When They Were Boys

by Larry Kane

  THEY

  WERE

  BOYS

  PART SEVEN: 1963—NEW YEAR’S DAY

  “People forget the time frame. When you think about it, Larry, it was just over seven hundred days since they thought it was all over. Seven hundred days . . . ”

  —Tony Barrow

  “My friends were in lights. My bus buddy George was now riding in cars driven by strange people.”

  —Tony Bramwell

  “Of all the craziness of 1963, the queen’s event, even without the queen, was the highlight, even if I may have pissed her off by returning her medal years later.”

  —John Lennon, in 1975

  The time frame of this story is astonishing. New Year’s Day 1963 came a little over two years after the first Hamburg visit ended with a nightclub fire, Paul and Pete’s quick exit, and George’s embarrassing underage deportation dilemma.

  It was two years after the terribly despondent boys looked inward and saw nothing worth continuing, with John Lennon beyond despair.

  It was two years and three days after the Litherland concert provided a brief tonic for the boys’ loneliness; exactly one year after the Decca crisis; and almost a year after Bill Harry declared the Beatles number one in Mersey Beat. A new year dawned, and it would be no ordinary year at that.

  On January 1, 1963, Astrid Kirchherr was alone in her solace, the Sutcliffe family longed for Stuart, and fans in Hamburg recollected the sweet and sometimes high-pitched tones of the boy singing “Love Me Tender,” the boy whose face could light up the night.

  Sam Leach was still promoting, but the boys had passed him by. His toothy smile and that wonderful, melodic accent illuminated even the most boring of conversations. Would his place in history be bookmarked for future generations?

  Julia Baird, sister of the child Mimi was “waiting for,” watching from a bit of a distance, was shell-shocked by the rise of John and the boys. Sister Jackie was startled; Baird remembers: “It was amazing. The radio, the TV, the papers. It was totally unreal, but from that Woolton church fair that we witnessed back in 1957, and now to this . . . and to think, this was my mother’s little boy . . . my brother.”

  Tony Bramwell, wide-eyed and still by their side whenever he could be, remembers:

  “It was hard to imagine, but Eppy was roaring on all engines. We still had to take long road trips, although I had to stay in Merseyside, but the outlook was brighter. He always seemed to be worrying a lot, but his worrying was a lot less. He would have periods of being down, but I noticed he seemed a bit more self-assured. The boys knew they were going places . . . now their eyes were on America. That was the big unknown.”

  Many of the other players were watching and listening. Colin Hanton was training for work as an upholsterer, Rod Davis was at Cambridge—the heady and classy banjo man of the Quarrymen says he was “watching the boys closely” as 1963 arrived. Pete Shotton, he of the washboard for the Quarrymen, stayed close to John, still with the memories of John striking his head with a washboard after he quit or was fired from the Quarrymen, depending on whose version you get. Shotton, who would become a fast-food millionaire, never knew in early 1963 that John and George would later help him buy a grocery store, setting him on his way.

  For Freda Kelly, the fan club secretary and intimate to the Beatles’ families, life was but a dream, but did she know what would happen in 1963? “Not quite,” she says today.

  “I always believed in them,” Kelly says, “but soon what was word-of-mouth through neighborhoods was spreading through the country. But the parents were still worried. Mimi, the Harrisons, Mrs. Starkey, and Uncle Jim [McCartney] were praying that it would last. As for me, I felt I was living a dream, but the dream was far from over. I would stay with them for years.”

  Kelly, seen in pictures with the boys near a farm field, was electrically attractive, and she had the chance of a lifetime to work with them, to see them up close, to bond with their families, to understand their roots, to cheer for them, and to be, mostly while they were in Liverpool, living every girl’s dream.

  “In many ways, I was like them,” Kelly says. “Humble beginnings, and just hoping for a break. My break was working for Brian, meeting them, and getting butterflies in my stomach every time I heard of another success, another concert. Now they had Britain. I knew the world would follow.”

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  “They were just too good to be missed,” she replies.

  Bill and Virginia Harry were not married yet, but they had spent so much time together that the union was inevitable, or so John Lennon thought. And so he was right. With a wink and a smile, Harry stares ahead and remembers wistfully: “She loaned me the fifty pounds to start Mersey Beat. I was indebted to her, you might say, but we were in love.”

  On March 16, 1963, the duo would make it official. They would take their vows. As of this writing, like the Beatles, they’ve reached the golden fifty-year anniversary—theirs is the longest-playing love song in the Beatles family.

  With love, anticipation, and a lot of support, the boys looked ahead to a year of emotional highs and lows, physical exhaustion, and hope that their own music would continue to sell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MUSIC STAMPEDE—A STORY OF TWO COUNTRIES

  “The failure by Vee-Jay Records to cash in on the Beatles . . . may be one of the greatest misses in recording history, while the sheer guts of Alan Livingston put the Beatles and his own company over the top.”

  —Bruce Spizer, prolific author and the world’s expert on the business practices of the Beatles

  “It was amazing how clueless we were in America. All this incredible music was piling up in Britain, and we had no idea how big it was.”

  —Chris Carter, host of Breakfast with the Beatles on XM Sirius and KLOS radio, Los Angeles

  “It was happening so fast. The press was eating it up. The hits were coming, and we never knew what speed of success was, until this.”

  —Derek Taylor

  THERE IS ALWAYS A SONG THAT YOU REMEMBER IN YOUR LIFETIME, a memory grabber that takes you back. For most early Beatles fans, those who loved them before the iconic years, there’s one song that will always be most vivid: “She Loves You.”

  Most people thought the title was “She Loves You, Yeah Yeah Yeah.” The “yeah yeah yeah” was so much a part of the early imagery of the boys, along with the much-maligned “mop tops” haircut. Essentially the boys’ performance of “She Loves You” embodied the whole early Beatles package.

  “It was everything in one song. The ‘yeahs,’ the boys shaking it up, the grand harmony, the scene of Paul and John face to face at the microphone,” says Chris Carter, host of Breakfast with the Beatles on Sirius Satellite Radio and KLOS Los Angeles, and one of the world’s real masters of the boys’ music.

  It was the Beatles’ all-time number-one single in England. But there was a much more significant meaning to that song. The Beatles were originally appealing to kids, but “She Loves You,” beginning in 1963 in Britain and continuing in America awhile later, signaled the changing of the fan base. The song solidified their growing appeal to all age groups, from teens, to young adults, to the mothers and fathers in their thirties and forties. And there was one other thing. Although they had written plenty of earlier songs, “She Loves You” sealed the deal for John and Paul as songwriters.

  As an eyewitness to so many concerts, in addition to the hard-rock songs like “Long Tall Sally,” I can attest that “She Loves You” always brought the house down like no other tune.

  “From an historical perspective, it certainly was the grabber that left its mark,” remembers promoter, roadie, driver, friend, and sometime gatekeeper Tony Bramwell. “I remember that it was the song that everybody played in their minds.”

  For a while in 1963, it was the Beatles versus the Beatles. There was a music stampede as their songs jockeyed for position on the charts, and with very few other artists in between. There was one glaring
reason for this phenomenon. John, Paul, and George had been writing songs for so long that their sudden rise in late 1962 and most of 1963 provided a real traffic jam of sorts on the charts.

  Their eventual song that startled America, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” was recorded in October 1963. It was not only the first mega-hit in America after its late-December release, it was also George Martin’s first attempt to use four-track technology. The multitrack system would enhance the recording experience, and would enable Martin to mix the different tracks in a single song.

  So, why was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” not an instant number-one hit in the UK? Blame the Beatles on that score.

  The song was released on November 29 in England. There were one million preorders in Britain. It would have been an instant number one if the Beatles had not collided with the Beatles. “She Loves You,” the first million-seller, was at the top of the charts. So, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had to wait a couple weeks to claim the number-one spot.

  The history of Beatles albums in Britain is extraordinary. The LP Please Please Me was released on March 22, 1963. It remained number one for thirty weeks. Their second album, With the Beatles, released on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That album stayed in the number-one slot in Britain for twenty-three weeks.

  The Beatles’ music stampede was unprecedented. Remember, it was two years earlier that Paul played “Love Me Do” for Horst Fascher, their protector in Hamburg, who loved the group but didn’t like the song.

  Many of the Beatles’ releases in 1963 were recorded in a most unusual session, under the direction of George Martin at Abbey Road Studios, on February 11. Ten songs were recorded in thirteen hours. The boys’ schedule for 1963 was almost overbooked, and Martin insisted on getting them to record as much as possible and in whatever time was available.

  There was a fascinating theme during the golden days of 1963, one that has been mostly overlooked. Even with their escalating fame and success, they treated their jobs as though it was 1962 all over again. Still hungry for success, the boys never took anything for granted.

  Billy J. Kramer, already a hit in his own right, remembers how methodical they were, even with hit records topping the charts one after another.

  “Everywhere I played with them, they played their hearts out,” Kramer recalls. “They were the same in 1963 as they were in 1961. They might have had better clothing and extreme fame, but they weren’t sure of it, in their own minds.”

  Freda Kelly, staying in touch with the families, watched the fan club grow and had a hard time coping with the gifts, the perfumed letters, and all the excitement. The boys came back to the Liverpool office, but not as frequently, and yet, she remembers, they came back as the same people she remembered first meeting.

  “To us, they were just the boys,” Kelly recalls. “Pete was no longer there but we stayed in touch. The egos were the same as the egos earlier. If they were changing or full of themselves, I didn’t see it.”

  Kelly was, as always, a believer, and what she may not have noticed was Paul’s growing influence on John’s band. Although he always deferred to John in public, Paul was spending more time with Brian Epstein. As usual, he avoided controversy. Paul was now twenty-one and exerting a stronger influence on the group. There was no feuding. That would come later—seven years later. In 1963, for Paulie and his three buddies, the work ethic remained priority number one.

  Tony Bramwell, Mal Evans, and master roadie Neil Aspinall never saw anyone let up in the work ethic.

  “They always worked so hard . . . never let up . . . never said ‘we are on top,’” Mal Evans remembered during an interview in 1966. “ . . . I would be so taken by their work habits, especially in the late 1963 time when they could have been out of control.”

  While the music stampede in Britain was overwhelming, the initial impact in the United States was not encouraging.

  The new fever, 1963 style, was punctuated by a strange cycle of events as the boys’ recordings slowly made their way to the United States. In the background were wise men and women, ineffective leaders, and a scoundrel of sorts.

  When Paul and John wrote “Can’t Buy Me Love,” it wasn’t intended to be autobiographical, yet it was symbolic of the legal scrapes going on in the United States. For a while, the boys couldn’t get attention in America. The frustrating failure of American record companies to see the boys’ potential was painful, especially to Brian Epstein. The mess over music rights in 1963 could never have been told in a three-minute song, but maybe in a full-length feature movie. It might have been titled A Hard Year’s Fights.

  Once again, the slope was slippery, and the Beatles efforts, with Epstein’s intense push, almost collapsed over the edge into ruin.

  In the early part of the year, Capitol Records, a division of EMI, had very little interest in the first song that Epstein dispatched to America—“From Me to You”—which ended up being distributed by Vee-Jay Records, a company that produced only black artists before signing the Four Seasons in 1962.

  Through a series of legal machinations, and Capitol’s indifference, Vee-Jay Records got the right of first refusal to the Beatles records, and conversely, Capitol executive Dave Dexter, the man in charge of approving new releases, did not view the Beatles favorably. Perhaps he agreed with the Decca chief who advised Epstein 1962 that guitar bands were history.

  Capitol’s failure to act, and its lack of awareness of the Beatles’ rise in the UK, placed Vee-Jay in a great position. As early as February 1963, Vee-Jay released “Please Please Me” in America. It never made the early Billboard charts, but in Britain it began a thirty-week run as number one on March 22. Was that a testament to the payola-and-plugola days of American music? After all, pay-for-play was under federal scrutiny. Vee-Jay’s promotional budget was moderate, but the fact is that the Beatles’ music was quite available in the United States in 1963. But they didn’t click. Or was it all about the fever not yet reaching America? The latter is the key question. Vee-Jay also released “From Me to You” in the United States and it managed to reach number 115 on the charts. The company did recoup its investment with the singles it still owned in 1964, including “Please Please Me”/“From Me to You”; “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”/“Thank You Girl”; “Love Me Do”/“P.S. I Love You”; and “Twist and Shout”/“There’s a Place.”

  In all, over 2.5 million Beatles singles were sold on the Vee-Jay label. The company was flying high and had been aggressive in signing new acts during the early rock ’n’ roll years of the fifties. After all, Vee-Jay had even signed a deal with Little Richard.

  Then the sky fell.

  Vee-Jay’s president, Ewart Abner, was in trouble. Abner was hugely successful as an executive, but he had a fault line, a gambling problem, and was accused of embezzlement. The company’s funds were depleted. The sixties version of Vee-Jay was over.

  Into the breach came a successful label—a rare mix of the Philadelphia-born dance-craze super hits and the boys from Liverpool. Cameo-Parkway Records, the Philly hit maker, famous for “The Twist” and “The Bristol Stomp” and many early-sixties dance themes, and partially owned by Dick Clark, got into the mix.

  And here lies a story of “no guts, no glory.” It is the story of two Bernies. Bernie Lowe was the chief of Cameo. Bernie Binnick, who ran Swan Records, shared nearby office space with copartner Tony Mammarella.

  Jerry Blavat, an original dancer on American Bandstand and a music legend in Philadelphia and across the country as a deejay, writer, and friend to all the major rock entertainers of the past sixty years, remembers how the “Bernies” reacted to the Beatles:

  BERNIE LOWE AT CAMEO-PARKWAY WAS NOT INTERESTED IN THE BEATLES, BUT BERNIE BINNICK, HE WAS A FORMER SHOE SALESMAN IN PHILADELPHIA, WAS VERY INTERESTED, AND RELEASED “SHE LOVES YOU” ON HIS SWAN RECORDS LABEL SEPTEMBER 6, 1963. IT WAS FAIRLY INVISIBLE ON THE RADIO, BUT BY THE TIME OF THE DECEMBER CAPITOL LAUNCH, THE COMPANY’S RELEASE FINALLY PAID OFF.
“SHE LOVES YOU” FLEW INTO ORBIT IN 1964. . . . DICK CLARK DIVESTED HIMSELF OF INTEREST IN CAMEO-PARKWAY AND SWAN RECORDS. IT WAS A GOOD CHOICE.

  Clark, who graciously wrote the foreword for my first Beatles book, Ticket to Ride, wanted to avoid any conflicts of interest as the pay-for-play investigations began in Washington.

  Bruce Spizer notes that Swan had an option on the next Beatles record but didn’t exercise it.

  “It’s kind of interesting that Bernie Binnick liked what he heard, but obviously he wasn’t sure about what would come next,” Spizer says. “He did, though, cash in when the Beatles hit the airwaves in late December.”

  But that mass eruption of the Beatles on American radio stations almost never happened.

  The Swan gambit paid off, but it took tremendous patience. Remember, 1963 was a boom year in Great Britain and Europe for the Beatles, but it was a bust year in the States. For eleven months of 1963, the Beatles were unknown in America. All those months earlier, the boys’ songs were on sale, but outside of the overly ambitious deejay Dick Biondi in Chicago, few people actually heard them.

  And then Capitol Records and Dave Dexter got a second chance when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was offered to Capitol. Once again, Dexter showed his hand. He said no.

  Incredibly, there would be a third chance for Capitol to get it right. Bruce Spizer recalls,

  DEXTER TURNED DOWN “I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND.” BRIAN EPSTEIN HAD ENOUGH. HE WENT OVER DAVID DEXTER’S HEAD TO ALAN LIVINGSTON, THE PRESIDENT OF CAPITOL RECORDS. LIVINGSTON LISTENED AND LISTENED AGAIN, AND BY LATE DECEMBER AND EARLY JANUARY, “I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND” WAS ON ITS WAY TO BECOMING CHAMPION OF AMERICAN RADIO. DAVE DEXTER HAD ALSO TURNED DOWN “SHE LOVES YOU,” WHICH SWAN CASHED IN ON. EPSTEIN’S LEAP OVER THIS EXECUTIVE’S HEAD, DIRECTLY TO LIVINGSTON, GUARANTEED THE ERUPTION OF EMOTION THAT WOULD GO OUT OF CONTROL AMONG AMERICAN TEENAGERS. WITHOUT ALAN LIVINGSTON, AND A LARGELY UNKNOWN DEEJAY, THERE MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN THE GREAT TIMING OF THE DECEMBER 26TH LAUNCH OF “I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND,” AND ALONG WITH IT, ALSO ONE OF THE GREAT RELATIONSHIPS, TO THAT POINT, IN MUSICAL HISTORY.