Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Speaking to them straight, and no doubt with some shyness, Brian told the Beatles that if they let him be their manager it would be a two-way street. He wouldn’t be dictatorial but would listen to what they had to say and take their views into consideration. He would be the manager and they the artists, and ultimately there’d be a contract embodying this, but in real terms it would be a partnership, everyone for the same goal. He made his novice status clear by adding “I’ll be quite honest, I’ve never been engaged in this kind of thing before,” and they said something like “Well, we don’t know anything about being managed so we could all try together.”49

  The Beatles recognized and respected integrity. Anyone who thought he could barge in and tell them what to do and how to be, like a Larry Parnes figure, wouldn’t last five minutes with them, and anyone they sensed to be bluffing would be deaded (Goon Show speak) even sooner. Wooler said the meeting ended with the discussion of management “on a ‘getting to know you’ basis, as in ‘If you like me and I like you and we can get on, well OK, we’ll clinch it.’ A sort of probationary period. That was how it was left.”50

  It also finished with another meeting fixed: Brian said they should return on Sunday at 4:30, when he’d report back to them about London. The shop would be closed but they should knock on the door: he’d be working inside, ordering stock for Christmas, keeping the promise to his parents to make up time.

  John, Paul and George had always thought Something’ll happen, something will turn up, and their mantra had proved right yet again … in the closest of all shaves. Without Brian Epstein materializing for them, the Beatles—as Bob Wooler foresaw—“were definitely going to collapse,” and this just eleven months after their sensational first return from Hamburg.

  Brian was, they felt, a bit “antwakky” (Liverpudlian for “antique”) but otherwise a cut above the rest. Not counting Jennifer Dawes and Maureen O’Shea—who effectively withdrew the moment Brian arrived on the scene; “he had class and he had money,” says Jennifer—Brian Epstein would be the fourth manager they’d had, the fourth man to come along and fix things for them, after Nigel Walley, Derek Hodkin and Allan Williams. This was the way John, Paul and George considered it, and in every key respect—contacts, professionalism, clout—Brian was in a different league. He was still Liverpool, which was crucial, but he had London connections, knew the record business and had money, which meant he knew both how to make it and how to hang on to it. They’d give him a try.51

  It’s fortunate Brian was a gambler, because the risks were his alone to shoulder. He was the only one who felt sure of a return on his time and investment. The Beatles were damaged goods: they had that reputation for being unreliable, unpunctual, arrogant and bolshie. Their perfunctory, take-it-or-leave-it attitude was so disliked by promoters that two had left it, and several others steered clear altogether. Their fee remained at maximum but their bookings had shrunk—the only promoters who gave them work now were Vic Anton (once a fortnight), Mrs. Best (ditto, at the Casbah), Sam Leach (weekly) and the Cavern (as often as possible). Also, they’d signed a recording deal in Germany of which they knew no details because it was all in German, and which could easily prevent them getting another in Britain. But the shirtsleeves of Brian’s mind were ready-rolled as he went to work in the final weeks of 1961, with no contract or offer of compensation, or even the likelihood of expenses being repaid. And as he was about to discover, managerial involvement with the Beatles didn’t come with any glowing testimonials. Allan Williams remained stoutly bitter about the way the lads he’d helped had given him a drubbing.

  Epstein went to the Blue Angel to learn from Williams what had happened between him and the Beatles. Still swearing they’d reneged on the agreement, sufficient for him to have threatened legal action, Williams vented his feelings with characteristic bluntness.

  When he told me he wanted to manage the Beatles I said, “Brian, don’t touch them with a fucking bargepole.” He didn’t use language like that, but he took it in his stride, as a gentleman would.

  He had the class I didn’t have, and—with having the music shop—he also had the credibility of some sort of lever. I could tell he wasn’t going to manage the Beatles for the money, and that he wasn’t a typical showbiz manager who’d rip them off. He loved them. I could see that. Brian Epstein was the best thing that could have happened to the Beatles because he was devoted.

  In the end, as he was leaving, I called out, “Just make sure you sign them up, because they’ll let you down.”52

  Nothing could dent Brian’s personal commitment. Now they’d properly met, he craved the Beatles’ association even more. As he’d recall in 1964:

  I liked them very much indeed. I liked them even more off the stage than on. Everything about the Beatles was right for me—their kind of attitude to life, the attitude that comes out in their music and their rhythm and their lyrics, and their humor, and their own personal way of behaving—it was all just what I wanted. They represented the direct, unselfconscious, good-natured, uninhibited human relationships which I hadn’t found and had wanted and felt deprived of. And my own sense of inferiority evaporated with the Beatles because I knew I could help them, and that they wanted me to help them, and trusted me to help them.53

  “I think if you show the public something lovely, they’ll accept it,” Brian said of the stylish and modern way he presented the windows at I. Epstein & Sons in 1951, when he was 16.54 Here was what he had in mind with the Beatles. All year long, in Liverpool and in Hamburg, they had stunned audiences and earned the extraordinary devotion of fans, himself included, so why shouldn’t this also happen if he was able to project them beyond Merseyside—through the northwest, say, and then the rest of England, Britain, the world? Even at such an early stage, it seems, at the outset of his management, he had in mind the ultimate goal, America. As he later said, “One has thought about America in connection with the Beatles for a long time, because I always thought—I was always quite sure, really—that the Beatles would make it big over there.”55

  And, most vitally of all, both to him and to the Beatles, he intended to strive for these triumphs from Liverpool, on their own terms.

  The impossibilities were piled high.

  Brian went to London on the overnight sleeper train and spent a full Friday with the record companies. Fixing his aim on the two giants of the British business, he had appointments at EMI House and Decca House. Inside his attaché case was the Beatles’ original contract with Bert Kaempfert and several copies of “My Bonnie.” It isn’t known if he also had photographs—it was too soon for him to have had new ones taken, but it’s possible he had some Jürgen Vollmer shots from the Top Ten Club earlier in the year.

  His primary contacts were sales directors. At EMI this was Ron White, now promoted to general marketing manager; he was the man whose office Brian had visited to negotiate Nems’ unique and advantageous trading discount. Brian’s good relations with EMI extended beyond this too: he was familiar to the records division managing director Len Wood, known in the business as “L. G.” “I knew Epstein very well before he had contact with the Beatles,” Wood later said. “He used to come down to town, join us at special industry dinners and sit at our table. A good man.”56

  Brian stopped short of giving White the really hard sell. Managers always said their act was “the greatest ever” and he wanted to be different. He pushed the Beatles well and politely, as befitting his company, and left a copy of “My Bonnie”; White promised to bring it to the attention of the company’s four senior A&R men—Norrie Paramor, Norman Newell, Wally Ridley and George Martin—and Brian reminded him to ensure they ignore the singer and listen only to the backing group. But even if one of them should want to see the Beatles, and maybe offer a recording contract, nothing was possible until the terms of the Kaempfert deal had been ascertained. White suggested Brian leave it with him and he would show it to a German-speaking colleague.

  Next, Brian lunched in the executive dini
ng room at Decca House, overlooking the Thames and the Houses of Parliament. His hosts were the company’s sales manager Sidney “Steve” Beecher-Stevens and his assistant Colin Borland, and Brian was again the youngster in such company.† To emphasize how Decca could profit from this extension of their association, he’d run Nems display ads in the Liverpool Echo the two previous evenings (November 29 and 30) in which Decca product was pushed heavily. Whether or not Brian bought the ad space with this motive in mind, it reinforced the message: Decca couldn’t refuse to see a group touted by a client who advertised company product and sold £20,000 worth of it per annum.

  There was, however, an administrative process to follow. All these record companies ran as efficient bureaucracies: Brian left Decca with the “Standard Audition Agreement” and the promise his application would be fast-tracked through the Artistes Department. Decca’s popular A&R team was about to undergo a radical shake-up—it would be reported in the music press within days—and he could expect news of an audition for his Beatles soon.

  His final meeting was an unusual one—still with Decca but in a different building, around the corner from the HQ. Brian had written to the Liverpool Echo columnist Disker and been surprised to receive a reply from London, and from Decca. Tony Barrow, alias Disker, had migrated from Crosby to London and taken a job in Decca’s sleeve department, writing LP liner notes—a position that fortuitously left plenty of spare time for freelance journalism. During their November correspondence, Brian asked Disker to write about the Beatles, and Barrow had to decline because his column didn’t generally deviate from record reviews. He says Brian arrived at his Decca desk in person, this time hoping he could help oil wheels to get the Beatles a contract. Oddly, he insists Brian had with him an acetate disc with a recording of the Beatles in the Cavern, blaming the rough audio quality on its origin as a TV broadcast. Barrow couldn’t hear much through the atrocious sound quality but promised to mention the visit to his Decca colleagues. He spoke to the marketing department, who will have registered Epstein’s pushing of his group a second time.57

  At the moment Brian Epstein was taking these initial steps to break the Beatles into the big time, the music business, show business, was contorting itself—up and down and around and around—over a new American craze. It started with a song—“The Twist,” turned into a hit by Chubby Checker—which then detonated in Britain in mid-November as both a musical sound and a dance fad, simultaneous with identical twin explosions in several other countries, including West Germany (Der Twist) and France (the Paris visited a month earlier by John and Paul was now Le Twiste mad). Craziest of all was America, where it was embraced by all ages, adults included, and all social classes. The trade press was stupefied by this unexpected development because the Twist was just the hated rock and roll under another name, newly hinged to a dance that, like the music itself, was strongly of black origin, with a lineage back to African slavery. As Cash Box exclaimed in an editorial, “If you spend enough time in our business, sooner or later you’re bound to see just about everything.”58

  The Twist broke big not just because it was a very good R&B record but because of Chubby’s dance steps, which anyone could do and everyone did do. It could even be done alone, becoming the first popular solo dance; floors were instantly full of people going through motions memorably described as “drying one’s derrière with an imaginary bath towel while pretending to be grinding out a cigarette with one foot.”59 In the improbable way these things happen, everyone was suddenly Twisting. Rock and roll had never shaken the White House but the American press buzzed over rumors that President Kennedy and the First Lady had danced the Twist at a party. Everyone was doing it, doing it, doing it—and those who didn’t do it talked about why they weren’t.

  The Twist boom would last until summer 1962 and then fade away, and its legacy was to remind the music business in America—and from there Britain and the rest of the world—that novelty dance crazes sold records. In the meantime, record companies indulged in the usual acts of chicanery, attaching the Twist label where it plainly didn’t belong—and one example was “My Bonnie” by “Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers.” Germany (Billboard explained) was suffering a bad case of “Twist-mania,” and it was no coincidence that Polydor prepared a rush reissue of “My Bonnie” with the word “Twist” plastered across Sheridan’s photo and replacing “Rock” as the classification on the label. Despite some good reviews, the record had yet to take off, and it was hoped this might kick-start some action. At the same time, Bert Kaempfert was hoping to conduct Twist business in America: information from the famous conductor/producer caused Cash Box to call Tony Sheridan “a Twister from England” and say that both “My Bonnie” and “The Saints” had been recorded “in Twist rhythm.” Better yet, America’s “six top record firms” were “fighting over the master,” all no doubt anxious to slay ’em with a bit of Anglo-Saxon Twist. Here was the Beatles’ first dalliance with the American record business … and they knew nothing of it.60

  EMI found itself in the lucky position of owning the hit in Britain, though actually it had had the song all along: Chubby’s recording was a clone of the original version by its writer Hank Ballard, twice issued by Parlophone to no interest whatever. For label boss George Martin, successes always came the hard way. He had another big hit in October/November 1961 with “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back,” in which the TV comedian Charlie Drake was set into an Australian aural landscape using sounds ingeniously conjured from studio equipment. There were also ongoing LP sessions with Spike Milligan and with Michael Bentine that required constant invention (and rare use of the new four-track tape machine at Abbey Road). “I always try to do something different,” George told Disc, a comment that couldn’t honestly have been said by another producer in Britain at this time.61

  One man not trying something different was Dave Dexter, Jr., at Capitol Records in Hollywood. George gritted his teeth as he saw his big successes rejected by the company EMI owned but felt powerless to instruct. Drake went to United Artists, and the Temperance Seven’s chart-topping “You’re Driving Me Crazy” went to Verve. EMI’s other big artists were dotted ad hoc around America, few succeeding, and it was at this point that L. G. Wood decided EMI must pursue an alternative and more focused policy. He reshaped the EMI-owned Top Rank Co-operative into a seemingly independent New York–based corporation, its twin-task to license more American masters for Britain and to find best-possible US labels for British records. EMI’s involvement in the as-yet-unnamed company was to remain secret, but one of its first moves was to secure a stronger relationship with the small but vibrant Chicago R&B label Vee Jay. To begin with, EMI licensed its hottest releases for British issue; ultimately, it was anticipated Vee Jay could become a home for some of the British acts rejected by Capitol under its way too literally applied “first turn-down option.”

  George’s main bugbear at this time, though, was his pay-packet: £2,800 a year plus a small Christmas bonus was a reasonable salary, but the job didn’t provide a car and there remained zero prospect of gaining a percentage royalty on sales. Every time George raised it with L. G. Wood, it was flatly rebutted. With his three-year rolling contract coming up for renewal in April 1962, George was seriously considering moving on.

  His private life was also at crunch time. His affair with Judy Lockhart Smith remained known to precious few, but after five years something had to give. Amid emotional turmoil for all concerned, George left his wife and two young children in Hatfield and rented a small flat in central London, not far from EMI House. It was handy too for Judy’s flat, which was just behind EMI.62 She shared with two other young women and George often bunked down for the night on a “chair bed”—a short-term solution for a long-legged man. He became more focused in his activities from the moment he and Judy were united. Left to his own devices, George was happy to amble or lose himself in projects that might satisfy creatively but reward inadequately. Judy was intent on making him more of an all-aro
und success. Already his secretary since 1955, she now took greater direction over George’s life and career, easing it into a higher gear, boosting his confidence and self-belief.

  One avenue ripe for a bolder approach was songwriting—handily aided by a rather nice grand piano in the corner of Judy’s flat. The former Guildhall composition student had been quietly placing tunes on record here and there for some years, usually written as “Graham Fisher,” and now there was an acceleration. Fisher co-wrote Matt Monro’s hit “Can This Be Love,” and there were further tracks in 1961 released by Ron Goodwin and Spike Milligan. As the year moved on, George wrote two short, catchy tunes, “Double Scotch” and “The Niagara Theme,” both of which were copyrighted under his real name and assigned to a new music publishing company, Dick James Music. The ace plugger and talent-spotter had left Sydney Bron after eight years and set up on his own. George and Dick had been close almost a decade, from the days when James spent daytimes in the studio and evenings on stage in his wig. George knew James was both a good publisher and hungry for success, and that he would work his songs hard. “Double Scotch” was “copyright 001” in the Dick James Music ledger.

  Publishing was still the core part of the music business it had been from the start, since before records. It was one corner of the essential triangle, as fundamental as the artist and record company. And it wasn’t just records: sales of sheet music, although in decline, were still healthy enough to have their own niche chart in Record Retailer, and a big chunk of a publisher’s balance sheet came from live and broadcast performances. George Martin’s first port of call with almost all his artists was the same as every other A&R man’s: Denmark Street—“Tin Pan Alley”—to find the right songs. Most of the time they came to him: his diary was filled with one lunch after another. Any publisher who couldn’t push wasn’t worth a penny. Plugging, also still known as exploitation, was the name of the game, the essence of the business, and a publisher was frequently more crucial in breaking a hit than the record company.