by Bob Spitz
The Beatles were genuinely happy to see Stuart. There were no hard feelings over his departure from the band—only relief, on both sides—and even Paul seemed to forget past grievances during their reunion at Ye Cracke. It was apparent from the conversation that Stuart had become very much at peace with his newfound life in Germany. Music was behind him now (although he would later occasionally sit in with local bands). The Beatles were his mates, and he remained their undying fan. But as mates, they’d revealed themselves in ways that had demonstrated frightening judgment. He warned his sister to exercise the “good sense to keep away from the Beatles because they’re a bad lot, completely lacking in moral fiber.”
[III]
From the start, the would-be dress designer and store-window stylist marked the Beatles for a makeover, an effort to present them properly and “to smarten them up” for discriminating audiences. Leather and jeans were fine for the Cavern, Brian argued, but the gatekeepers of the entertainment establishment they hoped to conquer would never look twice at them.
He was horribly wrong, of course—and horribly right. To Brian, Elvis may have been the epitome, but not the old Elvis, with his greasy hair, swivel hips, and sharkskin snarl. No, since Elvis had been discharged from the army, he’d turned over a new leaf. The new Elvis, in his toned-down civilian apparel, resembled Cliff Richard, of all people, and had waded so far into the mainstream that for the next ten years he’d languish as a Las Vegas act.
But that suited Brian just fine. What did he know of Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, or Jerry Lee Lewis? He may have sold their records at NEMS, but that didn’t make them household names. The real stars, to Brian, weren’t rock ’n rollers but pop stars: Ricky Nelson, Connie Francis, Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka, performers who understood the conventions of show business and were willing to adapt their images—and music—accordingly. They’d wind up with longevity.
For almost a month now, Brian had watched the Beatles’ performance with rising disappointment. His eye was drawn to their reckless behavior onstage, and not just the smoking and drinking, which were bad enough, but the way they sequenced a set of songs. Anyone who yelled out a request was granted his wish, even in the middle of another song. Often they’d just stop dead and launch into something else. There was no rhyme or reason to what they played and, therefore, no logical pacing. Having gone to drama school, Brian appreciated the beauty of building an act, controlling the ebb and flow of material, working the crowd toward a rousing climax. In the Beatles’ case, that meant getting from “Hippy Hippy Shake” to “What’d I Say” and, later, “Twist and Shout,” which always brought down the house. Too often, however, they got lost in between and blew the payoff. Not only amateurish, he maintained, but self-defeating.
This was a brave tack for a new manager with no points in the plus column, and even braver because, as the Beatles saw it, whatever they were doing seemed to be working onstage. The kids loved them, no matter what they did. Besides, real rock ’n roll wasn’t orderly, it wasn’t slick. Perhaps Brian didn’t appreciate that.
In a similar situation, John might have told a critic to fuck off, especially someone so glaringly “one of them.” But Brian’s outright admiration and straight speaking enabled him to make a convincing case, and when he spoke that way the Beatles listened. He insisted on some ground rules. From now on, eating onstage was out; so was smoking and punching one another, cursing, chatting up girls, taking requests, and sleeping. Lateness would no longer be tolerated. Brian expected everyone to show up on time and be ready to play, and he promised to print up a weekly list of gigs, along with addresses and fees, and provide copies for each of the Beatles in advance. To ensure there would be no slipups, he liaised with Pete’s mate Neil Aspinall, who was acting as driver and roadie for the band. In addition to the above, the Beatles were required to post their set lists beforehand and—this provoked heated debate—bow after each number. And not just a casual nod—a big, choreographed bow, which, by a silent count, was delivered smartly and on cue.
“Brian believed that would be very good for us,” Paul explained, “and I was also a great believer in that.” Bowing made sense, he reasoned, because it showed some polish on the Beatles’ part. It set them apart from the other bands. Later on, he would convince the others of the wisdom in wearing suits—and courting the press. “Paul was Mr. Show Business,” says Bill Harry. “Everything he did was calculated to promote the group.” John, on the other hand, greeted each concession, each nod to conformity, with unmasked hostility. He hated pandering, no matter how advantageous it might seem, and made no bones about it. When he felt threatened by Paul, he lashed out viciously—not necessarily at the target of his anger, nor with regard for the consequences—until the rage subsided.
That was the intricate nature of the band. It put Paul and John at cross-purposes, terrific cross-purposes, that would grow in intensity over the years. Passing was the perfect harmony that marked their songwriting relationship. In its place was a distinction so contrary, a conflict so profound, that the friction it produced built up an armor. Both men schemed aggressively to impose their vision on the Beatles. Always there was Paul’s need to smooth the rough edges and John’s need to rough them up. Somehow, it drove them to fertile middle ground. But the constant compromise was ultimately a debilitating position, and the balance on both sides could not be sustained forever.
The last two months of 1961 made enormous demands on the Beatles’ time. They were booked solid, six days a week, two—and occasionally three—shows a day. They played civil-service clubs, jive halls, charity shows, and guest nights; they continued appearing at the low-paying Cavern lunchtime sessions; they even put in time at the Casbah, which still drew modest crowds to Pete’s basement. Restless and itching to push beyond Liverpool, hoping to attract big-time attention, they accepted a booking in the South floated by a wily, energetic promoter named Sam Leach. Aldershot was an army-barracks town about thirty miles outside of London with “a nice old ballroom suited to hold three hundred people.” But when they got there, they found neither a single London agent in the house nor much of a crowd to speak of; only a dozen or so uninterested people showed up. The Beatles went through the motions anyway, then wound down the night dancing with one another and playing Ping-Pong.
On the way back to Liverpool, tired and depressed, the band put Leach from their minds and struck up a familiar refrain that had carried them through the doldrums in Hamburg. Affecting the accent of an American announcer, John would blare: “Where are we going, boys?”
“To the top, Johnny! To the top!” they’d answer in unison.
“And where is the top?” he persisted.
“The toppermost of the poppermost!”
The toppermost of the poppermost. Convinced that they were on the right track, the Beatles saw only one barrier remaining between them and the possibility of real stardom: a recording contract with a major label. It was their ticket out of the provinces, and it was so close, they believed, they could almost taste it.
Chapter 16 The Road to London
[I]
For a man who prized great recordings and traded in the hits of the day, it seems odd that Brian Epstein had never set foot inside of a record company. There had never before been incentive—nor, for that matter, invitation—for a representative of NEMS to go to the source. To a record company, NEMS was merely another of its accounts, and while it was a luminous one—the North Star, so to speak, in the galaxy of provincial retail outlets—all business with merchants was conducted through distributors located in Manchester. The London offices—the labels themselves—were reserved for the talent, a word construed to describe not only singers and musicians but also the A&R staff, producers, publicists, and marketing flacks.
Tony Barrow was hardly older than twenty when Brian Epstein strode into his office. A graduate of the Merchant Taylors’ School just outside of Liverpool, in Crosby, he went into the record business in 1957 at the unlikely age of seventeen,
writing a review column that appeared weekly in the Echo. Pop music was a complete mystery to the newspaper’s editors in those days; the idiom and its slang weren’t serious enough to warrant their hard-hitting brand of journalism. Barrow not only spoke the language, he could write pretty decent copy. But while the Echo deeded precious space to “a schoolboy,” it refused to admit as much in print, insisting instead that his column appear under the nom de plume “Disker.”
In one of those wonderful ironies that cater to legend, Disker became Brian Epstein’s oracle. Each week, before placing the NEMS record order, Brian consulted the column for tips about upcoming releases, and thanks to the generosity of Disker’s insight, he cashed in on many a hit that might otherwise have slipped past him. Disker was his trusty link to the trade, and therefore it was to the visionary Disker he wrote in December 1961 about his exciting new venture. “I have this fabulous group called the Beatles,” the letter began. “Will you write about them in the Echo?”
By this time, Barrow had moved to London, where he was working for Decca, churning out sleeve copy for the backside of album covers. “I was still writing the Disker column,” he recalls, “and was offended by Brian’s misconception of it. ‘Don’t you read the column?’ I wrote back rather stiffly. ‘I don’t write about local bands.’ ” Dismissively, he referred Brian to another Echo columnist—a lackluster “diarist,” or feature writer, named, quite coincidentally, George Harrison—but doubted that anything would come of it. Still, he ended his response on an upbeat note: “Keep me posted, because the moment they’ve got a record, I’ll certainly do something on it.”
A week later Brian turned up in London on the doorstep of his one and only Decca contact. He had come on short notice, he explained, to pick Tony Barrow’s brain and to wade ever so gently into the deep waters of the record business.
Decca Records, located in a stately stone mansion just off the Albert Embankment across from the Tate Gallery, presented an imposing image of a multinational company. But if Brian imagined partaking in the hushed tones of business conducted at high-polished board tables under glittering chandeliers, he was sorely mistaken. Barrow was stationed in a rather depressing annex across a side road, overlooking the backyard of a fire station. The office was a shabby, paneled cubicle of a room with a few posters on the wall, a double desk he shared with an Indian typist, and a tiny window through which they watched the neighboring firemen practice running out their hoses. It was difficult for Brian to find a seat in the clutter. Everywhere there were boxes surrounded by massive piles of unfolded, unlaminated record sleeves, called “flats ”—mostly overruns of South Pacific, which had been Decca’s biggest seller for years, and the latest Elvis Presley release, whose sales were in free fall and which, as a result, they had in excess.
Brian launched into his sales pitch about the Beatles, tossing out his “bigger than Elvis” knuckleball. Such hyperbole was still a novelty in the record business, but even so, Barrow couldn’t have been less interested. He was, however, charmed by Brian himself, whom he typed as “instantly impressive” and not at all “like the typical agent of the era.” It was essentially painless to indulge the “charismatic” man sitting across the desk from him for a few minutes.
Brian opened his briefcase and produced an acetate of the band. “I put it on the player,” Barrow recalls, “and heard the very exciting atmosphere of the Cavern—lots of screaming, chanting, and a steady bunk-bunk-bunk in the background, with a few errant falsetto notes mixed in—and that was about it.” Voices were impossible to decipher, to say nothing of songs.
Brian apologized for the awful quality. “I’ve taken it from the soundtrack of a Grenada television documentary about the Cavern,” he explained disingenuously. (It wasn’t until 1966, when Paul McCartney asked Barrow to hold up a cheap tape-recorder microphone to the loudspeakers, during the Beatles’ final concert at Candlestick Park, that Brian admitted he’d used the same technique to make the acetate.) Not that better sound would have made any difference. If Brian had brought something special, Barrow would have run it across to the A&R department, but from all evidence so far, the Beatles had nothing going for them.
As Brian was packing up to leave, he said, “Well, I’m in the midst [of] trying to arrange an audition with Decca.” Barrow asked who was acting as his go-between and Epstein mentioned Selecta, the local Decca distribution company in the Northwest. Barrow waited until Brian had left, then called Sidney Beecher-Stevens, who ran the label’s sales department, and described his meeting with the record-shop owner. “Epstein… Epstein…?” Beecher-Stevens wracked his brain for a connection. “Sorry, never heard of him. They must be pretty small.” When Barrow explained that it was NEMS, he could hear the huff on the other end of the phone. “Oh, they’re one of our biggest customers! Yes, yes, the band has to have an audition.”
A week later, just days before Christmas, Mike Smith, one of Decca’s young “bright lights,” turned up in Liverpool to catch the Beatles at the Cavern. Right off the bat, Brian was “very taken” with Smith, who wasn’t at all the kind of record-label hotshot he’d expected. A tall, slim East Londoner with slicked-back black hair, Mike was outgoing and polite and didn’t lord his position over them. Moreover, Brian could tell from observing Mike that “he liked the boys.” He didn’t stiffen up or attempt to remain poker-faced at their show; his expression flashed excitement from ear to ear. It hit all the right notes.
After a rousing lunchtime session, Mike went across Mathew Street to the Grapes, where he and the Beatles hoisted a few pints and promised to meet up again for the evening performance. Then Brian and Alistair Taylor took him out to eat at Peacock’s, in order to gauge the extent of his interest. “Right,” Smith said without any ado, “we’ve got to have them down for a bash in the studio at once. Let’s see what they can do.”
That was all Brian needed to hear. Alistair Taylor would never forget how his boss’s face turned beet-red. “He was barely able to contain his excitement—and it bled right through any presumption of coolness. We dropped Mike off at the Adelphi Hotel, then went straight back to Peacock’s and had a few too many gin and tonics to celebrate. Brian was in a splendid mood. He felt this was it. This was the break that would vindicate him.”
If Brian needed any vindication, it was not so much for his taking up with the Beatles as it was for the unlikely time he’d scheduled their Decca audition—January 1, 1962, a day not suitable even for singing in the shower. As a result, New Year’s Eve parties were out of the question; both John and Paul had been looking forward to celebrating with their girls, Cynthia and Dot, with whom things were growing progressively serious, but the appointment required they travel to London that night, a long, difficult trip that was discouraging from the get-go. Dot Rhone recalls the boys’ “ill humor” at what should have otherwise been an extremely joyous occasion for the Beatles. They celebrated the New Year over drinks early that afternoon and were on the road to London well before nightfall.
It had already begun snowing before they left Liverpool. Neil Aspinall drove the old Commer van through the wintry squall, an unsteady ride under optimal circumstances, with the four Beatles crammed clumsily in the back among the stack of loose, shifting equipment. The roads, dusted with fresh powder, wound circuitously south. Crawling and lurching along what was then the major motor route—the ponderous A5—they often spent long, frustrating stretches stuck behind long-distance trucks that heaved like elephants up the hillside to Carthage. At Birmingham, where the roads zigzagged through isolated farmland, they went east, following lonely roads that were rutted and in this weather largely impassable—not even divided highways—and then down, down, down through the outskirts to London.
The trip took nine hours. The Beatles were cold and grumpy upon their arrival at a hotel in Russell Square, and when someone suggested that they hoist a few in relief, there wasn’t a man among them who was inclined to protest.
It was late when they got to bed—and “very late�
� the next morning when they arrived at Decca Studios, in the north of London. Brian, who had come down by train on his own, was pacing figure eights in the corridor, furious with them. “He was frothing at the mouth,” Pete Best recalled. “I’d never seen him as angry as that.” John, in defiance, told him to “bugger off.” To make matters worse, Mike Smith hadn’t arrived. He’d been out late at a party and wandered in at a leisurely pace, a good hour late, which only wound up Epstein into a tighter knot.
Everyone was on edge. The guys were sleepy, hungover, nervous. To make matters worse, the studios were “freezing cold”; they hadn’t been used between Christmas and New Year. The Beatles, “ill at ease,” were left bumping about, waiting for a skeleton crew to set up inside the control booth.
History has held Brian Epstein largely responsible for the selection of songs performed at the audition. “[He] believed that the way to impress Mike Smith was not by John and Paul’s original songs,” Philip Norman concludes in Shout!, “but by their imaginative, sometimes eccentric arrangements of standards.” In cloudy hindsight, even John blamed Brian for picking “all these weird novelty things” that were “O.K. for the lads at the Cavern… but don’t mean a thing when you do them cold in a recording studio for people who don’t know the group.” To some extent, this is true. The standards no doubt pleased Brian, who regarded them as legitimate crowd-pleasers, but while he may have weighed in with his opinion, the decision of what to play was left entirely to the Beatles.
In fact, they’d taken a cue from Mike Smith, who encouraged the band to “play the whole spectrum of music” he’d heard at the Cavern. “We thought hard about the material we were going to play at the audition,” recalled Pete. And even though in hindsight Paul dismissed it as a “fairly silly repertoire,” the set they chose was significant principally because it indicated the band’s versatility and was an accurate cross section of their material.