The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  John was wasted, near collapse, but the others already knew what he was about to find out from a playback: that for all its hairiness, “Twist and Shout” is a masterpiece—imperfect but no less masterful, with all the rough edges exposed to underscore its power. It is raw, explosive. The sound of ravaged lassitude, of everything coming apart, only complements the spirit of a tumultuous live performance. In the booth, there was jubilation. George Martin and his crew knew they had “got it in one,” and as he and the others later claimed, they reveled in it. The Beatles had their first album, and as John so eloquently put it, they were “dead chuffed.”

  [III]

  But there was no rest for the weary. For the next ten days the Beatles humped around the country playing one-nighters on a route that often seemed designed by Jackson Pollock. After tearing out of London, they drove straight to Yorkshire, then east to Hull, stopping in Liverpool on February 14 long enough to play a Valentine’s Day dance.

  It was a riotous homecoming, with almost two thousand of the faithful jamming into the Locarno Ballroom, where an agitated disc jockey repeatedly admonished the crowd “to give the boys some air.” The Beatles were no longer the loutish, chain-smoking, largely unprofessional—shameless—band that had haunted local jive hives months before. They took the stage like stars and launched into a set that had been shaped and refined to make the most of their new success. Kinder, gentler, even their look had improved; it was more tailored, their Beatles haircuts stylishly groomed, and at key points during songs, when they sensed the audience was in their thrall, George, Paul, and John, on cue, would hit a falsetto oooo-o-o and shake their heads in unison, inciting an ecstatic response. This was a trick they had practiced on tour, and when it worked onstage they grinned broadly, beaming, as though delighted by the adulation. Screams ripped through the seams of each song: rapturous approval and vows of love mixed with general hysteria, amplified tenfold since their last appearance. For some friends, the scene held great significance. Colin Manley, the Remo Four’s guitarist, recalls how he had stopped by the Locarno to say hello to George and felt humbled by the Beatles’ aura. “Just a few weeks before they’d been nothing more than mates, one of us,” he recalls, “but it was clear that night they’d become stars.”

  But becoming stars didn’t mean star treatment. A week later the Beatles played an uproarious show at the Cavern, drawing the biggest queue that anyone could remember since the place had opened. Their sets ran long, instigated by delirious pleas for encores. As a result, it wasn’t until after eleven o’clock that they could break free of the club. Immediately afterward, they piled into the van and headed south to London, Neil Aspinall pitching down road after narrow road, mile after mile, against swirling winds and in almost total darkness, while the Beatles, slumped against one another in the back, stole whatever shut-eye the potholes permitted. Just before dawn, they crept into London, grabbed some breakfast, then wandered around the shops to kill a few hours, before turning up at the Playhouse Theatre for a BBC television taping. Afterward, they darted out the door and spun back on the same roads. All for a four-minute spot.

  There were times during the zigzag around the nation that the Beatles grumbled—grumbled mightily—about the brutal grind. How much would this really boost record sales? Why couldn’t it have been scheduled more conveniently? Was Brian driving them too hard? In the space of ten days, they’d come off a difficult tour, cut an album, played ten shows, and pulled off a day trip to London, with a solid block of eight days still ahead of them. The great distances they covered on the lousy British roads wore them out. “There was only a small piece of motorway in those days, so we’d be on the A5 for hours,” Ringo recalled. The roads killed them; the roads—and the lousy British weather. “Some nights it was so foggy that we’d be doing one mile an hour, but we’d still keep going.”

  Going—and grumbling. But after the grumbling came the work. Exhausted though the Beatles might have been, they never passed up an opportunity of any kind to promote themselves. A workingman’s club, a talent show, a dance, a radio plug—no appearance was too small for the Beatles. Drive all night to a gig, shake hands with a distributor, sign autographs at a record shop, they did everything—everything—necessary to get their name around, to win fans, to succeed. There was a feeling shared among the band that if they kept at it, the dream would come true. And every so often there was a payoff, an incentive that let them know they were on the right track, that it mattered, that it wasn’t for naught.

  The record deal was just such a reward, and it had kept them going for quite a long time. But it was nothing compared with the news Brian delivered the following week, while the Beatles played a club date in Manchester. “Please Please Me” had not only hit the charts, it had shot straight to number one.

  Number one! As much as the news thrilled them, they had to hear it for themselves.

  The Beatles remained skeptical. The NME Top Thirty cast them in a tie for the top spot, sharing honors with Frank Ifield’s dirgelike cover of “The Wayward Wind,” an American hit. Paul took a lot of grief over this distinction. Since breaking up with Dot Rhone, he’d been dating Iris Caldwell, Rory Storm’s ravishingly beautiful sister, who, as everyone in Liverpool knew, was two-timing him—with Frank Ifield. There was no denying that it irked Paul. He “was berserk over [Iris],” says a friend who knew them, and her affair with Ifield really set Paul’s teeth on edge, especially after Iris reported playing “Please Please Me” for Ifield and “he just burst out laughing.” Another incident at a concert intensified the rivalry. Paul, for some twisted reason, insisted on taking Iris to see Ifield perform at the Liverpool Empire. It seemed harmless enough at the time. Iris “knew Frank was practically blind,” and with her trademark long hair twisted in a bun, it seemed unlikely he would ever spot her in a dark, crowded audience. From their seats in the second row, Iris and Paul held hands, enjoying their little shenanigans. But near the end of the show, Ifield strode downstage and put his boot up on the footlights. “I’d like to sing a song that’s a great favorite of mine,” he announced, then rather suddenly pointed directly at Paul. “It’s called ‘He’ll Have to Go.’ ” Now their paths had crossed again: tied for Iris’s affections, tied for number one. If that didn’t take the cake! Disc, on the other hand, showed the Beatles holding down the number one position all by themselves.

  There was only one clear way to sort out the accuracy.

  On Sunday, February 23, the Beatles rejoined the Helen Shapiro tour, which was appearing at the Grenada, in Mansfield. The next day, before leaving for Coventry, Kenny Lynch invited Paul, George, and John to accompany him in a car he’d borrowed rather than take the bus. No one had to twist the boys’ arms. The bus was “a drag.” Besides, the scenes Lynch made were a hoot, usually culminating in some kinky backstage grope with a couple of birds.

  The Beatles, sans Ringo, piled into Kenny’s car—John holding the seat for Paul and George, which signaled he’d be riding shotgun. “It was a beautiful afternoon,” Lynch recalls. “Clear but with a cold, blustery wind. We were all happy to see each other and exchange recording war stories.” For Kenny, the layoff marked a milestone of a different sort; while the Beatles were making their album, he had rushed off to record “Misery,” making him the first artist to cover one of their songs. It was a dubious distinction from the Beatles’ point of view, inasmuch as they loathed Kenny’s interpretation. But on this day their only concern was determining if “Please Please Me” was number one.

  “We were following the coach,” Lynch remembers, “so we wouldn’t get lost.” But in Coventry, they pulled off the road, into a car park just behind the Lucien Theatre, to listen to a Sunday-afternoon radio show that counted down the charts. Waiting on edge, shivering in the unheated car, everyone lit cigarettes against the uneasiness, hope, and excitement that had been building up over the past two days. “It was a pretty intense moment. They knew [the record] would be pretty high because it was selling like hotcakes.” Kenny notice
d that John, Paul, and George were “stern-faced” as they stared at the radio in the dashboard, waiting for the news. Finally, at about 3:30, the BBC disc jockey announced: “This week, at number two, Frank Ifield and ‘The Wayward Wind’…”

  Before the opening bars even filtered over the airwaves, a cheer went up in the car. It was official. How the music magazines broke it down was beside the point. In England the BBC had the final word on the chart rankings, and by its count, Frank Ifield was number two.

  “Where are we going, Johnny?” the Beatles had asked repeatedly throughout 1961 and 1962. “To the toppermost of the poppermost,” John had promised. Now, only a year later, they had reached the summit.

  MANIA

  Chapter 21 The Jungle Drums

  [I]

  For the Beatles, everything changed with their leap to the top of the charts. They were no longer just a local act, not even a northern act. Once their record hit number one, they were lofted into a larger orbit that identified them as “Parlophone Recording Stars” or, perhaps somewhat prematurely, “Britain’s top vocal-instrumental group.” “Please Please Me” had extended their popularity far beyond the Cavern walls and far beyond the Mersey banks, establishing them as something of a national phenomenon. By the second half of the Helen Shapiro tour, everywhere the Beatles played, ear-splitting screams broke out at the mere mention of their names. The minute the lights went down, the crowd went crazy. And after each act finished its set, the theaters shook with kids hollering, “We want the Beatles! We want the Beatles!”

  The Beatles got a charge out of it, playing off the energy with increasing confidence, but it wreaked havoc with the tour. The show had been constructed so that each act was assured of its own twenty-minute set, giving Helen half an hour to close the performance. That had worked for a while, but as each day passed, as audiences grew more familiar with “Please Please Me,” as word of the Beatles spread from town to town, “all the people coming to the show were just waiting for the Beatles” and it often took several minutes to restore order between sets.

  During those first few months in the spotlight, the Beatles regarded the mayhem as a novelty—and a boost to their spirits. Most of the days were interminably long and insufferably boring, with hours spent cooped up on the bus followed by ridiculous hours of downtime. In the northern towns, they’d “have a walk through the streets and visit a greasy spoon for some lunch.” Afterward, if there was time, they would go shopping. Then, about four o’clock, before the first show, says Kenny Lynch, “we’d have a bacon sarnie and a mug of tea in the closest café to the theater.”

  The tea came in handy. John, for one, couldn’t function without it. His voice had never fully recovered from the bashing he’d given it recording “Twist and Shout,” and as a result, the live shows did a number on his vocal chords. On long bus trips, he’d sweet-talk the driver into stopping whenever possible so he could tank up on something warm. And “in the dressing-rooms,” observed Ray Coleman, who covered the Beatles for Melody Maker, “Lennon was addicted to tea.” His hand was constantly wrapped around a steam-capped paper cup, convenient to sip from or to warm his fingers. The conditions in most theaters were impoverished, the backstage comforts less than meager, the heat often nonexistent. If the Beatles had envisioned a world of glamour and luxury as rock ’n roll stars, this tour brought them back to earth with a thud.

  As dreary as the theaters were, their accommodations were often worse—the guesthouses they stayed in run-down, staffed with local help who regarded them as nothing more than riffraff. All-night service stations were the restaurant of choice for most package-tour units, with a heaping portion of starchy beans on toast and chips a safe enough bet to see them through until the next opportunity arose to eat something.

  Touring was hard work—and worse. “It was always a bore,” Ringo recalled. At least when they were on the bus, there were plenty of diversions. A card game was usually in progress among facing rows of seats. There were invariably conversations about the previous night’s show and its aftermath, with bloated conquests bandied about like fish stories. Each day, the boys plowed through newspapers, searching for their names. Once, in a Yorkshire town, they found an article hailing them as “a band in the American Negro blues tradition,” in which they reveled and quoted from ad nauseam. For a change of scenery, John read avant-garde poetry, along with a volume of Spike Milligan’s verse to lighten the mood. Everyone wrote home, with dreamy postcards sent to their girls.

  In the highs and lows of those journeys, however, John and Paul always made time to work on some music. “They wrote every day on the coach, like clockwork,” says Kenny Lynch. At some point John or Paul would catch the other’s eye, then they would get up nonchalantly, work their way to the back of the bus, take out their guitars, and get down to business. “It was always the same routine: one would play, and the other would be writing down lyrics and chord changes.” They were in their own private world back there, absorbed by the instant gratification of the work and adept at blocking out distractions. Every so often Kenny would lean over the seat in front of them and attempt to offer a line or critique the work. “Fuck off! Turn around!” they replied—and they meant it.

  On the bus, they began to explore new ground. The steadying success of the collaboration encouraged them to experiment with different chord combinations, concentrating more on the choruses—or what they called “the middle eight”—to give the songs a fuller, more accomplished sound.

  The effects of this creative experimentation began to show up immediately. A real breakthrough came on February 28, as the bus rolled south along roads from York to Shrewsbury. To fulfill an urgent request from George Martin for a follow-up single to “Please Please Me,” John and Paul spread out across the backseat and worked on several ideas. One, finished a few days earlier, was “Thank You Little Girl.”* The song still needed tinkering, but as they played around with it, other themes emerged and they went off on a tangent, leaving the song behind. In an interview with columnist Alan Smith, John recalled how after a while they were just “fooling around” on the guitar. “Then we began to get a good melody line, and we really started to work on it.”

  The new tune came quickly. Working in the key of C, they sketched out a verse using a standard four-chord progression. But when it came time to construct the middle eight, Paul accidentally hit a G-minor and felt something shift. “It went to a surprising place,” he explained.

  Once they had the melody, the words just tumbled out. It was John who came up with the basic premise. As he recalled it: “Paul and I had been talking about one of the letters in [NME’s] ‘From You to Us’ column.” Up to that point, all their songs exploited pronouns in the title as a way of making them “very direct and personal.” That way, Paul thought, “people can identify… with it.” This time around, they’d finally hit the mother lode: me and you, together, in the same phrase.

  “From Me to You” was finished before they even crossed the Shrewsbury town line. As soon as the ink was dry on the last “to you,” the Beatles knew they had another smash.

  The Beatles cut their new single five days later, sandwiched between a show in St. Helens and a radio appearance in Manchester. The session, which ran from 2:30 until 10:00 P.M. at Abbey Road, went as smoothly as the last. As uncertain as he still was about rock ’n roll, George Martin was amazed by the quality of the song—and that John and Paul kept writing obvious winners. He’d never experienced anything like it before, and the prospect that they were real, as opposed to one-shot wonders, gave him chills.

  They rehearsed the number once or twice while Norman Smith worked in the booth to get a balance on the mikes. George’s guitar intro’ed the song with a lick that mimicked the opening line. But something about it didn’t work for the producer. Martin pulled up a stool and listened to them play it again. There, right at the top: it was unexciting, slack. Why not sing the intro? he suggested. Just as George played it: “Da da da da da dum dum da…”


  Sing it? What an odd approach. No rock ’n roll artist in their memory had ever sung an opening lick, but it never occurred to the Beatles—nor would they have dared—to argue with Martin. Martin was known for creating an atmosphere in which recording artists felt comfortable to express their feelings. But there was a clear, almost palpable distinction between them, based largely on roles of authority. To working-class Liverpool lads, inadequate by nature in London, in the Smoke, Martin’s refined social graces and perfect diction drew a line. It put him in a position of command, of authority, and while their relationship was harmonious, it was an uneasy alliance. If he wanted them to sing it, they’d give it a try. Besides, after an initial pass at it, they heard the difference: it was dynamic, it drove them into the song. “In a way, this made them aware of George’s enormous musical sense,” says Ron Richards, who listened to the result sometime later that week and “wasn’t at all surprised” by how well it turned out. “The Beatles had marvelous ears when it came to writing and arranging their material, but George had real taste—and an innate sense of what worked.”

  From the moment they were signed, the Beatles regarded the States as the Promised Land. That isn’t to say they weren’t pleased with recent developments. In fact, they were thrilled by the opportunity to make the kind of records they were making and tickled by the possibility of getting airplay in London. But it was America—home of Chuck, Buddy, Elvis, Gene, Richard, and Phil and Don—on which they ultimately set their sights. America had the aura; it would legitimize them in a way that no one from England had yet experienced.