The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Fortunately, it wasn’t his call. Martin had instructed Ron only to put them at ease and find two or three songs that might be suitable for a record. Right off the bat, Richards chose “Please Please Me,” which the band had started performing at the Star-Club. But the song was too slow and plaintive—John had patterned it after Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”—with a repetitive guitar phrase that drove Richards nuts. “They had a riff going”—the two instrumental bars that prefigure “Last night I said these words to my girl”—“all the way through,” he recalls. It was overkill, an amateur’s mistake. Politely, Ron suggested that George “just play it in the gaps,” which immediately refocused and energized the song. He also liked the starkly primitive “Love Me Do,” cowritten by John and Paul when they were still Quarry Men, for the way they spun out “so plee-ee-ee-ese—love me do” at the end of each verse.

  After sifting through the band’s material, Richards decided to break for dinner before recording four songs—the two aforementioned Lennon-McCartney originals, along with another, “Ask Me Why,” and the old Latin chestnut “Besame Mucho,” which the Beatles had learned from a Coasters single.

  As an audition, the session brought mixed results. Ron Richards thought that “they handled themselves pretty well in the studio” but heard nothing that excited him. His engineer, Norman Smith, agreed. “They didn’t impress me at all,” he recalled. George Martin shared their reservations when he listened to a playback of the tape at the end of the session. While he quite enjoyed the Beatles’ voices, it was the material that troubled him most. “Besame Mucho” spoke for itself—it was a slippery little retread—but their original songs just didn’t cut it. “They were rotten composers,” Martin thought at the time. “Their own stuff wasn’t any good.”

  After the playback, Martin and Norman Smith rather mercilessly critiqued the tape. The fury of their response surprised the Beatles, who listened, crestfallen, as the two men “laid into them for about an hour and… were pretty forthright” about their performance. They went over everything, from the lack of “suitable material” to “embellish[ing] the sound” to their presence, which had somehow, incredibly, disappointed the record men. Despite laying things bare, however, they decided to hold back one criticism. Ron Richards had complained privately to Martin that “the drummer was no good and needed to be changed.” They’d labored in vain over the beat, trying to bring Pete up to speed. Richards coaxed him through the session, clapping out a fairly straightforward bass drum pattern—boomp bah-boomp / boomp bah-boomp—which he exhorted Pete to play with his left foot. “I thought it moved the song along better,” Richards recalls, “but he just couldn’t do it.” All Pete could do was play “fours”: boom—boom—boom—boom. If they intended to record this group properly, “he’d have to go,” Richards told Martin, who promised to have a word about it with Brian Epstein. But even without dredging up this fault, the producer’s overall response had been brutal. He’d given them a real raking-over. When the final blow had been delivered, there was a long, anxious silence. Almost apologetically, Martin asked the Beatles if there was anything they didn’t like. After a well-timed beat, George Harrison sneered: “I don’t like your tie.”

  The room went silent. For a split second, nobody breathed. A line had been crossed. Martin fixed George with a stern look, not certain what tack to take with this boy, when he noticed the flicker of a smile at the corner of George’s mouth. A joke! He’d been making a joke! What a perfect ice-breaker. Martin’s grin flashed approval ear to ear.

  As Norman Smith recalled: “That was the turning point.” The band clicked into Beatles mode, cutting up and peppering them with wordplay and double-talk in a manner reminiscent of the Goons. “During that one conversation, we realized they were something special.” It was exhilarating stuff. The three of them—Pete never uttered a word—worked off one another like comic pros. Martin and Smith laughed so hard that tears soaked the inside collars of their shirts. “We’ve got to sign them for their wit,” Smith told Martin after the band had packed up. Martin promised to think about it—but he’d already made up his mind. The Beatles were a go.

  The Beatles returned to Liverpool feeling reasonably optimistic. Martin had promised to see them again soon, and he’d given Brian encouragement that a proper recording session lay ahead. A pledge that he’d look for material for the band seemed proof enough of Martin’s interest. Suddenly everything seemed to be breaking the Beatles’ way.

  But there were unforeseen complications. For one thing, the Beatles had contracted gonorrhea in Hamburg. There was so much sex on the fly that it seemed almost quid pro quo that they would eventually have gotten it for their efforts. Now, however, it was Brian’s problem—to help them and hush it up. Brian had asked his solicitor, Rex Makin, to refer the band to a venereologist, and the lawyer urged discretion. By that time, John and Cynthia had taken out a marriage license, and gonorrhea was prima facie evidence of adultery and automatic grounds for divorce. Also, if John passed the clap on to Cyn, she could dissolve their relationship and lay claim to his earnings. It was an unlikely scenario, but Brian wasn’t taking any chances. Makin, who handled his share of dicey matrimonial cases, had a team of what he called “tame venereologists” on file who treated such cases with extreme confidentiality.

  All things considered, this situation paled in contrast to the problem that soon confronted Paul. One evening shortly after returning from London, he picked up Dot, who had spent the afternoon being examined by a girlfriend’s doctor. In the damp spring night, he took one look at Dot’s face and knew. He leaned against her and whispered: “You’re going to have a baby.” Dot could only hang her tiny shoulders and nod, trying not to drown in despair.

  Wordlessly, they drove out to the Mersey ferry and rode the choppy river in darkness, searching for answers. They held each other, reassured but suspicious. Cruel hours passed. Neither was prepared to tell the other exactly what they were feeling. “[Paul] was trying to be good about it,” Dot recalls, “but he was scared. At first, he said we shouldn’t get married, we were too young. I wanted to get married, but I couldn’t tell him that.” Against all impulses, she had already made an appointment with a local adoption agency. He hushed her lips with two fingers: no. That wasn’t the right way. There was honor to think about—his and hers.

  Clutching each other, they went off to face the music. Together, they confessed to Jim McCartney, who, to their surprise, “was delighted.” They should have this baby, Jim urged, irrespective of the fact that Paul wasn’t ready and Dot even less so; she was only eighteen. Jim loved kids. Besides, since Mary’s death, he was lonely.

  It was settled: Paul and Dot would get married before the momentous event, after which they’d move in with Jim. Paul would be the second of the Beatles to settle down: Lennon and McCartney, as it should be. Before there was any more discussion, Paul marched down to City Hall and took out a marriage license. Dot already wore the gold band he’d given her in Hamburg.

  If only Paul had wanted to get married.

  Between the Parlophone audition, on June 6, and another rock ’n roll extravaganza set for the Tower Ballroom on June 21, Brian booked the Beatles into an unrelenting twelve-performance marathon at the Cavern, kicked off by a “Beatles Welcome Home Show” that squeezed nine hundred screaming fans into that foul, cramped cellar. They did two sets daily for six days, back-to-back, broken up only by a stray appearance on a BBC radio program broadcast from Manchester.

  All of this was carefully coordinated by Brian, whose meager NEMS office, above the record shop in Whitechapel, became “the Eppy-center” of a fringe operation devoted almost entirely to his management business. Suddenly the roster doubled as he took on Gerry and the Pacemakers, and the staff expanded—and expanded again.

  Everyone was crammed into an orderly two-room suite. Brian was tucked away behind a glass-walled office, beyond which sat two young women who typed contracts, wage slips, and letters to promoters confirming various da
tes. Brian, driven himself, worked them like slaves. “He was very meticulous about how things were handled,” says Frieda Kelly Norris, who was sixteen when she joined the firm. “If you made any kind of mistake, his face would get flushed until he lost it completely and came down hard on you.” Letters were fired off in every available spare moment, and “he couldn’t wait” to see it on paper. He got very angry if they weren’t ready for his signature after what seemed like an unreasonable interval. After he dictated one—or sometimes a string of them, in a rapid, staccato style, stopping repeatedly mid-sentence to change direction—it was scrutinized for form, and God help the typist who let an error slip through. “Once, I transcribed a very long letter and took it in to him to be signed,” recalls Frieda Kelly. On inspection, Brian found a spelling mistake and, sputtering with fury, flung it back on her desk to be retyped. In the next draft, she left out a comma. “Now, all I had to do was insert it at the end of the line, where it belonged, but he inked around the entire paragraph so that it couldn’t be corrected, forcing me to type it over again.”

  Style was supreme—and diligence. It infuriated Brian if the staff wasn’t constantly busy. “Sometimes, I’d move papers from one side of my desk to the other, just to avoid his scorn,” says Beryl Adams, his earliest assistant. “If I stopped to blow my nose, he’d appear over my shoulder, staring hard at me until it was clear I’d gone back to work.” If anyone got done with her assigned tasks, which wasn’t at all likely, there was plenty of fan-club material to keep her occupied.

  Even before the group’s first recording session, the Beatles Fan Club had swung into full flower. A teenager named Roberta Brown, who followed the Beatles from gig to gig, had started it in 1961 as a means to ingratiate herself with the band. Each month Bobbie sent out a chatty mimeographed newsletter to mostly local girls who paid the five-shilling dues and wrote in periodically requesting intimate information about the lads—“the color of their eyes and hair, their height, their ideal girl, car, and food [in that order], and also their upcoming appearances.” This was a small, passionate group—perhaps thirty-five or forty in number. But by mid-1962, the mail descended on her home in bulging sacks, and as each day passed, the demand on her time—and the drain on her bank account—seemed more daunting.

  Frieda Kelly had pitched in to help before she went to work at NEMS, then persuaded Brian to get involved. This opportunity, as he read it, was a blessing. It gave him a pipeline directly to hard-core Beatle fans that he could flush with propaganda. “He said that if we gave him the postal orders, he would pay our bills for the postage and stationery,” she says. As a businessman, Brian recognized the value of a loyal consumer base.

  He also knew how to motivate people. “We’d talk in his office every afternoon, at teatime,” Bob Wooler recalls. “He usually kept a bottle of brandy there. If we were in a real drinking mood—in other words, gin—we’d meet at the Beehive, in Paradise Street, just so he could keep me up-to-date.” Every move the Beatles made was reported back to Wooler so he could cajole their fans and keep the home fires burning. It was a tactic Colonel Parker had employed while Elvis was in the army, studied with envy and admiration by Brian. “Sometimes he’d rub his hands. Oh, great news, Bob, great news. They’re going to do a BBC radio broadcast in Manchester. Do you think you could organize a coach trip from the Cavern?” As incentive, Brian offered to pay for the whole thing.

  The Manchester show would be a turning point. Brian had talked the Beatles into riding the bus home. It was a gracious gesture to their fans who had clapped like crazy during the band’s performance. Inside the Playhouse Theatre, the Beatles had played their hearts out. The response was phenomenal, better than anyone had anticipated. Afterward, as they made their way out, a crowd had gathered in the parking lot, not a big crowd but a spirited one intent on getting a closer look at these long-haired rock ’n rollers from Liverpool. The Beatles had to push their way through a gauntlet in order to board the bus. Bill Harry, who accompanied the band from backstage, recalls: “It was an amazing scene. The Beatles managed to climb into the coach, but the girls were mobbing Pete and he couldn’t get on.” Everyone on the bus had to wait—and watch. John, Paul, and George watched expressionlessly in the dark. Few friends who observed them realized what this grave demeanor concealed—how, in fact, it was a mask worn to conceal a bitter dissatisfaction. So hard were the lines of their lips and the set of their jaws that they might have been statues for a garden display. Outwardly, their composure never cracked, but inwardly they smoldered as Neil Aspinall extricated his friend from the crowd’s adoring grip. The Beatles never said a word—it was Jim McCartney, of all people, who angrily accosted Pete and accused him of trying to upstage the others—but they had already made up their minds to make sure that it never happened again.

  Chapter 18 Starr Time

  [I]

  In the dawning days of the Mersey sound, before packaged tours kept bands booked for months on end, a summerlong gig at Butlins was regarded as either Fat City or the Gulag. Few getaways were as popular as the institutionalized “holiday camps” scattered around Great Britain in rather modest and unassuming locales. Vacation retreats in Skegness, Pwllheli (Wales), Clacton, Blackpool, Filey, and Bognor Regis provided sanctuary for thousands of young working families on a budget for whom two weeks of regulated social activity and nightly entertainment was the perfect interlude to a fearsome fifty-week grind. Work and play: you could load up the car, drive a few hours through countryside as uncompromisingly beautiful and familiar as the backyard, and arrive in a walled-in oasis shimmering in the heat, where kids and adults romped side by side.

  Catering to the masses, the Butlins camps were governed by vox populi, and by 1960 it was clear that rock ’n roll had crystallized as a mainstream trend. Up-and-coming groups were awarded summer residencies at each Butlins satellite: Cliff Richard at Clacton, Clay Nicholls and the Blue Flames at Filey, and the Trebletones at Bognor Regis. For £16 a week—a cushy twenty-hour week—plus room, board, and flocks of adoring birds, it was a steady, much-sought-after gig.

  The Beatles, however, avoided Butlins like church. Disdainful of organized functions and the camps’ loutish appeal, John, who was inexorably middle class, refused to apply there for work. The whole concept of “chalet”—or barracks—living and uniformed perky “redcoats” who herded guests from activity to activity revolted him, and he waxed eloquent on it, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Paul’s family had spent many happy summers at Butlins. Johnny Byrne recalls how John wasted no opportunity to trash Butlins. “He told us it reminded him of a German concentration camp,” Byrne says.

  Liverpool’s representative at Butlins was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. In 1960, billed as Jet Storm, they spent two fun-packed months at Pwllheli, opening for the blustery Blackjacks. After the headliners departed early, Storm swiped Rory Blackwell’s first name and suggested his sidemen change theirs as well to spice up the band’s “boring” image. Just as the aggressively offbeat Lord Sutch had given his Savages appropriate stage names, Storm imposed a Wild West theme, so Johnny Byrne became Johnny Guitar, Charlie O’Brien metamorphosed as Ty Brien (after Ty Hardin, the star of TV’s Bronco), and Wally Egmond adopted the name Lu Walters, which, for all its commonness, sounded to Scousers like a chaw-spittin’ desperado. The only group member who balked at the hijinks was the drummer.

  Ritchie Starkey’s tenure as a teddy boy gave him the requisite aura: flamboyant clothes, an exquisitely chiseled beard, swaths of silver streaked through his lank hair, and status as one of the city’s fleetest dancers. His twelve-cylinder, red-and-white Standard Vanguard (for which he had no license) sealed the spectacular image. Although disenchanted with the idea of stage names, Ritchie was a team player and for a while consented, begrudgingly, to let Storm introduce him as “Rings,” in deference to his penchant for flashy jewelry. There was an effort to amend it to Johnny Ringo, after the mythical gunslinger; however, that fizzled when it was determined that the Col
ts’ singer had already staked a claim to it. Still, Rory was nothing but persevering. When Rory grabbed a ten-minute break in the middle of a set, his illustrious drummer took over the spotlight. “Ritch wasn’t that interested,” recalls Byrne. “He didn’t want to sing. But we’d bring the drums forward, which kind of amazed the crowd—you’d never see a drummer singing—and he’d do three numbers: ‘Alley-Oop,’ ‘Matchbox,’ and ‘Boys,’ the B-side of a Shirelles record we dug up.” In no time, he grew into the role; its blinding attraction energized him. “And eventually Rory began introducing the break, saying: ‘All right folks—it’s Ringo Star-Time!’ ”

  Ringo: it had a nice theatricality—not too tricky, not too serious. It synchronized awkwardly with Starkey, but “Starr was a natural,” the drummer recalled. “It made sense to me, and I liked it.” Ringo Starr. It rolled right off the tongue. What’s more, it looked great emblazoned on his bass drum. While the others struggled to establish their new names, Ringo seemed born to it.

  But his style wasn’t limited by name alone. Ringo had chops. “He was an excellent drummer and had a good feel,” says Adrian Barber, with whom Ringo occasionally gigged. It was an opinion that resonated throughout the Merseyside club scene. He was very popular with musicians, in general because of his personality, but particularly because he wasn’t a showboat: he established a nice groove that managed to serve the songs without taking anything away from them. His ego never got in the way. Of all the drummers in Liverpool, where the pecking order was so clearly established, bands ranked Ringo among the best. And by the summer of 1962, he figured in many of their plans.