Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  One of Brian’s big industry mistakes was approaching Dick James, an ex-crooner, to discuss the Beatles’ publishing. “Love Me Do” and “PS I love You,” the Beatles’ first record, was on Parlophone and, before Brian was sure what “music publishing” meant (he thought it meant printing up sheet music, such as the music he sold in his stores) the publishing had been given to Ardmore and Beechwood. Both Parlophone and A & B were EMI subsidiaries. Brian still didn’t know that publishing potentially represented millions of pounds, dollars, marks and yen collected from around the world. Publishing wasn’t just pages of printed sheet music anymore, it was royalties from the song, from the record and from radio plays. In the latter case, the Performing Rights Society (PRS) collected royalties in the U.K. and the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) collected royalties in the U.S. and passed them on.

  Brian wasn’t happy with A & B. He decided to shop around a bit before he offered the rest of the Beatles’ publishing to them. He asked George Martin who else there was. George wasn’t supposed to send people to their rivals, but he suggested Dick James. He had produced “Garden of Eden,” Dick James’s hit record on Parlophone, which had gone to number eighteen in the charts. Dick was not anyone’s idea of a pop star. His only other claim to fame so far had been singing the theme song (also produced by George) to the popular television serial Robin Hood on ITV. He was Brian’s age but was stout and balding and looked far older. He had finally seen the writing on the wall and knocked his abortive quest for pop fame on the head in order to become a music publisher. He had opened a small walk-up office on Tin Pan Alley (Denmark Street) on the corner of the Charing Cross Road and, for his first deal, had signed up none other than George Martin with an instrumental called “Double Scotch”: No. 001 in his catalogue. Now he was twiddling his thumbs, waiting for someone else, someone big, to walk up the stairs.

  George said, “Dick James is hungry and will work hard for you.” Then he picked up the phone and made an appointment for Brian to meet him the next morning after he had been to A & B. Brian went to A & B on time, but the manager, Syd Coleman, was late and the door remained locked. After waiting for half an hour, Brian was extremely angry and stormed off. He went straight along Oxford Street to Denmark Street and arrived half an hour early for his appointment with Dick James. Brian was pleased to find him already in, seated at his desk and looking busy. Perhaps this was the kind of man he could do business with.

  It’s said that the devil not only has a silver tongue, but that he also comes in many disguises. It is also said that he has all the best tunes—and he got ’em when nobody was looking. Dick already had a cunning plan to land this Liverpool sardine seated before him. He took Brian’s acetate and played “Please Please Me” and his mouth fell open theatrically. Think Jack Benny playing a music publisher for the cameras. “This is wonderful, a number-one hit,” he enthused. “I can get your boys on TV.”

  Now it was time for Brian’s mouth to fall open, because Dick had seen him coming and set up an ambush at the end of the alley in the shape of a phone call to Philip Jones, a producer friend of his, in charge of Thank Your Lucky Stars, a big pop music TV show. The producer agreed at once to have the Beatles on. This would be their first time on national TV and as Dick had intended, Brian was very impressed with the bait. The fish was hooked.

  Dick opened his palms and said earnestly, “We’d like to publish. Have you got anymore good tunes?”

  Brian, still with the mind-set of publishing meaning sheet music, and who had never heard of the monies that came back from deejays’ needle time from all the broadcasts in all the gin joints in all the world, agreed that indeed his boys had several good tunes. The deal they discussed was remarkable, given that highway robbery was not on Brian’s agenda. They would set up Northern Songs, 49 percent of which would be split between John, Paul (20 percent each) and Brian (9 percent), while Dick James and his silent partner, a city accountant named Charles Silver, would get 51 percent—after taking 10 percent off the top for administration. Today, publishers pay songwriters millions for their publishing. In that sleazy little office in Tin Pan Alley, Brian agreed to sell out the Beatles’ early catalogue for nothing, and what’s more, he didn’t go away and ask for advice before agreeing to the terms. He blindly believed everything that Dick James told him and thought he was lucky to have found him.

  At the end of the long meeting, Dick said, “Did you eat yet?” and they went off to lunch in Soho.

  “Please Please Me” was released in January 1963 and was a number-one hit. A few weeks later, on the evening of February 22, a strange cloak-and-dagger scene took place in Brian’s Falkner Street flat between John, Paul and Brian and Dick James, who had gone up to Liverpool for the day. Brian described Dick to the boys as “an expert in the business.” Paul and John didn’t have a clue about the hidden fortune that was to be found in songs. Like Paul’s dad, who actually had composed a song but didn’t take it seriously, they were happy to sing them. They had no idea that by so casually giving away 51 percent of their copyrights they were about to make someone incredibly wealthy—wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Within eighteen months, Dick James would go from a tiny walk-up in Tin Pan Alley to an entire block on New Oxford Street.

  As the Beatles themselves readily admitted, such was their utter faith in Brian that they never read a single contract he gave them to sign. That evening with Dick James, Paul and John were tired and running late to play at the Oasis Club in Manchester, so they signed, shook hands all round and left almost on the run to join us there, where I had already set up the equipment in readiness. The deejay for the evening was Dave Travis and he spun discs and kept the chat going until the boys arrived.

  There is a strange little postscript to the “Please Please Me” story. Norman Smith, the engineer at Abbey Road who had been so taken with the Beatles when they first recorded there, had a great sense of humor. It amused him that Decca had foolishly turned them down. He decided to play a mischievous little trick after they had their first number-one hit. “I couldn’t resist it,” he said, his eyes twinkling when he recounted the story. After the Beatles had recorded “Please Please Me” but before it was released, Norman had made up a name and sent a tape to Decca with a letter, asking for a deal. Once again, they turned down the Beatles.

  “What did they say?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “Just two words: ‘No thanks.’ But I don’t think their executives ever listened to the radio. They hadn’t a clue.” Norman went on to engineer thirteen number-one hits for the Beatles. As a further postscript, some years later, when his fiftieth birthday was approaching, surprising everyone, he suddenly made up his mind to achieve a long-held ambition. Yes, Norman—whom John used to call “Normal” and Paul called “2-DBs” after decibels—who had engineered so many hits for others, and who had even produced Pink Floyd, decided to be a pop star. He composed a song, threw up his prestigious position as head of Parlophone and changed his name from Norman to “Hurricane” Smith. His first song reached number two in the U.K., but his second one, “Oh Babe, What Do You Say,” knocked Elton John off the top of the U.S. charts. The icing on the cake was to be on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on his fiftieth birthday. It was a remarkable achievement, but Norman was always full of surprises.

  When they weren’t actually touring, the Beatles were able to maintain a little privacy. By the time they went into the studios to make their second album, With the Beatles, only a few hardcore fans camped outside. Even when they went into that first season of summer gigs at seaside resorts where they stayed in the same place for a week, it was still relatively peaceful. The idea of staying in one place during a nice English summer was great! We were like kids on holiday at Blackpool or Rhyl, paddling in the sea or swimming, strolling through town in late afternoon, eyeing the girls, going into arcades and playing pinball or shooting for a stuffed toy on the target range. In Jersey, local fans clustered at the theater, but mostly left the Beatles alone
during the day. The momentum was moving up a couple of gears, but the period of hiding in hotel rooms and assuming disguises every second of every day hadn’t yet arrived. Even running down the street to escape was still exhilarating and different. We just didn’t know how different it was to become. Mostly I remember how we all looked at each other and started laughing over nothing because life was so bizarre, so surreal. We would run along the beach and jump into the surf, laughing. It was crazy, blissful, a summer in a long dream.

  As time and their fame started to spread their freedom became restricted. It became impossible for them to escape, so most of the time they sat on the balconies of their hotel rooms, feet up on the railings, shades on, chatting about nothing very much. Weston Super Mare, scene of the famous photographs where they were snapped running and jumping along the beach in Victorian striped swimsuits, was a snatched moment of escapist fun.

  In the early days, Neil Aspinall drove and acted as roadie, until it became obvious that just one man out on the road with them wasn’t enough to control the increasingly hysterical crowds of girls, so Mal Evans drove the van with all the equipment and Neil drove the estate car in which the boys now traveled directly to gigs, or sometimes there was a tour bus. The tour bus was great because we had fun on it. It was like being in our own little space capsule, all friends together with a shared interest, surging from place to place with twenty or thirty musicians, a moveable feast that changed almost by the week. We’d play cards and sing songs in the back. Ringo was a great card player and generally won, but if money were bet, it was only pennies. It was like being on permanent holiday, broken each evening with a show.

  The Beatles’ very first proper U.K. theater tour—as in seated auditoriums—wasn’t until January of 1963, supporting Helen Shapiro and Kenny Lynch. Mostly, the venues were local ABCs and Gaumonts, places big enough to hold the anticipated crowds. On that first series of tours, there’d be Helen, the Shadows, Billy J. Kramer, the Dakotas and Billie Davis—a cute sixteen-year-old, managed by Stigwood, whose big hit “Tell Him” was in the top ten on the charts. The Beatles knew Billie from an early Top of the Pops and had fancied her then. On the tour all four of them—and I—pounced on Billie with lust in our minds and took bets on who would pull her. It became the tour mantra: “Who’s going to pull Billie Davis?” But Billie was madly in love with Jet Harris at the time and managed to evade our embarrassing pick-up lines.

  The next tour of twenty-four dates started almost immediately, with Tommy Roe and Chris Montez. “Please Please Me” had been huge but there was still no real hint of the hysteria that was to come. That happened about the time of the third tour—the Roy Orbison tour—which was in May and June of 1963. Brian didn’t allow the Beatles any respite. Between January and April 1963 he packed in three major tours. It was a very tight, exhausting schedule, but Brian was right to push so hard.

  Hysteria was a phenomenon that came from nowhere and shocked everyone with its power. Girls had screamed before, over Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard, and danced in the aisles to Jerry Lee Lewis, but it was different, more intense with the Beatles. The screaming had started on the first tour, with sporadic outbursts, but they were, after all, pop concerts. By the second tour, the girls screamed a little more, but it wasn’t until the third tour that they had learned to scream in earnest. To see three thousand almost deranged girls heading your way was quite terrifying.

  By the start of the third tour Roy Orbison had damaged his eyes and started wearing the dark glasses that became his trademark. The Beatles had released their third single, “From Me to You,” and they closed the first half of the concert. Brian’s new group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, opened the second half with “How Do You Do It,” which was top of the hit parade; then poor Roy Orbison had to follow as top of the bill. His act was all huge ballads, but he quickly found that you could not follow a screaming mass of hysterical Beatles fans with ballads and when the fans began to go seriously wild, he was screamed off the stage. After four or five days the running order was changed so that Orbison closed the first half and the Beatles closed the second half as top of the bill. Roy was relieved, annoyed and bemused, but he didn’t throw a tantrum. He was superb, an absolute Southern gentleman. Even on the coach he would stand until everyone had sat down. He’d been around long enough to have seen it all. He just bowed to the inevitable and got on with the show. A lovely man.

  The dream of being able to stroll through a seaside town and paddle in the sea unmolested ended when “She Loves You” came out. Then it all went ballistic. Beatlemania had arrived and it was scary. There was little to compare it to for the English press, except royal weddings and funerals, or the Cup Final. Still, that didn’t matter. They went at it as if they’d been waiting. The Beatles were front-page news every day for days and weeks on end. It was coats-over-the-head time. The police had to be notified when they were due to arrive in a town—or even if they were just going to be anywhere at all as a group. Official protection suddenly happened wherever they went, or there would be rioting. There was no option. At the very least they could be stripped naked and knocked unconscious with the sheer weight of numbers, or, worse, scalped.

  Celebrity security hadn’t been invented yet and no one knew how to deal with all this mania. Even at Cup Finals—the British version of the Superbowl—all they’d ever needed was a handful of police and the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade, both of which were now hopelessly inadequate in the face of the new fan. Suddenly the boys were coming up with funny disguises, like Peter Sellers in an Inspector Clouseau film, to fool the fans.

  The Beatles were now unstoppable. They got too big for a tour bus and had to be chauffeur-driven separately because the moment the coach was seen all hell broke loose. By the end of the so-called Roy Orbison tour it was screaming bedlam, even though the scenes of over fifty thousand screaming fans amassed together in the giant stadiums across the United States were still before them. The tour bus, with THE BEATLES written on the front like a destination, was constantly besieged. I can remember sitting inside, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of bodies and the screaming mouths.

  You could only get so close to an entrance to a theater—there would still be several yards of pavement to cross. The Beatles would psyche themselves up and take deep breaths before plunging into the frantic mob. They went past the joking stage of the early days when they compared it to a rugger scrum. To even open the door and run out became brave and foolhardy. In the end, the bus was mothballed, or used as a decoy. For the Beatles, even limousines were too vulnerable. They would arrive at gigs in police black Marias and ambulances and make a run for it as if in a hundred-yard dash with determined fans streaming in their wake.

  The disguises were necessary, but because it had never happened before the papers made a big feature of it. What would they show up in next? Disguised as what? The stories wrote themselves. Tradesmen with any kind of uniform doing their own everyday quiet minding-their-own-business thing anywhere near a Beatles concert were immediately under suspicion. They were leapt on, stripped. Was Paul underneath? Don’t ask! Get his clothes off! If it’s not Paul, Ringo might be in there. Oh, no! It really is a policeman. Most took it in good heart. After all, who gets manhandled by a gang of delirious young girls every day?

  As if attacked by a virus that changed their moral standards, teenage girls wanted sex with the Beatles and they didn’t care how they got it. When they tried to grab a live one, crawl through windows or hide in wardrobes, they were sorted out by Mal and Neil Aspinall like M&M’s, to be sampled and tasted first. Brian—who was puritanical where his protégés were concerned—would have had a fit had he only known, but he was kept totally in the dark.

  Big Mal was a demon for sex. His stamina would have been remarkable in a harem. In the flat, sooty back streets of Birmingham or Manchester, he was a stud straight from the Kama Sutra. Like sacrificial virgins, a lot of the girls willingly accepted that they would have to do it with Mal to get to John, Paul, George or Ringo,
and Mal knew it. Meanwhile at the hotel I would sleep blissfully on, tucked up in my little solitary bed and only hear about the goings on later from one of the boys, in the general chat and larking about in a hundred different dressing rooms.

  Looking back, it’s no good saying we had no idea of the full extent of the frenzy surrounding them, because as I’ve said, what was there to compare it to? People had heard about the “Bobbysoxers” who screamed at Sinatra or the scenes at Elvis gigs, but that was America where everything was always bigger, wilder, different. Nobody had ever witnessed that kind of thing in the United Kingdom or knew what to expect nor how to deal with it.

  After all, their first real theater gig, back in the autumn of ’62, had been that show in the one-horse town of Peterborough, supporting Frank Ifield, an Australian yodeller. The Beatles went on, did their little set. Nothing. Hardly a ripple. They didn’t mean anything to the audience. Polite applause. They came off, got in the van, went home. There were no reviews, no comments. In their wildest dreams they couldn’t have anticipated the difference those six short months would make to the rest of their lives.

  PART II

  London 1963–1966

  8

  As soon as the money started rolling in from nonstop touring in England—frequently cash stuffed in brown bags—Brian grasped his dream with both hands and opened offices in London in a bohemian (and relatively cheap) theater district, at 13 Monmouth Street, Covent Garden. These offices were small, with one purpose only: NEMS’s footprint in the capital. The day he walked in and claimed the offices, he appeared calm, but inwardly he was delirious with joy as he stood looking out of the window, contemplating the birth of his new empire in the capital. I think this was the moment he knew he had finally succeeded at something. During that transitional period, I spent all my time either with Brian in Liverpool and London, or traveling on the road with the Beatles.