Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  This being 1962, no one thought it odd to have a mime program on radio. It wasn’t long since the biggest shows in America and Britain starred a ventriloquist’s dummy. The Friday Spectacular format was clear enough: it was prerecorded every Monday evening in the ground-floor conference room at EMI House; eighty to a hundred young Londoners—mainly girls, most with autograph books in their handbags—were given tickets along with access to a free Coca-Cola bar (bottles with straws) and encouragement to dance. A temporary floor saved the parquet from stiletto heels. They took part in competition spots, and applauded when two or three guest stars mimed their records from a small stage.

  As almost every act was a solo singer, the mime situation was inevitable, but how the Beatles did it without instruments, and what they did when the record faded out, is lost knowledge. Here they were, though: surreally, the Beatles’ first stage performance in London was miming-with-nothing. It was also their first commercial radio show, reaching around three million. After the music stopped, one of the two main hosts, Muriel Young or Shaw Taylor, announced, “And now let’s meet the Beatles in person!”—but no recording survives, so it isn’t known who spoke or what was said when they first had the ear of the people.

  When the show was over, the tapes were edited for air-dispatch to Luxembourg and the girls and boys came forward with autograph books and the Beatles’ new Parlophone throwaway cards. Signing was standard on these occasions, and though a new experience for the Beatles in London, it was one they’d long mastered in Liverpool. At least one of them wrote To——; boys got a plain from, girls got a love from with usually three kisses; the first to sign would also write The Beatles—a reminder for people of who and what they were—and one or two of them might also draw an inky doodle beetle. All this would be crowded on a single pastel-colored page in every book. They were a band.

  The same point was emphasized on the Tuesday, when they plugged “Love Me Do” to the press. The Beatles’ guide around the London streets and offices was Tony Calder—18, small, sharp, glasses—the ballroom DJ and independent publicist and plugger working the scene from a shared top-floor office in Soho. He set up a few journalist appointments for them at hourly intervals, allowing thirty minutes for each session and then a cab ride or walk to the next one. “Brian Epstein asked me to do it,” he says, “and I was pleased to get involved because I liked the record.”3

  The day’s itinerary is lost, but three appointments are known: one very friendly, one friendly, one very unfriendly. They set out to meet columnists on the Fleet Street national dailies—Mirror, Sketch, Mail, Express and Herald—but no pieces resulted. “Many journalists that day treated the Beatles badly,” Calder says, though he himself was much impressed by them.

  The Beatles were a breath of fresh air in everything they did. There was no crap. They were wearing leather jackets, not suits, and must have been on speed because they had an energy I’d never seen before.

  Wherever we went, Paul and John sat in the two main positions and did the talking, George was sparkly eyed but hardly said anything, and Ringo didn’t say a word. Lennon was the gruffer edge, and McCartney just talked and talked all day long. His chat was fantastic—I’d never heard any artist go straight into it like that; it didn’t matter what the question was, he knew what he was going to say and he said the same thing in every meeting. He was phenomenal—it was full-flow bullshit that ended each time with a look at me and “Have we gotta go, Tone?” Then up they’d get. “Sorry but, you know, we’ve only come to London for the day …”

  Ringo wasn’t quiet in a Pete way—it was because the Beatles’ history was theirs, not his. As he would realize and describe, the price of his silence was a reputation for moodiness.

  People kept asking questions about the early days of the Beatles [and] I wasn’t in a position to talk about it. I hadn’t been with them long enough. I knew the story pretty well but I didn’t want to make any mistakes; it was like joining a new class at school where everybody-knew-everybody except me. So I thought, “Keep your mouth shut and you’ll be all right. Play it nice and safe” … and they all used to say, “Well, look at him, isn’t he miserable? He won’t talk to anyone.”4

  While Ringo was saying nothing, though, and George was quietly taking it all in and forming views, whichever Beatle talked spoke for them all. Theirs was constantly a united group message—particularly, on days such as this, when they hoped to meet the musical press.

  The weekly music papers were doing better-than-ever business. The NME (many still called it the Musical Express) had a 217,000 circulation—more than its rivals combined. Melody Maker sold about 78,000 but took solace from its discerning readership, Disc wasn’t far behind, and New Record Mirror (secretly owned by Decca) sold only about 25,000 but was on the rise. Between them, these papers provided comprehensive coverage of pretty much every recording artist, their work, and the music and record businesses. From hard facts to hot gossip, little eluded them, and their weekly news reporting was obsessively strong, giving every reader the tools to be fully informed, and providing history with the richest of repositories.

  What these papers lacked was criticism, skepticism, sarcasm, bile, bite. There wasn’t none, as history likes to suggest, but very little. Their tone naturally reflected the times—in many respects still vital, polite, positive, everything supported, everyone encouraged. This was (superficially, at least) a more innocent world, written in quips and exclamation marks, far less cynical than it would become.† The Beatles were ever-keen readers of the music press but had a heightened sensitivity to fakery. When Cliff Richard said he “couldn’t have girl friends because the fans wouldn’t like it,” and when he and other stars announced they didn’t smoke or drink, the Beatles knew it was nonsense. “We used to think they were soft,” John said—anything “soft” in their eyes being crap, finished, down the nick, fookin’ LAST. As George would explain, they never had any intention of going down that well-trodden, misbegotten road: “We’ve always disliked the phoney ‘star image.’ We’d much rather be ourselves. We always came out as ourselves, and we thought, ‘If they don’t like us how we are, then hard luck,’ and they did. People like natural better, I think.”5

  The Beatles hoped to meet Melody Maker, Disc and New Record Mirror, but, as no pieces appeared, they may have been turned away—though the last two did see them on a second promo visit a month later. Alan Smith extended the Beatles the warmest welcome of this first promo day, when they dropped into the NME office at 23 Denmark Street. To them, he was Liverpool-in-London, a home reporter on away turf; for him, it was a chance to deliver in person the group he’d been mocked for supporting, the object of some “Cockroaches” cracks and “northern” gags.

  As it turned out, whatever Smith wrote of their session wasn’t used—the Beatles hadn’t yet broken into the NME Top Thirty, and the paper’s successful editorial policy was “chart acts only.” An account of the visit popped up in a couple of November issues of Mersey Beat, for which Smith was now “London correspondent.” The Beatles told him they didn’t think much of Londoners, the final quote being “If they know you come from the north they don’t want to know.” Smith remembers how “The Beatles took the ‘We’ll show you!’ view about all that … but, on another level, the overwhelming sense I got from them was that buttons had been pressed and they were going to happen. It was like ‘We’ve got it, and here we are with it.’ ”6

  If the NME was the Everest of the music press, Pop Weekly was its hillock, and a riotously overused promotional tool for its co-owners Albert Hand and Robert Stigwood. Hand was a Presley fan, owner of Elvis Monthly and other curious low-end pop-mags published, improbably, in Derbyshire.‡ Stigwood was a savvy Australian impresario in London who’d signed a number of young actors, found them songs, put them in the studio, and produced, licensed and sometimes published their records. Stigwood’s “stars” were everywhere in Pop Weekly but groups didn’t figure in his thinking. It was so much easier to manage soloists; he
had them sculpted as plaster of Paris busts and sent them to journalists for favorable publicity.

  With all that, and its colossally arch hip-speak (“Remember we gogo-go every week to Digsville now, like Wow!”), Pop Weekly really was a peculiar little thing … but it did run an ad for “Love Me Do.” It was the Record Retailer situation again: EMI wouldn’t pay for it, so Nems did. Brian responded positively to a direct approach from Pop Weekly’s ad manager Sean O’Mahony, who remembers: “EMI gave me Brian’s number and I called him. I was used to dealing with rough managers who didn’t want to spend money but Brian was very different. We had an extraordinary phone call—he was so nice, so easy, so charming.”7

  “Love Me Do” went on to figure in Pop Weekly’s Top Thirty, but, for once, the placing of an ad didn’t earn them any editorial space. It might have done, but the Beatles’ personal visit here confined it to the spike. The magazine was put together in a little section of Robert Stigwood’s office, above a shop on a busy but run-down stretch of the Edgware Road, near Paddington.8 As Tony Calder remembers, the young journalist who interviewed the Beatles “was a horrible, Bri-Nylon white-shirted guy with acne and supposed power because he worked for a magazine ‘people wanted to be in.’ He made it clear he didn’t really feel like giving the Beatles his valuable time, and said to them at the start, ‘Guitar groups are finished. It’s over. It’ll never happen again.’ ” After a few minutes of hard answers to soft questions, John Lennon unilaterally terminated the interview. “John just couldn’t take any more of it. He looked at me and said, ‘Let’s fucking get out of here, the cunt’—and, as he rose, he managed to accidentally-on-purpose tip up the man’s desk, which knocked over and broke one of Stigwood’s plaster busts. Those busts summed up the state of the business at the time the Beatles arrived—it was a symbolic moment.”

  The Pop Weekly drop-in was also important in other ways. The Beatles had seen the name Robert Stigwood from reading the music papers; he was one of the major-ish players in the business. But when they came to his Edgware Road HQ it was a wooden staircase up off the street, leading to an office above a shop. Their manager had one of those, and he owned the shop—so just how much bigger was Robert Stigwood than Brian Epstein, apart from one being in London and the other Liverpool? If this was “the glamorous London pop biz” it didn’t amount to much and they didn’t need to be awed by it.

  At one point during the brief visit, it was suggested the Beatles go and meet Mr. Stigwood—but then word came back that he was too busy. They didn’t like it, and at least one of them (probably all four) mentally marked his card on an open-ended basis. As Paul told Melody Maker ten years later, “It was the very first thing we did when we came to London, going to Robert Stigwood’s office—and he wouldn’t see us. Never been struck on him since.”9 It was a nothing episode that would boomerang with a vengeance.

  The only article actually resulting from the Beatles’ day-long debut slog around London was in Dance News, a lively weekly that served the ballroom business from an office in Southwark Street, on the Thames’ south bank. Its writer, Derek Runciman, liked the Beatles and what they had to say, and it was here (in the November 1 issue) that they were first quoted in a national publication. John was identified in print as “leader and founder of the group” (which they’d agreed to say, if anyone asked) and this time, on his 22nd birthday, he did all the talking.10

  When Runciman enthused to the Beatles about “Love Me Do” (he told readers “If you haven’t heard it you are really missing something”), John produced the first printed intimation of what had always been his group’s hallmark—the speed with which they moved on, putting a present-day achievement fast behind them, even choosing to diminish it, in their dash to the next: “We weren’t expecting big things with ‘Love Me Do,’ in fact we aren’t so fond of it now. We’ve already recorded our follow-up and think it’s great.”11

  Noting all this and also their “different, unEnglish style clothes,” Runciman saw enough in the Beatles to stick his neck out. His piece, published under a good-size photo of them in front of the Liver Building, includes two things—the first London-recognition that things were stirring oop north, and some bold predictions: “These four gentlemen from Britain’s beat capital, Liverpool, are a big threat to the big names in the instrumental and vocal world. I know it is an easy thing for critics to say, ‘Oh yes, they’re going to make it big’ and then later say, ‘Well, you can’t always be right.’ But I shall herewith forecast that the Beatles are going to be very big and in time become one of the country’s top starring attractions!”

  Dance News ran its own weekly Top Ten, charting the most-played records in forty ballrooms around Britain. More so than through radio or TV, great numbers of people had exposure to new releases in the dance halls, played between a bandstand orchestra’s live music sessions. It was a flourishing scene, and only Tony Calder would have thought to bring the Beatles to Dance News because it was the paper of his business: he was London’s youngest DJ, working the Lyceum and three more ballrooms in the suburbs (Ilford Palais, Streatham Locarno and Tottenham Royal), and “Love Me Do” was one of the records he featured.

  Calder and his associates—Jeff Dexter, and the top dog, Ian “Sammy” Samwell—also pushed “Love Me Do” hard by sending it around to other DJs and putting the cost on Brian Epstein’s bill. “Record companies didn’t supply ballrooms,” Calder says. “Ballroom managers had to buy the records they played, usually by having an account with a local shop. We sent “Love Me Do” to every Mecca and Top Rank venue on the list. It was unusual, but we knew that because the Beatles were from Liverpool and sounded different, they weren’t going to be played unless we did something.”

  According to Dexter, the first-ever public play of “Love Me Do” (in the capital, at least) was in the Lyceum, spun a week or two before its release by Sammy Samwell. The man who’d written British rock’s original great record, Cliff Richard’s ‘Move It!,’ was the first to play the Beatles in London. “We took our initial copy of ‘Love Me Do’—a one-sided white label test-pressing—straight to the Lyceum on a Tuesday,” Dexter says. “Sammy played it three times that night and people came to ask us what it was.”12

  Samwell played “Love Me Do” to two thousand dancers in London every Tuesday and Sunday night, and dropped it into his DJ box for the Lyceum’s “lunchtime disc sessions” every weekday but one. Liverpool’s young office and shop workers had live music in their dinner-hour, London’s had a daily hour of dancing to records … and the Beatles were starting to migrate.

  “Love Me Do” was issued only in Britain for now. Just as the Beatles had to break out of Liverpool to reach the rest of the country, so they’d have to break out of Britain to reach the rest of the world. In America, Capitol Records turned them down flat. It isn’t known how much the Beatles knew of the background, but it will have hurt them and Brian to be rejected. George Martin expected nothing less, so routine had Capitol’s dismissal of its English owner’s product become. Music that sold strongly in Britain and often several other countries continued to be roundly dismissed by Dave Dexter, Jr., Capitol’s 47-year-old director of international A&R, and George always suffered: of the mere six British 45s picked by “Dex” for Capitol release in 1962, none was his.

  The Beatles first landed in America in a carton postmarked “London W1,” one of eighteen records dispatched from EMI House in Manchester Square to the Capitol Tower on Hollywood and Vine. “Love Me Do” didn’t stay long on Dex’s deck. Interviewed twenty-two years later for a US radio documentary called From Britain with Love, the then-retired Capitol executive ruminated briefly on his act of turning down the Beatles for America: “I didn’t care for it at all because of the harmonica sound. I didn’t care for the harmonica because I had grown up listening to the old blues records and blues harmonica players, and I simply didn’t … I nixed the record instantly.”13

  The fact that Chicago’s Vee Jay label was having a huge national hit with Frank If
ield’s “I Remember You”—a harmonica record Dex had nixed a couple of months earlier—prompted no circumspection, and neither did the success Capitol was having with another self-contained vocal-instrumental group, the Beach Boys. Dexter had no love for the British and a neat way of showing it. Though he rejected the Beatles, the Shadows, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Helen Shapiro and Matt Monro, he did issue Bobbikins, a piano instrumental by Mrs. Mills. Gladys Mills was that most British of discoveries, an ample 43-year-old, heavy-wattled housewife who chopped out party sing-along numbers on a saloon-bar-like piano. After finding sudden TV fame late in 1961, she was signed to Parlophone by Norman Newell, but while her debut single was a hit, the follow-ups weren’t—and it was one of these failures that Dex decided America needed.

  In view of his reproving words to EMI in 1961—“No adult over here ever buys a single”—only two conclusions can be drawn. Either Dexter felt American kids would flock to Mrs. Mills’ Bobbikins, or this was one huge finger up to England’s EMI—a policy colluded with at all management levels inside Capitol up to the president.14 The record sold precisely seventy-two copies throughout America, failing almost as miserably as Dexter’s five other 1962 picks, one of which was tartan singer Andy Stewart—again, not exactly teenage pin-up material. And after this (but for one further small-time exception), Dexter managed to ignore everything sent from England for another nine months, until deep into an intensely dramatic 1963.

  What happened next is a little cloudy, but the upshot was that “Love Me Do” wasn’t released in America. EMI’s procedure was to send some of Capitol’s rejections to its newly opened and secretly owned New York enterprise, Transglobal Music, Inc. It was essentially British EMI in America, given the twin task of (a) licensing good independent-label US 45s for UK issue, and (b) finding US labels to take the records Capitol turned down. EMI Archives holds a single document showing that Transglobal’s president, Joseph E. Zerga, was sent samples of “Love Me Do” to tout around some labels, but (apart from a late flurry of activity at Liberty Records, in December) there’s nothing to indicate which companies might have rejected it.15 Chances are that it saw little action, given that it was never heavily pushed by London.