With the Beatles

by Alistair Taylor

  Ringo was particularly delighted because the Americans really seemed to take to him. There was something about that laconic, hang-dog face that seemed to appeal to the Americans and suddenly he found himself headline news and in demand, even above John and Paul. ‘It was a shock for me, America,’ he told me. ‘I loved the radio stations and the pace and energy of the place, but most of all I loved it because I wasn’t just the guy at the back, the drummer.’

  But it wasn’t all good news conquering America. After the Washington concert, the Beatles were invited to a reception at the British Embassy and Brian decided they should go. It was a snooty affair full of the most undiplomatic diplomats imaginable. One chinless twit laughed out loud at John signing an autograph and announced loudly, ‘Oh, look. He can actually write.’ Surprisingly, John did not deck him, which seemed a pity to me. But he did take offence when a woman produced some scissors from her evening bag and snipped off a chunk of Ringo’s hair as a souvenir for her daughter. Brian led the boys out of the party in a cold fury. He was angry that supposedly upper-class people could behave so loutishly and in the car back to the hotel he apologised to the boys and promised that they would never ever be humiliated like that again. In future, official functions were definitely not on the schedule.

  The crowds were always biggest at Heathrow when we flew off on tour or returned from abroad. The worst time for me was when the Beatles returned from their first trip to America. Four of us were each assigned a Beatle to take care of and I was there to ensure John and Cynthia got through Heathrow safely. The press conference went on for so long that the fans had time to break out of the enclosure on the roof of the Queen’s Building and were pushing the police cordon back at a frightening speed. They were only kids but the force of them was amazing. I saw barriers buckling under pressure as the crowd swarmed towards us. The Beatles looked really scared as the crowd got closer and we could see policemen’s helmets being knocked off as the coppers started to lose control. John, Cynthia and I dived into the back of the faithful old Austin Princess. John was shaking with fear as we slammed the doors behind us and he yelled, ‘For fuck’s sake, get us out of here. Let’s drive.’ The driver sped out of Heathrow as fast as he could and we gradually started to relax. We had been told to drive along the perimeter road alongside the runway and we were followed by a frantic horde of fans. Some were running and we soon lost them but others were on motorcycles and scooters. We seemed to have the biggest tail of any of the Beatle cars, probably because the Austin Princess was pretty famous by then.

  ‘Put your foot down and lose them,’ I yelled at the driver. Well, I always did enjoy Z-Cars. And we accelerated away from most of them. We started to relax but after a few minutes the driver said, ‘There is a motorcyclist following us. He has been behind from the airport.’ We looked back to see this sinister lone figure all in black leathers, carefully keeping a safe distance behind. I didn’t like the look of this guy at all and I ordered our driver to shake him off. The Princess lurched into a sequence of dramatic manoeuvres which succeeded only in making us all feel sick. The motorcycle was powerful and it was still on our tail.

  I was concerned and I was even more worried when John said, ‘Oh fuck it. Stop the car and let’s see what the guy wants.’ I was still trying to work out if I had the authority to countermand John’s order when the car drew to a halt and he opened the door.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ he said. ‘Why are you following us? Hop in the car and let’s have a chat.’

  The stranger took off his helmet, put his bike on its stand and stepped into the car. He had a look of amazement on his face as if he was stepping into a flying saucer. He was a bit scared but he wasn’t going to miss this for the world. John pulled down the occasional seat which faced the back seats and asked him to sit down. Then they had a conversation that ranged across the Beatles, the tour, the bike, and a host of other things for several minutes. John signed his autograph and the stranger shook hands, his day made, and drove off on his bike.

  John was jet-lagged from the flight, pissed off from the press conference and still shocked from the scare at the airport but he still had the ability to sit and be charming to a mysterious motorcyclist. I was horrified at the risk he had taken but John Lennon was his own man and I think he admired the bottle of the guy on the motorbike and felt he had earned himself a special one-to-one chat. For me, it was a nightmare. I was supposed to protect the guy, which is hard when he invites complete strangers into the car.

  Later, we got a huge bill from Heathrow for the damage at the airport. Evidently, nine cars were badly damaged by being flattened by marauding fans. But in the end we paid nothing for the damage as it was decided we could not be held financially responsible for every fan’s reaction to the Beatles.

  And if we thought the pace of life with the Beatles had been lively before, it now accelerated into a blur of endless hyper-activity. Back from America, we had offers from all over the world for Beatles tours. Brian was deluged with demands to meet people, have lunch, have dinner, take holidays.

  In the new headquarters next to the Palladium, Brian and I studied huge offers from Australia, South Africa, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Hong Kong, Japan and Sweden. Arthur Howes was pressing for another British tour. The boys had just nine days off before they had to start filming their first movie, which became known as A Hard Day’s Night once Ringo had come up with the quirky phrase. The demands on the boys to do TV and radio appearances, Press interviews, while still keeping up their output of song-writing was unbelievable and unprecedented. With the luxury of hindsight, I still marvel that they managed to maintain the quality of their work under such sustained pressure.

  By the end of March, EMI announced that they had received orders of over one million copies for the new Beatles single ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ in Britain alone. In America, the advance orders were more than double that figure. This meant number one hits on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, as the American fans caught up with their British counterparts in filling their record collections with Beatles songs, the sales in the United States were extraordinary. In the Billboard Hot 100 listing for 4 April 1964, the Beatles had records at numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 41, 46, 58, 65, 68 and 79. And the word had spread down under as well. In Australia, the Beatles occupied the top six positions.

  The pace never dropped. The Beatles finished the Hard Day’s Night film and accompanying album and were then lined up for concerts in Denmark, Holland and Hong Kong on their way to invade Australia. They were scheduled to fly out to Copenhagen on 4 June but the day before that Ringo collapsed at a photographic session in Barnes with tonsillitis and pharyngitis.

  He was whisked straight into University College Hospital and he had been in there for less that two hours when my phone rang with a harassed hospital administrator on the line begging for advice on how to handle the avalanche of telephone calls they were getting from anxious Beatles fans. The whole business of the hospital was being interrupted because the switchboard was jammed with calls. The street outside was blocked by fans but the police were handling that and the ambulances were getting through. But it was the switchboard that had gone into meltdown. The hospital rang Brian and he smoothly handed them over to me to deal with. What was I supposed to do? But I suggested they use their medical pull with the Post Office to put some extra lines in and that’s what they did.

  It was a nightmare for Brian. It was much too late to cancel the tour so we somehow had to find a temporary replacement drummer. This didn’t go down too well with the Beatles. George in particular refused even to consider such an idea. I don’t think George’s heart was ever really in the touring and he announced that if Ringo was not well enough to go, then none of them should go. George was quickly convinced that the whole tour should be cancelled. Any excuse not to go was very welcome to George and he grasped it with both hands. Fortunately, Paul, and even John, were quickly convinced by Brian that it was essential that the tour went ahead and Brian
used them to convince George to get his act together. It was time to bring on the substitute and Brian and George Martin came up with drum repairer-turned-drummer Jimmy Nichol, an anonymous session musician who had played with Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames. We organised a quick session that afternoon and Jimmy nervously went through six numbers with the three healthy Beatles to check him out.

  Jimmy passed the audition, although I don’t see how he could have failed because we really had no alternative and he joined John, Paul and George in Denmark, Holland, Hong Kong and on to Australia. The welcome there was quite extraordinary. Brian couldn’t believe that there were more fans than ever and they followed every inch of the tour in their thousands. The Beatles’ joint feeling of being trapped in a succession of boxes as they called it was intensified with an endless sequence of hotel rooms and concerts interrupted only by increasingly meaningless social rounds of meeting mayors and the local dignitaries. The Beatles hated it. More than 300,000 people surrounded their hotel in Adelaide hoping for a wave from the balcony. And there were crowds of over 250,000 in Melbourne. The boys were unnerved by the level of the enthusiasm. John told me he felt these huge gatherings were like the Nazi rallies in wartime Germany, which was why he would react by ‘sieg heiling’ to the crowd and impersonating Hitler to try to show the lunacy of it all.

  It was bad enough getting Ringo to the airport on 11 June. He had recovered enough to rejoin the boys and I had to get him safely on the plane. It was my job to organise all the transport and we relied on police help a great deal. I’d fixed up for Ringo to be brought to Hounslow Police Station where I could pick him up and take him to Heathrow. Ringo is not the most organised guy at the best of times but he had me speechless half-way through the obligatory press conference. As he was in the Queen’s Building fielding a sequence of mind-numbing enquiries from the ladies and gentlemen of the Press, I was asked by an official to have Ringo’s passport ready, just to avoid any possible delays. I crawled down behind the table and whispered up to Ringo, ‘Can I have your passport?’

  He looked a bit blank and replied, ‘I haven’t got it, Al.’

  I said, ‘Stop joking around, Ringo. We haven’t got much time.’

  But he wasn’t joking. I started to feel very hot under the collar. Travel arrangements were my responsibility and that surely included making sure the only Beatle still in the wrong country to join a world tour arrived at the airport with his passport. Ringo said it was in his suit pocket at home. Only, helpfully, he didn’t know which suit. I rang Maureen and mercifully she was in. After an age she managed to find the passport but by then we were running out of time. Maureen managed to get a neighbour to rush over on his motorbike with the vital document but it still hadn’t arrived when the final call for the flight went out. I turned to my friend, Whip Waterhouse, of Pan-Am, who had helped me out in so many tight corners. He breezily told Ringo to get on the plane and said to me that they’d get the passport out to him on the next flight. But by then, the world’s press had sniffed out a real story in amongst the showbiz hype and they challenged Whip about Ringo’s missing passport. How could he travel without it? Whip smiled and said, ‘Gentlemen, a Beatle is a Beatle the world over.’ As the plane took off, the door of the lounge burst open and Maureen’s motorcycling neighbour rushed in, just in time to see the jet carrying Ringo and Brian take off on the first leg of its trip to Australia.

  Ringo joined the boys in Melbourne on 14 June, leaving Jimmy Nichol surplus to requirements. He never seemed very happy about his brief experience with the greatest group in the world, although the boys rated him highly as a drummer. Brian gave him £500 and a gold watch inscribed to him from the boys and thought that was that. But there were rumours later that Jimmy may have thought that Brian had somehow blacklisted him after that to prevent him from ever cashing in on his fortnight of fame. I’m sure that’s nonsense. Brian was not that sort of guy. He was grateful to Jimmy for getting him out of a hole.

  The Australian tour was a huge success. The boys were seen by more than 200,000 people and smashed all earnings records. Even when they stopped unannounced to refuel at remote Darwin in the Northern Territory in the middle of the night, somehow several hundred fans found out about the secret stop-over and arrived to see their heroes. Remarkably, the Beatles never returned down under, but our other group on tour, Sounds Incorporated, became phenomenally popular over there and did tour after tour. They were strictly instrumental and became incredibly successful. They were pretty playful as well. I remember getting a middle of the night phone call from them accompanied by lots of squeals and giggles. They thought it would be fun to wake up Mr Fixit while actually in the act of making love to some co-operative groupies. I wasn’t that prudish, but that shocked me at the time.

  When the Beatles returned in triumph to London, one of the first important dates was 6 July for the charity Royal première of A Hard Day’s Night at the London Pavilion in front of Princess Margaret. The streets around Piccadilly Circus were closed by the police in expectation of fan trouble and more than 12,000 turned up to see the boys. My memory of that occasion was of outrage when the Rolling Stones refused to stand for the National Anthem. I suppose they thought they were making a point but they were the guests of the Beatles that night and I believe they should have shown much more respect.

  I was sitting next to John Lennon and in the row behind was Mick Jagger and the rest of the Stones. They were good friends of the boys. Of course, John is seen as the great rebel but he wasn’t really like that. In fact, he was first on his feet when the first bars of the National Anthem were played and all other the boys stood up. So did everyone else, except for the Rolling Stones. They sat sprawled out as an arrogant gesture of defiance. John was definitely not impressed.

  The boys were much more heartened by the scale of the welcome they received back home four days later when they travelled to Liverpool for the northern première at the Odeon. It is estimated that one third of all Liverpudlians saw the Beatles that day. There were thousands of fans lining the route from Speke Airport to the civic reception at the town hall. The Beatles thoroughly enjoyed celebrating their extraordinary success with old friends.

  A Hard Day’s Night was just brilliant. To think that John and Paul had created those fabulous songs while immersed in the whirlwind of success amazes me to this day. It topped the charts around the world as the film showed that pop movies don’t all have to be rubbish. The boys were unhappy about certain aspects but I thought it reflected some of the lunatic humour of those days. No wonder it’s been successful all over again.

  No one today has any idea of the pressure Brian put on all his artists. He worked them all very, very hard. The Beatles made stage appearances around Britain, fitted in a trip to Sweden and then went off on their first nationwide tour of the United States. Brian and I plotted 32 shows at 26 concerts in 24 cities in 34 days. If you mentioned a workload like that to one of today’s bands, I reckon they would collapse with shock on the spot.

  But the Beatles did it. They did not complain because this was what they had been working towards through all those long, badly-paid sessions in Hamburg. They had served their apprenticeship and earned their position at the very Toppermost of the Poppermost. But it was hard for them. Most of the time, the boys said they did not know which city they were in. Their lives became a long and bewildering sequence of aeroplanes, hotel rooms and concert halls. They started in San Francisco on 18 August and, from the moment the crowds besieged them at the airport, they almost never stopped.

  At the airport they were herded into a fenced enclosure for photographs but manic pressure from fans smashed down the fences and the Beatles were whisked to safety just in time. Even worse at the Hilton Hotel, the Beatles were corralled up on the fifteenth floor, but even with the place crawling with police and security men, a middle-aged woman was beaten unconscious and robbed. Her cries went unheeded because the police thought she was just another hysterical fan.

  Brian was cornered
in San Francisco by a persistent American millionaire called Charles O Finlay, who was the owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball team. Mr Finlay was miffed that the Beatles had not included Kansas in the coast-to-coast tour of the States. And he was about to put that right. He had even announced his mission to the people of Kansas City before he’d left. Mr Finlay offered Brian $50,000 to do a single gig. When that was turned down he offered $100,000. Brian turned that down as well. Brian knew the only possible day they could fit in a Kansas concert was 17 September. But that was a precious rest day for the boys and he was not about to change it. Mr Finlay promptly wrote out a cheque for $150,000 and Brian decided it was time he talked to the boys. Brian told me afterwards he had started to warm to Charles O Finlay. He admired his single-minded determination and he quite liked his money. The Beatles were in their suite in the hotel playing another pointless card game and when Brian put the offer to them John took the lead and said, ‘We’ll do whatever you want.’ The other three nodded in agreement. As it turned out, torrential rain helped to keep the crowd down in Kansas and Mr Finlay made a loss. It was only just over a year since the Beatles had played The Cavern.

  That huge American tour was an amazing experience. The boys were constantly surprised by the excesses of America. After they had played Kansas, the hotel sold the bed linen to two Chicago businessmen who cut the sheets and pillow-cases used by the Beatles into three-inch squares and sold them on to delighted fans at $10 a time. In New York City, guys on the street were selling allegedly genuine cans of Beatle-breath and there were endless requests for used towels or even bathwater. The Beatles tried to laugh off the excesses but it wasn’t always so funny, especially when disabled people were wheeled in hoping a touch from a Beatle hand would have magical healing powers.