by Bob Spitz
As Brian saw it, the local concert business seemed rightfully his. He understood its simple mechanics, had the financial wherewithal to promote successful shows, knew the bands, knew whose records sold, had ties to the press. And he viewed Liverpool’s existing gang of promoters with undisguised scorn.
No longer was Brian Epstein seeking cover in the shadows. Now he was vying to take over the scene. The soft-spoken record-shop owner who pleaded rock ’n roll ignorance was gone. That persona had been replaced by a vigorous, opinionated businessman who began to view himself as a power broker.
Brian printed posters and hiked ticket prices to an “unheard-of twelve and six,” according to Sam Leach, to ensure a tidy profit. In fact, the show was so successful that he took another date, this time at the classy Empire Theatre, on Sunday, October 28, for which he doubled the advertising budget. And in every case the Beatles’ name appeared in the same type size—and was given the same prominence—as Little Richard’s. Fans, watching in awe, concluded that “the Beatles had really hit the big time.” Sitting in the audience that evening, Frieda Kelly says she grew melancholy. “When I saw them on the stage of the Empire, I knew they were no longer ours.”
Immediately following the Little Richard shows, the entire entourage left for Hamburg, where the Beatles fulfilled an outstanding obligation at their old haunt, the Star-Club. When they returned, on November 14, things cranked into high gear. Without time to recharge, the band made a beeline for London, where two days later they performed for another intimate audience of teenagers on a show that went out over Radio Luxembourg. Tony Barrow, who had never seen them perform, marveled at the spell they seemed to cast over the room at EMI headquarters. Standing near the side of a makeshift stage, in an office that had been specially converted to simulate a club atmosphere, he was unprepared for the audience reaction as the Beatles were introduced.
Muriel Young, the show’s host, announced: “I’m going to bring on a new band now who’ve just got their first record into the charts, and their names are John, Paul…”
“Immediately,” Barrow recalls, “the kids started screaming.” This caught him by surprise. “I’d never experienced anything like it before. The Beatles, at this time, were basically unknown. But if this bunch of kids in London had gotten as far as finding out the individual band members’ names, then it was a phenomenon of some kind, which, to me, was extremely significant.”
What provoked such a reaction? It is difficult to say. “Love Me Do” had received only scant airplay so far, not enough to spark a popular groundswell. Barrow suspects the APPLAUSE! sign had little to do with it, either, judging from the look on the kids’ faces. “They were genuinely excited,” he says. “They knew the song; they knew about the band. It had to be spontaneous, to some extent. But if you ask me, that special Beatles mystique was already at work.” At the time, such a phenomenon was unknown, even puzzling. This was London, after all, not the provinces. Bands didn’t simply wander into the city and take it by storm. But the jungle drums were already beating through cultural channels. Word of mouth traveled from town to town, from city to city, via teenagers who had seen the Beatles on the cinema circuit.
“Everyone had said, ‘You’ll never make [it], coming from Liverpool,’ ” Paul remembered. When, in late 1962, Bill Harry wrote an article about the vibrant Liverpool music scene in Mersey Beat, beseeching record-company moguls in London to “take a look up North,” not a single A&R man responded.
Others knew the score. Alistair Taylor, who left NEMS that November to work in London for Pye Records, knew from the moment Brian signed the Beatles that they were his ticket south. Says Tony Bramwell, then a NEMS office boy, “No one ever mentioned London, but it was understood we’d eventually be going there. Brian had a plan; he wanted to be Larry Parnes and swim in a big pond.” Everything would be in-house: “His own press officer, booking agent, television liaison—we’d all be under his thumb,” says Tony Barrow. “It was unheard-of.”
Brian certainly made no secret of his intention to dismiss the publishing firm Ardmore & Beechwood, who, according to George Martin, “did virtually nothing about getting [“Love Me Do”] played.” It incensed Brian that their professional managers, or song pluggers, couldn’t point to five or ten outlets they’d helped persuade to play the Beatles. Not even a single ad was placed by them in any of the music papers. Why should he add another Lennon-McCartney song to their catalogue? He could have done as well with “Love Me Do” on his own, without giving away the publisher’s share of the royalties.
George Martin provided the names of three alternatives—all of whom, he promised, “won’t rip you off.” The first one Brian went to see on the list was Dick James.
Calling Dick James a publisher was like calling Brian an impresario. A former big band singer with a gregarious, music hall personality and ever-present smile, James, who was forty-four, had been in business for himself for only a year, and with very little to show for it. There were no major hits in his portfolio and only a handful of potential standouts. But what he lacked in assets, he made up for in connections. Although James was no longer a performer, he claimed a wide network of show-business friends left over from his moderately successful run as a recording artist. In the mid-1950s, he’d enjoyed a string of popular hits—most notably “Tenderly” and the theme song to TV’s Robin Hood, both of which had been produced by George Martin. Dick and George had stayed in touch throughout the years. James had spent a decade toiling for various London music publishers, resolutely sending their demos to Parlophone for Martin’s consideration. “How Do You Do It” represented his biggest break to date, and he was crestfallen when he learned the Beatles had rejected it.
James, whose cubbyhole office was on Charing Cross Road in the heart of London’s music district, hadn’t been floored by the impact of “Love Me Do.” Though it placed at forty-nine on the Record Mirror Top 100 chart, he considered the tune nothing more than “a riff” and consequently had no expectations as far as any other songs written by the northern writers who were responsible for it. Still, he was curious to hear what appealed to an act that had the nerve to reject his own hottest prospect.
As luck would have it, Brian had brought along an acetate of “Please Please Me,” and as soon as James heard it he knew: it was better than “How Do You Do It.” Infinitely better—a smash. Without hesitating, he offered to publish it. Two months earlier Brian might have jumped at the chance, but with each successive professional experience, he grew more skeptical and restrained. What, he demanded bluntly, did Dick James intend to bring to the table? How would he contribute to the record’s promotion?
As the story goes, James swallowed his answer. Instead, he immediately picked up the phone and called Philip Jones, who produced a new prime-time television show called Thank Your Lucky Stars. Giving the performance of his career, Dick James instructed Jones to listen to “a guaranteed future hit,” then held the receiver up to a speaker blaring “Please Please Me.” Incredibly enough, Jones heard enough to interest him and, with the publisher urging him on, agreed to present the Beatles on an upcoming show.
Brian Epstein was stunned. Next to Juke Box Jury, this was the most influential spot on television that a recording artist could hope for. It meant national exposure, something EMI hadn’t produced with all its supposed firepower. Nothing like this had been offered to him before.
Brian and Dick James did everything but jump into each others’ arms. The wily James had already formulated a deal. Instead of the usual song-by-song arrangement favored by many British publishers—including EMI’s deal with the Beatles—James had something novel up his sleeve. According to George Martin, “Dick said, ‘Why don’t we sign… their future writing to a company which the Beatles would partly own?’ ” On the surface, it seemed like a magnanimous—and radical—offer. Most publishers got 50 percent of an artist’s performance royalties in addition to a cut of the sheet-music sales. (“By today’s terms,” Martin says, “if you acc
epted that, you’d be considered an idiot.”) James suggested creating a separate company—Northern Songs—that would publish all Lennon-McCartney songs and be administered by Dick James Music. Of this new venture, royalties would be split evenly (instead of James taking the standard 100 percent of the publishing rights and 50 percent of the writers’ royalties), albeit with a 10 percent fee taken off the top by Dick James Music. “Brian thought it was wonderful,” Martin recalled. And without hesitation, he recommended it to John and Paul.
Forty years later, Paul McCartney, in nearly every reminiscence, goes out of his way to curse the Northern Songs pact as “a slave deal”—and worse. He believes they were bamboozled out of the rights to their songs and, ultimately, untold millions of dollars, saying: “Dick James’s entire empire was built on our backs.” But at the time, it must have sounded like a sweetheart of an offer. When they were asked if they wanted to read the agreement, John and Paul declined. It called for Northern Songs to acquire Lenmac Enterprises, a holding company set up in April by Brian that owned fifty-nine Lennon-McCartney songs. Under the terms of the agreement, John and Paul were obligated to write only six songs per year for the next four years. During that time, however, they would add an extraordinary hundred new copyrights to the catalogue, each one a classic that would never again be under their control.
Chapter 20 Dead Chuffed
[I]
Only days after the release of their latest single, the Beatles viewed their Saturday, January 19, 1963, appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars as a major plug for “Please Please Me.” (At the afternoon rehearsal they learned that the spots were all “mimed” to records, which allowed them to more or less walk through the two-minute segment.) The audience was completely unprepared for what they saw. Gliding eerily across the screen were four extraordinary-looking boys, grinning at one another with goofy joy from beneath mops of unhumanly long hair and behaving like cuddly wind-up toys—heads bobbing on an invisible spring, shoulders seesawing to the beat, bodies jerking back and forth—in a manner reminiscent of a Carry On gang send-up. No one had ever seen hair that long—or that shape—before. Was it some kind of a joke? And their suits broke all the rules; they were smart and relaxed, with a nod to the tradition of good English tailoring, but also a wink in the way they were buttoned to the neck.
Once viewers got past the window dressing, the music knocked them out cold. Hearing “Please Please Me” had the same effect as being thrown into an icy shower. After sitting through thirty-eight minutes of warm, sudsy pop, this bracing rock ’n roll song cut right to the bone. The intro alone hit a nerve. The tone of it was powerful, unrelenting. Listen to this: “Last night I said these words to m-y-y-y-g-i-r-r-r-l…” Harmonies! Gorgeous three-part vocals, followed by a dramatic explosion of ascending guitar chords. “Please pleeeeeease me, wo-yeah, like I please…” And that finish—five sharp, emphatically executed chords wrapped up in a sustained burst of drumbeats—left the whole thing vibrating with uncommon energy.
A bomb had gone off. British rock ’n roll had arrived.
In the next three years, the Beatles would be joined by the Olympian forces of British rock: the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Hollies, Van Morrison, Manfred Mann, and Traffic, as well as virtually the entire Merseybeat roster—all of them swept in on the vast tide of musicians and personalities that transformed the popular culture. Plenty of others contributed to the exuberant groundswell, from artists (Hockney) to critics (Tynan) to photographers (Bailey) to designers (Quant) to writers (Fleming), but none of them caused such a stir as did the Beatles; none was as personable or as newsworthy; none was so innocent that every exploit, every record seemed genuinely fresh and unspoiled by creeping commercialism. “To those of us in England who lived for the next great American single,” says journalist Ray Connolly, “it seemed like the Beatles were the promise we’d been waiting for all our lives.”
Unlike “Love Me Do,” which had scrounged for random airplay, “Please Please Me” echoed everywhere. Radio Luxembourg had added it right out of the box, and not the occasional spotty play they begrudged to borderline new releases but the kind of all-out saturation that indicated a smash. The same happened at the BBC, where it immediately cracked the teenage playlists, then crept ever so gently into the “light programming” shows. Critics—including some who had found fault with “Love Me Do”—raved. By the end of the month, a year after being told the Beatles were inappropriate for radio, Brian was fielding offers from a variety of producers for appearances on such important shows as The Friday Spectacular, People and Places, Saturday Club, The Talent Spot, and Here We Go.
The mood in the overcrowded headquarters of NEMS was irrepressibly upbeat. Since the beginning of the year, the management end of the business had taken on a momentum of its own, sustained mostly by the Beatles but intensified by some fresh roster moves Brian had made, as well as others in the works. Plans were now under way for the release of Gerry and the Pacemakers’ first record—the resurrected “How Do You Do It,” produced by George Martin—which was scheduled for the end of January. And sensing some ground gained at EMI, Brian also signed the Big Three, in the hope of grooming them for a session with one of the company’s labels. “Things were going so well,” recalls Tony Bramwell, “that he started believing he had the magic touch.”
Indeed, Brian so enjoyed the deal-making aspect that he decided to develop another artist almost from scratch. Since the end of the previous year, he’d had his eye on a shy, plump-faced boy with unobvious good looks named Billy Ashton. Ashton’s voice was as thin as watered-down soup, he moved awkwardly onstage, and those loud, black-and-pink suits he favored didn’t fool anyone. But Brian, according to Alistair Taylor, “probably fancied the lad” and was full of his own “star-making” potential. “Brian knew Billy couldn’t sing,” says Taylor, but he wouldn’t allow a little thing like that to get in the way, “because [Billy] had the right image; he was a good-looking, clean-cut, impressionable young lad who could approximately sing, which would more than do.”
Decades later, Billy Kramer (Brian changed his name, thinking Ashton “too posh”) would be asked to account for Brian Epstein’s interest in his career. Shrugging, he says, “I was just a wild card,” meaning an inconsequential component. “It could have been anybody, when you think about it.”
[II]
Up until a year earlier, Brian Epstein’s only experience with rock ’n roll had been ordering records to stock the bins at his father’s store. Now he had to organize—relying mostly on his imagination—a full-blown management company substantial in size and complicated in detail. The duties were no longer limited to penciling in local club appearances but now involved recording dates, radio appearances, press interviews, label and contract negotiations, transportation, overnight accommodations, and fan mail. There were fees to be collected, weekly salaries paid (each of the Beatles received a paycheck of £50 every Friday), schedules coordinated, equipment purchased, wardrobe fitted. And Brian handled everything himself—every phone call, every booking, every piece of mail, every arrangement: every decision. There were assistants to do the legwork, but the responsibility was entirely his.
It was a demanding but manageable workload that Brian had undertaken. But with the success of “Please Please Me,” all hell broke loose. Sales were strong, stronger than anything EMI had expected, requiring repeated pressings to satisfy demand. And in Liverpool the impact was explosive. Now every time the band came in to see Brian, be it for routine business or to root through stacks of fan mail, extreme measures had to be taken to provide for their safety. “Whenever word spread that the boys were inside, kids started coming around the shop, blocking the doors so the ordinary customers couldn’t get in,” Frieda Kelly remembers. After so many years of complete informality, it seemed downright unfriendly, if not hostile, to suddenly throw up barriers. Eventually, Norris explains, the hard-core fans refused to leave NEMS until the Beatles came dow
nstairs, so Brian would send the boys out the second-floor fire escape, onto the roof, where a cast-iron ladder lowered them to safety on busy Whitechapel.
Harry Epstein wasn’t pleased. His business—Liverpool’s foremost appliance store—had become a hangout for crowds of Beatles fans that often snowballed into thirty or forty kids. More and more, when Harry returned from lunch with Clive they had to fight their way inside. Brian did his best to propose remedies—“I’ll ask Bob Wooler to have a word with the kids,” he promised—but the inconvenience grew only worse. Harry put his foot down: Brian had to look for another place to conduct his new venture.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Beatles were set to embark on their first major tour—dead-last on a six-act bill headlined by Helen Shapiro, the teenage pop sensation who reigned as Britain’s Sweetheart. A poised, showbiz-style belter with a megawatt personality, often described by friends as “a pint-sized Ethel Merman” (although Teresa Brewer was probably more apropos), Shapiro had racked up several middle-of-the-road hits and a following that was rock-solid in the provinces. The Beatles were “elated” to appear on the bill. In their book, Helen Shapiro was a star, even though she sang what John openly referred to as “mush.”