Lennon

by Tim Riley

  John first told Epstein, who probably gulped hard and smiled. Then John went to Mendips, taking along his half-sister Julia for protection, knowing Mimi would be furious. “You don’t understand, Mimi. I love Cyn, I want to marry her,” Cynthia remembered John saying. But Mimi was convinced Cynthia had trapped him, and shadows cast by Judy and Alf prejudiced her strongly against what she sensed was a tired rerun.

  In Lennon’s young mind, Cynthia’s pregnancy seemed less of a career threat than the trouble brewing around Pete Best. Before the band met up with George Martin again in London, they had to make a decision about their drummer. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison turned the task over to Epstein.

  Pete Best roams the outer circles of Beatles literature as the unlucky sod who got left behind. Even Best’s suicide attempt in 1965 gets overshadowed by Rory Storm’s double suicide with his mother that same year—at least the Best legend pulled back from the gothic. History, as usual, tells a more complicated story. Years later, the remaining Beatles made sure that the Anthology project brought royalties, rumored in the amount of £1 million, to set up the drummer’s family for life. But at the time it happened, Best’s ousting was as much of a shock to him and his fans as it was a boon for Ringo and, more to the point, the music itself. And the deck was not even reshuffled before the band had to break a new player in to all their arrangements while threading the next needle Martin had sent from London: an execrable song demo for the band to learn called “How Do You Do It?”

  The Beatles certainly didn’t replace Best to please their fans: the Mathew Street fallout was far worse than they had expected, and landed George Harrison with a black eye—an early sign of fan idolatry curdling into violence. Everyone had his motives, some of them overt, some of them covert: Epstein was quoted as saying he couldn’t take any more phone calls from Mona Best, who considered herself the band’s first manager, with exclusive rights to positioning and opinions. But there was also tension surrounding Neil Aspinall’s affair with Mona, which by then had turned his status from houseguest into full-blown home-wrecker. In Lennon’s mind, the calculus must have gone something like this: if they severed ties with Best, would the trusted Aspinall side with his lover and her son or with his mates? How could they possibly maintain good relations with Aspinall when they knew he still resided at the home of their axed drummer, the son of the club owner who had given them their first steady employment and kept on booking them at her Casbah and elsewhere until Epstein came along?

  Best’s bad luck was earned: he had worked hard onstage with these players, and they had found him wanting. Lennon’s assessment is cutting: “This myth built up over the years that he was great and Paul was jealous of him because he was pretty and all that crap. They didn’t get on that much together, but it was partly because Pete was a bit slow. He was a harmless guy, but he was not quick. All of us had quick minds, but he never picked that up.”14 Such group tensions are typical when three musicians decide their fourth is weak and needs replacing: the fourth may disagree, but also may have no clue what the other three are on about; there are some musical abilities that aren’t just difficult but impossible to teach. “The reason he got into the group in the first place,” Lennon recalled, “was because we had to have a drummer to get to Hamburg. We were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer, but by the time we were back from Germany we’d trained him to keep a stick going up and down (four-in-the-bar, he couldn’t do much else.)”15 McCartney, less bluntly, remembered, “We really started to think we needed ‘the greatest drummer in Liverpool,’ and the greatest drummer in our eyes was a guy, Ringo Starr, who had changed his name before any of us, who had a beard and was grown up and was known to have a Zephyr Zodiac”—the same luxury wheels as Epstein’s.16

  Besides the musicianship, there were entrenched personality differences, Harrison argued: “Pete would never hang out with us. When we finished doing the gig, Pete would go off on his own and we three would hang out together, and then when Ringo was around it was like a full unit, both on and off the stage. When there were the four of us with Ringo, it felt rocking.”17 Pete had gotten married to his girlfriend, Kathy, in the spring of 1962, and this created another wedge. Others have tried to argue that since Best was the most popular Beatle with the women, McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison took him down out of envy. This contradicts the logic of their ambition: why get rid of a popular character unless he didn’t share the same musical space? Martin wasn’t even asking them to dump Best; he had simply told them he intended to hire a stick man for studio sessions. Even Bob Wooler, a nonmusician, noted this tension between Best and the rest of the Beatles. He remembers overhearing McCartney showing Best how he wanted certain patterns played and thinking to himself, “That’s pushing it a bit.” And to Wooler, Pete had “no show about him,” even though he seemed to come alive for photo sessions.18

  Mike McCartney, a drummer himself, had a better explanation—the only one that makes any sense: “I used to go home and tell Paul about Ringo who I often saw playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He certainly hadn’t Pete’s looks, but he was an amazing drummer; he went at the drums like crazy. He didn’t just hit them, he invented new sounds.”19

  While Epstein dropped the bomb on Best at his NEMS offices, Lennon and McCartney headed straight to Butlins in Wales to collect Ringo. Ringo was amenable, even flattered, but had to fulfill Rory Storm’s request and finish up two more nights at the camp. “Then one day, a Wednesday,” Ringo recalled, “. . . Brian called and said, ‘Would you join the band for good?’ I wasn’t aware that it had been in the cards for a while, because I was busy playing. In fact, the guys had been talking to Brian, and George had been hustling for me.”20 To Ringo, a record contract and an acetate song demo were plunder.

  Initially, Best was in such a shock at Epstein’s news that he agreed to honor their commitments for the next couple of gigs while they went after Ringo. By the evening, though, he was a no-show, and Johnny Hutchinson of the Big Three subbed for two nights. Ringo joined full-time on August 18, his first Cavern gig; Granada Television cameras from Manchester showed up on August 22 for the first and only footage of the band at the Cavern, performing a calm, authoritative “Some Other Guy” and “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey” for a show called Know the North.

  Sacking a drummer and learning Martin’s choice for a first single preoccupied Lennon as he leaped into marriage. Like his parents before him, he had to sneak off and do it without Mimi’s blessing. Epstein served as best man, McCartney and Harrison giggled nervously, and Ringo was too new even to be included. Noticeably missing were Mimi, Bobby Dykins, and Lennon’s two younger half sisters, Julia and Jacqui Dykins. Although he swore John and Cynthia to secrecy, Epstein took the couple in hand and made the wedding day something more respectable than it might have been. Cynthia remembers a threatening downpour, and Paul and George pacing about awkwardly in the waiting room. “They were all alarmingly formal in black suits, white shirts and ties—the only smart outfits they had. George and Paul had made a big effort to look the part and clearly felt it was their role to support John, who was sitting between them, white-faced.” To the bride, they looked more as if they were attending a funeral. The paperwork in the registrar’s office took place as a workman roared away with his pneumatic drill in the opposite backyard. The registrar shouted the vows, and the couple had to shout back to be heard above the din.

  Always the gentleman, Epstein took them all to lunch afterward in the pouring rain. Cynthia remembers his gift, something they were too naïve to ask for: an apartment. “He announced that we couldn’t possibly live in my bedsit and that he had a flat he seldom used, which we could live in for as long as we needed it. John looked at him in amazement and I was so excited by his kindness that I threw my arms around him. . . . Brian told us he used it from time to time to entertain clients and we didn’t question it. In fact, we later realized, it was his bolthole.”21

  The wedding party laughed their way thr
ough the jackhammer ceremony and lunch, but the honeymoon was put on hold. That night the Beatles honored their gig in Chester, playing the Riverpark Ballroom. “At one point,” Tony Bramwell recalls, “John did say that he hadn’t really wanted to get married and felt pushed into it. (He even had another regular girlfriend he was besotted with, Ida Holly . . . not to mention a string of one-night stands).”22 Lennon’s sincere urge to do right by Cynthia, in spite of the brain trapped inside his pants, was a blip in the middle of tremendous career excitement. It lit a slow fuse that erupted almost five years later.

  At first, marriage must have seemed like just another car on a train that was moving too decisively to jump off: Lennon hired a new drummer on a Thursday, and the following Friday he married his pregnant girlfriend out of a mixture of duty and honor. Epstein forced the couple to keep their nuptials under wraps lest the fans think they’d been outgrown. This was an old-school tradition of maintaining the teenage façade in pop even as babies began popping out. In practical terms, it meant harsher separation for Cynthia, especially after she had Julian, than ever before.

  Lennon barely had time to focus. Now he had to deal with his new producer, George Martin, who had sent along a new song to rehearse: Mitch Murray’s “How Do You Do It?” The demo was originally pitched for Adam Faith, sung by Barry Mason, and backed by players who would become the Dave Clark Five. Martin pushed this number as the ideal debut single for a young band: a slight yet sturdy jingle featuring both lead singers in an intricate duet. But the song reeked of a hack’s cleverness (“Wish I knew how you did it to me, I’d do it to you”), which Lennon recoiled against as more of the swill rock ’n’ roll should vanquish. Amid the tides of Lennon’s emotional life, something told him that working up “How Do You Do It?” might give him leverage when pitching his own song. For at the same moment he asserted himself as group boss by firing Best and hiring Ringo, and defied his aunt Mimi by marrying Cynthia, Lennon confronted a new authority, a father figure of a producer who might yet gamble on their writing. Everything the band had worked for up to this point compelled this confrontation with George Martin: a debut single simply wouldn’t feel like theirs unless it featured original material.

  For a newly signed act, this was a radical, not to say self-defeating, notion: Martin had done his homework and found his hard-luck northerners a potential hit that could have delivered them to the radio and the charts and gained them pop visibility. And “Love Me Do,” while the band’s own, was not even up to the shopworn “How Do You Do It?” To appease Martin, and strengthen their resolve, they worked up an arrangement of Murray’s song, flew to London, and rehearsed it in Abbey Road’s Studio 2 on the afternoon of September 4.

  That day’s sessions were awkward and didn’t yield anything publishable. In a move that reflects poorly on Epstein, Ringo Starr’s appearance came as a complete surprise: Martin expected Best again, but had not yet booked a studio drummer. In effect, Ringo got an on-the-spot tryout. Lennon and McCartney urged Martin to hear their new arrangement of “Love Me Do,” but Martin asked for “How Do You Do It?” first, which they laid down with respectable if perfunctory punch. Many historians ridicule this Beatles take on the song as subpar, but it has plenty of spring and juice—and an even bolder subtext that screams, “We’re better than this!”

  Satisfied with the band’s homework, Martin then agreed to hear the new, quicker “Love Me Do,” with Lennon’s keening harmonica. This impressed Martin enough to give it fifteen takes—fourteen more than “How Do You Do It?” He reworked the harmonica line to return at the end of each chorus, giving McCartney those title-line vocal breaks. By the end of the session Martin had a new drummer and a new song to mull over, and a stubbornly assertive songwriting team.

  Martin called Epstein and for security set up another session a week later, on September 11: here an experienced producer’s gut instinct merged with skill. Martin booked a studio pro, drummer Andy White, but at the session alternated White with Starr: this way he could compare them back to back. Starr had won the Beatles’ confidence; in this session he won Martin’s. Starr gave him grief forever after.

  The band hunkered down, determined to give Martin what he asked for. Starr and White traded off on drums, and Ringo picked up the tambourine for White’s takes. Two different versions hit the racks.23 But Martin’s insistence on getting it right, combined with Lennon and McCartney’s belief in their own material, gives these September 11 takes of “Love Me Do” an ambition that outstrips the song’s flimsy construction. The song has one recurring smarmy moment, lit by its songwriters’ bouncing vocal on the word “plea—ea—ea—ease” setting up a delicious silence. They caught a heady Everly Brothers echo in that bounce, and a new idea took shape: a smooth, nuanced harmony atop a firm, propulsive beat—a new twist on C&W crossed with R&B.

  The structure of “Love Me Do” became a metaphor for all the innocence and yearning the Beatles held out for pop. It lived on as a slight yet enigmatic entrance for their career. They pulled it off by digging a shared promise from the song that far outcharmed its delicate frame, or that of any hack tune that blared anonymity. The ears that confronted this single, without any other evidence, heard enough in this sound to point toward a future that suddenly sounded unpredictable, like the beginning of a new mystery plot, bolder than anything British rockers had yet imagined for themselves. The message blared defiance: “We play our own material, just like Buddy Holly!” This gave the name “Beatles” distinct rock ’n’ roll heroics, a reach that held out a brash new confidence in the music, both its British claims on the Presley, Cochrane, Vincent, Berry, and Perkins records that had illuminated their lives, and the explosive new possibilities that suddenly leapt from the simplest of beats. That enticing silence just before the title phrase hinted at untold thrills to come, a lover’s pause before a blissful first kiss.

  Epstein ordered boxes and boxes of the single for his shop, hanging on every chart to watch its ascent. George Harrison remembered that hearing it for the first time on the radio “sent me shivery all over. It was the best buzz of all time. We knew it was going to be on Radio Luxembourg at something like 7:30 on Thursday night. I was in my house in Speke and we all listened in. That was great, but after having got to 17, I don’t recall what happened to it . . . but what it meant was that the next time we went to EMI, they were more friendly: ‘Oh, hello lads. Come in.’ ”24

  The week “Love Me Do” hit number seventeen, they bused back to London to record the follow-up: a Roy Orbison–style lament they had sped up as “Please Please Me,” done in eighteen takes on November 26. Now the ensemble entered a new space: Ringo suddenly seemed inseparable from the others, and while this new song built on another Lennon harmonica solo and a soaring vocal duet, the tempo hit gusts of pure bliss, especially on the repeated “Please” in the refrain, when McCartney leapt toward a deliriously high harmony.

  Mersey Beat columnist Alan Smith attended the session and was bowled over by the band’s progress. “It has everything, from the hypnotic harmonica sound that came over so well in ‘Love Me Do’ to the kind of tune you can remember after one hearing,” he wrote in the January issue.25 “This time the harmonica sounds much bolder, too. It almost jumps out at you. And in the background, there’s the solid, insistent beat, defying you not to get up and dance.” The number still soars on rhythmic poetry—bouncing melodies rest atop fluid meters, like a thought caught in a slipstream. Lennon spoke frankly to Smith about the song’s impetus: “I tried to make it as simple as possible. Some of the stuff I’ve written has been a bit way out, but we did this one strictly for the hit parade. Now we’re keeping our fingers crossed.”26

  Smith also quoted George Martin as saying the group resembled “ ‘a male Shirelles,’ ” the girl group whose songs the Beatles already had mastered in their set lists (“Baby, It’s You,” “Mama Said,” and “Boys”). Perhaps Martin’s ear knew more about rock than his accent let on. This intimacy Lennon and McCartney hinted at in their voc
al harmonies suggested an enticing idea about the rapture between band and audience. As his confidence in the band grew, Martin determined to follow them up to their home turf. Perhaps Epstein was right: you had to hear them at the Cavern to get the full impact of their sound.

  “I’m thinking of recording their first LP at the Cavern,” Martin said, “but obviously I’m going to have to come to see the club before I make a decision. If we can’t get the right sound we might do the recording somewhere else in Liverpool, or bring an invited audience into the studio in London. They’ve told me they work better in front of an audience.” This “Please Please Me” session included several takes of “Ask Me Why,” and another Lennon-McCartney original, “Tip of My Tongue,” which they shelved and gave to Tommy Quickly the following summer. (The Beatles’ attempts at this number appear to have been lost.) This meant the second single could also sport two Lennon-McCartney songs, with no hint of a fallback on “outside” material.