Though bound to EMI on record for five years, Brian had only a gentlemen’s agreement with Syd Coleman of Ardmore and Beechwood that A&B would continue publishing John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s song output. He felt disappointed with Ardmore and Beech-wood’s performance in publicizing “Love Me Do”—though, to be fair, the failure was all on EMI’s side—and now confided to George Martin that he’d be seeking new publishers for the Beatles’ follow-up single. His initial idea was to go to an American firm, Hill and Range, that held British rights on the Elvis Presley catalog. Martin’s advice was to pick a small firm with a drive to succeed that would match Brian’s own: “In other words, what I told Brian he needed was a hungry music publisher.”
The hungriest music publisher George Martin knew was Dick James, a tubby, amiable, bald-headed man whose office was one first-floor room at the corner of Denmark and Old Compton Streets. Born Isaac Vapnik, James had begun his career as a crooner in the 1930s, as featured vocalist with Primo Scala’s Accordion Band. He had sung with leading orchestras, including Henry Hall’s and Cyril Stapleton’s, and made several records, of which the most famous was the theme song for Robin Hood, a children’s series on early commercial television. On losing his moderate female fan base along with his hair he had turned first to song plugging, then to publishing. In November 1962, he had been in business on his own for one year exactly. Everyone knew Dick James, everyone liked him, but no one yet mistook him for Tin Pan Alley’s next millionaire.
In the early 1950s, as a newcomer to Parlophone, George Martin had produced Dick James on several minor hit records, including “Tenderly” and “Robin Hood.” It was natural, therefore, that when EMI’s own publishing company proved deficient, he should approach Dick James informally, both as a possible publisher for the Beatles and also in James’s old capacity as a plugger of likely recording material. The first approach, when Martin mentioned “this Liverpool group,” was not encouraging. James laughed his cuddly laugh and echoed, “Liverpool? So what’s from Liverpool?”
The answer, by then, was a disk with at least a toe-hold in the New Musical Express Top 100. James heard “Love Me Do,” liked the overall sound but agreed with Martin that the song was “just a riff.” He promised to use his Tin Pan Alley contacts to find them a good “professional” song for their follow-up record. This he produced within days, on a demo disk that he played to Martin. The song was “How Do You Do It?” by a young composer named Mitch Murray. “As soon as Dick played it to me,” Martin says, “I started jumping up and down. ‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is the song that’s going to make the Beatles a household name.’”
He said the same to the Beatles themselves when Brian brought them back to Abbey Road studios on November 26. He played them the demo of “How Do You Do It?” accompanied by his own carefully thought-out ideas on how the song could be adapted to suit them. He was surprised, and not a little irritated, when John and Paul said flatly that they didn’t like it, and wanted to do another of their own songs. This apparent willfulness in the face of an almost certain hit brought a stern lecture from Martin. “‘When you can write material as good as this I’ll record it,’ I said. ‘But right now, we’re going to record this.’”
His words sent them, chastened, into the studio, to produce a version of “How Do You Do It?” in which every note and nuance of John Lennon’s lead voice made plain their lugubrious distaste. George Harrison, halfway through, produced a guitar solo not far removed in scale and ambition from the twanging of a rubber band. Even so, they could not stop a little charm and originality from creeping in.
The song they wanted to record was one of John and Paul’s called “Please Please Me,” one fairly slow version of which had already been tried on Martin. Since then, they had worked on it, tidying up the lyric and making it faster. The revised version was now played by Paul and John on their acoustic Gibson guitars while Martin, perched on a musician’s high stool, listened critically. Then, as their voices broke together on the “Whoa yeah” Martin recognized something. His objection was that the song as it stood lasted barely more than a minute. They could lengthen it with an intro on John’s harmonica, and by repeating the first chorus at the end.
The first take of “Please Please Me” was so belligerently alive that George Martin decided to use it, even though Paul had forgotten the words in the first chorus and John, more obviously, had forgotten them in the finale. “The whole session was a joy,” Martin says. “At the end, I pressed the intercom button and said, ‘Gentlemen, you have just made your first number one.’”
He now had to break it to Dick James that the Mitch Murray song would not, after all, be out soon on Parlophone. “George rang me up,” James says. “His words were, ‘You know that song the Beatles were going to record…’” James held his head in Tin Pan Alley mock anguish, but agreed to meet Brian Epstein the next day with a view to publishing—and plugging—“Please Please Me.” It was arranged that Brian would bring an early pressing of the single for James to hear at his Denmark Street office at 11:00 A.M.
Brian arrived, instead, at 10:20. He had had an earlier appointment with another music publisher, but the man he was supposed to meet had not bothered to keep the appointment. Instead, it was suggested that he play his demo disk to the office boy. He had walked out in fury and come straight on to Dick James Music. James, to his lasting benefit, was at work already, and able to greet the angrily blushing young man in person.
A single hearing of “Please Please Me” was enough for James. He loved the song, he told Brian; could he publish it? Brian, a little nonplussed by the shabby office, asked what James thought he could do for the Beatles that EMI’s publicity department had not already done. James’s answer was to pick up the telephone and call a friend of his named Philip Jones, the producer of the Saturday night television pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars. He told Jones to listen, then put “Please Please Me” onto his record player and held the telephone receiver near to it. Jones agreed that it was very good. He also agreed, at James’s skillful prompting, to put the Beatles into Thank Your Lucky Stars. In five minutes, Dick James had guaranteed them exposure on what was—after BBC TV’s Juke Box Jury—the show with the greatest influence over the record-buying public. “Now,” he asked ingenuously, “can I publish the song?”
Another reason why George Martin had sent Brian to James was that he knew James to be very straight in financial matters. As a singer, he had himself frequently been done out of large earnings in the days when English artists received no royalty on American sales of their records. Twice in the early 1950s he had topped the American charts and yet received only seven pounds each time—the then standard studio fee. The deal he now offered Brian, while not actuated by pure benevolence, was both fair and imaginative.
Under the usual predatory publisher’s contract James would have taken 10 percent of the retail price of sheet music, plus up to half of the royalties from radio play and cover versions. Instead, he proposed that a special company be formed within his own organization but exclusively publishing Lennon-McCartney songs. The company would be called Northern Songs and its proceeds split 50-50: half to Dick James, 20 percent each to John and Paul, and 10 percent to Brian. It sounded handsome, and it was, notwithstanding the clause that James’s own company would take a percentage of Northern Songs’ earnings “off the top.” “Brian said to me, ‘Why are you doing this for us?’” James recalled. “What I said to him then was the truth. I was doing it because I had such faith in the songs.”
“Please Please Me” was not scheduled for release until January 1963. In the meantime, the Beatles were committed to return to Hamburg for a two-week engagement at Manfred Weissleder’s Star-Club. The booking had been made back in the summer, before George Martin’s advent, at rates of pay that no longer seemed attractive. All four, besides, felt they had had their fill of the Reeperbahn. Also, for the first time, they would be away from home during both Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The clincher was an o
ffer from Manfred Weissleder to Brian of one thousand deutschmarks in “brown bag money” that wouldn’t have to be declared for income tax.
On December 2, a severe jolt was sustained by the Beatles’ collective ego. Brian, through sheer effrontery, had managed to get them into what was then known as a package show of pop acts currently enjoying Top Twenty success. He had discovered the private telephone number of Arthur Howes, the country’s biggest tour promoter, and had rung up Howes one Saturday afternoon at home in Peterborough. Arthur Howes, a veteran at the agency game, smiled a bit when he heard the name of the group on offer, but was fair-minded enough not to refuse them without a trial. He offered to put them on for one night only at the Embassy cinema, Peterborough, in a show headed by Frank Ifield, the Australian yodeler.
The appearance was an unmitigated flop. The staid East Anglian audience had come to see Frank Ifield, not four unknowns from the north; they had come to worship suntan and upswept hair, not eccentric bangs, and to hear sentimental ballads, not Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins music. Total silence followed every perversely loud number. But something about them appealed to Arthur Howes; he told Brian that the disaster was not all their fault, and even made a small offer for the option of using them in future package shows.
On December 18, with the worst possible grace, they set off for Hamburg and what would be their farewell performance at the Star-Club. “Please Please Me” was just beginning to show in the Top Twenty; rather than vanishing abroad they felt they should be on home territory, taking every possible opportunity to promote the single. It was not much consolation that sharing the Star-Club’s Christmas bill would be Carl Perkins, one of their earliest rock ’n’ roll idols, whose easygoing numbers, like “Honey Don’t” and “Matchbox,” had proved ideal for giving Ringo a stab at singing lead.
By now the Beatles’ place as darlings of the Reeperbahn had been somewhat usurped by Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the highoctane R&B band who had taught them so much at Merseyside gigs like Lathom Hall. Kingsize Taylor, the towering, throaty-voiced butcher’s apprentice, was an uncomplaining workhorse for Weissleder and other German promoters, sometimes playing sets of up to twelve hours’ duration with just fifteen minutes’ break each hour. However, after several incidents with tear-gas guns in the flats above Maxim’s Club, Weissleder had felt it safer to move all his British bands into a small hotel, the Pacific. There Kingsize and the Beatles celebrated their reunion by pelting one another with grapes.
The Star-Club’s barnlike acoustics made it impossible for the bands to hear themselves while they played. To help him and his colleagues check their sound balance, Kingsize Taylor left a tape recorder running throughout much of that 1962 Christmas show. So was accidentally preserved for posterity the fullest and most vivid record of the Beatles’ soon-to-disappear stage act. Audibly drunk, fluffing words and notes, shouting back to hecklers in pidgin German, they lurch through some twenty songs in their old, undisciplined mixture of rock ’n’ roll classics, country songs, middle-of-the-road ballads, and show tunes—“Your Feet’s Too Big,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Besame Mucho,” even Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again.” Kingsize and the Dominoes had been featuring a new soul number, the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” which—keeping up Lathom Hall tradition—the Beatles had instantly pirated, reproducing even the Dominoes’ added guitar break.
On Ray Charles’s “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” the lead vocal is warbled by an unfamiliar voice that makes Ringo Starr sound Caruso-like by comparison. It is Horst Fascher, the Star-Club’s lethal bouncer. They let Horst (and also his brother Freddy) have a go onstage in return for getting the beer in.
TEN
“FOUR FRENZIED LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROYS EARNING 5,000 POUNDS A WEEK”
The winter of 1962–63 was Britain’s worst for almost a hundred years. From December to mid-March the entire country disappeared and a snow-leveled tundra took its place, stretching from north to south, silent and motionless but for snowplows trying to locate the buried highways. With the blizzards came Siberian cold that froze the English Channel, annihilated old people and the Essex oyster beds, wiped out the zebra at Whipsnade Zoo, turned milk into creamflavored sorbet, and caused beer to explode spontaneously in its bottles. Southwest England was completely cut off; indeed, there seemed at one point a sporting chance that Wales would never be seen again. As usual in Britain winter was the last thing anyone had expected and, as usual, the British responded to chaos with cheerfulness. A year of unprecedented uproar, of unparalleled outrage, thus began with a feeling that everything in Britain was much the way it had always been. Everyone talked, and talked, about the weather.
On January 12, the nation, still snowed into its homes, provided a bumper audience for ABC-TV’s Saturday night pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars. The show was popular for two reasons: its teenage record critic Janice, and the imaginative studio sets that were built around singers and groups as they mimed, not always accurately, their latest Top Twenty disk. Janice’s peculiar magic was a thick Birmingham accent in which, awarding some new release maximum points, she would invariably say: “Oi’ll give it foive.”
A certain act on Lucky Stars that night had caused some perplexity to the show’s producer, Philip Jones, and his set designer. Jones had kept his promise to his friend Dick James to book the Beatles in the same week that “Please Please Me” was released. Jones had not met them until the afternoon they arrived at ATV’s Birmingham studios, after driving straight down from a tour of Scottish ballrooms. “We’d no idea how to present them,” Jones says. “In the end, we just gave up. We decided to put each one of them inside a big metal heart. It was obvious that the song, not our set, would be the thing that sold them.”
The four metal hearts framed a pop group such as no British teenager south of Lancashire had ever seen before. Their hair was not blow-dried into a cockade; it fringed their eyes like the high fur hats of Grenadier guardsmen. Their suits buttoned up to the neck, completely concealing their ties. The front three figures did not, as was usual, step to and fro: They bounced and jigged with their guitar necks out of time. One, unprecedentedly, played a Spanish guitar; another held a bass guitar like a stretched-out violin, its skinny neck pointing leftward rather than rightward, in completely the wrong direction. All four compounded their eccentricity by refusing to look stern and moody, as pop stars should, but by grinning broadly at the cameras and each other. The song they performed was largely inaudible, owing to the screams of the studio audience—all but for the moment where, with one extra zesty “Whoa yeah,” their voices toppled into falsetto. Then, six million snowbound British teenagers heard what George Martin, on his musician’s stool, had heard; what Dick James in his Tin Pan Alley garret had heard; what Philip Jones had heard even over the telephone. It was the indefinable yet unmistakable sound of a number one.
The same week brought enthusiastic reviews of “Please Please Me” in the music trade press. Keith Fordyce, a leading Radio Luxembourg disk jockey, said in New Musical Express that “Please Please Me” was “a really enjoyable platter, full of vigour and vitality.” The World’s Fair thought the Beatles had “every chance of becoming the big star attraction of 1963.” Brian Matthew, emcee of Thank Your Lucky Stars and BBC radio’s Saturday Club, and the country’s most influential commentator on pop music, delivered the ultimate accolade, calling them “musically and visually the most accomplished group to emerge since the Shadows.”
The national press, however, still maintained an attitude of scornful indifference to teenagers and their music. One exception was the London Evening Standard, which on Saturdays published a full page by its young pop columnist, Maureen Cleave. A friend of Cleave’s, the Liverpool-based journalist Gillian Reynolds, had been urging her for months to come up and write something about the Beatles and the Cavern Club. Late in January, just as “Please Please Me” was about to enter the Top Ten, Maureen Cleave traveled to Liverpool to interview them for her Evening Standar
d page. On the train she met Vincent Mulchrone, the Daily Mail’s chief feature writer, bound on the same assignment.
The Beatles were in Liverpool to play a one-nighter at the Grafton Ballroom before leaving on the Helen Shapiro package tour. Mulchrone and Cleave were taken by Brian to see the queues that, as usual, had formed outside the Grafton two hours in advance of opening time. Some of the girls told Cleave they hadn’t bought “Love Me Do” when it first appeared for fear the Beatles would become famous, leave Liverpool, and never return.
The interview that followed was like none Maureen Cleave had ever done with a pop group. “The Beatles made me laugh immoderately, the way I used to laugh as a child at the Just William books. Their wit was just so keen and sharp—John Lennon’s especially. They all had this wonderful quality—it wasn’t innocence, but everything was new to them. They were like William, finding out about the world and trying to make sense of it.”
“John Lennon,” Cleave wrote, “has an upper lip which is brutal in a devastating way. George Harrison is handsome, whimsical and untidy. Paul McCartney has a round baby face while Ringo Starr is ugly but cute. Their physical appearance inspires frenzy. They look beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way.”
The piece caught the knockabout flavor of their conversation—John’s threat, for instance, to lie down on the stage like Al Jolson during the Helen Shapiro tour, and Paul’s rejoinder that he was too blind to see the audience anyway. In John, Cleave found a fellow devotee of the William stories. “After the piece came out, John said to me, ‘You write like that woman who did the William books.’ For me, it was like being told one wrote like Shakespeare.”