It was John who finally got through to Ringo, ringing up Butlin’s and then waiting until Ringo could be found and brought to the camp office phone. The pay as a Beatle, John said, would be twenty-five pounds per week. In return, Ringo would have to comb his hair forward and shave off his beard. His “sidies,” however, could remain.
Rory Storm was magnanimous over the theft of his drummer. The only stipulation Rory made was that when Ringo left the Hurricanes to join the Beatles his pink stage suit was passed on to sixteen-year-old Gibson Kemp, who had not yet left school and who was so small that the jacket had to be pinned at the back with pins to make it fit him.
Mersey Beat broke the news in its issue of August 23. Pete Best was out of the Beatles and Ringo Starr had replaced him. According to Mersey Beat, the change had been mutually and amicably agreed. The story went on to announce that George Martin was ready at last for the Beatles to go to London and record their first single for Parlophone. They would be flying down with their new drummer for a session on September 4.
The uproar among Pete Best fans was on a scale far greater than even Bob Wooler had predicted. Petitions signed by hundreds of girls poured into the Mersey Beat office, protesting at their idol’s banishment. For Ringo’s debut as a Beatle the venue was fortunately quiet and far from Liverpool—the annual dance of Port Sunlight Horticultural Society. But when he first took the stage with them at the Cavern, there were hostile chants of “Pete Best for ever! Ringo never!” The more besotted of Pete’s fans kept a nightlong vigil outside the Best family home. When Mona Best opened the front door to pick up her morning milk she found girls with tear-smudged eye makeup asleep all over her yard.
The following day, in chaos compounded of Pete Best’s firing and several pneumatic road drills, John Lennon married Cynthia Powell at Mount Pleasant Register Office. It was the same place where, in 1938, his mother Julia had married Freddy Lennon, putting her occupation down as cinema usherette for a joke. As on that earlier occasion, no parents were present. Cynthia’s mother had come from Canada but gone again; and Aunt Mimi could not bear to see history repeat itself so exactly. Cynthia was given away by her brother, Tony, and Brian Epstein—who had obtained the special marriage license—acted as John’s best man. With insufficient money to buy herself a new wedding outfit, Cynthia went before the registrar wearing some of Astrid’s cast-off clothes. Paul and George were there also, torn between embarrassment and giggles. Much of the service was inaudible, owing to road drills. Afterward, in the pouring rain, they ran across the road for a chicken lunch at Reece’s restaurant. Since Reece’s had no alcohol license, the toast to the newlyweds was drunk with water.
Brian had expected the Pete Best storm to fizzle out after a day or so, but he was wrong. When the Beatles turned up at the Cavern Club almost a week later there were still angry pickets outside. In a stage-door scuffle involving Pete himself—tough nut for all his good nature—George received a black eye that ripened spectacularly in the course of the evening’s performance. Brian, after this, refused to go to the Cavern unless Ray McFall provided him with a bodyguard. But, being Brian, he did not wholly dislike the notion of being “the most hated man in Liverpool.”
Pete’s mother had already paid Brian the first of many wrathful and accusing visits. Mona Best was—and remained—convinced that Pete’s sacking was due simply to the jealousy of John, Paul, and George. “He’d given them so much with his beat and everything. To a lot of the fans, he was the Beatles. I knew that Brian hadn’t wanted to do it; he respected Peter too much. None of the others was introduced to Brian’s parents; now why was that? Why was Peter the only one?”
The worst affected, after Pete himself, was Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ by now indispensable roadie, whose links with the Best family were now closer than most of their combined circle ever dreamed. Mona Best was still an extremely attractive and vibrant woman and, somehow in the past year, she and her older son’s friend, the serious young would-be accountant, had had an affair that had resulted in Mrs. Best’s becoming pregnant. Just a few weeks before Pete’s sacking, on July 21, she had given birth to Neil’s son, whom she named Roag and brought up as a Best, along with Pete and his brother Rory. In an almost Gilbert and Sullivan twist, the Beatles’ driver/bodyguard was also the father of their sacked drummer’s half-brother.
Pete understood Neil’s conflict of loyalties and had no wish for his friend to suffer on his account. When Neil considered walking out on the Beatles Pete urged him to stay with them for a few more months at least, to see where they might end up. For a time, the Beatles even continued using the Casbah as a meeting place before engagements, though they were careful to keep out of Mrs. Best’s way. “Then one day Paul knocked on the door and asked me if he could leave his car in the drive. I managed to keep my peace but Kathy, Pete’s girlfriend, gave John and Paul a damned good talking-to.”
Brian tried to soften the blow to Pete by offering to build a new group around him. What he eventually did was to fit Pete into Lee Curtis and the All Stars, the group managed by Brian’s friend and helper Joe Flannery. Joe agreed to accept Pete despite misgivings that his good looks would clash with those of Lee Curtis, Joe’s younger brother. The transfer was effected, he remembers, with subtlety typical of Brian. “First Brian got me to agree to have Pete. Then I had to talk to Pete and say: “I think I can arrange it with Mr. Epstein.’”
Pete, very naturally, failed to turn up for the first of the Chester Riverpark ballroom dates. Since Ringo had not yet arrived from Skegness, a substitute drummer had to be found at short notice. Brian solved the difficulty by borrowing Johnny Hutch from the Big Three.
The next big beat show at New Brighton Tower, on July 27, was presented, not by Sam Leach but by NEMS Enterprises. The star was Joe Brown, a popular Cockney rock ’n’ roller whose song “Picture of You” was currently high in the charts. Second on the bill were the Beatles. In this way, Brian implanted the idea that Joe Brown, for all his big name, was only a line of type ahead of them. More big names followed, always with the Beatles second on the bill. “He’d watch the charts all the time and see who was selling the most records,” Joe Flannery says. “When someone like Joe Brown or Bruce Channel came up, Brian would make a big day of it. There’d be an autograph-signing session at the shop, then the show in the evening. American stars used to think that was wonderful. They weren’t used to getting that kind of treatment in England, not even in London.”
On September 6, Brian took a full-page advertisement in Mersey Beat to announce a coup that any promoter might have envied. Little Richard, rock ’n’ roll’s baggy-suited and clamorous founding father, was currently touring Britain. Brian had negotiated with Richard’s London promoters to bring him to New Brighton Tower for one night, on October 12. The Beatles were second on the program, together with more Liverpool groups than had appeared in one place since Allan Williams’ Boxing Stadium show.
George Martin knew nothing of the Pete Best sacking. He expected Pete to be still with the others when, on September 11, they came back to the Abbey Road studios. Accordingly, down on the floor of Studio Two there waited an experienced session drummer named Andy White whom Martin had engaged to play on the record in place of Pete. When Ringo was introduced to him as Pete’s replacement, he saw no reason to depart from his original plan. He knew nothing about Ringo as a drummer, he said, and preferred not to take any chances. White must play on the recording.
After this rather stern beginning, Martin tried to make amends by involving the Beatles in every facet of the recording process. He explained that due to the wonders of EMI science they could record their voices and instruments as separate tracks, to be “mixed” afterward for optimum texture and balance. He let them record a warm-up number, then took them into the control room to play it back. He asked them if there was anything they didn’t like. George said, in his slow, gruff way, “Well, for a start, I don’t like your tie.” “Everyone fell about with laughter at that,” Martin says. “The o
thers were hitting him playfully, as schoolboys do when one of them has been cheeky to teacher.”
Martin had decided, after all, to use Lennon-McCartney songs as both the A and B sides of the single. For the A side, after much deliberation, he chose “Love Me Do.” The number had improved since he had last heard it, chiefly by the addition of a harmonica riff that John had copied from the Bruce Channel hit “Hey Baby.” For the B side, to bring Paul to the fore, Martin chose “P.S. I Love You,” liking the song for its harmonies, its switch from major to minor chords, and the way that John’s voice chimed with Paul’s on key words through the lyric.
During rehearsals that afternoon Martin somewhat relented in his attitude to Ringo’s drumming. “He hit good and hard, and used the tom-tom well, even though he couldn’t do a roll to save his life.” Ringo himself did not know yet that there was a session drummer waiting to replace him. When it came time to record the “Love Me Do” instrumental track Ringo was handed a tambourine and instructed to hit it twice on every third beat. He looked so doleful that Martin relented a little. They would record two versions, Martin said: one with Andy White on drums and one with Ringo. The vocal track would be mixed with whichever version came out best.
The White and Ringo versions became indistinguishable in the quantity of “takes” that were needed before Martin was content with the instrumental track. The fifteenth attempt finally satisfied him, even though John Lennon’s mouth had grown numb with sliding along the harmonica bars. There was a short break; then they returned to do the backing track for “P.S. I Love You.” Andy White sat at the drums and Ringo, this time, was given maracas to shake. He later said that he thought the others were “doing a Pete Best” on him.
At EMI’s next “supplement meeting,” when each label head outlined his release plans for the coming month, Martin caused a ripple of amusement by announcing that Parlophone was putting out a single by a group called the Beatles. The general view was that it must be another comedy disk. Somebody even asked: “Is it Spike Milligan disguised?” “I told them, ‘I’m serious. This is a great group, and we’re going to hear a lot from them.’ But nobody took much notice.”
Up in Liverpool, Brian had begun to prepare the Beatles for impending stardom. Freda Kelly from the NEMS office had to go round to each one with a printed sheet for “Life Lines”—favorite food, favorite clothes, likes, dislikes, and so on—just as it was done in the New Musical Express. Next to “Type of car?” Paul wrote “Ford Classic (Goodwood green)”; next to “Dislikes?” he wrote “False and soft people,” and next to “Ambition?” “Money etc.” George gave his main dislike, ironically, as “Black eyes,” his “Greatest musical influences?” as Carl Perkins, his “Ambition?” “To retire with a lot of money, thank you.” John, using an italic fountain pen, gave his “Dislikes?” as “Thick heads, Trad Jazz,” his favorite film director as Ingmar Bergman, his “Ambition?” as “Money and everything.” Ringo’s favorite food was “Steak and chips”; his “Likes?” “Everyone who likes me.”
On October 2, a second contract was signed by the Beatles and Brian—a thoroughly legal document this time, and witnessed, as the law required, by Paul and George’s fathers. The term of the agreement was five years. Brian’s share of the earnings was 25 percent. A further clause—a slip on Clive Epstein’s part, hastily rectified soon afterward—gave each side power to terminate the agreement at six months’ notice.
On October 12, Little Richard and retinue arrived in Liverpool for his show at the New Brighton Tower. The legendary screamer of “Lucille” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” was by now slightly toned down in a conventional sharkskin suit, his former wild, greasy locks planed flat to the scalp. But his manner remained as outrageously camp and his mood as wildly unpredictable as ever. With him came his British agent, Don Arden, a stocky, belligerent man who lost no opportunity to stress what a great honor was being done to New Brighton and Merseyside.
Entrepreneurs who have put on Little Richard shows tell bloodcurdling stories of his temperament, his unreliability, his bizarre whims and fancies, his refusal in some cases to do anything for the audience but slowly remove his clothes. But on October 12, 1962, when Richard performed at New Brighton Tower Ballroom, something seemed to have happened to put him in a mood of perfect tractability and cooperativeness. “Brian seemed to be able to do anything with him,” Joe Flannery says. “When Richard finished his act, something had gone wrong with the mike for the next group, Pete MacLaine and the Dakotas. Brian could even get Richard to walk across, nice as you please, and hand his personal microphone on to Pete MacLaine.” It was rumored that Brian had won the volatile star over by spending the previous night with him in a room at the Adelphi Hotel. Richard himself firmly denies this, however. “I didn’t even have so much as a sandwich with Brian,” he says now.
The Beatles were initially so overcome with nerves at sharing a bill with their greatest soul hero that they couldn’t even pluck up courage to ask him to do a photograph with them. Instead, while Richard was on stage, John stood watching him from the wings on one side and Paul photographed the two of them from the wings opposite.
After the show, he was just as seraphically amiable, telling local journalists how much he loved England and Liverpool, posing for pictures with John, Paul, George, and Ringo in a tickled-pink group around him. He even gave Paul instruction in the trademark scream he called his “little holler.” For the rest of his erratic career he would always maintain, “The Beatles was my group. I taught ’em everything they knew.”
So powerful was Brian’s influence over Little Richard that he was able to bring him back to Liverpool for a second concert, at the Empire theater on October 28, to head the existing bill of Craig Douglas, Jet Harris and the Jetblacks, and the Beatles. Brian planned the entire event as a means of giving them their first professional booking at the Empire.
Because it was Sunday none of the groups were allowed to appear in costume, so they all took off their jackets. The Beatles played in pink, round-collared shirts. For a fan like Freda Kelly it was no less a miracle that they had crossed the gulf from underground clubs to this softly lit, luxurious realm of concert and Christmas pantomime. “I remember when the spotlight went on Paul in his pink shirt, and he started to sing “Besame Mucho.” I thought, “This is it. Now they’ve really made it.”
“Love Me Do” was released on October 4, 1962, in a week when America’s grip on the British Top Twenty had seldom been stronger. Carole King, Tommy Roe, Bobby Vee, Little Eva, Ray Charles, and Del Shannon all had new songs making, or about to make, their inevitable ascent. The sensation of the moment was “Let’s Dance” by Chris Montez, prolonging the Twist dance craze that French students had imported into Britain during the summer. Among British artists, the continuing success of Helen Shapiro, Jimmy Justice, Kathy Kirby, and Shane Fenton seemed to bear out the Decca prophecy that solo singers were what the teenagers wanted, that guitar groups were “on the way out.”
EMI themselves seemed to think so. After “Love Me Do” was released virtually no effort was made to plug the disk to the trade press or BBC radio, or even to EMI’s own sponsored Radio Luxembourg show. Newspaper publicity was confined to a single printed handout, copied from the “Life Lines” that Freda Kelly had drawn up in Liverpool, vouchsafing to indifferent Fleet Street record columnists that Paul McCartney’s favorite clothes were leather and suede, that Ringo Starr’s favorite dish was steak and chips, that George Harrison’s greatest musical influence was Carl Perkins, and that John Lennon’s “type of car” was “bus.”
After his experience with Decca Brian was taking no chances. He himself had ordered ten thousand copies of “Love Me Do” from Parlophone. He had been told that that was the quantity you had to sell to have a Top Twenty hit.
Though the Liverpool fans loyally bought “Love Me Do,” and though Mersey Beat’s chart made it instantaneously number one, most of the ten thousand copies remained in unopened cartons in a back room of the Whitechapel
NEMS shop. “Brian took me and showed me them,” Joe Flannery says. “He even made up a little song about all the copies he hadn’t been able to sell. ‘Here we go gathering dust in May,’ he’d sing.” A few days later, in London, Flannery bumped into Paul McCartney. “Paul said he was hungry; he’d only had a cake to eat all day. I was amazed. I said, ‘Paul—how?’ Paul said, ‘Someone had to pay for those ten thousand records Brian bought.’”
The first radio play was on Luxembourg, after hundreds of requests from Liverpool. George Harrison sat waiting for it next to the radio all evening with his mother, Louise. She had given up and was in bed when George ran upstairs, shouting, “We’re on! We’re on!” Mr. Harrison was angry at being disturbed; he had to be up early the next morning to drive his bus.
A few scattered plays followed on the BBC Light Program, where pop was beginning to creep into “general” music shows like the early evening Roundabout. The best exposure was secured by Kim Bennett of Ardmore and Beechwood, the publishers who had first steered Brian back to EMI and George Martin. By dint of repeatedly nagging a radio producer friend, Bennett got “Love Me Do” onto the playlist of Two-Way Family Favourites, a hugely popular Sunday-morning show playing record requests for British forces overseas. After two appearances there on consecutive Sundays, “Love Me Do” was shown at number forty-nine in Record Mirror’s top 100. The New Musical Express, shortly afterward, showed it at number twenty-seven. Finally, on December 13, it reached number seventeen.
For a first record, especially on Parlophone, that was not at all a bad performance. If “Love Me Do” had not taken the country by storm, it had confirmed George Martin’s instinct that the Beatles could be successful singing the right song. He reached that conclusion even before “Love Me Do” made its brief Top Twenty showing. The second single under their first year’s contract was due to be recorded on November 26.
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