by Larry Kane
I met Alan Livingston once. During the 1964 tour, he hosted a VIP party in Brentwood, California—a charity fund-raiser featuring the four Beatles, standing under a tree, taking pictures and signing autographs. Lloyd Bridges and teenage sons Beau and Jeff were there. As the stars marched in, one by one, I was duly impressed.
But the boys were not happy.
The next day, John said to me, “It’s rubbish that only the big spenders get to meet us. But then again, Larry . . . ”
“Yes?”
“Then again, the charming Mr. Livingston helped us so much, that . . . could we really say no?”
Paul McCartney, gracious and charismatic toward more than seventy of Hollywood’s finest, would later sympathize with John.
“To think that police in America don’t even allow us to wave at the fans. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
But Livingston certainly deserved respect and payback. Without him, the flame for the Beatles in America may never have been lit.
It’s ironic that a forty-six-year-old executive, far from the madding crowds of teenagers, got what the Beatles were all about.
For Bruce Spizer, the Capitol acquisition of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is a classic case of good business/bad business:
THE FAILURE BY VEE-JAY RECORDS TO CASH IN ON THE BEATLES BECAUSE OF THE BOSS’S GAMBLING PROBLEM 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. THE FACT IS . . . LIVINGSTON’S ABILITY TO READ THE PUBLIC, AND THE YOUTH, WAS EXCEPTIONAL. HE SENT HIS COMPANY INTO OVERDRIVE BY SECOND-GUESSING A WELL-LIKED EXECUTIVE WHO HAD REJECTED THE BEATLES AT EVERY TURN. I OFTEN WONDER WHETHER DAVE DEXTER HAD BEEN READING ANY NEWS REPORTS FROM GREAT BRITAIN.
Livingston’s intuition would become even more legendary. Throughout the rest of his career, he produced and wrote many TV series, sponsored artists like Don McLean (“American Pie”), and was influential in his years at NBC-TV for a number of major hits, including Bonanza. He was a renaissance man who constantly offered new vistas in music, TV, movies, and the arts.
The Capitol boss became a Hollywood icon, and maintained a close business relationship with Brian Epstein.
Joe Flannery offers more about Brian’s decision to go directly to Livingston: “He had made a clear choice. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had to be released with drama and promotion, and on the signature of a big label. He knew it might be risky to go over people’s heads. But he had come too far and he decided to take the risk.”
Two years later, during the 1965 tour, in a conversation in his cottage room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Epstein told me, “Larry, I think he must have thought I was out of my mind when I told him, ‘They will be bigger than Elvis.’ But it worked, and here we are. Without his intervention, who knows what might have happened.”
The “bigger than Elvis” theme was familiar. Sam Leach had uttered those words three years before, directly to the startled Beatles.
Allan Williams thought Leach was crazy. “Bigger than Elvis?” he said to me doubtfully. “Did I believe that back in the post-Jacaranda days? No.”
Williams never looked at the boys’ future that way, but Leach did, and one year after he negotiated their first legitimate recording contract, Brian Epstein would bet the future on his forecast. It was a bold move by Epstein, forecasting a meteoric rise for the group, telling an American music mogul that they would overtake Elvis. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the blockbuster that paved the way for the Beatles’ American domination, was the biggest-selling Beatles single of all time. It sold 11 million copies decades before MP3s and the electronic revolution. Livingston got his payoff.
But there were other players.
One pioneer is almost forgotten in the rise of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Carroll James of WWDC radio in Silver Springs, Maryland, serving the Washington area, played the song for the first time in America. Deejay James received a request from a young fan, Marsha Albert, who had seen a clip of the Beatles on the December 10, 1963, broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. James arranged for an airline flight attendant to bring the record over. He played it on December 17.
James got the first play of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but a small-market station in New England beat him to the punch with two other eventual hits. It was WORC in Worcester, Massachusetts, that set the real early pace, and made some news.
On December 6, 1963, WORC started playing “I’ll Get You,” followed by “She Loves You.” WORC made history. Based on listener requests, the station proclaimed “I’ll Get You” as number one, and “She Loves You” as number nine. Word of the Beatles’ success on WORC started spreading around the country.
Between Carroll James in Washington and the aggressive play of WORC radio, Capitol Records was forced to move quickly. Capitol had wanted to wait till the Beatles’ arrival in February to release their music in the States. But Carroll James’s sneak preview changed all of that. By December 26, the song was being played in almost every market in America. Capitol ended up contracting RCA and Columbia Records to press extra copies of the single to meet demand.
Soon the song would become number one in America, John and the boys remembering that they got the news during their marathon Paris run in January.
Once again, I vividly remember the conversation years later.
“What was the most exciting moment in those early days?” I asked John during a film interview with Paul at the St. Regis Hotel in New York.
“Larry, it was Paris when we got the word that the song was number one, and we celebrated . . . milk, you know?”
Again, John loved being vague and eclectic.
“Milk?” I asked.
“Milk, Larry,” John replied.
The news they received in Paris prompted a sense of victory for the boys, getting ready for their first trip to the States. All of them were extremely, and sometimes painfully, nervous about the kind of reception they would face on their February visit to the United States.
The nerves didn’t last long. Before they arrived in America, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had become the group’s first American number-one song, entering the Billboard Hot 100 chart on January 18, 1964, at number forty-five and reaching number one by February 1. It held the top spot for several weeks before being replaced by “She Loves You.” It was again Beatles versus Beatles, an avalanche of old songs and new that collided on the way to Hit Land, a reverse scenario of what had occurred in Britain. And in retrospect, the Beatles’ explosion on the US scene in the first months of 1963 previewed the British Invasion of the American music industry that would soon follow.
Once again, record executives who passed on the boys were left to despair, and those who saw the light became heroes forever, which, in the life of the Beatles, is a very long time.
And as we see repeated in this story over and over again, it was persistence by Brian Epstein, and the courage of one man, in this case Alan Livingston, that changed everything.
There were other components in the Beatles’ success in America, which was speedier than their rise in Britain. Two men with diverse talents carefully crafted the words and images that paved the way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
BARROW ON THE BEAT
“With all the royalty in attendance, John had the cheeky request that the rich people in the audience should rattle their jewelry.”
—Tony Barrow
“Yes, it’s true. I did use the term ‘Fab Four’ in an early press release, but I never knew what I was unleashing at the time, did I?”
—Tony Barrow, talking to me on the Beatles’ chartered plane in August 1965
WORDS. CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THEM, especially when they help create imagery, and for the Beatles, that imagery was created before they really made it. Along with the lyrics of so many songs, the fanaticism, and the pure songwriting talent, words helped put the boys in play, even though at the time they were really too busy and all-consu
med to realize where the written words had placed them.
Bill Harry in print, and Bob Wooler via voice, had started it. And Derek Taylor and Tony Barrow had finished it—both extraordinary wordsmiths who could put feelings into type, not to mention having an ability to dramatically speak to groups, large and small, with elegance and clarity.
While, as you will soon learn, Taylor seemed to channel the life of a Beatle—cool, very funny, Beatle-like, and at the same time, protective—Barrow was demure and avuncular, a model of the press officer, dressed for the world of finance but hip enough to deal with the vagaries of rock ’n’ roll. Both shared an amazing talent—grace under fire—in one case, literally.
When our chartered aircraft, stricken by a small engine fire, made a cautionary landing at Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 1965, the well-traveled Mr. Barrow walked up and down the aisles making sure everyone’s seat belt was fastened, way before he fastened his own. The landing was soft, but with all the pressure of the moment, Barrow held his own while remaining calm, proper, and dressed to the hilt. If war broke out, you knew that you would want Tony Barrow in the foxhole with you, no doubt about it. While he may not have had Taylor’s dramatic and sometimes overextended flair, Barrow, on the beat, on tour, or simply one-on-one, was an image-maker supreme. His eyes would wander during the press conferences, looking at the reporters, sizing them up, knowing by body language and facial expressions what was coming next.
His road to joining the boys’ inner circle began with presenting local pop groups in his hometown of Crosby, in north Merseyside. His hosting duties led to a weekly column, at the age of seventeen, on pop and entertainment for the Liverpool Echo newspaper.
Barrow had a unique job when he arrived at Decca Records’ London offices, writing liner notes on the back of albums. He managed to continue his Echo column at the same time.
Brian Epstein noticed. In late 1962, Barrow survived a real conflict of interest: signing on with Epstein as a freelancer to promote the Beatles’ first single in Britain, “Love Me Do.” The song was released on the Parlophone label of EMI, and Barrow put together press materials while he was working at Decca, a major competitor to Parlophone. After joining Epstein and company in May 1963, Barrow became a progressive innovator—creating a disc that would be sent to every member of the fast-growing international Beatles Fan Club at Christmastime. The unique holiday greeting was so successful that it was then produced annually, an innovative electronic well-wishing that was created decades before the age of iTunes and social media networks.
But his most startling contribution was his talent as a promoter through words and creative advertising. Although like Derek Taylor he would clash at times with Epstein, the intuitive manager was amazed at Barrow’s cunning and capacity to think differently.
“I shall always appreciate the role that the press officers played for us,” Epstein graciously said to me in 1966. “Tony is one of the best in the business. Derek was so formidable.”
“I guess you like writers?” I asked.
“Not all, but I hired away two of the best, and you see what they did.”
For all of Epstein’s early naïveté about contracts and such, he was unbelievable in understanding the power of words, and the imagery that was created in people’s minds. He was adamant about banning film crews from many of the early concerts, and that was probably a bad move, considering the power of film. But he viewed the written word, in the early days, as more important than film. Then Tony Barrow arrived.
In the final six months of 1963, Barrow pulled off one of the greatest public relations and marketing campaigns in history. At selected engagements, at small and cozy movie theaters, Barrow cleared the way for film crews to shoot small portions of the performances. Most of the 1963 concerts were bigger than the previous year’s performances, but still intimate enough to allow a roving camera crew. In a masterpiece of planning, Barrow picked locations where he knew the crowds would be mostly girls who were sure to rise into a wild, screaming frenzy.
What Barrow did was exceptional marketing. The film cameramen would get just enough of each concert so they could show that fraction of a song on the evening news, but Barrow made sure that they got all the film they wanted of the screaming audiences. The result was an image of mass hysteria, even though the theaters were small and compact. This technique is mentioned at several junctures of this story, because it was so important every time it was employed. It also set a standard that is practiced today in the highly proprietary world of popular music. At mega-concerts far and wide, TV cameramen are allowed to take only a portion of video of one song at a concert, just enough to get it on the evening news, but not enough to make it commercially saleable, or material for exploitation. Epstein and company were so wary that one time Epstein followed a radio colleague of mine up a giant tower in the Rocky Mountains to make sure he wasn’t secretly making an audiotape of a concert.
Epstein, always looking ahead, feared that too much film could compromise the business later on. But Barrow and his work buddy Derek Taylor understood the technique of showing the film that counted the most, the wrenching and sometimes hysterical screaming, the girls flailing their arms, looking passionate and a bit delirious. It was this kind of footage that first appeared on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
This strategy helped the Beatles’ explosion in forthcoming locations—Sweden and Paris—and of course, sparked the interest and anticipation in the biggest prize, America. It was controlled marketing at its best. Today our business would call it “staging.” But whatever they called it in 1963, it worked.
As summer moved into autumn in 1963, Tony Barrow and Derek Taylor guaranteed that the words and images reflected an avalanche that was out of control. Taylor was still writing, and Barrow was already on the job for Eppy.
It was around that time that Barrow also coined the term “Fab Four.”
He recalls, “Yes, it’s true. I did use the term ‘Fab Four’ in an early press release, but I never knew what I was unleashing at the time, did I?”
For a while, Barrow was a not-so-quiet moonlighter. He was writing for the Liverpool Echo happily promoting the Beatles while his bosses at Decca Records were rejecting them. He also wrote columns after joining Epstein’s NEMS organization.
To describe Tony Barrow is to envision an English gentleman with the poise and class of royalty. Always dressed well, most of the time wearing a jacket and tie, Barrow was “in command” at all the press conferences on the international tours, especially in America in 1965, when the Beatles conquered Shea Stadium. In Hollywood, he delicately arranged the Beatles’ historic meeting with Elvis Presley. A few nights before that, when the engine dimmed on our turboprop as we headed into Portland, Barrow was the calm force surrounding a minor panic from John and George as we approached an emergency landing. Barrow came down the aisle and calmly assured everyone that “everything is on schedule . . . all just routine, you know.”
In many respects, from the beginning of his official tenure as an employee of Epstein and the band’s, Tony Barrow was a powerful presence in the Beatles camp during their most critical months. With the media, he was a cheerful offset to the intense and security-conscious Neil Aspinall, whose job was to keep away the unruly and the unfriendly. As with Derek Taylor, there was always a smile, a drink, a joke to clear the tension of traveling and crowds.
Great adventures are produced by exceptional people with unlimited energy, but for many of those who worked in the background to ensure the Beatles’ success, there was a price to be paid.
One of the untold stories of the Beatles’ early life was the price an individual endured amid the concern and chaos of the crowds, the would-be hangers-on, the lack of sleep, and this new, brave, unchartered world of an always-hungry public, if not berserk fandom. All of a sudden, the normalcy of the human spirit was shattered by the fear of the unknown, the fright of watching near-violent crowds around you, and the changes it brought about in your own beh
avior.
Today Tony Barrow savors the memories, but also knows very well that for all the joy, there was a good dose of suffering, especially in 1963.
MY LIFE WAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN BY THE COMPLETE CHANGE OF DAILY WORKING SCHEDULE. AS A WRITER AT DECCA I HAD WORKED FROM TEN UNTIL SIX, MONDAY TO FRIDAY, PERIOD. ONCE THE BEATLES BECAME INTERNATIONALLY POPULAR, AS SOON AS THE PHONE STOPPED RINGING IN THE OFFICE I’D START GETTING CALLS ON MY HOME LINE FROM JOURNALISTS AND OTHER MEDIA PEOPLE ALL ROUND THE WORLD. I WAS NEVER OFF DUTY, 24/7. AS I TRAVELED MORE AND MORE, I SAW LESS AND LESS OF MY WIFE AND OUR FAMILIES. ON REFLECTION THIS BECAME PARTICULARLY UNFORTUNATE AFTER THE FIRST OF OUR TWO SONS WAS BORN IN 1967. I CHERISH ALMOST ALL THE EXPERIENCES I HAD WITH THE BEATLES, THE LOWS AS WELL AS THE HIGHS, BUT I FEEL SAD NOW THAT I MISSED OUT OF WATCHING MY BOYS GROW THROUGH THEIR EARLY CHILDHOODS SIMPLY BECAUSE MY JOB DEMANDED SUCH NONSTOP ATTENTION.
That nonstop attention could wander into the middle of the night, which leads to the question: Would the Beatles have made it if a real scandal erupted? The answer is no, especially in the early days.
And on that subject, my mind wanders back to Las Vegas in 1964, when John was asleep in his hotel room, with two very young sisters on the bed watching black-and-white TV. It was about 4 a.m. Team Beatles—including Brian Epstein, Derek Taylor, and Neil Aspinall—rushed to my room and pleaded for help. Nothing happened in John’s room. I checked that out thoroughly. John was his usual self. The girls, about eleven or twelve years old, had broken through security. John invited them in and that was that. He loved talking to the kids, and yet there was an air of impropriety. But since I was a so-called reputable member of the media, Taylor urged me to go down to the lobby and convince their mother, who had been gambling all night, that it was all innocent, since it was. The mother was skeptical but may have later reached a court settlement with Epstein. For that moment in time, there was no scandal, and the Beatles marched on.