The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  The next play was at Capitol Records, where Brian was determined to storm the enemy gates. None of the American A&R staff wanted to be told how to conduct their business, especially by Brits, with their posh accents and stiff-necked etiquette. Nothing significant had ever broken out of the U.K., and if any of them dared admit their true feelings, nothing ever would.

  Brian’s contact at Capitol was a man by the curious name of Brown Meggs, who ran the label’s East Coast pop department. Under normal circumstances, Meggs probably would have made himself unavailable to a manager without portfolio, but unbeknownst to Brian, L. G. Wood had paved the way. Earlier that fall, he had sent Roland Rennie to “visit” Meggs, along with a letter of introduction from Sir Joseph Lockwood, EMI’s formidable chairman whose phone extension happened to be 4-6-3, or GOD. Rennie insists it was nothing more than a friendly chat “to get over this hurdle with the Beatles.” But he also acknowledges that subtle “pressures were put on” Capitol to get on the stick. Incredibly, it made not a lick of difference: Dave Dexter used the occasion to issue another pass.

  As a result, Len Wood himself flew to the States, a visit comparable in frequency to that of the pope. Wood had already summoned Alan Livingston to a meeting in New York. Livingston, a permanently tanned, smooth-talking, Hollywood-style protégé of Frank Sinatra, was the president of Capitol Records and on the board of EMI. More attuned to image than music, he operated Capitol in the manner of an old-style movie studio mogul, surrounding himself with talented A&R men whose decisions he either rubber-stamped or rejected. The prerogative—backed by Capitol’s considerable muscle—gave Livingston substantial clout in the music business. So strong was his autonomy, in fact, that it was unthinkable that anyone would, or even could, make demands on him. “But L.G. wasn’t asking anymore,” says Paul Marshall, referring to the Beatles’ forthcoming single. “He told Alan, ‘You must take it.’ ”

  Must: Livingston was surprised by the ultimatum. Capitol and EMI had never before operated on those terms. Each was supposed to have “the right of first refusal” on the other’s product, nothing more. And he was surprised by Wood’s demeanor, by the vehemence in the voice of this otherwise imperturbable Englishman. L.G. was, in fact, so agitated that he refused to leave it alone until Livingston agreed to put the record out.

  Years later Livingston would tell a significantly different story. According to a 1997 interview with the BBC, he insisted that Capitol’s decision to release the Beatles was his idea. After a surprise visit from Brian Epstein, he recalled: “I… took the record home to my wife… and said, ‘You know, I think that this group, they’ll change the whole music business if it happens.’ ” It was a ridiculous claim, considering the paper trail of rejections from his office as well as other substantiated accounts. Capitol had done everything possible to avoid the Beatles. But shoved against the wall by its British masters, it no longer had a choice.

  Fortunately, in this case, Capitol was handed a lulu of a record that launched the new group—and the label—into the stratosphere.

  The record Brian delivered to Brown Meggs was “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles’ most inspired production yet, the apotheosis of the bust-out “Merseybeat” sound that took all its most harmonious elements, the guitar-oriented riffs and vocal harmonies, and condensed them into a two-and-a-half-minute rave-up that fairly jumped off the grooves. From the unsparing two-chord intro, there was no letting up. “Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something…” The energy was impossible to let go of. Part easygoing pop, part joyous rocker, part roller-coaster ride, it came at the listener from every angle, with rhythmic jerks and handclaps and inadvertent detours from the standard four-chord structure. As if the overheated arrangement wasn’t tantalizing enough, the Beatles’ performance was extraordinary, from John and Paul’s slashing harmonies to Paul’s sudden full-octave leap into falsetto, capped off by stirring confessions—“I can’t hide, I can’t hide”—that seem to gain in fervor each time they are sung. If the suits at Capitol were duly affected by the record, they never let on. But no doubt about it: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was like no record they’d ever heard.

  If Capitol was required to release the Beatles in America, then at least this was a record it could get behind. But according to Livingston, they wouldn’t press more than an initial run of 5,000 copies, standard for any new artist. Shortsightedly, Capitol had neglected to keep an eye on the numbers in Great Britain, where EMI had received an unheard-of advance order for 700,000 copies of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” only three days after dealers there were notified of it. Even at Capitol, an artist with a strong track record could count on an advance of only 25,000 copies, 50,000 at the most. There was also an advance order for 265,000 copies of the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, a figure that would have staggered any American label. But for the time being, Capitol ignored these numbers, preferring to eye with disdain the millstone that had been looped around its neck.

  Sid Bernstein made up in spades for Capitol’s stunning lack of enthusiasm. He was the original Charlie Hustle, and he was convinced of the Beatles’ greatness before he ever heard them sing a note. The son of a Harlem tailor, Bernstein stumbled into the music business while still a journalism student at Columbia University, managing a neighborhood ballroom in Brooklyn that showcased the great Latin bands. In those days mambo was the province of not only Puerto Ricans but also Jews, both of whom shared the dance floor, and Bernstein acquired a passion for it through such leading lights as Ralph Font, Tito Rodríguez, Marcelino Guera, Tito Puente, and Esy Morales, the latter of whom Bernstein left the ballroom to manage.

  Bernstein traveled the turbulent mambo circuit for two years, until the thirty-five-year-old Morales’s untimely death. He came to the agency business booking Latin, jazz, and R&B acts in the 1950s before gravitating into the teen stars department at General Artists Corporation on the strength of his relationship with Judy Garland and Tony Bennett. Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, Dion, and Chubby Checker were a far cry from those mellifluent heights, but that never diminished Bernstein’s drive, and he flogged the agency’s pop roster like a team of prized stallions.

  In his spare time, he began attending evening courses at the New School, in Greenwich Village, one of which was a lecture on Western civilization given by the noted analyst Max Lerner. Lerner required that each student read a British newspaper once a week to gain insight into the English form of government. “After a while,” Bernstein recalled, “I started to see in the slim entertainment pages the name ‘Beatles’ popping up,” first in small print, then in headlines. “And then the word ‘Beatlemania’ appeared.”

  Instinct convinced Bernstein that he should jump on this before someone else in America caught wind of it, so he attempted to interest GAC’s agents in taking on this new group. Nothing doing. “They thought the name was crazy and gave me every excuse for not letting me go over to see them.” Instead, he made private inquiries about the Beatles, eventually tracking them to Brian Epstein. It must have been child’s play to tantalize Brian with lavish name-dropping and hype. “I hit him with my experience,” Bernstein recalled. “Tony Bennett at Carnegie Hall, Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall.” The names and that place were all the pitch he needed for Bernstein to “sell him on [the Beatles] doing Carnegie Hall” in early 1964. “So we made a deal on the phone for sixty-five hundred bucks for two shows.”

  From various angles, the deal was either brilliant or utterly foolish. This wasn’t agency money or part of a promoter’s discretionary fund. Bernstein had reached into his own pocket to book no less a venue than Carnegie Hall for a group that had no hit record and no following in America. Who would come to see them? How would he create any interest?

  At their first meeting in New York, Brian brought the answers with him. Capitol, he revealed, had agreed to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in January. Since Bernstein had booked Carnegie Hall for Wednesday, February 12—weekends were reserved for the symphony—it gave them a good mont
h to build word of mouth. Then Brian dropped the clincher: two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Bernstein heard that, he said, “I knew I was home because, in those days, when you appeared twice on Sullivan you were a star.”

  And then, out of nowhere, Capitol announced that it intended to put an astounding $40,000 into promoting the Beatles’ new record. The sudden reversal in outlook would never be explained, but to Bernstein, it was the telltale sign that a new star had been discovered.

  [III]

  Even without Brian at the controls, the Beatles remained constantly on the go. Appearing in a package of endless one-nighters—five weeks of sold-out one-night stands—they racked up miles, difficult miles, hopscotching between towns and cities where fresh outbreaks of Beatlemania were reported like the flu. But as Beatlemania grew more intense, life on the road became ever more precarious, and once-precious downtime left them preoccupied with the planning of safety and escape routes.

  “Girls are fainting in the streets,” reported Melody Maker just prior to the tour. “Scores are injured in the crushes.” Many locales attempted to head off such mayhem by having convoys of police cars liaise with the Beatles on the outskirts of town for an escort to the theater. Outside Birmingham, news of “rampaging fans” forced the Beatles to exchange clothes with the police in order to disguise themselves so they could enter. “Getting them inside,” according to the music magazine, “was like a military operation.”

  Sometimes getting them out was an even hairier proposition. In Sunderland the Beatles were led like escaping refugees through a narrow, pitch-dark backstage corridor that deposited them into an adjoining firehouse. One by one, they slid down the pole, then waited while a decoy engine lured waiting fans into a wild-goose chase through the deserted town. Of course, there was another side to all of this. Before one show, in East Ham, George Martin arrived backstage quite jauntily to announce that “ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had cleared a million [advance orders] before release.” It was incredible news, a first for the British music industry, and the Beatles were suitably thrilled.

  During the show, as was now always the case, an exit strategy began to unfold. All plans focused on the getaway car, a gleaming black Austin Princess idling by the stage door. The Princess was considered sort of a down-market limo. “I assumed they’d have either a Daimler, a Bentley, or a Rolls-Royce,” Alistair Taylor recalls. Mal Evans, a big, bearlike but scatterbrained ex-Cavern bouncer who had been hired in August to assist Neil Aspinall and act as a bodyguard for the boys, detected Alistair’s disapproval and explained. They’d tested all the available limos, he said, and found that the Princess had doors that opened wider to accommodate diving in.

  While half a dozen questions flashed through Taylor’s head, he was pushed bodily into the car, which was already rolling forward. Up ahead, “a cordon of law enforcement officers held back a sea of screaming heads.” A police car fell in alongside, with its blue light flashing.

  Suddenly the car jerked forward, then skidded to a stop in front of two innocuous-looking doors behind the theater. They were flung open and four blurs burst from its dark mouth: Paul first, John right behind him, followed by George and Ringo. Each Beatle dove headfirst into the backseat of the Princess—except for Ringo, who fell on his face, with his feet in the gutter.

  “Rich, Rich, come on, man!”

  “I’ve got me fooking foot stuck,” Ringo wailed.

  Before anyone responded, the three Beatles wriggled out of the car, picked up Ringo as if he were luggage, and threw him into the back. Reaching behind him, Alistair slammed the door shut and Mal sped away.

  “So, this is Beatlemania,” Alistair mused. He couldn’t believe the rush as the police line broke a split second after the car squeaked through and kids, hundreds of kids, swarmed through. “We screamed into central London with the blue lights flashing, running every traffic light,” he recalls. “It was just like the Queen coming—only it was four Liverpool musicians. If that didn’t beat all.”

  On the morning of November 22, expectation surged through Merseyside about the group’s second album, With the Beatles, due to arrive in local stores later that afternoon. Information had been leaked about the selection of fourteen songs, but there was an air of intense heat surrounding the project that refused to let up until it was actually in people’s hands. All the clubs were full of talk about it, and the music papers had already issued encomiums. Melody Maker, in a forum with three top disc jockeys, touted it as “a great album… that puts the Beatles unmistakably at the top of the beat tree,” while Alan Smith, writing in NME, called it “a knockout,” predicting it would top the charts for a record-setting eight weeks. “Most of the material on With the Beatles is wild and up-tempo,” Smith revealed, while citing “All My Loving” as the album’s true “highlight.”

  “The second album was slightly better than the first,” George said, “inasmuch as we spent more time on it, and there were more original songs.” Seven Lennon-McCartney numbers—half the songs—were featured among the lineup. Following the same effective balance as on their first album, mixing originals with American covers, the Beatles ripped through a stingy thirty-three and a half minutes of music that put the excitement back into Top 40 pop. There was nothing timid or bottled up about the performances on this album, from the blazing attention-grabber “It Won’t Be Long” to the very last beat of “Money.”

  In between, “All I’ve Got to Do” cha-cha’ed in and out of a brooding but affectionate melody that took its cues from the kind of primitive urban R&B sound that was popular in New York. It was influenced, John recalled, by his attempt to write a Smokey Robinson–type song, but it is closer in style to the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You” and early Drifters records. If “All I’ve Got to Do” comes off as restlessly dark and moody, the album’s spirit jerks back and forth along a fragile emotional line. The fans couldn’t have asked for a more exuberant teenybop anthem than “All My Loving,” which became somewhat of an instant Beatles classic. To them, its sunny simplicity, with those chirpy vocals, galloping guitar triplets, and irresistible hooks, perfectly exemplified the developing “Beatles sound.” And the cover of “Please Mr. Postman” is whipped with such slap-bang ferocity that the interpretation goes a long way toward overtaking the Marvelettes’ version.

  “We were all very interested in American music, much more so than in British,” Paul later admitted. That deep-felt debt to classic rock ’n roll brought them back once more to “Roll Over Beethoven.” From the band’s earliest efforts, Chuck Berry songs had been a staple of their repertoire. John always considered Berry “one of the all-time great poets, a rock poet” as much as anybody (including Bob Dylan), and addressed his admiration directly when he said, “I’ve loved everything he’s done, ever.” George’s vocal and guitar solos pay tribute to Berry’s handiwork. He didn’t try to embellish or outstrip the original—he turbocharged it with an undercurrent of handclaps accenting the beat.

  If anything stuck out as being awkward or out of place, it was Paul’s delivery of “Till There Was You,” an overly pretty ballad from The Music Man, which was performed in such a precious way that, according to George, Paul “sounded like a woman.” Songs like this one, along with “A Taste of Honey” and “Besame Mucho,” can easily be seen as the Beatles’ response to George Martin’s and Brian Epstein’s request that they broaden their image and appeal with a selection of pop standards. Such material had always been part of the Beatles’ standard sets, even in Hamburg and at the Cavern, where audiences could either slow dance, light up cigarettes, or, if they grew too bored, visit the loo. But on an album of rock ’n roll songs, it proved too conspicuous. Such indulgence didn’t harm their credibility, but it did nothing to further the Beatles along the path they had marked out for themselves.

  Besides, there was too much other territory for them to explore. Paul, who wrote “Hold Me Tight” at Forthlin Road while he and John were still teenagers, refers to it as “a failed attempt at a
single which then became an acceptable album filler,” but since their Cavern days it had been shaped and reshaped, most recently with a quirky middle eight, that eliminated its flatness and cranked up fresh interest. Even “I Wanna Be Your Man,” given a surly, suggestive reading by the Rolling Stones, sounds more intimate under Ringo’s chummy vocal. And “Money,” a barn burner left over from Hamburg, put the torch to all the assembly-line Liverpool covers, the repetitious rave-ups blaring out of every club within ten miles of Clayton Square, and transformed the song into something else entirely. This version pulled the song off the stage and thrust it into the garage, where the Beatles roughed it up and gave it a new potency that had eluded it before.

  Among the elements that lifted this album above its predecessor are the innovative double-tracking—a process that allowed the Beatles to layer vocals and rhythm tracks rather than recording everything live, in one take—and its unique cover, an ethereal, grim-faced, black-and-white portrait that conjures up a striking, if disturbing, image of the boys. Nervous that EMI might pressure them into using the same kind of uninspired group shot as on Please Please Me, they enlisted Robert Freeman to come up with something “artistic,” something bold. “We showed him the pictures Astrid and Jurgen [sic] had taken in Hamburg and said, ‘Can’t you do it like this?’ ” George recalled. Freeman posed the Beatles against the velvet curtains of a hotel dining room in Bournemouth, using mostly natural light that seeped in through an enormous window along one side of the wall. It was a stunning departure from the usual upbeat, glossy sleeves on which labels exclusively relied. Given the circumstances, EMI’s reaction was inevitable. They hated the concept, calling it “shockingly humorless,” and threatened to pull the cover for something more “happy” and less “grim.” Brian, too, was less than enthusiastic. “He was convinced it would damage their image,” Tony Barrow recalls, “but the boys put their feet down.”