The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  That night happened to be a scorcher. It had rained earlier in the day, and moisture hung in the thick air like clotted cream, none of which deterred an overly large crowd from descending into the Cavern right on schedule. It seemed like “an extra two hundred kids turned out” to check out the young emperors’ new clothes—and they weren’t disappointed. The Beatles looked resplendent and, in their manager’s eyes, finally like proper entertainers. They “actually glowed” as they took the stage, slightly embarrassed in front of the hometown crowd, but not enough to diminish their obvious pride. Unfortunately, that mood didn’t last very long. No one had taken into account what heat did to new paint, and as the temperature climbed, water condensed on the ceiling and ultimately the emulsion dripped, splattering their new clothes.

  It was Brian, not the Beatles, who emerged from the episode enraged. Convinced that the Liverpool scene was run with the maximum ineptitude, he began to see catastrophe in every piece of business outside of his control. The only solution was to take matters into his own hands, beginning with the release of “Love Me Do,” which would not, under any circumstances, be left to chance. Thanks to NEMS, Brian had an insider’s knowledge of how record companies operated. Most threw a dozen new records out there each week in the hope that one of them caught fire. The Beatles weren’t a priority of EMI’s, but they were his priority. And he intended to do everything in his power to ensure that they got the best shot.

  First on Brian’s crowded agenda was publicity. Drawing on the previous contacts he had made, Brian touched base once again with Tony Barrow, who was still working for Decca, and notified him that the Beatles’ debut record would finally appear in a month. “He’d been picking my brains on the phone from Liverpool for almost a year,” Barrow recalls, “relying on my relationships with guys at NME [New Musical Express] and Melody Maker.” Now Brian wanted Barrow to work for him, doing independent PR from behind his desk, of all things, at a rival record label. On the face of it, the proposal appeared dicey, but Barrow replied that he saw no conflict as long as it didn’t require him to pound the pavement at the music trades. To avoid the appearance of impropriety, Barrow enlisted Andrew Loog Oldham, a “flamboyant” eighteen-year-old hustler “with an attitude,” to cover the press while he concentrated on writing releases. “I put together the original press manual on the Beatles, along with some biography on each of them that Brian intended to send out to the media,” says Barrow.

  The stuff Barrow turned out was dry as toast, rewrites of the fluff spun out by the girls who ran the Beatles Fan Club. (“John… likes the colour black, steak and chips and jelly… and dislikes—thick heads and traditional jazz.” “Paul… favours black polo necked sweaters, suits, leather and suede.” “George… enjoys egg and chips, Carl Perkins and Eartha Kitt, and wants nothing more than to retire with lots of money.”) Brian wasn’t fooled. “He suggested the whole thing be written with more of an edge,” Barrow says, “harder, more colorful, punchier stuff about each boy.” To draw attention to the unusual spelling of the band’s name, he insisted they include an apocryphal story of John’s about an odd man descending with a flaming pie delivering the news that they shall forevermore be Beatles—with an a. “Then he pushed me to do a review of the record, right up front in the press kit, under the name Disker of the Liverpool Echo.” Initially, Barrow refused on the grounds that it smelled bad, not to mention the vaguest whiff of dishonesty, but for enough money, it was easy to rationalize. Says Barrow: “I was a hack being paid a fee to do some writing. And, after all, I was impressed with ‘Love Me Do.’ ” Eventually, Brian decided to blanket the media with these press kits to supplement EMI’s beleaguered in-house staff.

  The next challenge was airplay. “It was a hell of a job trying to get ‘Love Me Do’ on the radio,” recalls Ron Richards, who moonlighted as Parlophone’s promotion man. “At that time, there weren’t many programs on the BBC where you could get a pop record played.” The most obvious show was a Sunday morning countdown of the charts, one of the top-rated shows, which all labels courted. Richards was friendly with its producer, Ron Belchier, who promised to give the Beatles a special listen. But when Richards called back for a reaction, he was told, “No, they’re too amateurish for me.” Richards was understandably dejected. He knew that without significant BBC airplay, the Beatles didn’t stand a chance. There was no other reasonable way to effect a breakout (or to launch them).

  The disappointment must have been evident in his voice, because Belchier took pity and recommended that Ron try a new show—its name long since forgotten—that the Beeb was starting on Saturday mornings to showcase young groups. Richards immediately sent over a demo (the label misidentified Paul’s writing credit as McArtney, which was corrected on the eventual release) and won a precious slot in the rotation. “They promised to play it,” he remembers, “and it felt like we’d won the lottery.”

  But they still had to convince Radio Luxembourg. It was the only station that played pop nonstop, with a signal beamed directly into London’s teenage market. To ply goodwill, EMI flew its tastemakers to Luxembourg twice a year, in order to wine and dine the station’s deejays and play the new lineup. “Then, we came back [to the U.K.],” scoffs a promo man, “and they forgot about our records and played somebody else’s.”

  When “Love Me Do” appeared, on October 5, it received only scant attention on the station. For one thing, there was too much competition from abroad: “Sheila,” by Tommy Roe; Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” (which had been cowritten by Carole King, whose own single, “It Might as Well Rain Until September,” was running up the charts); Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart”; the 4 Seasons’ debut smash, “Sherry”; “Let’s Dance,” by Chris Montez; as well as new records by Elvis, Ray Charles, Neil Sedaka, and Del Shannon. But while “Love Me Do” had a nice little pop groove to it, reinforced by John’s portentous bluesy harmonica intro (fashioned after the one Delbert McClinton played on “Hey! Baby”), its stripped-down lyric and molasses-paced beat, which quite needlessly jolts to a standstill at the end of the break, failed to convey the bold energy the Beatles personally felt toward rock ’n roll. It didn’t give disk jockeys anything to sink their teeth into. There was the flood of competing British releases to consider, which left hardly any opening for new artists, much less the Beatles. Even Parlophone was chagrined by the apparent lack of effort coming from its parent, EMI, and further annoyed by the meager two thousand records that were initially issued, the standard pressing at the time for new, unproven artists. Despite its seeming lack of interest, however, EMI did buy time for the Beatles to appear on the October 12 segment of Radio Luxembourg’s The Friday Spectacular, a kind of live studio party that featured new releases, which it hoped would at least stir some interest in the record.

  For a time it appeared to be an uphill battle. Tony Barrow played “Love Me Do” for London’s top deejay, Jimmy Saville—later an intimate friend of the Beatles, but back then a force to reckon with—who was “unimpressed.” The same response occurred when the boys polled around for reaction on their own. Dot Rhone, who had rented the basement flat below John and Cynthia, recalls being invited upstairs one night in early October and being asked by John to phone Radio Luxembourg to request “Love Me Do.” Dot didn’t mind doing the favor. John had shown enormous sympathy following her breakup with Paul, going so far as to give her the rent sometimes when she was short. There was no problem getting a deejay on the phone, nor responding that it was “fantastic” when he asked her personal opinion of the song. But her heart skipped when, out of the blue, the deejay confessed he “wasn’t at all that thrilled with it.” It startled Dot, and it must have shown on her face, because as soon as she hung up, John sneered: “He didn’t like it, did he?”

  Nevertheless, the record flew out of the stores in Liverpool, especially at NEMS, where it was promoted as though Elvis had put in a personal appearance there. Hundreds were sold in the week following its release, though there was no danger
of its ever going out of stock. “Love Me Do” reached a respectable if unspectacular number on the British charts, thanks, in large part, to those heavy sales in the North. “Brian bought boxes and boxes of ‘Love Me Do,’ ” recalls Alistair Taylor. “Later, when it came onto the charts, he bought several thousand more, hoping to push it higher and draw more attention to it, but after a while we realized that it could only go so far.”

  The Beatles, however, were headed to the toppermost of the poppermost.

  [III]

  With hardly any time to catch their breath, the Beatles kept another appointment at Abbey Road, on November 26, to undertake a follow-up to “Love Me Do.” Despite the fact that the record had stalled, there wasn’t much financially at stake from the label’s standpoint. “EMI never gave us any budget,” says Ron Richards. “We’d decide to record an artist and simply set up studio time.” Nevertheless, George Martin preferred to oversee the session himself. Initially, the label chief may have shown ambivalent faith in the Beatles, but he had seen and heard enough to fire up his optimism. What’s more, he suspected the label had a real shot at breaking this band, especially considering a secret weapon: “How Do You Do It.” Martin remained convinced that the song was a hit; after the Beatles retooled their previous version, he believed, they could ride its coattails to stardom.

  But once inside the studio, the band almost immediately began hustling Martin to record a song of their own. Exasperated, Martin grew peevish with their defiance and snapped: “When you can write material as good as this, then I’ll record it.”

  Such a rebuke would have silenced most bands, but the Beatles saw it as an opportunity. They reminded Martin about “Please Please Me,” a version of which was already in the can. “We’ve revamped it,” they explained, angling for a chance to convince him of its merits. Gradually, their persistence and endearing Scouse charm wore down Martin’s defenses, and once more, to his credit, the producer relented.

  Without hesitation, they ran through a take of the song that incorporated all of Martin’s suggestions. It was no longer dreary or overblown; the Roy Orbison influence had been carefully pared away. In fact, it bore hardly any resemblance to the demo they had cut with Ron Richards eight weeks earlier. Martin “knew right away” he had something special on his hands, but he checked his enthusiasm, suggesting instead that they give it a try together to see what turned up. It was a huge concession. It meant he was once more shelving “How Do You Do It” to take a flier on an unpolished Lennon and McCartney song.

  “Please Please Me” may have been unpolished, but not unexceptional. Only a sigh longer than two minutes, it rocked the lofty studio like a small explosion, its beat unleashed to startling intensity: a bass throbbing faster than an accelerated heartbeat, a cascading harmonica riff as joyful as birdsong, a lead vocal that drives like a sports car with a hole in its muffler, harmonies that soar and clutch each other for dear life, a convulsion of “c’mons” that churns up tension and desire. Throughout, the song sends spikes of exclamation and falsetto raging through the lyric. Not since Little Richard had vocals raged so viscerally in a pop song.

  “Please Please Me” was the world’s real introduction to the Beatles. It was a stark concentration of the band’s emerging sound—catchy melodies, clever lyrics, seamless three-part harmonies, nimble instrumentation, and dynamic chords dropped into patterns that transformed a tired form. John’s vocal is about as raw and rough-edged as anything to come out of the British pop scene—and distinctive. He makes no effort to sound boyish or cute; there is an aggression in his voice, a tenacity loaded with innuendo that digs right into the suggestive lyric. Paul’s bass lines are already synthesizing elements of a dramatic style, accenting the standard runs with sudden shifts of phrasing and hiccups that later revolutionized the form. The way his bass and George’s guitar recoil from the four “c’mons” sounds almost as if they are being jerked away from the melody. And Ringo forever dispels any notion of his ineffectiveness in the recording process by providing a precise, sharply dealt backbeat, which cuts loose at the end of the song, with a crisp, machine-gun burst of percussion.

  Critics tend to credit “I Saw Her Standing There” and “All My Loving” with setting off the initial blast of Beatlemania, but “Please Please Me” was the spark that lit its fuse. It was a rejection of all the sugarcoated pop that had clogged the British charts for more than five years. In its place, the Beatles had assembled fragments of their favorite American hits, borrowing from the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran, and Buddy Holly, and given the resulting mosaic a bold personal touch.

  One can only imagine what George Martin felt when listening to the playback. A man schooled in the formalities of classical music, it must have rattled his bones to hear the track he had just produced. It was so far outside the parameters of his own taste, not to mention what colleagues considered to be well beyond his grasp. Martin was an old-school music man. He believed in good, carefully structured songwriting, tight arrangements, very controlled orchestration, and pitch-perfect acoustics—all of which resonated in the cracks of “Please Please Me,” but with a remarkable new vibrancy. “Please Please Me” rocked! Martin knew it the moment he heard the tape. Grinning, he looked up over the console and exclaimed: “Gentlemen, you’ve just made your first number one record.”

  Yet the Beatles didn’t feel like stars. In part, of course, this was because they were virtually unknown outside of Liverpool. The surrounding cities—places like Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham—nurtured their own hometown pop heroes who had built a loyal following in much the same way the Beatles had done at the Cavern. Promoting a Liverpool band in Manchester was like asking the United fans there to root for the Anfield soccer team. Even the French could expect to be shown more courtesy. If “Love Me Do” managed to explode, then the Beatles could march through distant clubs on their own terms; but until that happened, they were more or less restricted to playing gigs closer to home.

  Still, there were plenty to go around, and throughout the fall of 1962 Brian made sure their collective dance card was filled. He worked furiously to keep them busy and in front of as many kids as possible, believing that exposure, more than anything, would contribute to their success. “He spent all day on the phone, booking the gigs himself,” says Frieda Kelly, whose desk sat in an alcove outside Brian’s office door. “The second he hung up on one person, he was already dialing another.” Often, unable to endure an indecisive promoter, he toggled between two lines, juggling dates and deals like a harried stockbroker. “He was a very impatient man. Everything had to be done by his clock. And if he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he pushed harder and harder.”

  And more steadily. There weren’t enough hours in the day; there weren’t enough days in the week. As time wore on, Brian devoted only cursory attention to NEMS, laying off most of the administrative responsibilities onto his brother, Clive. Even when the store closed at midday on Wednesdays, he stayed rooted to his desk, his assistants working the phones and typewriters, going at a breakneck pace. No one took time off.

  Because he remained so insecure, Brian often accepted offers for the band that fell way beneath their current stature—ridiculous gigs at cinemas, floral halls, and jive hives—to keep up the appearance of surplus bookings. These were interspersed with enough big shows to keep the money respectable, but eventually Brian sought a bigger share of the pie. Ballrooms and arenas guaranteed larger paydays, which gave him another idea about upping the ante.

  In preparation, he met promoter Sam Leach at the Kardomah Café and proposed what he thought was an intriguing deal. The objective, he explained, was to book the Beatles onto shows headlined by established stars; that way, he could command a larger fee and, at the same time, link the Beatles to popular recording artists. All he needed was the proper venue. Locally, there was only the Tower Ballroom, a massive hall that Leach had locked up under contract every weekend throughout the year. “I will book big names and we’ll do it together,�
� Brian said. “How does that sound?”

  To most ears, it would have sounded crazy. But Leach was thinking ahead. Convinced that the Beatles were on the verge of stardom, he thought: “If I do this, we might do other things together.” Secretly, he’d always wanted to manage the Beatles; perhaps this would lead to some kind of cooperative arrangement. Besides, he’d started a little independent label, Troubadour Records, which in June 1961 had released a single by Gerry and the Pacemakers; even though the Beatles already had a Parlophone contract, their record might bomb and he could wind up holding an option on their next effort. So instead of dismissing Brian’s offer out of hand, Sam said: “All right then, Brian. I’ll do it. Fifty-fifty.”

  It was more than gracious, but Brian balked. Dismissively, he explained, as if lecturing an employee: “That would be impossible. I’m in [business] with Clive, who is a part of NEMS. We’ll have to share a third each.” Leach, predictably, refused to budge, at which point Brian stood up to leave. “You’ve made a very big mistake,” he warned, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Leach went directly to John, who wrenched a few leftover dates out of Brian. But, as usual, financial hijinks followed. “Sam had a habit of not paying groups,” says Bob Wooler. “There was always an excuse. But he’d charm them, [saying]: ‘I’ll book you next time, and you can rest assured there will be a double fee.’ ”

  Brian had heard that one once too often and finally pulled the plug minutes before the Beatles were due to go onstage at the Tower. “This meant war,” Leach recalled. “The Beatles were now finished there, and without them, so was I. That forced me to book bigger attractions to compensate.” Desperate, Leach called Don Arden, a notoriously hard-assed promoter who toured fading American stars around Europe, and begged for one of his Little Richard dates. Banking on big advance ticket sales, he promised Arden £350, “to be paid in cash before [Little Richard] goes on.” Arden promised to shoot off a contract, but before he could get it in the mail, Brian Epstein offered £500. Money, money, money—Arden couldn’t resist. Meanwhile, Leach had papered Liverpool with advertisements for the show: SAM PRESENTS LITTLE RICHARD AT THE TOWER! “Even before the Beatles exploded, Brian viewed himself as an impresario,” says Peter Brown. “There was always that infatuation with presenting someone, and with concerts he could do it in an area that expanded his control and influence.”