Shout!

by Philip Norman

  On EMI’s Columbia label, the A&R head Norrie Paramour meanwhile enjoyed virtually unbroken success and gigantic sales with his discovery, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. George Martin did not particularly like the echoey guitar sound that the Shadows had made all the rage. But he did envy Paramour his golden, effortless protégés. Each comedy success for Parlophone was the result of an endless search for new original material. With a pop group the product was all the same, so Martin thought: You simply sat back and let it happen.

  Such was Martin’s frame of mind that April day in 1962 when Brian Epstein walked in and played the Beatles’ demo. After all their efforts to be otherwise, they would have been enraged by Martin’s first idea. Perhaps, he thought, he had found his very own Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

  On Wednesday, June 6, 1962, the Beatles arrived at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in the leafy north London suburb of St. John’s Wood. Today, the place still looks very much as it did back then: the very last imaginable location for an international record company’s creative nerve center. Within an expansive front drive stands a plain-fronted late Victorian town house, painted plain white, with a steep flight of stone steps ascending to its front door. The espionage world could hardly have created a more innocent front for the labyrinth of state-of-the art studios, technical departments, and offices that lay—and still lie—behind.

  The Beatles followed their manager up the front steps in a state of high excitement largely induced by Brian’s failure to explain precisely what was to happen today. They believed—as did everyone in Liverpool—that the test was the merely routine preamble to recording for Parlophone on the basis of a contract already promised. Mersey Beat had said so, even giving July as the month of their first record release and inviting readers to suggest possible titles for issue. They were, in any case, still dazed after Hamburg, the Star-Club, and six virtually sleepless weeks.

  At Abbey Road studios that day, something entirely unexpected happened. George Martin, that elegant BBC-accented A&R man and the four scruffily shod Liverpool boys took a liking to one another. Early in their conversation George Martin happened to mention he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, the founding members of the radio Goon Show. “Goon” humor is dear to most Liverpudlians: In John Lennon’s eyes, especially, Martin was instantly raised to near divinity by his connection with the man who had sung the “Ying-Tong Song.” He was, besides, agreeably plainspoken, neither ingratiating nor condescending. John and Paul—and especially George—were soon plying him with questions about the studio and its equipment. Only Pete Best remained, as usual, silent. George Martin does not remember exchanging a word with him all afternoon.

  Brian had already sent down a neatly typewritten list of songs that the Beatles could play if required. A large portion were standards, like “Besame Mucho,” since these, Brian thought—mistakenly—had impressed Martin most on the demo tape. There was also the batch of new songs they had written in Hamburg, mostly round the battered piano at Jim Hawke’s Seaman’s Mission on the docks.

  Despite everything else on George Martin’s mind, the test he gave the Beatles was exhaustive. Ringed by their puny amps they stood in the well of the huge studio, attacking song after song, then waiting, in sudden silence, for the verdict of the polite, unexcited voice over the control-room intercom. What they did not realize was that Martin was putting each of them on test individually, to try to see which might be the Cliff Richard he still hoped to find. He could not decide between Paul, whose voice was more melodious, and John, whose personality had greater force. George, and his rather strained, adenoidal voice, figured little in these computations. “I was thinking that on balance I should make Paul the leader,” Martin says. “Then I realized that if I did, I’d be changing the whole nature of the group. Why not keep them as they were?”

  The question of material remained vexing. Martin still felt that “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Your Feet’s Too Big,” and “Besame Mucho” were “too corny.” Nor did he particularly like the songs they had written for themselves. He listened patiently but without inner animation to the one that, plainly, they hoped he would choose as the A side of their record. Called “Love Me Do,” it was a simple and very brief Lennon and McCartney composition whose loping rhythm served mainly as a showcase for Pete Best’s drumming. Its chord structure was basic; its harmony unambitious; its lyric the kind that any tin-eared beginner might have jotted on an envelope: “Love, love me do… you know I love you… I’ll always be true…” Its only virtue was that at least it sounded glancingly like other 1962 pop songs. But Martin still decided to reserve judgment.

  One thing he did know, right from the beginning, was that he didn’t want Pete Best. “At the end of the test I took Brian on one side and said, ‘I don’t know what you intend to do with the group as such, but this drumming isn’t at all what I want. If we do make a record, I’d prefer to use my own drummer—which won’t make any difference to you because no one will know who’s on the record anyway.’” Brian did not protest. Nor did he mention it to Pete, who was packing up his gear as excitedly as the other three.

  “If we make a record” was still as far as Martin would commit himself. He liked the Beatles, and felt there was definitely “something” there. At the same time he knew that in signing so offbeat and potentially uncommercial a group, he could well risk his own small position within EMI. Besides, he had a full program of recording celebrities such as Bernard Cribbins, and a live LP to make at London’s first satirical night club, the Establishment.

  Not until late July did Brian receive a definite offer. Martin agreed to record the Beatles on Parlophone, subject to the most niggardly contract that EMI’s penny-pinching caution could devise. In an initial one-year period Parlophone would record four titles at a royalty, to Brian and the Beatles together, of one penny per double-sided record. Four further one-year options were open to Martin, each bringing a royalty increment per record of one farthing, or a quarter of an old penny.

  A few days after the audition someone said a curious thing to Pete: “They’re thinking of getting rid of you, you know—but they don’t dare do it. They’re too worried about losing all your fans.”

  At about the same time Bob Wooler, the Cavern disk jockey, making his rounds of Liverpool after dark, came into Danny English’s pub to join a meeting in progress between Brian, Paul, and George. Wooler, as a long-time confidant, had been specially invited, though for what reason Brian would not say. It soon became clear that Paul and George were both urging that Pete Best be sacked.

  Brian himself held out for some time against sacking Pete. At first, he seems to have thought he could appease all sides by keeping Pete on for live dates but using a substitute drummer on record, as George Martin had suggested. Brian had nothing against Pete—indeed, he relied heavily on him as the group’s most punctual and businesslike member. Pete’s home in West Derby, and the little coffee club downstairs, continued to be the Beatles’ main rendezvous and base camp. An added complication existed in Neil Aspinall, their indispensable van driver and bodyguard, who was Pete’s closest friend. There would also, in the event of unpleasantness, be Pete’s mother to contend with. Mona Best, as Brian already knew, was a force one did not lightly provoke.

  All through June and July, before word came from George Martin at Parlophone, the plots simmered against a still unsuspecting Pete. The Beatles—already billed by Brian as “Parlophone Recording Artists”—were back at their old ballroom haunts, the Grafton, the Majestic in Birkenhead, and the New Brighton Tower. It was after a radio appearance in Manchester, on the BBC Light Program Northern Dance Orchestra Show, where he had been literally mobbed by girls, that someone dropped the first hint to Pete: “They’re thinking of getting rid of you, you know.” The thought amused Pete; he even mentioned it jokingly to Brian, who responded by blushing and spluttering “how ridiculous.” Just the same, when Martin wrote to him in late July, and the Parlophone contract became real at last, Brian to
ok care not to let Pete Best know.

  John stayed out of the plot, having a far more urgent worry on his mind. His girlfriend, Cynthia, in one of her rare utterances, had informed him that her monthly “friend” had failed to pay her a visit. Since John and she were virtually living together, in equal innocence of birth control methods, this crucial friend’s arrival had long been in jeopardy. Now it was certain, confirmed by a woman doctor whose harshness drove the mild, shortsighted girl to tears. Cyn was going to have a baby.

  John bowed to the inevitable as fatalistically as any north country workingman. In that case, he told Cynthia, there was nothing else for it; they’d have to get married. With Cyn’s mother away in Canada the only family member to be reckoned with was John’s aunt Mimi. They put off breaking it to Mimi until the eve of their hastily arranged wedding. Mimi’s response was a hollow and heartfelt groan. She had groaned in exactly that way in 1938, when John’s mother, Julia, came home and threw a marriage certificate casually on the table. “I told them,” Mimi remembered, “‘I’ll say one thing only, then I’ll hold my peace. You’re too young! There now, I’ve said it. Now I’ll hold my peace forever.’”

  August began, and still Pete Best knew nothing of the contract with Parlophone. The Beatles, en route for the Grafton on West Derby Road, were all in Mona Best’s sitting room, waiting for Pete to come downstairs. He did so in high spirits, full of the Ford Capri car he had almost decided to buy. Mrs. Best remembered that Paul, in particular, showed unease over the price Pete intended to pay for the car. “He went all mysterious, suddenly. He told Pete, “‘If you take my advice, you won’t buy it, that’s all. You’d be better saving your money.’”

  On Wednesday, August 15, they were on at lunchtime in the Cavern. The next night was the first of four major bookings at the Riverpark Ballroom in Chester. Pete had decided to make his own way there, giving John a lift. They both came out of the Cavern and Pete asked John what time he should pick him up tomorrow night. John muttered, “Don’t bother,” and walked away in a hurry. Later, at home, Pete got a call from Brian in his Whitechapel office. “He said he wanted to see me there tomorrow morning at 11:30. That was nothing unusual. He’d often ask me things about halls or bookings that I knew from the time when I’d been handling the dates.”

  Pete’s friend Neil Aspinall drove him into the city to see Brian the next morning. “I went bouncing into Brian’s office,” Pete says. “As soon as I saw him, I could tell there was something up. He said: ‘The boys want you out of the group. They don’t think you’re a good enough drummer.’ I said, ‘It’s taken them two years to find out I’m not a good enough drummer.’ While I was standing there the phone rang on Brian’s desk. It was Paul, asking if I’d been told yet. Brian said, ‘I can’t talk now. Peter’s here with me in the office.’”

  “I went outside and told Neil. He said, ‘Right then, that’s it. I’m out as well.’ Brian followed me and asked me if I’d still play the dates in Chester, as they wouldn’t be able to get a replacement drummer in time. I said, OK, I would. We went outside, and Neil went straight away to ring home and tell Mo about it. I just went off and had a few pints—numb. I’d been cut and dried and hung out on the line.”

  Luck had very seldom favored the boy who was born Richard Starkey on July 7, 1940, at number 9 Madryn Street, deep in the Liverpool Dingle. The baby was one month late and had to be induced with forceps; as his mother, Elsie, lay upstairs recovering, the sirens sounded Germany’s first aerial visitation. The densely packed Dingle houses had no bomb shelter other than the coal hole under the stairs. As Elsie, with Ritchie, and three neighbors crouched there, she could not understand why the baby on her shoulder was screaming. Then she realized she was holding him upside-down.

  The sad-eyed child they named Ritchie after his father came to consciousness on the tailboard of a moving van as it carried his mother’s few possessions from Madryn Street around the corner to a new, even smaller row house in Admiral Grove. His father, Ritchie senior, a bakery worker, had by now moved away from home but continued conscientiously to support his wife and child. He could only send 30s (£1.50) a week, so Elsie herself took work as a barmaid in a pub. Young Ritchie thus spent much of his early childhood at the home of his grandfather Starkey, a boilermaker in the Mersey shipyards. He was a solitary boy, but philosophical and happy with the little that he had. His only reproach to Elsie was the lack of any brothers and sisters, “so there’d be someone to talk to when it’s raining.”

  His education was dogged from the beginning by chronic ill health. At the age of six, after only a year at primary school, he was rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix. Surgeons operated in the nick of time to save his life, but he remained in a coma for several weeks. Elsie would come in late, after work at the pub, to peep at the little figure in its hospital cot. He recovered, became his old cheerful self, and was about to come home when he fell out of bed while showing a toy to someone. This first absence from school eventually dragged out to a full year.

  At eight, consequently, he was unable to read or write. A neighbor’s daughter, Mary Maguire, did her best to help him catch up by encouraging him to spell out words from magazines. The operation had left his stomach in a delicate state from which it was never to recover fully. When there was lamb scouse—stew—for dinner, Mary would sit beside Ritchie, carefully picking the onions out of his portion.

  When he was eleven his mother began to keep company with Harry Graves, a Liverpool Corporation house painter, originally from London. Harry and Elsie married in 1953, when Ritchie was not quite thirteen. He had begun to attend Dingle Vale Secondary School, but was still greatly handicapped by all the lessons he had missed. That same year, he caught a cold that turned to pleurisy and affected one of his lungs. They took him to the big children’s sanatorium at Heswall on the Wirral; he remained there for the next two years.

  When eventually discharged he was fifteen and of graduation age. No one remembered him at Dingle Vale Secondary when he went back there for a reference. He could read and write only with difficulty, and the months in a hospital had left him thin, weak, and sallow. Patches of premature gray were starting to show in his hair and his left eyebrow. His nature, against all the odds, continued to be cheerful.

  The Youth Employment Officer, well accustomed to such lost causes, eventually found him a job with the railway as a messenger boy. He left after six weeks because they wouldn’t give him a uniform, and took casual work as a barman on the ferryboats plying slantwise over the Mersey between Liverpool and New Brighton. Then, thanks to his stepfather, he was taken on by Hunt’s, a local engineering firm, as apprentice to a carpenter. The overalls, the slide-rule, the contract binding for years ahead all promised security for life.

  A fellow Hunt’s apprentice was a boy named Eddie Miles who lived near the Starkeys in Admiral Grove. When the skiffle craze began in 1956 Eddie and Ritchie started a group to amuse the other apprentices in the dinner hour. Ritchie, who had always banged and beaten on things, took the role of drummer. Harry Graves bought him his first full set, paying ten pounds for it down in London and carrying it valiantly back to Lime Street on the train.

  The Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, as they called themselves, played around the same church hall network as John Lennon’s original Quarry Men. Ritchie by now was using brand-new drums for which his grandfather Starkey had lent him the fifty-pound deposit. The set was his passport, around 1959, into Liverpool’s most successful amateur group. He joined the Ravin’ Texans, afterward the Hurricanes, the quartet that played while Rory Storm sang and, occasionally, shinned up ballroom pillars. The others nicknamed him “Rings,” because he wore so many, then Ringo as it sounded more cowboyish. Starkey was first abbreviated to Starr at Butlin’s summer camp, so that his solo drumming spot could be billed on a poster as “Starr Time.”

  Until 1961, Ringo belonged to a group far more glamorous and successful than the Beatles. He only got to know them in Hamburg when Rory Storm came over t
o play the Kaiserkeller and from then on he got to know them well, in many an uproarious bedroom and bar. The Beatles liked him for his droll, harmless humor; for being, in those unreal neon nights, as homely as a Pier Head pigeon. And he was, undoubtedly, a better drummer than Pete Best. The plot to oust Pete dates right back to 1961, when Ringo joined the Beatles as a backing group for Wally in the record booth at the Hamburg railway station.

  After Hamburg, Rory Storm’s fortunes became somewhat mixed. At one point, he even signed on at his local unemployment office as “rock ’n’ roll pianist.” Ringo had by now given up his apprenticeship; and he, too, spent several weeks on the dole, sitting out vacant days at the Cavern, the Jacaranda, or the Mersey Beat office upstairs on Renshaw Street. Late in 1961, while sorting through some records, he noticed an LP by Lightnin’ Hopkins that gave the singer’s birthplace as Houston, Texas. Ringo, who had always adored the Wild West, conceived the idea of emigrating to America. He even wrote to the Houston Chamber of Commerce enquiring about job prospects in that area. The chamber wrote back helpfully enough, but Ringo lost heart at the sight of the registration forms.

  Early in 1962, Peter Eckhorn appeared in Liverpool to recruit musicians for his Top Ten Club. When Brian Epstein priced the Beatles out of his reach Eckhorn persuaded Ringo to go back to Hamburg with him and join Tony Sheridan’s resident band. Eckhorn thought highly enough of Ringo to offer him a permanent job at thirty pounds per week, with a flat thrown in. He was also the special favorite of Jim and Lilo Hawke at the Seaman’s Mission. But Ringo felt homesick for Liverpool, Admiral Grove, and his mother.

  In August, he had rejoined Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and gone south to Skegness with them for their regular summer gig at Butlin’s camp. Back in Liverpool, his mother opened the front door one day to George Harrison’s pale, unsmiling face. Mrs. Graves told him that Ringo wasn’t at home. “Tell him we’re trying to get him to join us,” was George’s message.