Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Creativity was confined to laughs at this time because, as songwriters, Lennon-McCartney were temporarily stalled. They’d come up with four new numbers, two each, but until Parlophone let open the creative valve, there was no great incentive to write more. Meanwhile, the Beatles’ repertoire progressed once again, embracing a further clutch of new songs—performances first seen, heard and enjoyed by their ecstatic audiences when July tipped into August 1962.

  Top of the pile was “I Remember You,” which Paul sang while John played harmonica—the fourth such combination in the Beatles’ set. It was a 1941 number, freshly revived by Frank Ifield, an English-born Australian singer who had the blow-waved looks of a matinee idol, and, in producer Norrie Paramor, the ideal man to give him sound guidance. The combination of harmonica and a yodeling country-music voice (copied from Slim Whitman) greatly appealed to the British public, who kept “I Remember You” at number 1 in the NME for eight straight weeks. It went down “amazingly well” with audiences, says Paul, but it was also a blow to the Beatles. They’d been hoping to be the first British group to use harmonica on record; as Ifield was a solo singer this was still possible, but while waiting for Parlophone to get them back into the studio their chance of seizing the initiative was slipping away.

  The summer charts showed Twist had turned: while the dance itself would long endure, the record fad was fading. The genre’s last major hit in America was “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, a musical family from a poor black district of Cincinnati. It sold next to no copies in Britain but hit bulls-eye with the Beatles, combining as it did the pedigree provenance of New York label Wand (a Scepter subsidiary from 1650 Broadway) with impeccable production by Luther Dixon. Here was high energy in action: a full band in a big brass groove, a rousing crescendo where the song just took off, and a strong lead vocal from Ronnie Isley with backing from brothers Rudy and Kelly—their falsetto wooohs sung in unison.

  The Beatles’ front line really went for it. John took the lead vocal at his most full-throated, ripping into the repeated line “Shake it up baby!” Paul and George doubled at the second mike and threw everything into the high wooohs. John’s and George’s guitars put beef where the brass had been. And they created their own simple but exciting arrangement for the vocal crescendo—John started it alone at his microphone, George arrived at the second to add his voice, then Paul joined him to make the third. Better yet, where the Isleys’ original had only one crescendo, the Beatles put in a second where the record faded to a finish. “Twist and Shout” was Medley-Russell arr. Lennon-McCartney-Harrison; it was America arr. England; and though the Beatles didn’t play it every night, when they did, the halls shook.

  The Beatles’ intense drive to stay one step ahead of every rival (and they were already at least fifty clear) was taken to extremes by Paul in July/August 1962 when sleuthing songs unknown or unconsidered by others. A good find was “Nobody But You,” a B-side by a group from Towson, Maryland, called the Lafayettes. Beyond a mawkish introduction, this was a strong call-and-response number in the style of Kansas City. Paul also resurrected a couple of interesting numbers from the old, old days—“Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop,” the swing blues by Lionel Hampton’s orchestra that in 1946 topped Billboard’s “Most-Played Juke Box Race Records” chart, and the 1930 Marlene Dietrich torch song “Falling in Love Again,” which he rearranged as a rock waltz, a bit like “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody.” Paul invented a new lyric and sang it impressively, but the song’s success hinged on how well George delivered the middle-eight solo, which could be hit or miss.

  Until the last day or two of July, George Martin was silent on the Beatles. He was in no hurry to get them back in the studio. They were the beat group (from Liverpool, of all places) he’d been corralled into signing against his own judgment, whose self-written songs he considered substandard (though he was being forced to issue at least one of them), whose backline gear was poor and whose drummer he’d have to replace. He’d enjoyed their personalities, and maybe some good would come of it in the end, but he had more pressing concerns.

  One was Spike Milligan’s spoof of the epic war film The Bridge on the River Kwai, recorded with a full wash of George’s most decorative sound-scenery. After its recording, the film’s producers got wind of it and said they’d sue if the LP was issued. All looked bleak until George suggested shifting the action from Burma to Wales and calling it Bridge on the River Wye. To achieve this, he and an engineer had to go through the master tape and splice, with razor blades, the K off every Kwai. The resulting album (which sold poorly) was almost as labor-intensive as the construction of the infamous bridge.

  So little came easy. On June 29, Parlophone released Bernard Cribbins’ follow-up to “The Hole in the Ground.” Here again was George’s perpetual problem: after a comedy hit, what next? Novelty discs only succeeded if the ingredients were right, which meant starting afresh with new ideas every time. In this instance, the old creative team came up with “Right, Said Fred”—another show of hands in Britain’s class struggle, another enduring airplay hit, and another best seller, peaking at 10 (Record Retailer chart) at the start of August.

  It still remained apparent—embarrassingly so, sometimes—that George Martin flopped when he followed a formula. His attempt to make a twee pop star out of Compact actor Leo Maguire was an unmitigated failure, dead within days … but when he was original, George excelled with triumphs beyond any other producer in the business. Just when his bête noire, Norrie Paramor, was celebrating the enormous success of his Australian singer Frank Ifield with “I Remember You,” George worked with the Australian all-around artist Rolf Harris to record the extraordinary Sun Arise.

  It was another example of George’s matchless invention in the studio. Lacking a didgeridoo, he replicated its tones with two cellos, a double bass, a piano and Harris’ own mouth-sounds; by artful manipulation of two-track quarter-inch tape, he had Harris double- and triple-track his own voice, giving it a rich tonal quality and some impressive harmonies; then, in the final mix, George drew an aural landscape every bit as impressive as one of Harris’s canvases. Twenty years before the dawn of the phrase “world music,” a seemingly authentic piece of Aboriginal sound from the outback of Australia was recorded (along with its B-side) inside a brisk four hours in St. John’s Wood … and, once again, the public strongly said yes. The record grew slowly, but by December 1962 only Elvis stood between George Martin and his second number 1.

  All this time, the Beatles were but a background thought. Two months had elapsed since their Abbey Road session. In May, Brian Epstein had expected the release of the Beatles’ first record in July. By late June this had become “toward the end of August,” and now he was reduced to hoping for September. Such delays were unhelpful—he’d be assembling a marketing-bookings strategy to follow the first record and needed to know the date.

  Then, as July ebbed away, a one-sided, seven-inch acetate disc arrived at Nems Enterprises, mailed from the Parlophone office in London. The song’s title, as written on the label, was “How Do You Do,” which was cordial but incorrect because really it was “How Do You Do It.” The story of that song encapsulates the twin components of the music business at the time the Beatles were making their first record: the business of songs, ruled by publishers, and records, the domain of record companies.

  In this scenario, the main player was a breezily confident 22-year-old Londoner by the name of Lionel Stitcher. In summer 1961 he bought a ukulele, taught himself to play, and started to compose pop songs (words and music). Inventing himself the professional name Mitch Murray, he quickly bagged a few minor and unsuccessful A- and B-sides, and on May 4, 1962, at his parents’ house in the north London suburb of Golders Green, wrote a song he first called “How Do You Do What You Do to Me,” which was its top line. He recorded a basic demo version five days after that, and three months later it was being reworked by the Beatles and set to become their first record. This was how it happened …

&
nbsp; The standard music business procedure was three-ply: (1) The composer would try to get a publisher to take his song copyright; (2) the publisher would try to stir interest in the song with a record company A&R man; (3) the A&R man would get it recorded by one of his artists. Murray was shrewd, however: he’d hand over copyright only when a recording was certain, ideally as an A-side, and he himself did the shopping around—before writing songs he’d been a traveling salesman, so he knew the selling spiel. “How Do You Do It” was turned down for Adam Faith by his manager Evie Taylor and turned down for Brian Poole and the Tremeloes by their producer Mike Smith. When Murray visited EMI House on June 7, Parlophone’s Ron Richards liked the song and a week later confirmed his intention to record it. On the 19th, Richards played the demo to Dick James, the ex–Parlophone singer turned music publisher who regularly dropped into the office; Mitch Murray’s diary mentions an enthusiastic June 20 call from James, but Murray held out—he wouldn’t assign the copyright until sure of his song’s fate. Nonetheless, from this point, Dick James would remain involved.

  A further month passed before the Beatles entered the picture. James was back at EMI House on Friday, July 27, the same day or thereabouts that George Martin decided to give “How Do You Do It” to his Liverpool group. (“I thought it was a good song,” he says, “no great work of art but very commercial.”) In a conversation he’d be asked to repeat countless times in the future, James replied, “Liverpool? You’re joking. So what’s from Liverpool?”42 George then did what everybody had to do with the name Beatles—spell it out. He told James they were “unusual types,” quirky, with long hair. The other side of that weekend, on July 30, James relayed the good news to Mitch Murray: his song was going to be recorded by a new group. “I said to him, ‘What do you mean, group?’ I didn’t know what ‘a group’ was. Was it a singing group? Was it an instrumental group? In 1962, the word group didn’t mean very much at all. Dick had to explain to me that they sang and played at the same time.”43

  They did, and they didn’t like “How Do You Do It” one little bit. Brian passed the acetate over to the Beatles with the same message he was given: that, finally, they had another recording date—Tuesday, September 4—and that this song would be the A-side of their first record. Dropping the stylus into the groove, they were horrified to hear the kind of light white English pop to which, in their browserie reveries, they attached their most brutal verdicts. “We hated it,” Paul remembers, “and didn’t want to do it. We felt we were getting a style, the Beatles’ style, which we were known for in Hamburg and Liverpool, and we didn’t want to blow it all by suddenly changing our style and becoming run of the mill.”44

  They could kick, they could scream and they could whine to Brian—and they did at least the last of these—but resistance was useless. They had to learn the song and, more than that, they had to work on improving it. It was insubstantial as it stood. The kernel of an appealing number was inside—as George Martin, Ron Richards and Dick James all realized—but if the Beatles had to record it then they’d spruce it up first. Paul recalls the moment: “We said, ‘Well, what are we gonna do with this?’ ”45

  The acetate had been recorded with Adam Faith in mind, so it was a skippy little ditty in the key of F#. John and Paul switched it to G; they also wrote a new intro, the final D chord of which was repeated at the end of each verse as a transition; Paul added a harmony vocal that ran constantly above John’s; George came up with some lead guitar lines and a middle-eight solo that, while unspectacular, was at least well thought out; they tweaked some of the lyrics; and they dumped the half-step modulation in the demo’s final verse. This technique, where the key suddenly shifted up (in this instance to G#), was rife in the kind of pop the Beatles hated. Even with all these alterations, the song was nothing like what they wanted to do, especially for their first record, but where it lacked passion they were at least giving it a little polish.

  All this rearranging of “How Do You Do It” was done by John and Paul, with a little input from George on the guitar lines. They chose not to involve Pete. It was pointless—he’d be gone before the recording session, and even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be there.

  The problem all along for Brian was his contract to give Pete paid employment. Ending this would leave him exposed to the possibility of legal action, which could hinder the Beatles’ progress. Brian decided his strategy in early August—six weeks after first discussing options with his lawyer, David Harris. He’d get Pete into another group and offer them management. If he took the position, all well and good; if he rejected it, he was breaking the contract, not Brian.

  As both the Big Three and the Pacemakers had drummers integral to their lineups, the solution wasn’t obvious. Brian had to create a situation to achieve it—and it was with this at least partly in mind that he arranged Nems Enterprises’ first tour. It would begin on August 26, run for eight days, stay entirely in the north of England and star the hit singer Mike Berry. Brian fixed it all, including the venues and supporting groups, one of them placed there for a specific purpose.

  The Mersey Beats were new to the scene, and young—the two main guys were lads, Tony Crane and Billy Kinsley, 17 and 15—but they were good and already beginning to go places. They were open in their admiration of the Beatles, who clearly influenced their style and repertoire, and the Beatles were friendly and helpful to them in return. Brian started getting them some local bookings, not as their official manager (there was no contract and he took no commission) but on a goodwill basis—something he did for a few of the local acts. His plan was to make Pete Best the Mersey Beats’ drummer and, as their big-name player and older man, de facto leader. They already had a drummer, a lad who worked in a butcher’s shop, but he was about to join another group and would also have problems getting time off for the tour. When Brian had the difficult meeting with Pete—which was now just days away—he’d be able to offer him this alternative position, with the tour representing immediate employment. It was a gambit, not brilliant but not without merit either. (What a nuisance it all was, though. Other groups hired and fired people all the time without any fuss or difficulty.)

  The ball was set rolling on August 14 when Brian phoned Butlin’s Skegness and asked for “Ringo Starr” to be paged over the public address. It was the summons Ringo had been waiting for, and the detail remained fresh in his memory when asked about it in New York two years later. “Brian Epstein phoned me up on a Tuesday and said, ‘Would you join the Beatles?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, can you get home tonight?’ And I said, ‘I can’t leave the other group just like that, I must give a bit of notice.’ So I said, ‘I’ll be there Saturday.’ ”46

  Fellow Hurricane Bobby Thompson was having coffee with Ringo in the Butlin’s canteen when the PA crackled its message. He’d recall it was “the Beatles” on the phone, not specifically Brian, which may tie in with a call Brian would describe John making, where he said, “You’re in, Ringo, but the beard will have to go. You can keep your ‘sidies’ though.”47

  Until this moment, Thompson had still been hopeful Ringo would join him in the switch to the Dominoes, but it wasn’t to be. “Ringo turned around to me and said, ‘Sorry Bob, I can’t turn this down,’ and I said, ‘That’s all right—I only wish it was me.’ And that was that—Ringo didn’t join King-Size after all.”48

  With his arrival set for Saturday, Brian made Thursday the day for his crunch meeting with Pete. It wasn’t fair to leave it any later. The Beatles did have three bookings in the interim, and Brian believed Pete would honor them … though if he didn’t, they could always use the drummer from another group. It was far from ideal, but these were exceptional circumstances. On Wednesday they twice played the Cavern, lunch and night, and between the two Brian phoned the house in Hayman’s Green and said he wanted to see Pete and Neil in the office at eleven the following morning. Neither thought any more of it and Neil’s brow knotted in puzzlement only as they left the Cavern that night. It was no big
deal that they asked him to leave the amps on stage—it was a deviation from old practice, but happening often now for rehearsals—but as he was packing away Pete’s drums, Neil asked John to confirm the time he’d collect him the following evening. They had a gig in Chester. John said he didn’t want a lift, that he’d get there on his own, then he turned and rushed off in a way that made Neil think something was up.49

  The details of what occurred the following day would always be skewed by dint of being publicly related by only one party. Pete would be asked about it for the rest of his life, whereas the Beatles and Brian had a number of reasons for not discussing it. One was that they rapidly left it behind, another was that Pete would indeed, just as Brian feared, legally challenge his dismissal, a move that automatically choked open discussion.

  The following transcript, from audio of an interview Pete had with New York lawyers in 1965, is a relatively straight if incomplete account of what happened after he and Neil arrived at the Nems Enterprises office in Whitechapel, Liverpool, on Thursday, August 16, 1962.

  So the next morning two of us went in. Epstein was sitting behind the table and he was fidgeting with papers and moving ink-stands—he couldn’t look me in the face. He talked about how the group had been going on, and how did I think the group was doing, and I told him “Fab” and then, like a bolt out of the blue, he just turned around and said, “I’ve got some bad news for you: the boys and myself have decided that they don’t want you in the group any more, and that Ringo is replacing you.”

  I was flabbergasted. I said, “What’s the reason behind this?” And he said “mainly because they think you’re not a good enough drummer” and also because at EMI Studios George Martin said “the drummer isn’t good enough.”