Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  “Who’s Loving You” (and its A-side, “Shop Around,” which John also thought great) defines the moment when a new musical playground opened up for John Lennon, and for the Beatles. A soulful singer and his supporting vocalists deliver a romantic song of melody and rhythm, a lyric that doesn’t just say “I love you” but wraps the feeling inside a storyline, one that reached the tender core of a Lennon few saw. More than anything, he loved its sound, a style defined in America as rhythm and blues. “Shop Around” made the top of Billboard’s R&B chart, giving Tamla its first number 1 and million-seller. John also loved the way “Shop Around” had a preliminary section that didn’t recur in the rest of the song, like the old 1920s numbers Julia taught him on banjo. He appreciated the name too, the Miracles; they were a group, like the Beatles. “Robinson” was credited as composer on both sides of the record, but John had no way yet of realizing this was also the singer, and that he’d turn out to be that forever hero William “Smokey” Robinson.

  It isn’t known if John added “Who’s Loving You” and “Shop Around” to the Beatles’ repertoire, but the songs lived within him regardless and enriched his personal tastes. R&B! He loved Elvis, Eddie, Chuck, Carl, Gene, Buddy, Little Richard, Jerry Lee and all the other great Fifties heroes (all R&B- or C&W-style rock and rollers), and now he loved this 1960s black pop music from the northern United States—and when he shared his passion with Paul and George, they loved it too … just as they were all gripped at this time by yet another momentous arrival in their lives: “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” by the Shirelles. This one record effectively launched the “girl-group sound”—R&B with beat, rhythm, melody and harmony—and no musical force beyond rock and roll was ever as crucial to the Beatles’ development.

  The Shirelles were four 19-year-old black girls from Passaic High School in New Jersey who came under the wing of Florence Greenberg, the mother of one of their school friends; Greenberg owned her own independent record label, Scepter, based ten miles from Passaic, in New York City. The tapestry of the American music business was already enhanced beyond measure by the creative partnership of blacks and Jews, and a bright new chapter opened with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the greatest teenage love song of the period and the first record by a black female group to top the US charts.

  Greenberg ran Scepter Records from an office at 1650 Broadway and West 51st Street. Her choice as Scepter’s in-house producer was Luther Dixon, 29, a black singer-songwriter-arranger; “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was written by a composer partnership new to those who studied record labels: the husband-and-wife pairing of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, 21 and 18, words and music respectively. They numbered among an array of talented young songwriting teams who arrived each day at the same building to work for the publishing company Aldon Music. Each pairing, and a piano, were squeezed into neighboring cubicles in a modern Tin Pan Alley scenario—a Teen Pan Alley. Almost all the songs that lit up the first half of the twentieth century were written in similar circumstances twenty-three blocks south of here—tunes for musicals, films, dance fads and hits; now they were being written for seven-inch vinyl discs and the teenagers who bought them.

  At 1650 Broadway, and in offices at the Brill Building across and farther down Broadway at 1619, it seemed everyone was the child or grandchild of European Jews.† There was Goffin and King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, writing songs for producers like Phil Spector and Jerry Wexler. Sedaka sang the numbers he and Greenfield wrote, but otherwise the pairings created a host of classy compositions for different performers. Often these were black girl-groups, urban teenagers who’d honed their voices and harmonies by singing gospel music in church. And they were girls singing to girls, a revolutionary departure in pop music.

  Gender didn’t stop the Beatles (or other Liverpool groups) singing these numbers—a good song was a good song and that was enough for them. John grabbed “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and Paul and George took the backing vocals, and while there’s no recording of them doing it, several say it had extraordinary power and tenderness, like another “To Know Her Is to Love Her.” To the Beatles, to John and Paul especially, the composer credit Goffin-King would become nothing less than a trademark of quality, sufficient in itself to make them listen to or buy a record, and rarely were they disappointed.

  Then they flipped the record over and discovered the B-side, a song called “Boys.” This wasn’t Goffin and King’s work but almost entirely the creation of Luther Dixon, who cowrote, arranged and produced. Dixon was the creator of the Shirelles sound that the Beatles loved—another name for them to sleuth on record labels. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” works beautifully with strings, “Boys” is big-beat R&B, the backing singers up front. That’s how the Beatles did it. John sang lead and Paul and George gave full support, the two of them leaning in toward the microphone, laughing and harmonizing bop-shoo-op-abop-bop-shoo-op into each other’s faces, or sometimes, on appropriate occasions, bobwooler-abob-bobwooler. If they realized it was a girls’ song about boys, it didn’t matter. While several Liverpool groups did “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the Beatles were one of only three to sing “Boys.” King-Size Taylor and the Dominoes did it, and so did Rory Storm and the Hurricanes: it became the latest specialty number in Ringo’s popular nightly Starrtime! spot—and he didn’t change the gender either.

  No such sounds were being made in Britain, where, by definition, everything was smaller-scale. There were no black songwriters or producers, no independent companies releasing pop records, and the business was fixated on Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and also the new chart-topping Parlophone star Adam Faith. Cliff was Britain’s golden boy, his every record in the top ten, several making number 1; the Beatles had a collective attitude about him, which meant they had John’s attitude: the Shadows were OK to listen to, samey but good, but Cliff was loathed. “We’ve always hated him,” John said in 1963 with a degree of outspokenness that shocked. “He was everything we hated in pop.”24

  Bigger even than Cliff, though, was Elvis. The post-army Presley was scaling heights far greater than those reached first flush, holding fort atop the British charts most weeks between November 1960 and April 1961. All this was in spite of his films—suddenly the cornerstone of his career—receiving less than great reviews. Asked if Elvis would reject an unsuitable project, his manager Colonel Parker replied, “For the 500,000 dollars a picture they’re paying him, plus 5,000 dollars a day overtime, they’re going to offer Elvis a bad script?”25 Yes, they were, and these movies and the songs that came with them were beginning to drive his original fans mad with frustration. The Beatles liked Elvis’s new records enough to sing them, but knew they were second rate compared to “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Mystery Train.” In his weekly Disc column, the TV and record producer Jack Good frequently put the Beatles’ thoughts into print. Having reluctantly yet constructively panned Elvis’s films, and been disappointed by the records which (bafflingly to him) were selling more than ever, Good wrote his hero an open letter. “Now that your mission of converting the squares is well and truly accomplished, how about making a few sides for us?” it pleaded. “Some real, low-down, raunchy, scraunchy rhythm and blues, Floyd Cramer knocking the guts out of the old piano, and D. J. Fontana beating the hide out of his drum kit, and then some uptempo screaming—big dramatic stuff?”26

  As far as Good was concerned, one of the best records of 1961 was a George Martin production, the atmospheric West Indian folk song “Long Time Boy,” by Nadia Cattouse, who hailed from British Honduras. Good called it “the most magical record I have heard for months: this could be sensational”—but it didn’t sell enough to chart. It did underline how EMI always provided the funds for its label chiefs to record the artists and songs of their choosing, no matter how commercially viable they might be … and George was also able to claim involvement in
one of the five whole tracks picked for US single release in 1960 by EMI’s own company, Capitol—selections made in Hollywood by Dave Dexter, Jr. None made the charts, which was no surprise given Capitol’s supremely brazen refusal to put any promotional effort behind them. While George didn’t always agree on policy with his A&R colleagues, they were united in deploring Capitol’s corporate behavior—and none would forgive or forget it.27

  This was, though, a breakthrough period in George Martin’s career, when his chart successes became regular. The singer Matt Monro arrived as an artist of quality with “Portrait of My Love,” and when it peaked at 3 in the NME (January 13, 1961) it was one of two Martin productions in the same top ten. The other was “Goodness Gracious Me!” by an Indian-accented Peter Sellers and Italian actress Sophia Loren, whose face and figure adorned many a boy’s bedroom wall. One of the great productions of George’s career, this also peaked at 3, earned a silver disc, and—with its appealing “boom-boody-boom” lyric and wobbleboard flexing—captured the enduring imagination of the British public. Then George again made the unfashionable fashionable by recording a 1920s-style jazz band, nine intemperate and wittily original young men who called themselves the Temperance Seven. He produced their Parlophone debut, “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” in EMI Number 2 studio in February, and it was soon heading into the charts.

  By the end of January, the Beatles were playing seven bookings a week and life had become much more hectic—especially for Paul, because while the others could lie in bed until the afternoons he had to be at the factory every morning, Monday to Friday. Seven bookings in the first half of the month were followed by thirteen in the second—everything was already accelerating. The Beatles’ fee, ranging from £6 to £8 10s per booking, was much more than anyone else earned: few other groups were paid more than £2 and played once or twice a week, so in the table of income the Beatles were easily toppermost. All these engagements were in the north end, which was fine for Pete, but John, Paul, George and Stu had to make a crosstown bus journey or two (usually to the Best house) before going on stage. It was like playing away all the time, and they only saw these places in the dark.

  The north end was also hard. No part of Liverpool was free from violence, and they’d all had tough experiences in places like the Dingle, Toxteth, Garston and Speke—everywhere, actually—but here they had to be ever mindful of the roughnecks’ strict territorial mentality. One night toward the end of January, some Seaforth Teds managed to isolate Stu at Lathom Hall and inflict a bad beating. He was only just home from Hamburg but here he was, right in the thick of it, picked on because he was smaller, or puny, or clever, or not from the local area, or wore dark glasses, or dressed differently, or because some Ted’s girl sighed when he crooned “Love Me Tender.” Any reason would do. When word reached the others that Stu was in trouble, they flew to the rescue. Pete says it happened backstage: “John and I piled in and managed to stop it, and in the ensuing scrap John broke his finger.”28 Neil Aspinall related it a little differently:

  I wasn’t there because I’d dropped them off and gone home to do my correspondence course. But when I went back to pick them up they said, “There’s been a fight in the bogs.” John had broken a finger, Pete had a black eye, Paul had been dancing around and Stuart had been kicked in the head. It was Liverpool, one of those “lucky we got away with it” situations. Apparently Stu had been trapped in the toilets by some Teds because their girls had been screaming, and John had probably done one of his big fucking winks. They didn’t go to hospital.

  It might have been, as Neil reflected, just one of those Liverpool situations, but that didn’t comfort Millie Sutcliffe. She was traumatized when Stuart returned to Ullet Road battered and bleeding. He refused to let her summon a doctor right away, but she prevailed in the morning—the medical opinion was that no obvious damage had been done and a couple of days’ bed rest would see him right.29 Stu ignored the advice and was back on stage a few hours later alongside John, who played guitar with the middle finger of his right hand in a splint.

  The damage was already receding when Astrid arrived. She’d shown Stuart her Hamburg, he would show her his Liverpool, and they would walk it dressed in each other’s clothes. The plan was that she would stay with Stuart and his family, but such was Millie’s hatred of Germans, and upset that Stuart was engaged to one, it was a disaster. As Astrid explains, “She never said she hated me but there was always a horrible politeness, and I could feel the horribleness inside. I felt uncomfortable whenever I was in her company.”30

  The situation quickly broke down. Stuart told his mother he and Astrid intended to sleep together and she forbade it. In 1961, very few mothers would have said otherwise, but events here became overheated. As Allan Williams remembers, “Stuart and Astrid arrived at our house [58 Huskisson Street] at midnight and she was crying her eyes out. We let them stay with us, and they slept together. Astrid was a very lovely, gentle person and she got on well straight away with Beryl. I think we turned what was a nasty experience for them into a pleasant one.”31

  Stuart had become accustomed to people’s stares for a while, but it was as nothing compared to the looks he and Astrid got together. Swapping clothes in Liverpool in 1961 was bold beyond belief. Rod Murray couldn’t have been happier for his best friend. “Astrid was very pretty and really avant-garde. She and Stuart looked exotic in their black leather and he was obviously happy. I thought, ‘What a lucky guy.’ ”32

  Astrid’s visit was a reminder to the Beatles—not that they needed one—of the possibility of a return Hamburg booking. If the document is to be believed, Peter Eckhorn had scribbled that agreement on November 30, 1960, saying they could come back to play his Top Ten Club in April, for a one-month season extendable to two at his discretion. Deported just hours after that was written, Paul and Pete were instructed they had to appeal within thirty days to stand any chance of ever being readmitted into Germany. It was a process they began late, in the first week of the year. Realizing the deadline would be expired by the time their appeal reached Hamburg, they misrepresented the deportation date, giving it as December 5, and hoped the Germans wouldn’t notice. Not a good start.

  Finding some unused pages in the back of an old Liverpool Institute exercise book, Paul drafted a statement which politely insisted that deportation for his and Pete’s silly act of burning a rubber in the Bambi Kino passageway was a punishment disproportionate to the crime.33 Though Allan Williams’ link with the Beatles was diminishing, he was still committed to getting them back to Hamburg, and got his secretary to restructure Paul’s words into formal statements, one each for Paul and Pete. She then typed them and sent the documents with covering letters to Herr Knoop, the chief officer of the “aliens police.” His office received the documents on January 12, days after the deadline; Paul and Pete would be requiring leniency from a bureaucratic German official known to have none.

  This wasn’t the only hurdle to overcome before the Beatles could return to Hamburg. John knew that unless he could lift the restriction on his passport, he’d also be going nowhere. Limited to six months from August 15, 1960, it was set to expire on February 15 and its extension (while he remained under 21) was in doubt. As usual, left to their own devices, the Beatles bordered on clueless. On top of all that, while sending off his semi-fictional appeal to Knoop, Paul had started work at Massey & Coggins. Even assuming he could get the restriction overturned, the only way he’d be free to return to Hamburg would be to quit the factory and forgo his aspiration of rising through the ranks to executive level.

  This apparent dichotomy was highlighted on Thursday, February 9, 1961, when the Beatles made their first appearance at the Cavern, the cellar jazz club in Mathew Street.‡ John, Paul and George hadn’t been back since the Quarry Men last played here in spring 1958, when, as John remembered it, they’d received a year’s ban for playing rock and roll. New owner Ray McFall was becoming steadily more accepting of the electric guitar, however. His Wednesday Rock Nig
hts were doing fair business, and in October 1960 he’d introduced lunchtime sessions—two hours of good records and live rock underneath the city for four days a week, soon extended to five. Sessions ran 12–2PM, members’ admission one shilling. There was a clear market for it—and, from January 1961, Bob Wooler became the club’s talent booker, compere and DJ, his new catchphrase (taken from George Martin’s Peter Sellers LP) coming clear through the loudspeakers: “Remember all you cave-dwellers, the Cavern is the best of cellars.”

  It didn’t take Wooler long to promote the Beatles. They weren’t available on Rock Nights because their Wednesdays were booked by Brian Kelly or Vic Anton, but Wooler added them to a shortlist of groups able to perform at lunchtimes because they had no other jobs. Uniquely in Britain, Liverpool now sustained several professional rock groups, including the Beatles, Derry and the Seniors, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Gerry and the Pacemakers (home from Hamburg the first weekend of February) and the Big Three. The last named were Cass and the Cassanovas without Cass, who’d slipped off to London and wasn’t coming back.

  Wooler offered the Beatles £5 for their Cavern Club debut, a pound each for the five, or twenty-five bob each for the four if Paul didn’t turn up. “I remember the guys—John and George particularly—coming down to this coil-winding factory where I worked and saying, ‘We’ve got an offer to play the Cavern,’ and I said, ‘I’m not sure, I’ve got this real good job here, coil-winding, could be a good future in it.’ And they said, ‘No, come with us.’ I bunked over the wall …”34 The wall, as Massey & Coggins managing director Jim Gilvey remembers it, was about fourteen feet high, so this was some bunk. Being too far to run, they took the bus or train into town, likewise Paul’s return, and the entire escapade probably ate the best part of three hours out of his working day. His absence was noticed and doubtless some measure of unremembered rebuke meted out, met by Paul’s promise not to do it again.