He might have shown less reticence had he known how bored the Beatles themselves were at this moment, and how desperately they, too, were hoping for something to happen.
November 1961 found them in precisely the same position as after their return from Hamburg three months before. They were undisputed kings of the Cavern, and of Mersey Beat. They had had the satisfaction of seeing bands that used to condescend to them now avidly copying their R&B repertoire, their clothes, their hair, and even the types of instrument they played. They had been abroad; they had even made a record, albeit under an alias, which now, it appeared, was selling for actual money in the shops. These were achievements pleasant to contemplate, so long as they did not put their hands in their pockets, to feel the halfpence there, or look down at their shoes, or listen on Saturday morning to the BBC Light Program, when the Top Twenty was beamed to Liverpool from places still a million miles away.
The one bright spot had been meeting up again with Sam Leach, the promoter who formerly ran the Sunday afternoon sessions at the Casanova Club in Temple Street. They liked Sam, as everyone did, for the scope, if not the invariable success, of his concert enterprises. He now ran many—some said, too many—dances all over Liverpool, apparently relishing the continual uncertainty as to whether his door receipts would cover costs. He was a pleasant, big-eyed, scatterbrained youth, always nudging people and laughing.
Sam, even so, was the first local impresario to look beyond the northwest, to London. Realizing that no London agent would ever come up to Liverpool, he was planning to start his own record label, and had already booked Gerry and the Pacemakers to cut some demonstration disks in a studio in Crosby. His plan for the Beatles was no less audacious. He would get them on in a hall down south, and lure the big London impresarios to see them.
Sam Leach’s choice of a southern venue was Aldershot, Hampshire. That glum military settlement, more adjacent to Stonehenge than London, had a dance hall called the Queen’s that Sam Leach hired for five consecutive Saturday nights. It wasn’t exactly the West End, as he conceded, but it was roughly in that direction. If the Beatles could hit Aldershot in a big enough way, the word might easily spread.
Sam and a photographer friend of his named Dick Matthews made the nine-hour journey from Liverpool to Hampshire in a hired Ford Classic. Following them down the highway came a van containing the Beatles and driven by one of Sam’s bouncers, Terry McCann.
They reached the Queen’s Hall, Aldershot, to find four people waiting. “I’d meant to put an ad in the paper,” Sam says. “But it hadn’t got out. Maybe I forgot. We went round all the local cafés, telling people, ‘Hey, there’s a dance on up the road.’ We said we’d let them in for nothing if they came.”
Eventually, eighteen customers had been rounded up. “The lads said it wasn’t worth playing at first, but Paul persuaded them. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s show we’re professionals.”
The Beatles gave those eighteen people a two-and-a-half-hour allout nonstop session. When they showed signs of flagging, Paul revived them with his Little Richard act, played to the limit. Dick Matthews, a learned-looking man in a tweed sports jacket, photographed them on the little stage with its wallpapered proscenium, and the half-dozen couples, not all very youthful, jiving under a mirror globe that the management felt it not worthwhile to illuminate. Sam Leach also went among the dancers, pleading with them to look more numerous by spreading out.
Helped by Southern Watney’s bottled pale ale and Sam’s irrepressible spirits, the evening had its measure of jollity. When the last of the few dancers had gone John and George, in their thin shortie overcoats, danced a ritual slow foxtrot together. “Then we had a game of football [soccer] over the dance floor with ping-pong balls,” Sam says. “When we finally got outside there was a great wagon-load of bobbies waiting for us. “Get out of town,” they said, “and don’t come back.” The next Saturday, 210 people came to the dance, just to see the Beatles—but they weren’t there.”
Despite the Aldershot fiasco, bright ideas still rocketed around inside Sam’s tousled head. He despised promoters like Brian Kelly for the meanness of their dances, with one group only onstage and a finish well before midnight. Sam dreamed of marathon jive sessions, like they were in America, with half a dozen groups or more on a bill lasting into the early hours. Groups were there in abundance all around: Sam needed only an outside sporting chance of being able to pay them.
Earlier that year, he had negotiated with Tommy McArdle the wintertime hire of the New Brighton Tower Ballroom. This gargantuan relic of Victorian seaside splendor—and of an actual tower, higher than Black-pool’s—was the largest dance venue anywhere on Merseyside. Its use for rock ’n’ roll was spasmodic, ceasing arbitrarily when violence threatened its gilded fabric, or when Rory Storm, climbing up inside the dome, fell to the stage and almost broke through it to the one-thousand-seat theater underneath.
“Operation Big Beat,” as Sam Leach called his inaugural Tower night, took place on November 10, 1961, the day after Brian Epstein had walked into the Cavern Club. The Beatles shared the bill with Gerry and the Pacemakers, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, and the Remo Four. Special buses were provided to transport the Liverpool fans through the tunnel and downriver to New Brighton’s bleak, unfrequented sea promenades.
“It was a real foggy night,” Sam says. “The Beatles were on at another dance as well, at Knotty Ash Village Hall. They went on at half-seven in the Tower, then over to Knotty Ash, then they came back later for their second spot at half-eleven.” Neil Aspinall, Pete Best’s friend, drove them and their equipment in a secondhand van he had recently bought. He had forsaken his accounting studies to become their road manager for a fee of 5s (25p) from each of them per night.
Operation Big Beat attracted a crowd of 3,500. “I was that scared,” Sam Leach says. “I thought maybe I’d not sell any tickets at all. There were hundreds there, even when the Beatles played first at half-seven. When they came back for the half-eleven spot, the kids went wild.” Tommy McArdle, the Tower’s general manager, was somewhat less entranced. “I was ready to ban the Beatles there and then. I caught them behind the stage, poking their fingers through the backcloth. All starry it was, and beautiful, and Lennon and them just sticking their fingers through it.”
As Operation Big Beat wore on, and the empty pint glasses formed regiments on the two licensed bars, the Birkenhead faction expressed itself in the customary way. “I was in the big downstairs bar,” Sam Leach says, “and I see this fellow get hold of a table and pick it up. He threw it straight at the mirror behind the bar. It went within just a few inches of Paul McCartney.”
Sam rose to the Birkenhead challenge by hiring bouncers in quantities outnumbering the biggest gang. When fifty Teds from Birkenhead paid the Tower a visit, Sam Leach and a hundred bouncers were waiting. One of his regular helpers, a barrel-shaped youth named Eddie Palmer, later grew famous in Liverpool gangland as “The Toxteth Terror.”
“I got so that I could feel trouble coming,” Sam says. “There were these four big yobboes in one night that I knew were out to give the Beatles a good thumping. They were up near the stage, all pissed and whispering to each other. I’d got a bouncer behind each one of the four of them. The first moment one of them pulled his arm back, all my four lads pounced at once.”
A few days later at the Cavern Club word was passed to the Beatles that Brian Epstein had come in again. He watched them play and, as before, spoke to them when they came off stage at the break. They still had no idea what he wanted, and so were as inclined as any other Cavernite to laugh at his dark suit and tie and briefcase, and the blush that spread over his face when any of them, especially John, looked him directly in the eye. Even so, they were vaguely flattered to number among their followers this obviously prosperous businessman whose car, it quickly became known, was a new Ford Zodiac.
His aura grew still more impressive when he took to arriving with a personal assist
ant. Alistair Taylor, an employee in the Whitechapel record shop, had found himself elevated to this mutually flattering post.
All through November, in a roundabout way, Brian was enquiring about the Beatles: about where they played, for whom, and at what fee. The idea that he should manage them was one he had not yet articulated, even to himself. It was in a purely theoretical way that he questioned the record company reps, and contacts in London at the big HMV Oxford Street store, about groups and managers and the relationship of one to another. And everyone whom he quizzed unconsciously reiterated the same discouraging fact: People of his age and social background played no noticeable part in British pop music.
Meanwhile, Polydor Records had dispatched his order of two hundred copies of “My Bonnie,” an event loyally noted by Mersey Beat. The record sold moderately well among the Beatles’ following, though some—Raymond Jones included—were disappointed to find them only a backing group to Tony Sheridan and billed as “the Beat Brothers.”
Bob Wooler, the Cavern disk jockey, was one of the first to discover Brian’s interest in managing the Beatles, even though his overtures were still muffled by his own embarrassment and uncertainty, and by the Beatles’ own elaborate indifference to all outsiders. Wooler, as a close adviser, went with them to the first formal meeting suggested by Brian, early in December. It was to take place on a Wednesday afternoon, directly following their Cavern lunchtime show. Wooler and the Beatles stopped off for beers at the Grapes first, and possibly the White Star, and so did not reach Whitechapel until well after the appointed time. It was early-closing day, and they found Brian waiting for them on the darkened ground floor, among displays of home appliances. “He hated to be kept waiting,” Wooler said. “That was his first introduction to many hours of being kept waiting by the Beatles. He was quite open by that time about wanting to manage them, but they still wouldn’t commit themselves. It was left at, ‘well, we’ll see what happens.’”
Equally little encouragement came from those in Brian’s own circle to whom he confided his plan. He had already consulted his family’s lawyer, E. Rex Makin, hoping for some legal help on the kind of contract he might offer the Beatles. Makin lived next door to the Epsteins on Queens Drive and had known Brian and Clive since their boyhood. He poured scorn on what he termed “just another Epstein idea.”
The other person Brian sought out was Allan Williams. He had discovered that Williams used to have a contract of some kind with the Beatles, and had been responsible for sending them to work in Hamburg. Visiting the Welshman at his Blue Angel Club, Brian found him still resentful about the commission the Beatles owed him. Williams said he wanted nothing more to do with them, and that Brian was at liberty to take them over. His advice, however, was not to touch the Beatles “with a barge-pole.”
At another afterhours meeting at the NEMS shop Brian, blushing furiously, succeeded at last in coming to the point. He told the Beatles that they needed a manager; he was willing to do it; did they want him to? A silence ensued, broken by John Lennon’s gruff “Yes.” Paul then asked if being managed by Brian would make any difference to the music they played. Brian assured him that it would not. There was a second uneasy silence, again broken by John. “Right then, Brian,” he said. “Manage us.”
Harry and Queenie Epstein, who had been away to London for a week, returned home to find their elder son in a state of high excitement. He sat them down in the drawing room and insisted that they listen to “My Bonnie,” telling them all the time to pay no attention to the voice, only to the backing. From Brian’s hectic chatter, and the din on a normally well-mannered phonograph, Harry at last extracted the displeasing news that shop business was about to be let slide again. Brian assured his father this was not so: Managing the Beatles would require only two half-days each week.
On the Beatles’ side the news spread as rapidly as news in Liverpool generally does. Sam Leach heard it direct from Paul. “He said there was this millionaire who wanted to manage them.” Sam, though he had been putting the Beatles on regularly at New Brighton Tower, had no contract with them and did not attempt to manufacture one. Nor did Pete’s mother, Mona, who had helped to get them on at the Cavern, and had pushed them in other ways. She was satisfied Brian knew, as everyone did, that Pete was the Beatles’ leader.
Not all the parents were quite so content. Olive Johnson, the McCartney family’s close friend, received a call from Paul’s father in a state of some anxiety over his son’s proposed association with a “Jew boy.” Since Olive knew the world so well, Jim asked her to be at Forthlin Road on the evening that Brian called to outline his intentions for Paul. “He turned out to be absolutely charming,” Olive says. “Beautifully mannered but completely natural. He and Jim got on well at once.”
John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi was less easily placated. What worried Mimi about Brian was precisely what impressed the other parents—his charm and position and affluence. “I used to tackle Brian about that,” Mimi said. “‘It’s all right for you,’ I told him, ‘if all this group business turns out to be just a flash in the pan, it won’t matter. It’s just a hobby to you. If it’s all over in six months, it won’t matter to you, but what happens to them?’”
“Brian said to me, ‘It’s all right, Mrs. Smith. I promise you, John will never suffer. He’s the only important one. The others don’t matter, but I’ll always take care of John.’”
EIGHT
“ELVIS’S MANAGER CALLING BRIAN EPSTEIN IN BIRKENHEAD”
Brian, at the outset, foresaw no great difficulty in getting the Beatles a recording contract. As a retailer, he was in regular touch with all the major London companies: Decca, EMI, Phillips, and Pye. He had given them all good business in building up “The Finest Record Selection in the North.” Any of them, surely, would be only too glad to oblige so large and reliable a wholesale customer as NEMS Ltd.
There was a further promising augury. Each week, the old-fashioned broadsheet Liverpool Evening Echo published a record review column signed with the pseudonym “Disker.” Brian, soon after meeting the Beatles, had written to Disker, soliciting a mention for them. It turned out that Disker was not based with the Echo but was a freelance journalist named Tony Barrow, Liverpool-born but now living in London. As well as his journalism, Barrow worked regularly as a writer of album-sleeve notes for the Decca label.
Tony Barrow wrote back to Brian, saying that as the Beatles had not made a record yet, he could not mention them in Disker’s column. What he could do, as a fellow Merseysider, was to recommend them to Decca’s “Artists and Repertoire” department. The ensuing conversation, strangely enough, was much as Brian had imagined it. “When I mentioned Brian Epstein,” Barrow says, “everybody asked ‘Who?’ But when I mentioned NEMS, it was quite different. ‘Oh, yes—NEMS of Liverpool. Very big retailers for us in the northwest.’”
The word reached Decca’s Head of A&R, Dick Rowe. A large northern record retailer had a pop group he wanted auditioned. It would be tactful, for business reasons, to say “Yes.” The job was given to a new young assistant in the A&R department named Mike Smith. However, in fairness, the gesture was more than perfunctory. Mike Smith offered to come up to Liverpool to hear the group to best advantage in the club where they usually played. And so, Brian, several weeks before the Beatles had agreed to be managed by him, was able to give them an astounding piece of news. Someone from Decca—from the company that had Tommy Steele, and Buddy Holly, and Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, and Duane Eddy and Bobby Vee—was coming into town to audition them.
Mike Smith arrived and, after an expensive dinner with Brian, was conducted to Mathew Street, past Paddy Delaney and down the eighteen cellar steps to witness the Beatles in their stifling habitat. Their playing impressed the A&R man, not enough to sign them there and then but certainly enough to arrange a further audition for them as soon as possible in London, at Decca’s West Hampstead studios. This second test was quickly confirmed for New Year’s Day, 1962.
On New Year’s Eve, in cold snowy weather, the participants made their separate ways south. Brian traveled down by train to stay overnight with his aunt Frieda in Hampstead. The Beatles set off at midday by road, packed with their equipment in the freezing rear of Neil Aspinall’s van. Neil had never been to London before and, striking blizzards near Wolverhampton, lost his bearings altogether. Not until ten hours later did they arrive in Russell Square, near King’s Cross, where Brian had booked them into a small hotel, the Royal. For the rest of New Year’s Eve they wandered round, watching the drunks in Trafalgar Square and trying to find a place to eat. On Charing Cross Road they met two men who offered them something called “pot” on condition they could “smoke” it together in Neil’s van. The Liverpool boys fled.
At Decca’s studios the next morning they had to wait some time for Mike Smith to arrive. Brian, as ever punctual to the second, reddened at this implied slight, just because they were unknown and from Liverpool. The Beatles, already nervous, became more so when Smith rejected the amplifiers they had dragged with them from Liverpool and made them plug their guitars into a set of studio speakers.
Brian believed that the way to impress Smith was not by John and Paul’s original songs, but by their imaginative, sometimes eccentric, arrangements of standards. Among the fifteen numbers heard by Mike Smith—and preserved for posterity on bootleg singles, stolen later from the master tape—are Paul’s versions of “Till There Was You” and “September in the Rain’; “Sheik of Araby,” sung by George with jokey Eastern effects; and semihumorous versions of “Three Cool Cats” and “Your Feet’s Too Big.” From scores of Lennon-McCartney songs the only three selected were “Hello Little Girl,” “Like Dreamers Do,” and the recently written “Love of the Loved.”
The Beatles were far from happy with their performance. Paul’s voice had cracked with anxiety several times; George’s fingers were stickier than usual; at certain points in Chuck Berry’s song “Memphis” John as lead vocalist seemed to have been thinking of something else. And Pete Best kept up the same drum rhythm, patient rather than cohesive. Only on “Love of the Loved” had the elements coalesced: Paul’s voice at its most appealing within an arrangement both neat and dramatic.