Despite George Martin saying one or more photographers would attend the session to take publicity shots, none did, and no pictures are known to exist. If they did, what happened this evening might be clearer, because its details are somewhat fogged, like so many aspects of the Beatles’ early EMI days. This relationship had started obscurely and would continue so, and these two facts are related; it was only after five more months that everything would become transparent and straightforward.
The first of several long-lingering debates about this June 6 session would center on what kind of an audition it was—an Artist Test or a Commercial Test? Several interested parties remember it one way and several the other, both views apparently stemming from paperwork pinned to the Abbey Road staff noticeboard. But the crucial documents are clear beyond doubt and can dispel any misleading information for whatever reason it existed: this was no audition at all—the Beatles were at EMI because they already had a contract. George Martin, for understandable reasons, considered the session little more than a look-see, a chance to assess the group he’d signed blind, but the Beatles and Brian believed they were there to make their first record, and the studio was set up to do it—the gods in the upstairs control room would be sending the Beatles’ sound to two quarter-inch tape decks.13
The extent of George Martin’s involvement this evening would also be subject to competing claims, but what’s clear is that Ron Richards started the session. It isn’t known if Brian was told George would be mostly absent, so this may have come as a disappointment—and, with that, a sense of being slighted.
The session had barely started when it stopped. The Beatles had good instruments—John and George both played their superior American guitars, the Rickenbacker and Gretsch, Paul had his inexpensive German violin-shaped Hofner bass, and Pete a perfectly adequate Premier drum kit—but their back-line equipment was tatty, still the amps Decca hadn’t liked on New Year’s Day. Brian was aware of the need for better equipment and had done nothing about it; the reason for this is unclear, though it could be that, since amps had been the Beatles’ domain long before he came along, it was something he left them to sort out for themselves, with the increased money they were earning … except that they hadn’t. Paul’s old Truvoice amp and mighty bass speaker—the five-foot-tall “coffin,” as grunted up and down the Cavern steps several times a week by Pete and Neil—just weren’t suited to recording, and this was clear the second Paul played a few notes so Smith could get a recording level. The studio didn’t carry spare guitar amps, but the problem was solved by technical engineer Ken Townsend, in a white laboratory coat, bringing a heavy Tannoy speaker up from a basement echo chamber.
The object of the session was to make the Beatles’ first single. No one noted how many songs they rehearsed before the red light went on and the tapes were set rolling, or whether they bothered to play the rehearsed “opening medley,” but Ron Richards selected four numbers for recording—“Besame Mucho,” “Love Me Do,” “PS I Love You” and “Ask Me Why”—from which the final choice of two would be made. This was most odd. The fact that three or perhaps even all four of these songs matched the Beatles’ own choices underlines again what an uncommon situation this was. Recording artists always had to do what they were told, to perform only songs chosen and ready-arranged for them—yet here were the Beatles, at their debut session, putting forward their preferred material and having it chosen. They weren’t only signed unseen, they’d been brought in for a session without being given songs to learn and without the involvement of an arranger or session musicians. Disregarding the R of A&R, George Martin was treating it like the test it wasn’t, albeit with one proviso …
What the Beatles never knew, and no one was discussing, was the pressure exerted behind the scenes by Sid Colman and Kim Bennett. Ardmore and Beechwood expected to publish one or both sides of this Beatles record—which was why they’d prompted the Parlophone signing in the first place. While the song that lit their interest, “Like Dreamers Do,” fell unregarded by the wayside before or during the evening, it was manifest that at least one Lennon-McCartney song had to be chosen from those recorded. Discreetly, George Martin was getting the measure of what these two Liverpool boys could give him.
Documents show that “Besame Mucho,” “Love Me Do,” “PS I Love You” and “Ask Me Why” were recorded in that order, and as it was standard procedure for producers to take the most promising number first, Ron Richards patently favored the old Spanish song for the Beatles’ first A-side. The session tape, which would include variant takes and revealing banter between the numbers, was not kept, but two of these June 6 recordings—“Besame Mucho” and “Love Me Do”—survive as acetate discs and the former is merely an average performance, nothing startling.* Richards stopped John and George’s backing vocals, omitting even their usual cha-cha-booms, and he was taken aback by Pete’s drumming, where an unnecessarily relentless tom-tom pounding was interspersed by weak snare-drum fills and shuffles rather than the required attack. “Pete Best wasn’t very good,” Richards would always recall. “It was me who [later] said to George Martin, ‘He’s useless, we’ve got to change this drummer.’ ”14
George Martin didn’t much care for the Beatles’ “Besame Mucho.” While the evidence is contradictory, he seems to have arrived at the session when they were playing “Love Me Do”—possibly after being fetched by Chris Neal, who was operating the tape machines. Neal would remember, “After they’d run through a couple of tunes Norman and I were not all that impressed with, all of a sudden there was this raunchy noise which struck a chord in our heads. It was ‘Love Me Do.’ Norman said to me, ‘Oi, go down and pick up George from the canteen and see what he thinks of this.’ ” George walked into the upstairs control room—the Beatles couldn’t see him and didn’t know he was there—and was attracted by something they were doing. “I picked up on ‘Love Me Do’ mainly because of the harmonica sound,” he would remember. “I loved raw harmonica and used to issue the records of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.”15
Though George liked the harmonica, he wasn’t crazy about “Love Me Do” and instantly homed in on a problem with its arrangement. The Beatles’ Hamburg and Cavern rehearsals ought to have prepared them for every eventuality, but at four junctures during the song there was an awkward moment when John sang the title line and, in the same split-second of completing the last word “do,” resumed playing his harmonica. The head of Parlophone came down from the control room, exchanged hellos with the Beatles for the first time, and explained the problem. As Paul recalls:
George Martin said, “Wait a minute, there’s a crossover there. Someone else has got to sing ‘love me do’ because you’re going to have a song called Love Me Waahhh. So, Paul, will you sing ‘love me do’?”
God, I got the screaming heebie-jeebies. We were doing it live and I was suddenly given this massive moment on our first thing, where everything stopped, no backing, the spotlight went to me and I went [in trembling tones] love me dooooo. I can still hear the shake in my voice when I listen to it.16
Paul’s heebie-jeebies are certainly audible on the recording, constricting his voice not just at those four places but throughout the song, big-moment nerves afflicting him here as they’d done at Decca and the BBC, and in his first appearance with the Quarry Men, and right back to when he collected school prizes. And beyond the shaky vocal, the recording affords other insights. At this point, “Love Me Do” was arranged slower than it would become, with a bluesy emphasis. To John and Paul this meant integrity, and their pushing of “Love Me Do” over, say, “Hello Little Girl” or “Like Dreamers Do,” which sounded more obviously “commercial,” reveals their initial approach to the business of making records. Their aim was to make something catchy and worthy.
However, the most ear-grabbing aspect of this “Love Me Do”—the first recording of a “new” Lennon-McCartney song—is a negative one. Pete’s skip beat was disastrous. It triggered eccentric tempo changes that made the Beatle
s seem tentative and even amateurish. It’s strange that his bandmates, John and Paul especially, ever considered it a good idea, although maybe Pete had executed it better in the Cavern. Here at EMI, his failure to keep the correct time forced the others to speed up with him, and then he hesitated at the start of the middle-eight, initially playing it straight before suddenly shifting up into that skip. It isn’t known how many takes of each song the Beatles recorded, but it’s a compelling thought that the preserved “Love Me Do,” complete with flaws, may have been the best of several—it was customary for only the “best” recording of a song to be pressed as an acetate disc. George Martin and Ron Richards were distinctly unimpressed. They were used to working with precision drummers, timekeepers who bound the sound of their fellow musicians. Both men decided that Pete was unsuitable for recording, not to be used on future occasions. It was the fourth time in four sessions he’d been rated not good enough—at least once too many.
“PS I Love You” and “Ask Me Why” aren’t available for study, but Richards would remember being little impressed by either. His view of the former was that he wouldn’t consider it for an A-side because it shared the title of a well-known song. Norman Smith’s interesting last analysis of the recordings was that “it was twenty minutes of torture—they made a dreadful sound!—and then they came up to the control room.”
It took twenty possibly torturous steps to get them there, a flight of wooden stairs that led the Beatles into a recording studio control room for the first time. They hadn’t got this far at Decca. Making themselves as comfortable as possible, standing and leaning against unfamiliar big machines, they and the seven others squeezed into the small room fogged the air by lighting up—everyone here was a heavy smoker. Pete says they listened to a playback of the recordings and that he at least thought them good, then George Martin spoke to them, saying what would be required of them as Parlophone artists, and clarifying certain technicalities.17 “He was giving them a good talking to,” says Ken Townsend, “explaining about the studio microphones being figure-of-eight—in other words, you could stand on either side of them as opposed to stage mikes which were one-sided.” Norman Smith says the Beatles stayed quiet all this time. “They didn’t say a word back, not a word. They didn’t even nod their heads in agreement. When he finished, George said, ‘Look, I’ve laid into you for quite a time, you haven’t responded. Is there anything you don’t like?’ They all looked at each other for a long while, shuffling their feet, then George Harrison took a long look at George and said, ‘Yeah. I don’t like your tie.’ ”
George Martin did not instantly appreciate the joke (he was, he says, rather proud of his tie, black with a red horse motif, bought at Liberty’s) and the younger George would remember a fleeting tension: “There was a moment of ohhhhh, but then we laughed and he did too. Being born in Liverpool you have to be a comedian.” Paul recalls “a little tense second and then everyone laughed,” and Smith’s account would prevail: “It cracked the ice, and for the next fifteen to twenty minutes the Beatles were pure entertainment. When they left, George and I just sat there saying, ‘Phew! What do you think of that lot then?’ I had tears running down my face.”18
Two parties who’d come together for a combination of reasons never discussed, converged here for the first time and found the experience inspiring. When Brian Epstein met the Beatles he was bowled over by their music and their magnetism; George Martin wasn’t yet appreciative of the first, but the second had him hooked. As he’d say, “I did think they had enormous talent, but it wasn’t their music, it was their charisma, the fact that when I was with them they gave me a sense of well-being, of being happy. The music was almost incidental. I thought, ‘If they have this effect on me, they are going to have that effect on their audiences.’ ”19
The Beatles always spoke of how they felt intimidated by George Martin’s cultured speaking voice—the adopted crystal that cut through his London clay, suiting his personality as if to the manner born. Being British, and especially coming from Liverpool, they were bound to feel second-class by comparison. As Paul describes it, “We hadn’t really met any of these London people before, these people who talked a bit different. George Martin was very well spoken, a little above our station, so it was a little intimidating, but he seemed like a nice bloke.”20 George Harrison would say, “We thought he was very posh—he was friendly but schoolteacherly, we had to respect him, but at the same time he gave us the impression he wasn’t stiff—that you could joke with him.”21 And as George Martin would add, “It was love at first sight. John, George and Paul—I thought they were super. They had great personalities, and they charmed themselves to me a great deal. George was probably the most vociferous of the lot. Pete Best was very much the background boy—he didn’t say much at all, he just looked moody and sullen in the corner.”22
While three ebullient Beatles relaxed into gags, Pete was silent. “I never entered into any conversation with him [George Martin],” he said in his autobiography, and Norman Smith confirmed it: “Pete Best didn’t say one word. I got a feeling something wasn’t right between them—it wasn’t only that George and Ron found fault with him as a drummer.”23 George Martin felt Pete was “almost surly,” although this personal opinion had no bearing on his professional judgment, which was to use a session drummer—a hired hand—next time the Beatles came in to record. He voiced this to Brian, John, Paul and George at the end of the session, while Pete was out of the room.24
No Beatle ever said if he drove away from Abbey Road dreading the prospect of their evening’s work being issued, or excited that two of the four songs would soon become their first single. Brian had told Mersey Beat the record would be issued in July, so what would Parlophone pick? Given that John would tell Melody Maker “We were hoping to be the first British group to use harmonica on record,” they seem to have wanted their first 45 to be “Love Me Do,” Lennon-McCartney’s earnest little R&B number.25
There was, plainly, so much they still didn’t know. First, George Martin and Ron Richards were not done with their deliberations over which Beatle to make lead singer. On the basis of the music recorded, they seem to have favored Paul because he sang two and a half songs at the session to John’s one and a half. Whatever they’d heard of George was enough to rule him out. As George Martin explains, “Still I was thinking ‘Is it John Lennon and the Beatles or Paul McCartney and the Beatles?’ I knew it wasn’t George. And then suddenly it hit me that I had to take them as they were, which was a new thing. I was being too conventional—but then, I hadn’t really heard anything quite like them before.”26
No one had. The record business had no template for the Beatles. At the start of July 1962, the NME—routinely keen to analyze its own Top Thirty—reported its “Chart-points race” for the year’s first six months. Elvis was 1, Cliff 2 and Chubby Checker 3, and beyond them were soloists, duos, trios, orchestras and the like. The only “groups” in the Top 75 were the Karl Denver Trio at 5, the Shadows at 8 and B. Bumble and the Stingers at 15—respectively, a yodeling Scottish country trio, an English instrumental quartet, and an instrumental American novelty act. Groups like the Beatles, rock bands, didn’t figure.
There were no groups like the Beatles. Three guitars and drums, all three front-line guitarists singing lead and harmonies, a group who wrote their own songs—it was simple, direct and not done. George Martin’s decision to accept them this way, as a leaderless unit, was, correspondingly, a first too—and precisely what they’d hoped for and Brian had been trying to help them find. They’d lucked into the only producer in London who shared their resistance to convention, the only man with a reputation for sound experimentation and a strong knack for the unusual … and he’d lucked into the Beatles.
But it was just as well they were already under contract, because on the strength of this first session George Martin wouldn’t have signed them, not on their musical performance at any rate. Unhappy with both the drummer and the material, he decided to iss
ue none of these first recordings, sweeping the session under the carpet. They could start again another time, though with one important caveat: their contract required Parlophone to record six “sides” and they’d already done four.
As George Martin had told Disc in December 1961, “A beat group presents far more of a problem than does a solo artist … there’s the snag of finding the right material.” George knew too the Ardmore and Beechwood imperative—that their first record had to include at least one number by Lennon-McCartney, ideally the A-side, and yet he didn’t consider even the best of them good enough. As he reflects, “I was looking for a hit song and didn’t think we had it in Love Me Do. I didn’t think the Beatles had any song of any worth—they gave me no evidence that they could write hit material.”27
George instructed Ron Richards to find a song for this Liverpool group—to keep his ear to the ground in Denmark Street, Tin Pan Alley—and, when he found it, to consult him and then send it up to Brian Epstein for the Beatles to learn. “Love Me Do” could be the B-side of whatever Ron found, and if this process took weeks, or even months, so be it: he was in no hurry.
* * *
* Both were released in 1995 on The Beatles Anthology 1.
THIRTY
JUNE 7–AUGUST 18, 1962
THE UNDESIRABLE MEMBER
Everything reignited on Saturday, June 9, with Welcome Home. Four acts supported the Beatles in a four-and-a-half-hour show that cost Cavern members 6s 6d and non-members 7s 6d—if any could get in. June had always been the quiet month for Liverpool music clubs, but not anymore. “It felt like there were a thousand in there,” says one of the blissfully compressed, Barbara Houghton. “The place was heaving and the atmosphere more than electric. What a night, what a night!”1
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