The Parlophone office had been in touch, suggesting Brian come down for a meeting, and his wording suggests he went in anticipation of a positive outcome (though he can have had no idea why). The appointment was with George Martin, Wednesday, 11:30, at Abbey Road.
It was three months since the two men had met, the time when George had been unmoved by the Beatles’ sound and got a little miffed with Brian at one point, though he hadn’t disliked him.
This time, George said, he was able to break some good news: he was going to give the Beatles a contract to record for Parlophone.
The facts behind this May 9 meeting would be glossed over so effectively that neither man talked much about it, but some elements of what happened can be pieced together with certainty.34
First, it’s evident—and vital for all that would follow—that George Martin thought well of Brian Epstein and Brian Epstein thought well of George Martin. There was a sustained mutual appreciation of purpose, methods, ethics and articulacy, and it started in this meeting. Having said that, George wasn’t thinking future. It wasn’t his decision to sign the Beatles and he intended to hand them straight over to Ron Richards. The meeting was short, under forty-five minutes, and there were several things he needed to explain.
Most of the time was taken up by George outlining to Brian the essentials of the contract there would be between them. It would be EMI’s standard recording agreement—the same one issued to Cliff Richard, the Shadows, Adam Faith, Helen Shapiro and almost everyone else, and much the same as that used throughout the business.
• EMI committed to recording a minimum of six “sides” (pieces of music) in the first year, typically to be issued as three singles. EMI would own the recordings and have sole right of production and reproduction.
• All recording costs, including studio time, would be paid by EMI.
• There was no “advance” on royalties. The royalty rate was one penny per “double-sided record” (single) on 85 percent of sales, paid quarterly.‡ LPs were calculated proportionately, usually as six or seven singles.
• It was a four-year contract, but EMI was bound only for the first. If the company chose to renew, the royalty would be increased by farthing increments to a ceiling of 1½d.
• The contract was for the world. Half the prevailing royalty would be paid for record sales outside Britain.
If George didn’t actually say to Brian “Nobody ever gets rich from a recording contract” there was no need. Everyone in the business knew it, and a calculation would have confirmed it. In the Beatles’ case, this penny they’d get on 85 percent of sales would have to be divided five ways: 15 percent to Brian, the rest split between John, Paul, George and Pete. If they sold a thousand records, they’d get fifteen bob each, and if they ever managed such a famous, gilded, pinnacle-of-career accomplishment as a million-seller, they’d each get £750. If this happened in America—which was, quite obviously, ludicrously unlikely—it would be £375.
The contract explanation over, the two men compared diaries and set the Beatles’ first recording date twenty-eight days distant, on Wednesday, June 6. It would be a standard three-hour session, 7–10PM, for which they should arrive in good time. Brian was breaking into the Beatles’ holiday period but knew they’d have bitten George Martin’s hand off for the chance. They could even rehearse for a couple of days beforehand, to be properly prepared.
Such groundwork would be essential, because George told Brian he wanted to assess the Beatles’ singing abilities individually. All he’d heard of them so far was the acetate with “Hello Little Girl” on one side and “Till There Was You” on the other. The labels, in Brian’s handwriting, assigned the first to John Lennon & The Beatles and the second to Paul McCartney & The Beatles, and George Martin needed to determine which way he would make the Beatles go. After all, every vocal group was Someone and the Somethings. It isn’t known if he explained this thinking to Brian, but Brian did leave the meeting conscious of George’s wish to test the singers one by one. It seems George also asked to hear them doing other songs, different from the ones he’d heard before, which—as he would say—hadn’t knocked him out at all.
Finally, they discussed promotion. Living in Liverpool, the Beatles were a long way from EMI’s publicity setup, so George told Brian he’d arrange for one or more photographers to be present on June 6 to take some shots while they were recording.
That was it. The meeting was over. Brian and George shook hands, and George said he’d set the wheels of bureaucracy in motion. Brian could expect to receive the contract for signing within two weeks.
This was it! Brian’s excitement spilled out. Getting a recording contract was his first promise to the Beatles, the biggest step toward making them the very greatest of stars he knew they would be. This day, May 9, 1962, was six months exactly since he’d first seen them in the Cavern, on November 9, 1961; half a year had led them to this moment. The contract, Brian would write, was “the ultimate—this, to us, was the greatest thing that could happen.”35
Bursting to tell, he came out of the studios, crossed Abbey Road by the adjacent zebra crossing and walked straight to St. John’s Wood Post Office on Circus Road. He phoned his parents and he sent two telegrams. One was to Bill Harry, for announcement in Mersey Beat:
HAVE SECURED CONTRACT FOR BEATLES TO RECORDED FOR EMI ON PARLAPHONE LABEL 1ST RECORDING DATE SET FOR JUNE 6TH. BRIAN EPSTEIN
Whether its errors were caused by Brian’s excitement or a clumsy telegraphist isn’t known; another message went to the Beatles in Hamburg, sent care of the Star-Club. Though lost soon afterward, its wording would be remembered by Pete five years later as:
CONGRATULATIONS BOYS EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL36
It was a busy day for telegram boys. As Brian would remember it, he received messages from at least three Beatles.
[JOHN] WHEN ARE WE GOING TO BE MILLIONAIRES
[PAUL] PLEASE WIRE TEN THOUSAND POUND ADVANCE ROYALTIES
[GEORGE] PLEASE ORDER FOUR NEW GUITARS37
George expressed their feelings in a pair of letters he sent to girls back home, fans who’d written to him and were rewarded with fulsome replies. In one, a three-page note to Margaret Price, he said: “We are all very happy about Parlophone, as it is a big break for us. We will just have to work hard & hope for a hit with whatever we record. (We don’t yet know what the producer will want.)”
George was making a crucial point. It was already perplexing that they’d landed a Parlophone contract, knowing the EMI labels had previously turned them down, but—however it came about—now they had one, what songs would they be directed to do? The Beatles’ knowledge of the London recording business came from what they read in the weekly press and gleaned from chatting to other musicians, and this told them that record companies always chose the material. Parlophone could want the Beatles to record one of the stage numbers they performed best, or else they’d be given a song to learn—perhaps something old, a chestnut their A&R man fancied them doing, or something new, written by their A&R man maybe, or by a Tin Pan Alley songwriter.
As much as they could, John and Paul decided to take matters into their own hands. “Please rehearse new material,” Brian’s telegram said. They chose to interpret this as “please write new material” and, in this instant, the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership was effectively reborn.
The three self-written songs John and Paul had finally, reluctantly and self-consciously started playing at the end of 1961 were all old, from 1957 to 1959. They’d written again recently—Paul had “Pinwheel Twist,” John had “Ask Me Why”—but everything else was ancient. They hadn’t composed together in two years and most of their material was older still: it was in 1958 that they filled a school exercise book with words and chord-letters formed “eyeball to eyeball” in Paul’s front parlor and John’s front porch. Lennon-McCartney Originals they had called them, but there’d been few since.
All that changed in the second
week of May 1962. This was the moment when John Winston Lennon (21 years, 7 months) and James Paul McCartney (19 years, 11 months) looked each other full in the face and saw that something, saw white-hot ambition, determination, daring, craving, personality, talent and ego, and went for it.
Three weeks later, when they left Hamburg, they had two more numbers ready to take to London on June 6, songs not only scribbled down on paper but rehearsed—one of them, or even both, they hoped good enough to be accepted by Parlophone for the Beatles’ first record.
They eased themselves back into business by revisiting an oldie. John and Paul felt “Love Me Do” was the best of their early songs, though it wasn’t one they’d chosen to revive before now. It was mostly Paul’s number, written in 1958 under Buddy Holly’s magic spell. By 1962, Paul and John had a whole other body of love songs to inspire them—the rhythm of Tamla and soul of Smokey Robinson, the buoyant melodies of Goffin and King, the grooves of Luther Dixon’s Shirelles, and, vital in this particular instance, the blues of Arthur Alexander and the mouth organ sound of James Ray and Bruce Channel. In ’58 “Love Me Do” was Holly, in ’62 it was harmonica; everything was still America but they’d migrated from country to city.
Originally written in the higher key of A, “Love Me Do” was retooled in G, which instantly made it bluesy—even though (but for its three-note bass line) the song remained acoustic. The unfussy first-person lyric—essentially, “please love me because I’ll always love you”—was embellished with a new bridge, “Someone to love, somebody new / Someone to love, someone like you,” and when asked about the song nine years later, John vaguely remembered contributing it.38 They also worked out a simple vocal arrangement: Paul and John sang together in harmony, Paul holding the higher register.
John explained in a 1963 Melody Maker interview that there was clear method in their thinking when it came to the mouth organ: “It was just after ‘Hey! Baby’ came out—[and] we were hoping to be the first British group to use harmonica on record.”39 The instrument radically altered “Love Me Do” ’s sound.
Another important difference was the tempo: what had once been a lively, Hollyesque rhythm was now slower, befitting its blues feel, though they did also opt for a little variation. The work on “Love Me Do” was done during downtime hours in the Beatles’ lodging, and because it was important they all learned it, Pete was there. He made a particular contribution they agreed to pursue. “The idea was to make the middle-eight different from the rest of the tune,” Pete remembers, “and I said, ‘OK, we put the skip beat in.’ ”40 The “skip beat” was a fluctuation in tempo, an acceleration to lead into the vocal bridge and again later, before the instrumental middle-eight. It was a strange idea, but must have sounded good enough in the moment for John and Paul to accept.
After “Love Me Do,” in the space of a week or so, another new song emerged, “PS I Love You.” This was Paul’s creation … “but,” qualified John, “I think we helped him a bit. He was trying to write a ‘Soldier Boy,’ like the Shirelles track.” The main influence of “Soldier Boy” was the format: “PS I Love You” is a letter sung aloud—the writer is away, sending a love note to his girl back home.41 Paul may have sprung his opening line, “As I write this letter,” from Pat Boone’s ballad hit “I’ll Be Home,” the McCartney family’s favorite song when they moved into their new house (20 Forthlin Road) in 1956, a happy summer that preceded autumn’s horror, when his mother died. Instrumentally, “PS I Love You” is lightly Latin, a rhythm much evident in pop music at this time and favored by Paul through his singing of “Besame Mucho,” “The Honeymoon Song” and “Till There Was You.” John liked it too: it was an influence on Ask Me Why, the song that—with “Love Me Do” and “PS I Love You”—gave them three new numbers to play to Parlophone.
Some of this activity was witnessed by Gerry and the Pacemakers when they arrived from Liverpool to start their own seven-week Star-Club season. (“All 24 of us sleep in the same room but we’re English,” John wrote in a postcard to a fan.) They drove over in their van, bringing with them Bernie Boyle, the Beatles’ young pal—he’d thrown in a job at the Fruit Exchange to spend a few weeks in Hamburg, having first asked Brian Epstein if he could work at Nems when he got back; Brian said he could. The presence of other Liverpudlians in Hamburg added to the fun and sharpened the Beatles’ competitive spirit, making John feel he had to become even more outrageous. He figures strongly in two more crazy tales that happened during the last three weeks of May—one being the incident when he “pissed on nuns.”
Eleven years later, John would write a letter mentioning “a few Hamburg incidents concerned with urinating publicly and otherwise—[which] I won’t go into as the ‘myths’ are more interesting (stories abound there).”42 Talk of such happenings, sufficiently magnified by 1973 for John to describe them as “myths,” would become much multiplied in the years afterward, with truth a distant casualty. But … something did happen.
They’ve all talked about it. Paul acknowledges some accuracy in the wider story but mostly dismisses the main headline: “ ‘Beatles Pissed On Nuns’ is one story that wasn’t true at all. We were staying in this place where you had to go down about five flights of stairs to go to a toilet, so sometimes we’d piss out the window—a good old English medieval habit! And one day, right down the road from where we were pissing, there happened to be some nuns. They didn’t see us, but somebody did, the papers picked it up, and it went from being a joke to being a fact.”43
George supported some of this, saying, “John didn’t piss on the nuns—we peed over a balcony into a deserted street at about 4:30 in the morning,” though he also added, blithely, “We were free to piss on anyone we wanted to, if we wanted, although we never actually did.”44
Pete—or, quite evidently, his Fleet Street ghostwriter—zoomed in on John’s participation and helped enlarge it into legend. He spoke of John’s “anti-clerical demonstration” against “four gentle nuns” and said “Lennon unzipped and sprinkled the four sisters with a mini-cloudburst out of a cloudless sky.” Poetic stuff.45
Few of the numerous other observations are from people who observed it, but there was one other witness, Bernie Boyle. “I was there for the ‘pissing on nuns’ incident, but I’ve no idea whether he hit any nuns or not—he was just pissing into the street from the balcony of their apartment on a Sunday morning as people were going to church. It could be the story was embroidered, but something happened because I saw it.”46
John went into most detail about it in an interview in 1971: “There’s all big exaggerated stories about us in Hamburg, about us ‘pissing on nuns’ and things like that. What actually happened was we had a balcony in these flats and one Sunday morning we were all just pissing in[to] the street as people were going to church. And there were some nuns over the road, going into the church. It was just a Sunday morning in the club district, with everyone walking about, and three or four people peeing into the street.”47
While “three or four” of them were relieving themselves, legend would attach the tale solely to Lennon, and this seems to have happened quite quickly. The key then became not so much “did he or didn’t he?” but who objected to it? Horst Fascher, who says he was present, explains that the nuns called the police and Manfred Weissleder smoothed everything over “by paying five hundred marks for the people to get their dress clean” (“people” meaning nuns and “dress” meaning habits). Pete says there was no trouble at all beyond two almost-laughing policemen giving John “the mildest of rebukes.”48
Actually, nothing happened. Then, later, the incident was mentioned to Pastor Albert Mackels, the priest of St. Joseph’s church, whose order of St. Elizabeth nuns had been dampened or dangled before, and he would—in the fullness of time—take action over it.
Less doubt or misinformation surrounds the other wild tale. For Bernie Boyle it was just part of the entertainment: “In the Star-Club one night John came on stage with a toilet seat around his neck, and a c
ape on, and a hat. He was out of his fuckin’ brain.” John himself said it happened “when Gerry and the Pacemakers and the whole of Liverpool was over there. We’d really get going then. I’d go on with underpants and a toilet seat round me neck, and all sorts of gear on, and out of me fuckin’ mind. And I’d do a drum solo, which I couldn’t play, while Gerry Marsden was playing.”49
In the light of all this jollity, it could be easy to forget the Beatles were a professional band. They had a new record contract and were under signed agreement in Hamburg to do a top-of-the-bill job of work for two or more hours a night, which they did. And, in spite of all the puke and pills and drink and girls, they were better than good. As the Pacemakers’ Les Maguire concedes, “When you watched the Beatles you knew you were seeing something special, even if you didn’t know what it was. They were different. There was always competition between the groups, and we knew there was a gap between them and us.” The Beatles did great business for Manfred Weissleder, more than enough for him to say he wanted them back again soon. (They told him he’d have to discuss it with their manager.)
Some budding young talents were also watching. Hamburg’s first own beat band, the Bats (for whom Stuart Sutcliffe had played), were now followed by a second, the Rattles. From their names and musical style—guitars and vocal harmonies—the influence was obvious. Frank Dostal, later to join the Rattles as guitarist, tuned in to the Beatles right away. “They were relaxed on stage but at the same time energetic and humorous. They had a special mixture of rock ’n’ roll and black music that was more or less unknown to German audiences. In Germany you could not get records by black groups like the Shirelles, so nobody knew of them.”
Another future Rattle, drummer Reinhard “Dicky” Tarrach, says the Beatles “were the first guys I had seen who talked to the audience. All the other bands said, ‘Thank you, the next song is …’ but the Beatles made jokes on stage. They were very intelligent and as they had German girlfriends they spoke mixed German and English words. John Lennon had a toilet seat round his head. They were laughing about these things and that inspired us to do little stories and be talking with the audience.”50
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