They also added their own new numbers to the set. “Please Please Me” was kept untested, but “Ask Me Why” stayed in the repertoire after the BBC show and they sometimes played “Love Me Do” and “PS I Love You.” A degree of hesitation did remain, however. Geoff Davies, big Beatles fan and Cavern regular, remembers how the audience continued to prefer “the R&B stuff” to any original numbers: “When they played PS I Love You we’d think ‘what’s this soppy love song?’ but then we got used to it and were won over.”17
Around midnight on June 15, John spent several hours talking to Lindy Ness, and the subject of ambition—and the need for “fresh challenges”—featured strongly. “He spoke of getting away,” she says, “of not restricting himself to one place all his life. He didn’t see himself staying in Liverpool forever. He talked about that a lot. I remember him saying he needed to ‘be somewhere bigger, less provincial.’ ”18
It was just the pair of them on a pavilion bench in Sefton Park, lit by the night sky. A short distance away, George and a conquest were steaming the windows of his Anglia—and yet, despite the obvious opportunity to initiate an encounter of his own, John did nothing but talk, and listen while Lindy, 15 years 3 months, talked to him. “People assumed we were having a sexual relationship,” she says, “and he’d brag to other lads that I was his ‘jail bait,’ but actually he was protective. I was very nervous—I didn’t know what was going to happen to me—but he treated me really well. I was in safe hands and it was also very interesting. I was on a steep learning curve.
We spoke about our Woolton childhoods and where we used to play, though we didn’t really have to explain it because it was understood—like John, I was a Just William child. We talked about God and religion and about drawing. He liked my drawings—I was a budding artist and he seemed to regret not going more down that road himself; he talked about me going to art college and said something like “Don’t screw it up like I did.” But it wasn’t all serious conversation—we also had a laugh, told jokes, imitated people. I was very cynical, so we had that in common too.
Cynthia rarely saw John in these hours. It’s with mathematical as well as figurative accuracy that Lindy reflects, “I don’t think she knew half of what was going on in his life.” Only occasionally now did Cyn go to Beatles shows—and when she did he largely ignored her, people remember. Also, she and John rarely slept together overnight. They wanted to, but her landlady locked the front door before retiring. John usually popped in by day and at weekends—though, even then, Cyn had to maintain stealth at all times. Having a man in her room transgressed the British landladies’ code of “keeping a respectable house,” and discovery meant eviction.
When they chose their moments, though, the house at 93 Garmoyle Road finally yielded Cyn and John the opportunities for closeness in short supply since their Gambier Terrace nights two years earlier. Taking no more precautions against pregnancy than ever, they grabbed what they could despite the grubbiness of the surroundings. Externally, the house was a typical south Liverpool upper-working-class red-brick terrace, pleasant enough; inside, Cyn’s £2 10s a week rent gained her a side-facing upstairs room with a single bed, moth-eaten chair, one-bar electric fire and one-ring cooker, plus shared use of a landing bathroom (hot water by appointment with crossed fingers).
Paul’s girlfriend Dot had moved into the smaller room next door. While Cyn had solid reason to be here (her mother was only now returning from a long trip to Canada, would shortly be going back, and their house in Hoylake remained rented out), Dot’s parental home wasn’t much more than a mile from Garmoyle Road; she moved in partly to keep Cyn company and partly for the chance for more intimacy with Paul. They’d also been going together coming up three years but had only limited opportunities for bed.
So it was that, for a few weeks in the summer of 1962, Lennon and McCartney both had birds in neighboring rooms beyond parental regulation. When they weren’t being Beatles together on stage, or riding to venues in the van, or rifling through racks of records, or hanging out in Brian’s office or in cinemas, coffee bars, pubs and drinking dens, or sitting somewhere writing songs together, they would descend on the same house and retire to adjoining rooms for worldly pleasures. These boys were close … so close they also partnered in an X-rated photographic enterprise at this same time. Their bedroom models weren’t their girlfriends but a pair of obliging young ladies who didn’t rush back to a job after Cavern lunchtimes; one of them lived in a top-floor flat in a large house on Prince’s Road, close to the Rialto Ballroom—the houses built by George’s paternal grandfather; John and Paul got them to stand topless (or better) in “arty” Romanesque poses while they operated the camera Paul had just given his brother … and immediately borrowed back.
Mike’s camera also saw plenty of Beatles action, adding a wealth of new shots to his already priceless archive. A purpose-made session took place on the entrance driveway of Allerton Golf Course—the walking or cycling shortcut between John’s and Paul’s houses. It’s Beatle time in leafy suburbia: John, Paul and George, three leather jackets and jeans, grouped around the Anglia. Terry Doran’s Warrington garage, Hawthorne Motors, used the best picture for promotion, as part of the deal by which George got his car cheaper; it ran as a Mersey Beat ad on July 12: LIKE GEORGE HARRISON OF THE BEATLES YOU CAN BECOME THE PROUD OWNER OF A FIRST-CLASS CAR. The picture also tells another story: Pete. His absence here is a perfect illustration of three Beatles going about Liverpool without him; they’re the same tight threesome of old, Japage 3, a quartet only on stage.
Mike also took a fine photo of John and Paul with Gene Vincent, when their hard-living Hamburg hero shared a Cavern bill with them on Sunday, July 1; and he took several pictures aboard the MV Royal Iris when, five nights later, the Beatles again played as supporting act to trad jazz star Mr. Acker Bilk on a Riverboat Shuffle.19
This was an important period for Mike McCartney, now 18, who found within the space of weeks both a profession and a revelatory new mode of life. The job was a three-year apprenticeship in hairdressing, taken on the advice of family matriarch Auntie Gin, herself a hairdresser before the war. The lifestyle was surrealism, inspired by a TV program about Dalí and Buñuel. Mike started behaving curiously, like going around Liverpool with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth. His older brother suggested he “stop it” as it was getting embarrassing, but Mike carried on. With such thoughts, and in conjunction with the spur of Paul’s camera gift, Mike was suddenly a second young McCartney in Liverpool being productive and creative … and their ambitions dovetailed when Paul urged Mike to “make me look famous.” Mike would bluntly reflect, “He didn’t give a bugger about me and my photography, he just wanted photographs of himself,” but he obliged all the same. In the weeks around Paul’s 20th birthday (June 18), they staged a number of attempts at pictorial artiness, indoors and out; Paul was after a strong image he could use alongside Astrid’s recent half-shadow photos of John and George—the session he was still sore about missing.20
The Royal Iris booking fell on the fifth anniversary of John and Paul’s meeting, a youth coming up 17 singing “Come Go with Me” to a lad just turned 15. They didn’t remember the date (or probably even the year) but still they were tight together, driving forward and now writing songs again as Lennon-McCartney … or, as Paul was actively considering, Lennon-James. With the Beatles clearly on the cusp of something—soon to issue their first record, soon to be mentioned in the press—Paul contemplated taking a professional name. Almost every star had one. “I remember being in the back of Brian Epstein’s Zodiac—his big, posh Ford car—and talking about whether Paul McCartney was the right name. He felt it was a bit of a mouthful and I did too—we wondered how people were ever going to remember it. People had never really remembered it at school. So I was going to become Paul James, from James Paul.”21
How long they deliberated isn’t recalled, but it was days or weeks, not minutes—until finally they decided to leave the name unchanged. As Paul ex
plains, “In the end we just thought, ‘No, let them remember our names.’ ” It was just a small decision among so many big ones in summer 1962, but the conclusion would come to be of great importance: these three Beatles were striving for the big time as themselves, with their genuine, everyday names.
They’d also have better equipment. John and George—pacesetters since the start in terms of progressing their musical gear—bought new British-made Vox guitar amplifiers: George got an AC-30 (thirty watts) and John an AC-15. John’s cost £133, George’s even more, and Brian was their guarantor for the weekly drip repayments with Hessy’s that stretched ahead to June 1964.22 They also picked out new guitars, and made their biggest investments yet by ordering identical Gibson J-160E electric-acoustics, the affectionately named “Jumbo Gibson” that could be played as it was or plugged into an amp. A special order was sent to America for them by Rushworth & Dreaper (Hessy’s main rival) and the cost was immense—£161 1s each, including hire-purchase interest. Brian was again the guarantor and Paul didn’t join them in the acquisition—he’d borrow theirs.
Brian also advanced them a new “van.” Pete was about to be pushed out, so Neil’s future employment remained very much in doubt and they didn’t want to be also without wheels. Terry Doran guided them to a Ford Thames 800 Express Bus, cream-colored, which seemed to suit all their needs. It seated eight, with the option of two more fold-down seats in the rear, enough space to accommodate five and their gear without much fuss. Nems Enterprises shelled out the money and repaid itself from the Beatles’ weekly income; the “Group Expenses” column of their typed weekly Accounts Statements carried a £4 deduction in addition to Neil’s £8 wage. This Thames 800 would be the Beatles’ transport well into the future, getting them to all the places up and down the country where opportunities opened up.
One of these, Brian hoped, would be the Granada Television studios in Manchester. Contact was made with this first-class ITV company, one that proudly boasted “From the North” on its programs, and the first person who journeyed across to Liverpool was Dick Fontaine. Aged 23, he was one of a bunch of savvy Cambridge graduates being given the opportunity to come up with interesting ideas for films, and then make them; he was introduced to John and Paul in the Cavern on a night they weren’t playing, then went out for a drink with them and was surprised to be impressed.23
While Fontaine set about thinking how to frame something around the Beatles, his fellow graduate at Granada, Leslie Woodhead, was working on Know the North, a series of short TV films about local contrasts. One edition was about music, and having already filmed the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band—sturdy, traditional Yorkshire open-air music—he was looking for a counterpoint when Fontaine mentioned the Beatles in their Liverpool cellar. Woodhead arranged to meet Brian Epstein in the lobby of the Adelphi Hotel and saw no one there resembling everyone’s image of a shifty rock and roll manager. It was quite some time before he established that a fastidiously groomed young man “so improbably smart it surely couldn’t be him” was his host for the evening. Brian took him to the Cavern, where Woodhead was pinned back by the sheer noise, and then they went for a drink with the Beatles.
It was plain that they had something about them. They were charming and caustic in a way that only working-class Liverpool kids could be. Paul was a jaunty young man with the eyes of a spaniel, implacably confident of his charm, and John stuck in the odd barbed word. He was obviously wickedly funny but didn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to mess with. George was a rather shrinking presence and I’ve no recollection of Pete at all, or whether he was even there. And Brian was all charm and affability, cool but very enabling—he was going to make this Beatles thing “happen.”24
But the Beatles’ staple work was always the stage. Radio and TV were shortcuts to audiences, money was earned and word-of-mouth spread through the daily diary. Before Brian, they operated entirely on Merseyside; now, the Beatles’ calendar was a patchwork-quilt of new places. In their first seven weeks back from Hamburg, they had six days off. Tuesday was usually the breather, although when special engagements arose, they were placed here. Bookings stretched months ahead, something that Star-Club boss Manfred Weissleder was keenly aware of when writing to Brian on July 10. Contracts were made for two further Star-Club visits before the end of 1962: for two weeks at the start of November, and for the year’s final fourteen days, concluding on New Year’s Eve. In November, they’d be sharing the bill with one of their all-time heroes, the great god Little Richard.
Brian didn’t only book the Beatles into the Star-Club—he also agreed to terms for the second group he managed, the Big Three. Stifled in the spring, his expansion ambitions blossomed in the summer and kicked off with Liverpool’s hard-rocking trio. Bassist Johnny Gustafson says they were signed on the recommendation of John Lennon; they came under Brian’s “sole direction” in early June and put their signatures to a five-year contract with Nems Enterprises Ltd. that began on July 1.
Why was Brian signing artists beyond the Beatles? Because Liverpool was teeming with talent that deserved a broader audience, and he was establishing a framework to make it happen; because he intended to stay in Liverpool, and management of several artists would give him some clout when battling London’s forces—its record companies, promoters and agents—from two hundred miles away; because having a talent roster would enable him to put together stage bills dominated or even completely filled by them; and because it made sound business sense: the Beatles were the pacesetters, the hot property, and from now on, when he had to tell inquiring promoters they were busy on a requested date, he could offer an alternative group and keep the work in-house.
The Big Three’s contract reflected a fact that had become pressing since Brian signed the Beatles in January: that his remuneration for being both manager and agent, 10 percent rising to 15, was barely enough to meet costs, let alone give him a living income. He was stuck with the terms of the Beatles contract for the time being but wasn’t going to repeat the mistake—Nems Enterprises’ commission on the Big Three’s income was 15 percent if they earned up to £50 a week each, then 25 percent. Considering how he could boost their income, they were still going to be much better off than before. Lead guitarist Adrian Barber (who made Paul McCartney’s “coffin” loudspeaker) would recall, “When Eppy appeared on the scene everyone wondered what a manager did, and then we saw that thirty shillings a night was going to be £25. That was a big, big difference. You can’t argue with that.”25
But they did. The Big Three and Brian argued constantly. They signed the contract agreeing he could advise them on their stage wear, and then they hated him for it. Thrown off course, without the working coalition he struck with the Beatles, Brian made misjudgments. The Big Three were tough nuts, so willful in their projection of hard that they fought him over everything, especially the clothes, and if they weren’t already difficult enough to handle, their first trip to Hamburg, in July, worsened everything by several degrees. They returned to Liverpool minus Barber, who, Gustafson says, flipped through all the drugs, booze and sex—he stayed in Hamburg and took a job as the Star-Club’s sound technician. “We returned to Liverpool with new guitarist Brian Griffiths, even louder and more raucous,” Gustafson says. “The group Brian signed had very quickly changed.”26
Brian sent the Big Three to Hamburg to replace Gerry and the Pacemakers, who drove back to Liverpool in late June and promptly became his third signing. They too put their signatures on a five-year Nems Enterprises contract effective July 1, so within the space of days Brian went from handling one group to handling three—and it would have been four if the Four Jays hadn’t been reluctant to give up their day jobs and turn professional. It’s hard to imagine Paul being best pleased about all this—he’d long worried that Gerry and the Pacemakers might overtake the Beatles as the ‘Pool’s top group, and that they’d get their big break first, and perhaps now Brian would be pushing them as hard as he was pushing the Beatles. He had nothing
to fear: Brian was always crystal clear on the hierarchy of his signings—and so was everyone else.
Managing three groups was enough to land Brian local dominance. Proof of Nems Enterprises’ power first appeared in the Echo on July 13 with an ad for the huge Grafton Ballroom’s inaugural rock night, on Friday, August 3—all three star attractions were Brian’s, listed in the order that confirmed rank: the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Big Three. Advance tickets were available from Nems and vouchers for discount admission were mailed to Beatles Fan Club members. Brian was starting to sew up the Liverpool scene—its top end, at any rate—earning the resentment of the promoters who, until just a short time earlier, had operated quite happily without him. Now he’d come in, was running the best talent, raising group fees to record levels, and staging promotions for which he was attracting patrons’ spending money and selling tickets from his own busy shops slap in the center of town. (The footfall benefited the business of Nems Ltd., too.)
One of these rivals, Sam Leach, saw a demonstration of the newcomer’s steel. In late June, Don Arden struck an agreement to promote an October British tour starring Little Richard, before his season at the Star-Club. The American star had never been to Britain and would be big box office. Leach called Arden from a public phone box and made a verbal accord to present him at New Brighton Tower Ballroom on October 12 for £350. Though it was subject to written confirmation, Leach instantly ran an Echo ad announcing the sale of tickets he hadn’t yet printed for the show he hadn’t yet contracted. Brian was already conversant with Arden and had probably met him by now; he offered (says Leach) £500 for the Little Richard show and Arden gave it to him instead. All was fair in love and promotion—these events happened days after Leach’s wedding, at which Brian was a special guest, making a warmly generous speech to toast the happy couple.27
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