to Quickly, a recording deal was arranged with a subsidiary of Pye on the basis of John and Paul’s anteing up an appropriate smash, and within a few weeks “Tip of My Tongue” was released as a single.
All the while, George Martin was pressing for another Beatles single to preserve the headlong run at the charts. A song begun in Newcastle in the afterglow of a late-June gig seemed as if it might fit the bill. Riding in the back of a poorly lit van, Paul had sketched out a lyric fragment that showed early promise. It was modeled on an “answering song,” according to Paul, who recalled hearing a Bobby Rydell record that put the form to clever use. A chorus of girls would sing, “Go, Bobby, go, everything’s cool,” while Rydell shot back, “We all go to a swingin’ school.” The way Paul envisioned it for the Beatles, he’d sing, “She loves you,” whereby the band would respond, “Yeah… yeah… yeah,” offering a nonsensical but effective hook. He subsequently ran it by John, who decided that the answering business was a “crummy idea” but the lyric was worth exploring. They went back to their room at the Turk’s Hotel, whipped out their guitars, and in a few hours’ time had the bones of the song in place.
“She Loves You” was finished the next evening, during a rare day off in Liverpool. The boys worked intently in the tiny dining nook at Forthlin Road while Paul’s father sat not five feet away, chain-smoking and watching TV. His presence, the competing noise, didn’t matter—nothing could interrupt Paul and John’s concentration. They wrote with a sense of mission, replacing wobbly phrases, playing lines over and over, refining the way things scanned, until they’d gotten it right. And when they were done, they knew they had a hit on their hands. The song has a tremendous, explosive kind of energy that bursts from the opening notes and culminates in a beautiful split of harmony in the parcel of yeahs. George Martin listened to a rundown of it in the studio on July 1 and thought it was “brilliant… one of the most vital [songs] the Beatles had written so far.”
The band polished the song over the next few days, teaching George Harrison a third harmony to fatten the effect. Back in the studio, with Martin perched on a wooden stool in front of the piano, they belted it out, following an arrangement John and Paul had concocted on their guitars. Engineer Norman Smith, who was standing over the mixer, did a double-take as they turned up the juice. Earlier he had spotted the lyrics on the music stand and felt his heart sink. As he later relayed to Mark Lewisohn: “ ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I thought[,] Oh my God, what a lyric! This is going to be one that I do not like.”
In fact, there was something for everyone in the lyric, though nothing grabbed listeners as much as the performance. The Beatles sing “She Loves You” with such conviction and with such energy that for the brief time it lasts—considerably less than two and a half minutes—they create a groove that is not only completely irresistible but also quintessential. What the Beatles built into the song provided, for them, a perfect, lasting image: the yeah-yeah-yeahs and the falsetto ooooos (when performing this, they shook their heads in unison, setting off rapturous shrieks from the fans) became iconic symbols. No matter how their music evolved, no matter how they experimented with complex musical textures and electronics, it is hard to think of the Beatles today without visualizing them as four grinning mop tops positioned in that classic stage pose—the guitars riding high on their chests, drumsticks rhythmically pummeling the cymbals—singing, “And you know you should be glad: oooooooo,” with a decisive shake of their beautiful hair. Nothing identifies them more vividly.
When the second Vee-Jay single, “From Me to You,” was released, American disc jockeys ignored it completely—a silence even more devastating than scorn. “No one played it; they thought it was a dud,” says Paul Marshall, who brokered the deal. Now, with a third record due out, Marshall went back to Capitol Records. Capitol usually offered a song and dance to soften the rejection of an English act, but this time the pass was brutally direct. Dave Dexter proclaimed the Beatles “stone-cold dead in the U.S. marketplace.” Capitol wasn’t interested in the slightest—not now, not in the foreseeable future.
Without even Vee-Jay as a backup (the label was reorganizing in the wake of its economic bungle), the Beatles were without hope of an American release. In the meantime, Roland Rennie approached an acquaintance named Bernie Binnick, who owned a small Philadelphia label, Swan Records. Swan, which had cobbled together a few hits with teen star Freddy Cannon, didn’t even register on Billboard’s national radar screen. But Rennie was desperate, and the price was right—“They didn’t pay anything to license it,” he recalls. “They just guaranteed to put the bloody thing out, as a favor to us”—which, though less than idyllic, at least assured the Beatles that “She Loves You” would get a fighting chance.
Days before “She Loves You” was due to be released, NME calculated that three Liverpool groups—the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas—were responsible for sales amounting to more than 2.5 million records. Numbers like that left the Beatles dazed, in a state of euphoria. Only nine months before, they were still hustling for £10 gigs in Liverpool, hoping against all odds just to make a record. “Sometimes, you know, I feel as if there’s nothing I’d like better than to get back to the kind of thing we were doing a year ago,” Paul mused in the midst of the hot summer tour. “Just playing the Cavern and some of the other places around Liverpool. I suppose the rest of the lads feel that way at times, too. You feel as if you’d like to turn back the clock.” If that was even remotely feasible before, all bets were off the moment “She Loves You” hit the airwaves.
Unlike any of the band’s previous records, “She Loves You” touched off a nationwide reaction the press immediately dubbed “Beatles fever.” Before the record was even released, Parlophone had advance orders for “a staggering 235,000” copies—figures “so enormous” that even EMI was impressed. No act in corporate memory had ever spurred such demand. And suddenly everything the Beatles did resonated with meaning. Both music papers—Melody Maker and NME—interviewed them ceaselessly, hanging on every word, as did a dozen or more radio personalities on Britain’s top-rated shows. The Beatles, eager to please, did their part. They responded perceptively and with unguarded enthusiasm, supplying insights on everything from the details of their early career to their most personal habits. But mostly their conversations were filled with the chatter of young men awestruck by the general good luck that had befallen them. Beyond the burdens of touring and songwriting, Paul mooned about go-karting, Ringo discussed his special knack for dancing and dreams of one day opening a string of ladies’ hairdressing salons, John fantasized about writing books before tackling a West End musical, and George confessed to sloth, admitting that his idea of “the life” wasn’t so much about fame as it was “sitting round a big fire with [his] slippers on and watching the telly.” Intuitive, inventive, and taken with the sound of their own voices, the Beatles developed a penchant for delivering folksy generalities that helped create accessible images of familiarity. “I’m not really interested in sport… except for swimming,” Paul told a reporter. “But that’s the thing these hot days, isn’t it? It really cools you off.”
The first two weeks of September were as much a whirlwind as anything the Beatles had ever experienced. From London, where they prerecorded sessions for an upcoming BBC radio special called Pop Go the Beatles, the path zigzagged aimlessly between mid-size cities, from Worcester to Taunton and then Luton, hitting converted cinemas along the Gaumont and Odeon chains. Then they played the ABC Theatre in Blackpool for the second time in little more than a month before turning around and heading right back to London.
Brian had managed to slip in a few midday sessions at Abbey Road studios so the Beatles could make headway on their second album. Previously, they’d recorded a slew of standout covers—“You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Money,” “Devil in Her Heart,” “Till There Was You,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Please Mr. Postman,” songs they’d been playing for years—along with two exciting Lennon-McCartney originals, “It Won’t Be Long” and “All My Loving,” the latter of which Paul had written on a piano immediately before a gig at a Moss Empire theater. Now they were set to round things off a bit, with the first song ever written by George, “Don’t Bother Me,” and two numbers originally earmarked for Ringo—“Little Child” and “I Wanna Be Your Man.”
Things were kept “fairly simple” for Ringo. By design, he had to sing from behind the drums, so the overall arrangement couldn’t be too demanding. Besides, Ringo “didn’t have a large vocal range,” Paul recalled, to say nothing of his concentration. “If he couldn’t mentally picture [the song], you were in trouble.” But neither Paul nor John was deterred by Ringo’s shortcomings. He was too likable, too amusing, not at all self-indulgent, and he appreciated their efforts on his behalf. These latest songs were a further indication of their affection for Ringo—their commitment to giving him more of the spotlight—though at the last minute John claimed the vocal on “Little Child” for himself and they fairly gave away “I Wanna Be Your Man” to the Rolling Stones.
On September 10, John and Paul encountered publicist Andrew Oldham in London’s West End. The boys had been on the way to Dick James’s office, window-shopping on Jermyn Street in an area overrun with music stores that Paul referred to as their “Mecca,” when a taxi drew up carrying the Rolling Stones’ snarky manager.* Oldham was on his way to Studio 51 in Soho, where the Stones were rehearsing, and he invited the two Beatles to attend. During the cab ride over, he casually let drop that the Stones were looking for a follow-up to their first single—a half-assed cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On”—and wondered if they had any suggestions. Left unsaid, but certainly understood, was the preference for a Lennon-McCartney number.
Not more than a few minutes later, Paul recalled telling Mick, “Well, Ringo’s got this track on our album, but it won’t be a single and it might suit you guys.” John didn’t flinch. He regarded “I Wanna Be Your Man” as “a throwaway,” but even at that point it was still basically a work in progress. Paul had come up with a lick—“I want to be your lover, baby, I want to be your man”—and little more. They played what they had for the Stones—John used Keith’s guitar and Paul turned Bill Wyman’s bass upside down—who were immediately intrigued. The song had their name written all over it, a stylish, bluesy vamp they could “Diddley up” when it came time to put their stamp on it. John recalled: “So Paul and I just went off in the corner of the room and finished the song while we were all still there, talking.”
The donation was both friendly and strategic. For John and Paul, songs were like currency. Every solid cover boosted their fame and fortune and allowed them to reap the benefits and lay back a little when their own singles began the slow slide down the polls. On almost any given week, one could flip through the pages of Melody Maker or New Musical Express and discover ads for records by, say, Tommy Quickly that carried the tagline: “Another Smash Hit from the Sensational Song Writing Team John Lennon and Paul McCartney.” Or an item that announced NEWLEY WAXES BEATLES’ TUNE. After a stunning string of Beatles hits, Beatles songs became a sort of status symbol.
Of course, the more famous the Beatles became, the more other bands greedily sought out Lennon-McCartney songs. Whereas John, Paul, and George once raked record stacks for undiscovered gems by Barrett Strong, James Ray, or Arthur Alexander, now mavericks combed the Beatles’ singles for B-sides they could hijack. Friends, eager to ride their coattails, routinely asked for spare songs, to the point where John and Paul grew guarded about their former generosity. Billy Kramer recalls an occasion in Bournemouth when he overheard John working on an early version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “Can I have that song?” Kramer asked, having instantly recognized its potential, to which John shook his head emphatically and replied, “No, we’re going to do that ourselves.”
On September 15, 1963, the Stones opened for the Beatles at the Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The show was a milestone of sorts for both bands. An upscale benefit for the Printers’ Pension Corporation, the theater hosted a formally dressed crowd of donors drawn from the upper crust of British society. Everyone was on his best behavior: the Beatles, gentlemen to the core, wore their fancy mohair suits, and the ever-scruffy Stones showed up in dark trousers, pale blue shirts with ties, and dark blue leather waistcoats that made them look like waiters from Le Caprice.
But when it came to music, no one held anything back. The Stones did what the Stones do best—they blew out the walls in a torrent of blues-inspired mayhem. As one reviewer recalled, “their act [was] fast, wound-up, explosive.” And the Beatles brought down the house. “The Royal Albert Hall fairly shook on its foundations,” reported a cultural magazine that covered the gig. Nothing remained intact once the bands took the stage, least of all the dignity of the fancy-dress crowd, which lost control of themselves, whistling and screaming like giddy teenagers.
It was the first of many such extraordinary events that would be repeated during the coming years. “We were like kings of the jungle then,” John remembered, seeing tony London at his feet. The scene dwarfed any dream they’d had in their heads all these years. Paul was especially impressed by the magnificence—and the glory. Before the show, the two bands were herded up a wide set of marble stairs at the back of the hall, facing Prince Consort Road, for a photo op. In the late afternoon, with sunlight sifting in through the mullioned windows, Paul remembers looking over at the others, beaming in their smart, stylish clothes, and thinking, “This is it! London! The Albert Hall!” Years later he would admit to the thrill it gave him, standing there with the other boys, the world seemingly at their fingertips. “We felt like gods!” he said. “We felt like fucking gods!”
Little did he realize that this was just the beginning.