Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Two similar events happened that night, Saturday, April 7, 1962, and neither made any headlines. Seventeen steps beneath Liverpool streets, in a club running with condensation, the Beatles treated a packed audience to a farewell session before leaving for Hamburg’s red-light district. Two hundred miles south, sixteen steps beneath London streets, in a club running with condensation, Brian Jones told Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (as he told everyone he met) he’d shortly be moving to London and forming a band. They’d play none of that rock ’n’ roll shit but stick to the real thing: Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf. Within a month, in the May 2 issue of Jazz News, Jones advertised his intention:

  RHYTHM AND BLUES

  Guitarist and Vocalist forming R.&B. Band, require Harmonica and/or Tenor Sax, Piano, Bass, and Drums. Must be keen to rehearse. Plenty of interesting work available.

  BOX No. 1277.12

  • • •

  The slow but steady rise of R&B groups in the south of England was no more noticed by recording managers than the surge in “beat group” activity up north. In December, Brian Epstein had enticed a Decca man to Liverpool and got the attention of EMI … then EMI folded, Decca rejected, and he was never again able to get anyone to so much as look at the Beatles. “There was a lot of heavy grind for Brian in the early days,” John once remarked, and he probably didn’t know the half of it. “He never stopped,” says Bobby Brown, “he was always going somewhere.” Brian himself would recall the period by saying, “I did everything I could. Everything. I shouted from the rooftops.”13

  Some days he was consumed with anger over his treatment, and on others his morale hit the floor and he questioned his abilities. Bob Wooler would describe occasions when, after a Cavern midday session, Brian took him to his favorite lunch café, Peacocks, and metaphorically cried on his shoulder. “He would say, ‘What am I doing wrong? Why aren’t the record people responding?’ All I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it, Brian. They should come and see what the Beatles are doing to audiences.’ He was so disappointed—but he was persistent and determined to make a breakthrough. Of course, his family couldn’t see it—they were saying, ‘Give up, Brian. You’ve given it a go, now give it up.’ ”14

  Brian wouldn’t give up. In 1962, EMI and Decca had 80 percent of the record market between them, with four or five other companies sharing the rest. He saw them all. The list of men who rejected the Beatles but signed the flimsiest of inexperienced talent on the strangest of whims is longer than will ever be known—it was so quickly something none dared admit … but (to a greater or lesser degree) it encompassed the A&R staff at Pye, Philips, Ember and Oriole Records.†

  There was more to these rejections than an inability to hear the Beatles. Londoners were sniffy about Liverpool—they always had been and always would be. Brian’s and the Beatles’ undiluted determination to achieve their breakthrough from Liverpool, on their own terms, was not doing them any favors in the capital. Less than a year later, interviewed for Peter Cook’s Soho-based arts magazine Scene, Brian remembered, “London agents said we’d never do it from Liverpool, we’d never get the TV exposure and all that. It was hard getting them work.” Clive Epstein would recall how his brother “put up with rudeness and indifference and doors being slammed in his face.”15

  Brian was also continually told Change the name Beatles. It was preventing their progress. Ditch it, call them something more sensible, less unpleasant. Bob Wooler was again the confidant. “They said, ‘What do you mean by the Beatles?’ Brian would spell it out for them and they said, ‘What a ridiculous name!’ He said to me, ‘They’re suggesting that as the name Beatles doesn’t mean anything they’ll have to change it.’ I reassured Brian the name was positively valid, not just because they were known on the local scene but because it was a short name and, when you put it on posters, the shorter the name the bigger the print.”16

  The Beatles took all this news badly. They were steamed up about Londoners’ patronizing attitude to Liverpool, and became all the more determined to show them. But how? After EMI, Decca, Philips, Pye, Oriole and Ember, there was nowhere else; the few other record companies that existed were niche-specialists with no chance of charting a record. John, Paul and sometimes George would meet Brian off the London train, a four-hour-plus run from Euston. They sat in the Punch and Judy, a “greasy spoon” caff down the slope outside Lime Street station, and when Eppy walked in with a long face they knew he was home empty-handed. When Brian’s London meetings took him past six o’clock he’d be aboard the night’s final train, the 8:45, pulling into Liverpool at 1:45 after a change at Crewe. They’d retire to Duke Street and digest the news over one of Joe’s late-late curries. As John would describe it, “He used to come back from London and couldn’t face us because he’d been down about twenty times and come back to say, ‘Well, I’m afraid they didn’t accept it again.’ And by then we were a bit close with him and he was really hurt. He’d be terrified to tell us that we had not made it again. He did all that—he went around, smarming and charming everybody.”17

  Those were retrospective remarks. Bob Wooler would remember Beatles irritation over Brian’s failures, and how “John lost patience with him from time to time, which didn’t help.” John admitted to this: “We did have a few little fights with Brian. We used to say he was doing nothing and we were doing all the work. We were just saying it, really. We knew how hard he was working. It was Us against Them.”18

  At the end of the line was a laugh, as there always was. In his autobiography, Brian related the tale of a despondent night in Joe’s Restaurant when every record company had turned them down and every idea had been explored. “Right. Try Embassy,” John suddenly said. Embassy was Woolworth’s budget label, cover versions of chart hits performed in the style of the originals by singers and session men under other names. Embassy records sold well but didn’t qualify for the charts, and the label was artistically moribund: it didn’t sign creative talent. They laughed long … and hard … because, really, where were they? “It was,” says Paul, “all a bit bloody hell, what are we gonna do?”19

  John and Paul were openly gloomy about their chances of success. “We didn’t think we were going to make it at all,” John recalled two years later … before adding that they hadn’t all been so pessimistic: “It was only Brian telling us we were going to make it, and George. Brian Epstein and George Harrison.”20 So this one time when the seemingly indefatigable Lennon and McCartney felt defeated, their young friend George stayed optimistic. He rallied them, he showed them that while they might be thinking the worst, he was remaining hopeful. Wasn’t “Something’ll turn up” the Beatles’ mantra? Such was the depth, and the strength, of the personalities in this group.

  The rejections put a crimp in Brian’s management expansion plans. In mid-March, he wrote to the other groups he’d said he would handle—anything between two and five of them, including Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Remo Four—to withdraw his offer. He had to get the Beatles a record deal, and would branch out into wider management later. Despite this, he decided to set up a separate company for his entrepreneurial interests—his stewardship of the Beatles, his developing ideas to become a promoter, and, eventually, the management of other artists. It would be a proper business on a proper business footing, with its own office, staff, banking and stationery. His idea was to involve Clive as much as possible: Brian considered his brother “the businessman of the family: calm, cool and efficient,” and working in tandem would give him a layer of protection against their father’s opposition.21

  This time, there was a vital difference in Brian’s message to his father: he was transparent in his commitment to doing just this, being an impresario, and therefore he’d be taking a reduced involvement in the shops. Clive would remain hands-on, but Brian wouldn’t be, not so much; he would promote Peter Brown from Great Charlotte Street to become manager of the Whitechapel record department, to handle the responsibility he was reli
nquishing. Harry’s objections were understood and noted, but Brian pressed ahead. He had his lawyer process an application to the Board of Trade for the formation of a company called BC Enterprises Ltd.—BC for Brian and Clive, styled this way, no spaces or stops. He expected everything to be up and running by the time of his return from Hamburg, after he’d overseen the Beatles’ first week or so there …

  … which was a trip that almost didn’t happen. It suddenly materialized during March that Paul and Pete needed official, individual clearance letters to get back into Germany. The legacy of their 1960 deportation, that crazy Bambi Kino incident, was rearing up again. The police dispensation they’d scrambled to get at the last moment the previous March, so they could play the Top Ten season, was for twelve months only and would expire on March 28, 1962, two weeks before their Hamburg return. Just like Allan Williams before him, Brian suddenly found himself jumping through bureaucratic hoops at the German consulate in Liverpool, filling out forms and begging and scraping to get the troublesome Messrs. McCartney and Best back into Deutschland. He was successful, but future restrictions were enforced even tighter: permit applications would have to be made on a trip-by-trip basis.

  They’d soon be seeing Astrid, Klaus and Stuart again. On February 3, just before Stuart’s trip to Liverpool, these close friends were photographed together during a carnival at Stuart’s Hochschule. It was a dressing-up event: Klaus wore a velvet shirt with medieval ruffle, and Stuart wore tight black leather trousers, black winkle-picker shoes, and a black shirt tied like a blouson halfway down his chest, showing his navel. He looked well, confident, the same hip individual he’d been since landing in Hamburg eighteen months earlier. It was one of several fine, recent photos. Stuart was ill, but in short interludes of better health Astrid was able to photograph him. He could have stepped back alongside John anytime. With the combed-forward fringe, boots, black T-shirt, waistcoat and skinny tie, he was the Altona Beatle, not yet 22. Astrid took his picture in Reinhart Wolf’s studio, and in Stuart’s artist’s garret at the Kirchherr-Bergmann house, standing by the easel that held yet another brilliantly intense new canvas. In one photo, the left side of Stuart’s face was illuminated by the light streaming through the attic window, and the right side, to the room, was in shadow.

  The camera loved and tragically lied. Stuart wasn’t well at all. Around mid-March, his headaches became dramatically more violent—he suffered vicious, debilitating attacks that lasted hours and sometimes days. As Astrid remembers, “He didn’t know what was happening to him. He went from one doctor to another and they couldn’t help him. If he was writing a letter, his handwriting would get very weird when the attack was at its highest point. He’d keep holding the pen but it was just lines and scribble. He was a very, very controlled person and was trying to get the pain under control …”22

  Nielsa Kirchherr paid the medical bills, which included a course of spinal massage. After one session Stu and Astrid passed an undertaker’s window displaying coffins: Stuart said he didn’t want the standard one, he wanted pure white wood. Nielsa rebuked him for saying such things. To his own mother, Stuart started letters he never completed, the barely legible ones described by Astrid, half-formed words calling himself “a very sick little boy” scratched across the pages.

  Hamburg’s imminent new rock and roll venue now had a name: the Star-Club. It had picked itself—the biggest stars would work its stage, and Manfred Weissleder could make use of the giant five-pointed yellow neon star erected over the entrance when it was the Stern-Kino (Star-Cinema). It was at Grosse Freiheit 39, in the heart of the action, and Peter Eckhorn knew his reign running St. Pauli rock was finished. Half his Top Ten house band had already been lured across, first Roy Young and then Tony Sheridan. Eckhorn could count his contractual release money while staring at an empty stage.

  Since the new band needed a drummer, Sheridan got back in touch with Ringo. He was offered a year’s contract, running to April 1963—he’d get about £30 a week, an apartment and the use of a car. It was his best deal yet. Had he not left Hamburg in February, it would have been a cinch. If Hamburg’s fatal floods hadn’t come and Granny Annie hadn’t died, he’d probably just have switched clubs like Sheridan and Young did—alley oop! As it was, he’d gone home and picked up other offers, new adventures to explore, not old ones to repeat. While he’d had a great time in Hamburg and was very tempted to return, he said no. As Sheridan and Young stayed in St. Pauli more or less continuously from this point, year after year until later in the decade, Ringo’s instinctive decision was crucial to his future.

  Sheridan’s was just one of four offers Ringo received in the space of about three weeks. The second was to join Howie Casey and the Seniors on the road, and the third was the one he accepted—to rejoin the Hurricanes. It wasn’t so much that he craved their company or musicianship, though they were all still mates, it was what they were doing that interested him: they were off to France for a month or more, to play to the soldiers at a United States Army base.

  Only four months after Ringo reluctantly ended his Houston emigration plans, he’d be inside the little American enclaves that dotted the postwar European landscape, enjoying access to PX shops full of amazing American goods. And as it also happened that the Hurricanes’ return from France would lead into a third straight Butlin’s summer season, running from the start of June to early September, Ringo would be back with Rory another six months before considering his next move.

  The US Army contract had one stipulation: the Hurricanes had to have a female singer. The GIs didn’t want to sit looking at men all night long, they wanted a broad. Richy failed to persuade Swinging Cilla to make the trip (her dad wouldn’t let her go), but they found their girl in Vicky Woods, an attractive blonde who sang in a double-act with her mother in Liverpool’s other thriving entertainment scene, clubland—the working men’s, church, social and political clubs that ran parallel to the rock/jive business but rarely crossed over. With Vicky on board, Rory & Co. were ready once more to put their passports to good use, and Ringo’s return gave them the boost they’d been lacking since he left—in his Echo ad for their booking at New Brighton Tower on March 23, Sam Leach announced they were “back to their top form.” Ringo was in the groove, the man of the moment, respected by and in demand from fellow musicians … and it was just days after committing to France that he got his fourth offer. Liverpool’s number one group wanted him.

  The Beatles had between eight and ten bookings a week and sometimes someone was ill and couldn’t play. Gerry Marsden deputized for George one lunchtime; Gerry was about five inches smaller, so John and Paul found an orange box from the Fruit Exchange and made him stand on it. Gerry was always up for a laugh and he knew the numbers well enough to make a proper contribution. On Monday, March 26, the Beatles had a lunchtime session in the Cavern and an evening booking at the Kingsway Club in Southport, and, late in the morning, Pete phoned in sick. One name came to mind: the man they’d enjoyed playing with at their Christmas party three months earlier. The Beatles instructed Brian to fetch Ringo.

  It was already midday, Cavern starting time, when Brian knocked at 10 Admiral Grove. Elsie left him waiting outside while she went upstairs and rapped on her Richy’s bedroom door. He was in bed. He came down and Brian said the Beatles wanted him, and they had to leave immediately. Ringo said he was more than happy to play with the Beatles but wasn’t going anywhere until he’d put on some trousers and drunk a brew of tea. Aware of the clock, Brian was no doubt fit to burst, but he had to wait. The two had exchanged a brief hello once or twice in past weeks, when Ringo had gone along to see the Beatles play, but their first proper meeting was in Brian’s car as he sped Ringo down the hill to the Cavern. As Ringo would recall, “I didn’t know much about him, except how strange it was that the Beatles had a manager, because none of us had a real manager.”23

  The Beatles were in uncharacteristic disarray—Cavernites were shouting they’d have to be getting back to work soon, so were
they gonna start playing? The drums were assembled around Ringo (by Neil, presumably) only after they finally started, and it was twenty minutes before he had a full kit. But when he did, the four of them gelled as a musical unit just as they’d done in December. As Ringo said, “They were doing really great tracks—Shirelles tracks and Chuck Berry tracks—[and] they did it so well. They had a good style. There was a whole feel about Paul, George and John. And Pete Best—it’s no offense, but I never felt he was a great drummer. He had one sort of style, which was very good for them in those years, I suppose, but they felt, I think, that they wanted to move out of it more.”24

  Ringo wasn’t familiar with all the songs, but his bandmates were more than happy with the way he played. Paul said he was particularly pleased with his work on “What’d I Say,” John loved the way he “went to the toms [tom-tom drums]” in the middle-eight of “Rock and Roll Music,” and George simply enjoyed the complete experience, commenting, “Every time Ringo sat in, it seemed like ‘this is it.’ ”25 George admired Ringo: he liked his drumming, his attitude, their chemistry, and that he didn’t rush away afterward but was looking for the same good time they were. “Pete would go off on his own and we three would hang out together, and then when Ringo was around it was like a full unit, both on and off the stage. When there were the four of us with Ringo, it felt rocking.”26