by Bob Spitz
The result was an unqualified success. In no time, Brian built the record department from a nook in the ground floor into a solid, full-scale enterprise that challenged NEMS’ much larger and more well established competitors. It wasn’t location or floor space or special pricing that did the trick as much as it was Brian’s wide-eyed ambition. Instead of stocking a selection of current hits and staples, as was the custom among Liverpool’s retailers, he resolved to carry every record in print on demand, so as not to have to special-order one when a customer requested an obscure title. That meant keeping a huge inventory on hand, as well as a system for constantly updating it. Had he bothered to run this scheme past Harry, it is likely to have been dismissed as too speculative or grandiose. But as he was promised free rein—and seeing as his parents were reluctant to dampen his happiness—no effort was made to check the hasty growth, and as a result, the department expanded and flourished.
More important, Brian seemed to thrive in his new role. No one worked harder or showed more determination. Every minute of his day was given over to the demands of his precious record department. He ordered every record himself, stayed in contact with the major distributors in Manchester, trained and supervised the young staff, and handled the books. Along with Peter Brown, he even worked the counter on a regular basis. John Lennon’s boyhood friend Mike Rice, who worked at Martin’s Bank, where NEMS had its account, recalls how Brian was always at the store, always working no matter what the time of day. “My girlfriend and I would usually stay late in Liverpool, and walking past NEMS, we always saw him slaving away. It became a joke between us. We’d phone each other late at night and say, ‘I’ve just been past the record store and—he’s still there!’ ”
By the end of 1960, NEMS had become “the most important record outlet in Liverpool, if not the whole North of England.” Teenagers thronged the three stores each day to stay in the swing of things. Says Brown: “There was really no radio [for them] to listen to; the BBC didn’t play rock ’n roll and Radio Luxembourg was spotty. So, if these kids wanted to hear new music, they had to come in[to NEMS] and listen to it.”
Promoters were encouraged to put up posters in the stores, while NEMS always handled tickets to local events and sponsored transportation. For a teenager in Liverpool, NEMS was the pipeline for reliable information. Someone hanging out there always knew what was going on. And if all else failed, you could always go there to pick up a copy of Mersey Beat.
Mersey Beat was the brainchild of John’s art school mate Bill Harry, who’d been pasting up magazines since he was old enough to hold a pencil. Frank Hesselberg commissioned him to start a newsletter reporting on the local club scene, which they called Frank Comments. It folded after a few issues, but Harry wasn’t deterred. He made further half-baked attempts with Storyville and 52nd Street, to keep tabs on the jazz movement, but with dwindling financial support, they both lapsed into a precipitate decline.
He scrounged up another £50 from a friend and persuaded his girlfriend, Virginia, to leave her accounting job at Woolworth’s. Together, they rented attic space in a building on Renshaw Street, near the art college, and with a single Olivetti typewriter began compiling material for the first issue. Mersey Beat, which made its debut on July 6, 1961, broke no new ground as far as appearances went, looking too much like a dense student newspaper. But its copy leaped over a cliff. No one in the North had devoted more than a line or two to rock ’n roll, and here was a whole magazine full of the stuff. A grainy picture of Gene Vincent grinning graced the cover, along with an article about “Swinging Cilla,” a local, throaty-voiced girl named Cilla White who sang on and off with the Dominoes, Hurricanes, and the Big Three.* And most peculiar, and perhaps just the irreverent edge Harry was striving for, a disjointed piece of nonsense called “Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles” as “Translated from the John Lennon.”
Harry cranked out a print run of five thousand and hit the streets running. Most newsagents and bookshops agreed to sell his funky rag, but only one or two copies each. (He split the cover price – threepence a copy—with the retailer.) At the Whitechapel branch of NEMS, Harry asked to see the manager and was shown directly into Brian Epstein’s office. “He looked extremely smart, was very polite, talked posh—everything about him was precise and impressive,” Harry recalls. “Straightaway, he agreed to take a dozen copies of [Mersey Beat].”
Brian was waiting when Harry returned the next week to collect the receipts. “I can’t understand it,” he told Bill, pointing to the empty paper bin near the counter. “They sold out in a day. Next time, I’ll take twelve dozen copies.” Harry was stunned, but not as much as Brian was when the second issue sold out. Harry arrived at NEMS at noon with the next allotment and kids were queued up, waiting for it. He had a phenomenon on his hands.
“The next week,” Harry recalls, “[Brian] invited me upstairs to his office and offered me a sherry. I thought: how civilized of him.” Civilized indeed, but with an underlying purpose. “He wanted to know all about what was happening—who was buying the newspaper and what the music scene was like in Liverpool.” The front page was devoted to a breaking story: BEATLES SIGN RECORDING CONTRACT! accompanied by an Astrid Kirchherr photograph of the band. “This is actually in Liverpool?” Brian marveled, thumbing through Mersey Beat. “Who are all these groups?” He couldn’t get over it.
When the third issue appeared, it carried a new column—“Record Releases by Brian Epstein of NEMS”—that flaunted his newly acquired enlightenment about Liverpool’s beat music scene, gleaned almost verbatim from the pages of Mersey Beat. Eventually, he got around to the question that would change everything. Sitting owl-eyed across from Bill Harry, he held up a page of Mersey Beat and wondered: “What about these Beatles?”
What about these Beatles?
Legend has it that Brian stumbled inadvertently over the Beatles when folk hero Raymond Jones confronted him at the NEMS counter sometime on October 28, 1961, and demanded a copy of “My Bonnie.” In his autobiography, Brian wrote: “The name ‘Beatle’ meant nothing to me…. I had never [before] given a thought to any of the Liverpool beat groups then up and coming [sic] in the cellar clubs.” It made for nice copy later, when the press began to call, but as far as the truth went, it was hogwash.
Epstein knew all about the Beatles from his careful scrutiny of Mersey Beat, and what that didn’t tell him, Billy Harry did. What’s more, there were posters plastered everywhere around NEMS announcing various Beatles appearances. “He would have had to have been blind—or ignorant—not to have noticed their name,” Harry contends. Besides, his salesgirls knew the Beatles and made a fuss over them when they came into the store.
A month or two later, interrupting a routine inventory at NEMS, Brian confronted an unsuspecting Alistair Taylor. “Do you remember that record by a band called the Beatles?” he asked out of the blue. Taylor had, indeed; “My Bonnie” enjoyed an embarrassment of sales and was constantly on reorder. “They’re playing at this place called the Cavern. We ought to go see them.”
Without further delay, Brian phoned Bill Harry at the Mersey Beat office. “The Beatles are at the Cavern,” he said. “Could you arrange for me to go and see them?”
What an odd request, Harry mused. No one needed help getting into the Cavern, especially for a lunchtime session; all you had to do was stand in line and pay the shilling. But he recognized Brian’s appetite for protocol. A call to Ray McFall, placed by an intermediary such as Bill, would set Brian apart from the hoi polloi. With his perfectly sculpted hair, his blue, pin-striped suit furling like drapery, and of course a black, calf-skinned briefcase clutched rather powerfully in his hand, he’d stride into the club as if he owned the place.
Any suspicions Harry had about Brian Epstein’s motives were no longer in doubt.
[II]
In early October, shortly before John’s twenty-first birthday, he had received a £100 gift from his aunt Elizabeth (whom John called Mater) in Scotl
and and had taken off with Paul for a spontaneous two-week jaunt. A letter from Stuart had indicated that their exi buddy Jürgen Vollmer now lived in Paris, working as an assistant to photographer William Klein. When John and Paul turned up unannounced outside his tiny hotel on the rue de Beaune, Vollmer was thrilled to see them, delighted that they had come, as they’d explained, to hang out and soak up whatever it was that made him unique. One of those idiosyncrasies was his groovy clothing. Even in Hamburg, they’d known of Vollmer’s frequent excursions to the Paris flea markets, where he put together that wardrobe. Now, they encountered him wearing bell-bottoms a good five years before the rest of the world would catch the trend. That look wouldn’t fly in Liverpool, where sailors were derided unmercifully for their flared legs. But the Beatles bought corduroy jackets, wide-striped “grandfather” shirts, and the sleeveless sweaters that were staples of the Left Bank exis.
“I showed them all the places where I hung out with the artistic crowd,” Vollmer remembered. They couldn’t take their eyes off these people, who seemed so exotic and fascinating, even more so than the colorful Hamburg natives. Finally, after a few days on the prowl, John and Paul asked for a special favor. “We want our hair like you have it,” they said.
In a room at the back of the Hôtel de Beaune, John and Paul sat patiently, nervously, on an unmade bed while Jürgen took a pair of scissors to their greasy manes. According to Vollmer, “I cut their hair [so that it was] more to the side, [although] forward nevertheless, until it looked like mine.” Hardly bowl-shaped, it was sleek and soft-looking, swept to one side, with the hint of a tail that bounced delicately on their shoulders. The Beatles had always possessed half of the equation. Now the whole package was in place.
No one was more surprised than Alistair Taylor when Brian invited him to see the Beatles at the Cavern. He’d been in that dungeon before—“dozens of times”—when it was a jazz club. “We both detested pop music,” Taylor recalls. “The music was totally alien to us. Even though we’d sold all those records [of “My Bonnie”], neither of us played it, nor particularly liked it.”
Brian had no idea how to get to the Cavern, even though it was two hundred yards from NEMS. And once inside, he was awestruck. “It was nothing like what we’d expected,” Taylor remembers. “The place was packed and steam was rolling down the walls. The music was so loud, we couldn’t hear ourselves think.” Both men were uncomfortable in ways that had nothing to do with the physical surroundings. “We were way out of our element. We were both in suits and ties, everyone was staring at us. We were very self-conscious.”
To make themselves less conspicuous, Brian and Alistair took seats near the back. Both men sat stiffly, with their hands folded across their chests. And the band—why, they were shocking, disgraceful. “They could barely play,” Taylor says, “and they were deafening and so unprofessional—laughing with the girls, smoking onstage, and sipping from Cokes during their act. But absolutely magic! The vibe they generated was just unbelievable.” Halfway through the set, he glanced over at Brian and noticed they both were doing the same thing: tapping their hands on their legs.
Afterward, the Beatles disappeared into “a broom cupboard” at the side of the stage. Brian looked reassuringly at Alistair. “Well, that’s it,” he said. “We’ll go have some lunch now. But… let’s just go and say hello to them.”
As Epstein and Taylor made their way to the front, Bob Wooler announced their presence and asked the kids to give them a hand. Wooler didn’t know Brian, other than having seen him “hovering around the counter at NEMS,” but he sensed this Cavern appearance was something significant. Only a few days before, while negotiating a fee for the Beatles with promoter Brian Kelly, Wooler got a taste of the band’s surging popularity. Discussing a contract, Kelly had grumbled bitterly about paying their £10 7s. fee. “Then, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Brian, but they want double that from now on. I’ve been told they’re going for fifteen pounds.” Kelly was irate. “I’m not going to pay those fuckers fifteen pounds!” he screamed. “They’re not worth it.” Wooler disagreed: “You’ve got to book them, Brian, and you’ll have to pay them what they want.” And Kelly did.
No one so much as got up to greet Epstein when he edged inside the bandroom. They knew who he was, however, having drawn his ire on several occasions for loitering in NEMS’ listening booths. George decided to give him a friendly tweak. “And what brings Mr. Epstein here?” he asked, smirking and thickening his Scouse accent.
Brian didn’t notice—or wouldn’t give George the satisfaction. Flashing his tightest, most professional smile, he replied: “We just popped in to say hello. I enjoyed your performance.” He introduced Alistair, who nodded stiffly. “Well done, then. Good-bye.” And they left.
Neither Brian nor Alistair said a word to each other all the way to Peacock’s, in Hackins Hey. Both men were puzzling over the bizarre experience, and besides, their ears were pounding: neither of them could hear. The restaurant was crowded. It was a businessman’s hangout and a welcome sight; it went without saying, they felt more comfortable around people who looked and acted their age. After being seated and ordering drinks, Brian asked Alistair for his opinion. Taylor, a notorious yes-man, was honest. He thought the Beatles were “absolutely awful,” but admitted there was something “remarkable” about them, something he couldn’t quite put into words.
Brian’s reaction made Alistair uncomfortable. “He stared at me for the longest time, with a tight little smile on his lips,” Taylor remembers. “It seemed like he was going to burst. Finally, he blurted out: ‘I think they’re tremendous!’ ”
Taylor found this admission “very odd.” Brian wasn’t at all the kind of person who showed emotion in front of the help, especially over something as superficial as a rock ’n roll band. It wouldn’t be the proper thing to do. But as they talked more about the Beatles—and that was the only thing they discussed throughout lunch—a consensus arose that the band, and even pop music in general, had something extraordinary to offer, something they’d overlooked before and that now demanded their involvement. “We laughed at how both of us had been converted—like that—to the pop world,” Taylor recalls. It felt refreshing, they admitted, to have been among kids who were intoxicated by music. And all that power and excitement—while neither man professed to understand it, they’d been nonetheless moved.
They were still laughing and a bit flushed from drink when Brian called for the check. Then, out of nowhere, he grabbed Alistair by the arm and said, “Do you think I should manage them?”
Chapter 15 A Gigantic Leap of Faith
[I]
As word spread about the Beatles, Liverpool’s music-minded teenagers reached for their own piece of the rock, with new bands forming at the rate of three or four a week. The Cavern, always besieged by hopefuls, was suddenly awash with young, mop-topped rockers angling for a showcase in the dark, dingy, sweaty-hot cellar. On any given day, Ray McFall was inundated by bands with the most “delicious-sounding” names: Wump and His Werbles, the Kruzads, Gerry Bach and the Beathovens, Liam and the Invaders, Abraham and His Lot, Ray Satan and the Devils, San Quentin and the Rock Pounders, Rip Van Winkle and the Rip-It-Ups, Dean Stacey and the Dominators, the Big Three, the L’il Three, the Four Just Men, Eddy Falcon and the Vampires, Danny and the Hi-Cats, Dino and the Wild Fires…
Rummaging through the pages of Mersey Beat revealed a similar euphonious constituency: Ian and the Zodiacs, Karl Terry and the Cruisers, Pete Picasso and the Rock Sculptors (really!), Steve and the Syndicate, Dee Fenton and the Silhouettes, Ken Dallas and the Silhouettes, the Spidermen, the Cyclones, the Undertakers, Nero and the Gladiators, Alby and the Sorrals, the Press Gang, the Pressmen, Earl Preston and the TTs, the Morockans, Eddie Dean and the Onlookers, the Landslides…
Slightly over three hundred rock ’n roll bands combed the city for gigs, more than three times the number of the previous winter, before the Beatles’ phenomenal debut at Litherland Town Hall. Every lunch
time was a picnic, every night another party. It didn’t matter how professional you sounded or how nimbly you handled a riff as long as the audience was happy. (And that didn’t take much.) Bands played what they wanted; shared material, equipment, and personnel; referred one another to gigs; passed lazy afternoons talking shop. Neither jealousies nor egos interfered with the spirit of friendly competition. A few star attractions seemed to have cornered the market on paying gigs, but anyone who showed talent was welcomed into the fold. The sense of community was that strong.
But all that was about to change.
For Brian Epstein, putting the Beatles out of his mind should have been easy. He already had enough on his plate at NEMS. Harry had ceded almost all responsibility to his capable sons. The three record departments were booming. Conceivably, there was incentive enough to open more NEMS stores, perhaps a string of them across the North of England and beyond. Brian was sitting on a potential retail empire. All he had to do was concentrate on the work.
But that had become next to impossible. According to Alistair Taylor, Brian was “besotted” the minute he saw the Beatles. He couldn’t stay away from them. At lunchtime, instead of joining his father and brother at a restaurant, as had been their daily custom, Brian pulled off his tie and headed straight for the Cavern. He’d stand by himself at the back of the cellar, underneath the middle archway, starry-eyed, clearly entranced by the performance. The whole atmosphere captivated him. It wasn’t just opportunity knocking, the chance to cash in on a phenomenon. To a young man who had been struggling his entire life to fit in, tormented by insecurity and shame, this was Shangri-la. Here, you could be whatever you wished, you could act on your impulses, be as reckless as your heart desired. Brian may not have looked or dressed like these kids, but he responded to the turbulence, the sexual tension, and uninhibitedness of their scene. He wasn’t an outcast here. Here, he was the great Oz.