The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  It was becoming evident to keen observers that these demonstrations of adulation transcended mere popularity and stardom. Roy Orbison was popular, Cliff Richard was a full-fledged star, but neither encountered the manic emotional display, the tearing passion, that surrounded the Beatles. This was something more. It was hard for people to put a finger on it. The hysteria was primitive and overtly sexual. Certainly there had been some of the same response to Elvis, and before him, Johnnie Ray and Frank Sinatra, but nothing so aggressive, nothing that ranged to this extreme. Publicly, the Beatles laughed it off, but it was no joking matter. Their homes were invaded, their privacy shattered. Everywhere they went, either alone or with family and friends, fans accosted them “like persistent termites,” demanding autographs and pictures. “There was no longer any question of the Beatles appearing in a club or, indeed, anywhere in direct contact with their public,” writes George Melly in Revolt Into Style. “They had become a four-headed Orpheus. They would have been torn to pieces by the teenage Furies.”

  While everyone debated the merits of the phenomenon, one aspect went unchallenged: the Beatles had set the stagnant British music scene on fire. Kids across the country were totally caught up in the excitement, gobbling up records and concert tickets at an unprecedented clip. Rock ’n roll—British rock ’n roll—became the major topic of conversation: who was coming out with a new record, what they sounded like, where they were playing, how hot they looked. Everyone wanted to be up-to-date, on top of the scene. Meanwhile, the American stars who had dominated for years began fading from the fore. Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, and Elvis continued to sell, but nowhere near as strongly as their British counterparts. “Wave the Union Jack!” New Musical Express advocated in a July issue, noting that “not a single American record has topped the Charts this… year—something which has never happened before in the 11 years since the top table was introduced!”

  The record labels tore through the clubs in Liverpool, signing everyone in sight, and the subsequent proliferation of releases was dizzying indeed. In a span of two months, Decca announced singles by the Dennisons (“Come On Be My Girl”), Beryl Marsden (“I Know”), and Lee Curtis and the All Stars (“Let’s Stomp”), featuring Pete Best on drums; Pye issued Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four (“Lies”), the Searchers (“Sweets for My Sweet”), and the Undertakers (“Everybody Loves a Lover”); Fontana released Earl Preston and the TTs (“I Know Something”), Howie Casey and the Seniors (“The Boll Weevil Song”), and the Merseybeats (“It’s Love That Really Counts); HMV put out the first Swinging Blue Jeans record (“Too Late Now”); and Oriole released a single by Faron’s Flamingoes (“See If She Cares”), signed Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to a contract, and, in case anyone missed the point, prepared two compilation albums titled This Is Merseybeat, volumes one and two, featuring sixteen northern rock ’n roll bands.

  In June Polydor began releasing sides from the 1961 sessions with Tony Sheridan in Hamburg—only this time crediting the band as the Beatles, as opposed to the original Beat Boys. It was inevitable that the session would come back to haunt them, but not even the Beatles expected it to crack the charts, which it did immediately following its debut. “It’s terrible,” John complained to a reporter for Melody Maker, objecting to the quality of the record and the circumstances of its release, but both refused to go away. EMI was particularly stung by the situation. After finally breaking the Beatles, it seemed unjust that a competing disc would surface to confuse record buyers.

  To staunch a potential backlash, EMI countered by issuing an EP—or extended-play single—with “Twist and Shout,” “A Taste of Honey,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” and “There’s a Place.” No one had an inkling if such a concept would meet with enthusiasm, considering that all four songs were already on the Please Please Me album. But it hit the stores on July 15 and by the end of the weekend had sold an astonishing 150,000 copies, with back orders for 40,000 more. Come August, it became the first EP ever to enter the Top Ten.

  Dozens of dates were booked in East Kent and Bournemouth through the summer, interspersed with tours of Jersey and Wales. Meanwhile, John and Paul were busy writing “Bad to Me” for Billy J. Kramer, as well as “Hello Little Girl” for the Fourmost, another NEMS act, which George Martin agreed to produce for Parlophone. Brian also signed a rambunctious teenager named Tommy Quigley who had been working an act locally with his twin sister, Pat. Following a welcome Parnesian name change to Quickly, a recording deal was arranged with a subsidiary of Pye on the basis of John and Paul’s anteing up an appropriate smash, and within a few weeks “Tip of My Tongue” was released as a single.

  All the while, George Martin was pressing for another Beatles single to preserve the headlong run at the charts. A song begun in Newcastle in the afterglow of a late-June gig seemed as if it might fit the bill. Riding in the back of a poorly lit van, Paul had sketched out a lyric fragment that showed early promise. It was modeled on an “answering song,” according to Paul, who recalled hearing a Bobby Rydell record that put the form to clever use. A chorus of girls would sing, “Go, Bobby, go, everything’s cool,” while Rydell shot back, “We all go to a swingin’ school.” The way Paul envisioned it for the Beatles, he’d sing, “She loves you,” whereby the band would respond, “Yeah… yeah… yeah,” offering a nonsensical but effective hook. He subsequently ran it by John, who decided that the answering business was a “crummy idea” but the lyric was worth exploring. They went back to their room at the Turk’s Hotel, whipped out their guitars, and in a few hours’ time had the bones of the song in place.

  “She Loves You” was finished the next evening, during a rare day off in Liverpool. The boys worked intently in the tiny dining nook at Forthlin Road while Paul’s father sat not five feet away, chain-smoking and watching TV. His presence, the competing noise, didn’t matter—nothing could interrupt Paul and John’s concentration. They wrote with a sense of mission, replacing wobbly phrases, playing lines over and over, refining the way things scanned, until they’d gotten it right. And when they were done, they knew they had a hit on their hands. The song has a tremendous, explosive kind of energy that bursts from the opening notes and culminates in a beautiful split of harmony in the parcel of yeahs. George Martin listened to a rundown of it in the studio on July 1 and thought it was “brilliant… one of the most vital [songs] the Beatles had written so far.”

  The band polished the song over the next few days, teaching George Harrison a third harmony to fatten the effect. Back in the studio, with Martin perched on a wooden stool in front of the piano, they belted it out, following an arrangement John and Paul had concocted on their guitars. Engineer Norman Smith, who was standing over the mixer, did a double-take as they turned up the juice. Earlier he had spotted the lyrics on the music stand and felt his heart sink. As he later relayed to Mark Lewisohn: “ ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I thought[,] Oh my God, what a lyric! This is going to be one that I do not like.”

  In fact, there was something for everyone in the lyric, though nothing grabbed listeners as much as the performance. The Beatles sing “She Loves You” with such conviction and with such energy that for the brief time it lasts—considerably less than two and a half minutes—they create a groove that is not only completely irresistible but also quintessential. What the Beatles built into the song provided, for them, a perfect, lasting image: the yeah-yeah-yeahs and the falsetto ooooos (when performing this, they shook their heads in unison, setting off rapturous shrieks from the fans) became iconic symbols. No matter how their music evolved, no matter how they experimented with complex musical textures and electronics, it is hard to think of the Beatles today without visualizing them as four grinning mop tops positioned in that classic stage pose—the guitars riding high on their chests, drumsticks rhythmically pummeling the cymbals—singing, “And you know you should be glad: oooooooo,” with a decisive shake of their beautiful hair.
Nothing identifies them more vividly.

  When the second Vee-Jay single, “From Me to You,” was released, American disc jockeys ignored it completely—a silence even more devastating than scorn. “No one played it; they thought it was a dud,” says Paul Marshall, who brokered the deal. Now, with a third record due out, Marshall went back to Capitol Records. Capitol usually offered a song and dance to soften the rejection of an English act, but this time the pass was brutally direct. Dave Dexter proclaimed the Beatles “stone-cold dead in the U.S. marketplace.” Capitol wasn’t interested in the slightest—not now, not in the foreseeable future.

  Without even Vee-Jay as a backup (the label was reorganizing in the wake of its economic bungle), the Beatles were without hope of an American release. In the meantime, Roland Rennie approached an acquaintance named Bernie Binnick, who owned a small Philadelphia label, Swan Records. Swan, which had cobbled together a few hits with teen star Freddy Cannon, didn’t even register on Billboard’s national radar screen. But Rennie was desperate, and the price was right—“They didn’t pay anything to license it,” he recalls. “They just guaranteed to put the bloody thing out, as a favor to us”—which, though less than idyllic, at least assured the Beatles that “She Loves You” would get a fighting chance.

  Days before “She Loves You” was due to be released, NME calculated that three Liverpool groups—the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas—were responsible for sales amounting to more than 2.5 million records. Numbers like that left the Beatles dazed, in a state of euphoria. Only nine months before, they were still hustling for £10 gigs in Liverpool, hoping against all odds just to make a record. “Sometimes, you know, I feel as if there’s nothing I’d like better than to get back to the kind of thing we were doing a year ago,” Paul mused in the midst of the hot summer tour. “Just playing the Cavern and some of the other places around Liverpool. I suppose the rest of the lads feel that way at times, too. You feel as if you’d like to turn back the clock.” If that was even remotely feasible before, all bets were off the moment “She Loves You” hit the airwaves.

  Unlike any of the band’s previous records, “She Loves You” touched off a nationwide reaction the press immediately dubbed “Beatles fever.” Before the record was even released, Parlophone had advance orders for “a staggering 235,000” copies—figures “so enormous” that even EMI was impressed. No act in corporate memory had ever spurred such demand. And suddenly everything the Beatles did resonated with meaning. Both music papers—Melody Maker and NME—interviewed them ceaselessly, hanging on every word, as did a dozen or more radio personalities on Britain’s top-rated shows. The Beatles, eager to please, did their part. They responded perceptively and with unguarded enthusiasm, supplying insights on everything from the details of their early career to their most personal habits. But mostly their conversations were filled with the chatter of young men awestruck by the general good luck that had befallen them. Beyond the burdens of touring and songwriting, Paul mooned about go-karting, Ringo discussed his special knack for dancing and dreams of one day opening a string of ladies’ hairdressing salons, John fantasized about writing books before tackling a West End musical, and George confessed to sloth, admitting that his idea of “the life” wasn’t so much about fame as it was “sitting round a big fire with [his] slippers on and watching the telly.” Intuitive, inventive, and taken with the sound of their own voices, the Beatles developed a penchant for delivering folksy generalities that helped create accessible images of familiarity. “I’m not really interested in sport… except for swimming,” Paul told a reporter. “But that’s the thing these hot days, isn’t it? It really cools you off.”

  The first two weeks of September were as much a whirlwind as anything the Beatles had ever experienced. From London, where they prerecorded sessions for an upcoming BBC radio special called Pop Go the Beatles, the path zigzagged aimlessly between mid-size cities, from Worcester to Taunton and then Luton, hitting converted cinemas along the Gaumont and Odeon chains. Then they played the ABC Theatre in Blackpool for the second time in little more than a month before turning around and heading right back to London.

  Brian had managed to slip in a few midday sessions at Abbey Road studios so the Beatles could make headway on their second album. Previously, they’d recorded a slew of standout covers—“You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Money,” “Devil in Her Heart,” “Till There Was You,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Please Mr. Postman,” songs they’d been playing for years—along with two exciting Lennon-McCartney originals, “It Won’t Be Long” and “All My Loving,” the latter of which Paul had written on a piano immediately before a gig at a Moss Empire theater. Now they were set to round things off a bit, with the first song ever written by George, “Don’t Bother Me,” and two numbers originally earmarked for Ringo—“Little Child” and “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

  Things were kept “fairly simple” for Ringo. By design, he had to sing from behind the drums, so the overall arrangement couldn’t be too demanding. Besides, Ringo “didn’t have a large vocal range,” Paul recalled, to say nothing of his concentration. “If he couldn’t mentally picture [the song], you were in trouble.” But neither Paul nor John was deterred by Ringo’s shortcomings. He was too likable, too amusing, not at all self-indulgent, and he appreciated their efforts on his behalf. These latest songs were a further indication of their affection for Ringo—their commitment to giving him more of the spotlight—though at the last minute John claimed the vocal on “Little Child” for himself and they fairly gave away “I Wanna Be Your Man” to the Rolling Stones.

  On September 10, John and Paul encountered publicist Andrew Oldham in London’s West End. The boys had been on the way to Dick James’s office, window-shopping on Jermyn Street in an area overrun with music stores that Paul referred to as their “Mecca,” when a taxi drew up carrying the Rolling Stones’ snarky manager.* Oldham was on his way to Studio 51 in Soho, where the Stones were rehearsing, and he invited the two Beatles to attend. During the cab ride over, he casually let drop that the Stones were looking for a follow-up to their first single—a half-assed cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On”—and wondered if they had any suggestions. Left unsaid, but certainly understood, was the preference for a Lennon-McCartney number.

  Not more than a few minutes later, Paul recalled telling Mick, “Well, Ringo’s got this track on our album, but it won’t be a single and it might suit you guys.” John didn’t flinch. He regarded “I Wanna Be Your Man” as “a throwaway,” but even at that point it was still basically a work in progress. Paul had come up with a lick—“I want to be your lover, baby, I want to be your man”—and little more. They played what they had for the Stones—John used Keith’s guitar and Paul turned Bill Wyman’s bass upside down—who were immediately intrigued. The song had their name written all over it, a stylish, bluesy vamp they could “Diddley up” when it came time to put their stamp on it. John recalled: “So Paul and I just went off in the corner of the room and finished the song while we were all still there, talking.”

  The donation was both friendly and strategic. For John and Paul, songs were like currency. Every solid cover boosted their fame and fortune and allowed them to reap the benefits and lay back a little when their own singles began the slow slide down the polls. On almost any given week, one could flip through the pages of Melody Maker or New Musical Express and discover ads for records by, say, Tommy Quickly that carried the tagline: “Another Smash Hit from the Sensational Song Writing Team John Lennon and Paul McCartney.” Or an item that announced NEWLEY WAXES BEATLES’ TUNE. After a stunning string of Beatles hits, Beatles songs became a sort of status symbol.

  Of course, the more famous the Beatles became, the more other bands greedily sought out Lennon-McCartney songs. Whereas John, Paul, and George once raked record stacks for undiscovered gems by Barrett Strong, James Ray, or Arthur Alexander, now mavericks combed the Beatles’ singles for B-sides they could hijack. Frien
ds, eager to ride their coattails, routinely asked for spare songs, to the point where John and Paul grew guarded about their former generosity. Billy Kramer recalls an occasion in Bournemouth when he overheard John working on an early version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “Can I have that song?” Kramer asked, having instantly recognized its potential, to which John shook his head emphatically and replied, “No, we’re going to do that ourselves.”

  On September 15, 1963, the Stones opened for the Beatles at the Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The show was a milestone of sorts for both bands. An upscale benefit for the Printers’ Pension Corporation, the theater hosted a formally dressed crowd of donors drawn from the upper crust of British society. Everyone was on his best behavior: the Beatles, gentlemen to the core, wore their fancy mohair suits, and the ever-scruffy Stones showed up in dark trousers, pale blue shirts with ties, and dark blue leather waistcoats that made them look like waiters from Le Caprice.

  But when it came to music, no one held anything back. The Stones did what the Stones do best—they blew out the walls in a torrent of blues-inspired mayhem. As one reviewer recalled, “their act [was] fast, wound-up, explosive.” And the Beatles brought down the house. “The Royal Albert Hall fairly shook on its foundations,” reported a cultural magazine that covered the gig. Nothing remained intact once the bands took the stage, least of all the dignity of the fancy-dress crowd, which lost control of themselves, whistling and screaming like giddy teenagers.