The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Deliberate or not, John Lennon managed to fuel his rage in a stupor of uncontrolled intoxication. He’d begun blowing off steam in Hamburg from the moment the Beatles arrived, drinking steadily. At an early-morning party following their opening shows, he doused an annoyed Brian Epstein with warm beer. That established a pattern for the next seven weeks. No one complained when John showed up drunk onstage or played in animal skins or “foamed at the mouth” following a “Prellie sandwich,” but it had a cumulative effect. Gradually, the antics grew wilder and more destructive. John began to pick fights he couldn’t win, storming friends in a hail of insults. He told Adrian Barber that “all people [were] basically shit” and deserved abuse. It seemed that anyone who crossed his path was fair game. Gerry Marsden recalled how one night, without any provocation, John crowned a fellow with a bottle during a friendly card game and got a beating in return. The guy “knocked hell” out of John. “And all of us just stood there and let him do it.” He had it coming, they agreed, and got what he deserved.

  John’s spring was filled with similar binges and brawls. It became “a trend [for musicians] to bounce around and do inexplicable, outrageous things,” but John took on audiences without regard for the consequences. One night he danced up to the microphone and announced: “Hey, remember the war? Well, we fuckin’ won!” Then, grabbing his crotch, he screamed, “Sieg heil this!” In case that hadn’t gotten their attention, he dropped his pants and pranced across the stage in his underwear.

  Friends from Liverpool, who were used to John’s belligerence, thought he’d gone “a little bit mad.” John, in a harsher self-evaluation, later insisted he was “out of my fucking mind.” But the anger and self-hatred were the result of something much more rational. Wounded by the real world, he preferred to face it drunk. Drinking was an excuse, a way to bury the pain of Stu’s death. Drunk, he wouldn’t have to deal with the loss or his unresolved feelings.

  If the other Beatles were concerned, they did nothing to intercede. As far as anyone could tell, they never acknowledged that John was out of control, never suggested he take it down a notch or two. It may have seemed perfectly normal to three twenty-year-olds that a comrade would blow off steam in a place like the Grosse Freiheit. Liverpool lads were known to “let loose like maniacs.” And it wasn’t too far afield from John’s usual hostile behavior—only more pronounced and enduring than before.

  Part of it, no doubt, could be traced to frustration. It was a word he grappled with repeatedly in later recollections of Hamburg—frustration over the Decca rejection, over the Beatles’ image, over their lack of a topflight drummer, over an indefinite future. Now, news from Cynthia added to his frustration. She had moved into a one-room flat, a “shabby little… bedsit” with a shared bath, in a terrace house near Penny Lane, where John looked forward to setting up permanent residence with her following the band’s return to Liverpool. (This, despite the fact that John had begun a torrid relationship with Bettina Derlin, one of the Star-Club’s raunchier bartenders.) Until then, however, Cynthia had invited Dot Rhone to keep her company there. Instead of applauding her self-sufficiency, John dashed off a letter to Cynthia, barely disguising his displeasure. He urged her to “find another flat” for Dot so that it wouldn’t infringe on their privacy. He viewed Dot, who was even more fragile and insecure than he was, as a threat to their relationship. “Imagine having her there all the time when we were in bed—and imagine Paul coming all the time—and especially when I wasn’t there. I’d hate the idea.”

  Aside from music, Cynthia was the one bright spot in John’s life. Now, too, those sands had begun to shift, and everything under their feet started to give way.

  [II]

  By the beginning of May, Brian Epstein was desperate. He had run out of options as far as record-company contacts were concerned and dreaded facing the Beatles empty-handed when they returned home in a few weeks. “The pressure was really getting to him,” recalls Alistair Taylor. “He’d grown increasingly distraught.” With his back to the wall, Brian relented and went back to see George Martin about his open-ended offer to audition the Beatles.

  It seemed like an exercise in futility, but Brian put on his most charming face for the meeting, determined to win the producer’s friendship as well as his support. Apparently, the approach paid off. During their amiable meeting at EMI Studios on the morning of May 9, Martin not only honored his offer for an audition but proposed issuing a recording contract for the Beatles before even meeting them. It was an extraordinary development and, no doubt, one that Brian hadn’t anticipated. He must have been astonished, not to mention giddy with excitement.

  And yet, while the gesture appeared magnanimous, it was little more than an insurance policy for Martin, should the Beatles live up to expectations. The contract, in effect, guaranteed the band nothing, least of all a recording session. Instead, by signing it, the Beatles gave EMI a lock on their services if the audition showed promise, at which time Martin only had to countersign the document for it to be binding. Otherwise, it would be worthless.

  Brian, who surely recognized the drawbacks, responded quickly, believing that any contract was better than nothing at this point. So, on May 9, 1962, he arranged an audition date for a few days after the Beatles returned from Hamburg, then rushed off to the nearest post office to telephone his parents and wire two cables. The first was to the Beatles in Hamburg—an incisive announcement that set the tone for everything that eventually happened. It read:

  CONGRATULATIONS BOYS. EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION. PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL.

  A second message, delivered to the Mersey Beat offices the same day, said:

  HAVE SECURED CONTRACT FOR BEATLES TO RECORDED [SIC] FOR EMI ON PARLAPHONE [SIC] LABEL. 1ST RECORDING DATE SET FOR JUNE 6TH.

  It was a stunning piece of news. None of the Beatles had been forewarned of new developments on that front, and only George had held out hope for such an outcome. By way of celebration, they clapped one another on the back and reprised a popular chant:

  “Where are we going, lads?”

  “To the toppermost, Johnny!”

  “And where is that?”

  “The toppermost of the poppermost!”

  They had lusted after this for so long that, finally in hand, it hardly seemed real.

  While the Beatles had rescued John from a murky home life, nothing had rescued Cynthia Powell from hers. In February Cynthia’s mother had emigrated unexpectedly to Canada, renting out the family house and leaving her daughter, who was only nineteen, to her own devices. Unable to make ends meet while continuing her art studies, Cynthia bounced from place to place like a foster child, surviving a disastrous, short-lived stint as one of Mimi’s boarders, followed by a month with her aunt Tess, commuting from the remote Wirral peninsula, interspersed with nights on the couch of her friend Phyllis McKenzie.

  By late spring, the turmoil of Cynthia’s life had reached an unprecedented pitch. John was gone, her mother situated halfway across the world. Rather than resuming classes at art school, she now taught all day at a high school in darkest Garston, where the kids were such savages that it was said “they played tick* with hatchets.” A feeling of “isolation” began to take hold. To complicate matters, Cynthia’s “money had run out,” forcing her to accept public assistance. Despite finding her own flat, she felt vulnerable, desperate. Convinced that control was slipping from her grasp, Cynthia began to worry herself sick—literally. In the mornings she woke up feeling nauseous, lethargic; it took an effort just to get out of bed. When her “period got later and later,” the wild card fell.

  Cynthia feared the worst: she was pregnant. At a hastily arranged exam, the doctor confirmed it, delivering a stern lecture on responsibility and birth control. “The horror of it was almost too great to take in,” she recalled. Afterward, Phyllis McKenzie attempted to console her, but there was more: on the way to the examination, Cynthia tore open an envelope from art school that had arrived in the morning post to discover t
hat she’d failed her exams. Bursting with shame, she admitted to Phyllis that the situation had gotten beyond her.

  With her mother gone and John in Hamburg, the only person Cyn could discuss things with was Dot Rhone. The girls had grown inseparable since the Beatles had left. Both naive, both insecure, both overshadowed by manipulative boyfriends who exploited their naïveté and insecurity, they clung to each other like two orphans. Neither girl had much of a life outside her relationship; they were as needy as nestlings—John and Paul provided everything that had been missing from their lives. Now, alone all these weeks, there was a sense of real intimacy between them. They spent most nights scraping together “crummy” meals, then stretched across Cynthia’s bed until late, smoking and giggling about the boys. Unexpectedly, in May the flat next to Cynthia’s became vacant. Dot says, “I couldn’t afford it, but Paul volunteered to pay the rent.” She moved in the next day. Like Cynthia, Dot flirted with fantasies of Paul returning, making a home with her, and eventually proposing marriage. The whole setup seemed ideal: the two Beatles living next door to each other, their girlfriends best of pals.

  When Cynthia became pregnant, Dot naturally came to the rescue. “She was so scared,” Dot remembers. “She wanted to marry John—very definitely—it just wasn’t the right time. She realized they weren’t ready for it, but there was no other solution.”

  Against the rise of irrational fear, Dot tried to calm her friend, offering copious emotional support. She knew better than to treat Cynthia’s pregnancy with neglect. Certain precautions had to be taken, sensible diets observed. Dutifully, Dot tended to Cynthia, reassuring her that everything would turn out all right. She filled the nights with advice and companionship, even rehearsing ways with Cynthia of how to break the news to John. When that moment finally came, however, it was more difficult than either of them had anticipated.

  On June 2 the Beatles returned to Liverpool amid a torrent of expectation. Mersey Beat stirred up excitement about their homecoming, which caused a great tidal wave of joy in the hearts of faithful fans. There was even an “official fan club” that beat the drum in the clubs. Word buzzed through the city that “the Beatles [were] back.” There was a clamor to see what innovations Hamburg had handed them, what breakthroughs they’d made, what new goodies they brought home.

  Brian met the boys at the airport and suggested an impromptu meal to celebrate, but everyone was eager to get home.

  John, especially, wanted to see Cynthia and their new flat. He made a beeline to the dreary building and took the stairs “two at a time,” bursting into the room with flowers, food, and a rakish smile. The silence that followed was painfully awkward. Cynthia decided not to beat around the bush. John hadn’t been in the flat more than a moment or two when she blurted out the news.

  Pregnant: it must have felt like an ambush to John, who initially had trouble digesting its meaning. Frozen in place, he stared at her, dazed, unable to fire off a customary glib remark. “As the words sunk in I saw the color literally drain from his cheeks,” Cynthia recounted. “He went white.” She did her best to put an ironic spin on it, but John’s disappointment was impossible to ignore.

  His concern went straight to the Beatles. “I thought it would be goodbye to the group…,” John admitted later, when the shock had worn off. After all the hard work, the years of endless garbage gigs and enduring disappointment, the idyll was shattered. Just like that, just when a breakthrough seemed inevitable. Now it appeared that fate had dealt him a timely blow, and blowing it big-time would surely be his fate.

  Resignedly, he proposed they do the right thing and get married.

  For a short time, Cynthia remained hopeful. There was plenty of Beatles business to distract John from this latest blow. It’s unclear whether he even confided in Paul, who always showed pragmatism in such matters. “John didn’t share much with anybody,” recalls Bill Harry. “He was more comfortable playing the loner. He seemed very secretive, as though he were unwilling to trust people—or unsure how to go about it.”

  Despite such emotional upheaval, the Beatles were distanced from it somewhat by their audition, which raced up blindly on June 6, 1962, only four days after their return from Hamburg. Dazed and punished by exhaustion from the seven-week bacchanal, the Beatles were cautiously optimistic about their chances with George Martin, believing, as Brian himself wished, that the contract provided by the label led directly to a recording session. Still, the grim specter of Decca hung over them: nothing could be taken for granted anymore, especially by Brian, who implied that this “was [their] last chance” as far as record companies went.

  If kismet was any indication, then they were already in a hole. The studio Brian directed them to proved nearly impossible to find. For more than half an hour, Neil Aspinall steered the van, loaded with the Beatles and their equipment, haltingly through the sleepy north London suburb of St. John’s Wood, searching for the entrance to EMI Studios. Somehow, they wound up in an upscale residential area whose weave of streets held extravagant Edwardian mansions set off by ample lawns, lilac hedges, and bushes trimmed to the flatness of tables. “Where’s the recording studio?” the Beatles jabbered impatiently as the van slowed in front of 3 Abbey Road, at the intersection where it meets Grove End. Neil checked the location against the address he’d been given. It matched, but the place seemed utterly wrong. “It’s a house!” Pete Best recalled saying, staring at the squat two-story structure surrounded by a fenced-off wall. There was no sign, nothing official that announced EMI’s proprietary claim. “This has got to be it,” Neil concluded, pulling into a forecourt behind the gates. But as they unloaded the van, a fissure of uncertainty took hold. “What is this place?” they wondered. “Where’s [George Martin] going to record us?”

  Their noisy fluster was no coincidence. Abbey Road wasn’t meant to look like a recording complex, much less a facility like EMI’s other studios at Hayes, which adjoined its record factories. It had originated in 1831 as a nine-bedroom residence, with five reception rooms, servants’ quarters, and a wine cellar, before being converted in 1928 into the world’s first “purpose- [or custom-] built” studio. For all the building’s unpretentiousness, much of the modern technology found in the more imposing high-tech studios was first designed by EMI engineers in one of its boxy, low-ceilinged rooms. The fundamentals of stereo were developed here, as were moving-coil microphones, large-valve tape recorders, and an amusing battery of sound effects that gained industrywide use throughout the war years and beyond. None of that, however, would have impressed the apprehensive Beatles, who were growing increasingly anxious to make their own mark.

  Be that as it may, they were momentarily awed, entering the building and “stepping into… another world.” The scope of the interior plainly unnerved them. “Coming into Abbey Road for the first time… we thought, ‘This is a small place,’ ” Paul recalled, “but it just kept going on and on.” The homespun facade, as it turned out, was just for show. The place was immense. Like a Chinese puzzle box, a block of buildings had been erected, one behind the other, in what was formerly the garden, with corridors leading off at right angles to more studios and offices. Lugging their equipment like porters, the Beatles struggled to maintain their composure. It was awesome. And the library stillness inside was terrifying.

  Brian came rushing up to meet them as they trundled inside. Laughing, probably relieved that they’d turned up within a reasonable time frame, he attempted to answer their scattershot questions while herding them toward Studio Three, the “corner suite,” which had been reserved for their test. There was a feverish excitement in the air, and as two EMI assistants accompanied the band down the hall, the Beatles established a kind of frisky onstage rapport, joking and “firing [off] quick one-liners” at one another to take the edge off their nerves. “We were nervous,” Pete Best acknowledged. “We were feeling the old butterflies.” Still, defensively, they threw up a clownish smoke screen so as not to let on about their fears. “We were arrogant,
cocky. You know: We’re the Beatles. We weren’t about to let anything show.”

  All that changed, however, when they pushed through the doors to Studio Three. “Look at the size of this place!” they beamed to one another, thinking it resembled “a football pitch.” The room was wide and airy, with a faint hospital-like smell. Errant wires snaked along the floor, and there were some chairs stacked routinely in one corner and a sound booth off to the side; otherwise, it was empty of the sound paraphernalia they had seen at Decca or even the Polydor sessions with Tony Sheridan.

  While they set up, George Martin wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The Beatles were talked through the technical process by Ron Richards, another Parlophone producer, who brought along a couple of sound engineers to check out the band’s meager equipment. Eventually, the boys were escorted downstairs to the canteen, where Martin sat having tea. In his subsequent revisions of their meeting, Martin liked to skip directly to the session, where “it was love at first sight.” No doubt he was drawn to them in some instinctive way, charmed by their personalities, cowed by the length of their hair (which he considered “shocking”). But in fact, the introductions were more businesslike than romantic. It all boiled down to this: he wanted to hear what they could do. Then he would evaluate their potential and determine the next move.

  In the meantime, the Beatles spent all afternoon running material for Ron Richards. They had polished a set of thirty-two songs that Brian had selected from their prodigious repertoire, and barely stopping to catch a breath between numbers, they breezed through them all, as though they were playing a breakneck lunchtime session at the Cavern. Richards says that he took an immediate liking to the boys themselves but “wasn’t terribly impressed” with what he heard. Their songs bored him, and their musicianship was “adequate” at best. If it were up to him, Richards says, “I probably wouldn’t have signed the Beatles.”