Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  The Vipers’ debut session was on October 4 in Abbey Road Number 2 studio, 7–10PM, after they’d worked their day jobs. The sound was rightly rough: this was 1920s Chicago rent party music, call-and-response singing, strummed guitars, plucked bass and fingered percussive washboard. It was George’s first session with untrained musicians, just him and a group of coffee-bar players.

  Though new to the studio, the Vipers had the swagger of youth and were prepared not to be impressed, but as their guitarist and singer Wally Whyton would recall, they took an immediate and prolonged liking to their producer: “George Martin was amazing. We were a fairly eccentric bunch and thought we were Jack the Lads. Every night the 2i’s was packed out and everybody wanted to see the Vipers, so we were full of our own importance, but George was an absolute gentleman, a toff. He never got fazed if we fell off stools, or were late, or didn’t have the money to get home. He was amazing, pulling down a minor salary at EMI and producing all those records.”21

  The Vipers were seen on BBC-tv and had other publicity, but their first record didn’t sell. Skiffle was a slow boom coming—primed, lit, not yet exploding. Of more pressing concern within EMI was the fact that George had missed landing the big fish: under managers John Kennedy and Larry Parnes, Tommy Hicks very quickly became Tommy Steele, Britain’s first rock and roll star, all screams and dreams.

  Snap decisions about talent were made all the time by all A&R men, and everyone made mistakes, but this came at a bad moment, because the gossip within the record business was that Parlophone was being shut down. Oscar Preuss had warned George that EMI’s top brass might do this one day. Parlophone’s viable artists would be assigned to Columbia or HMV and some let go. The general manager of the record division, C. H. Thomas, was actively pushing for it, intending to shift George Martin to HMV as junior producer under Walter Ridley. If he was to stave off the threat, he had to come up with more hits.

  Brian Epstein was in Soho too, but not at the 2i’s. The clubs he patronized were more discreet, where men danced with danger and perhaps, before the night was out, did something that could see them beaten up or behind bars. Though hardly RADA’s only homosexual, Brian had no known relationships here, instead finding or contemplating “trade” in more perilous avenues. He left Bayswater during the term and found necessarily cheaper accommodation—a flat at the southern end of Finchley Road, by Swiss Cottage.

  RADA was school. Students had to stand and bid good morning to the teacher—a difficult transition for an adult who’d spent six years in business. He was also troubled by the “conceit, hypocrisy and narcissism” of his fellow actors.22 Brian’s five tutors were pleased with him though. His “sensitivity” and “intelligence” were complimented in the written reports, and all agreed that he showed promise as an actor. He was especially good as the playwright Konstantin in Chekhov’s The Seagull, one tutor saying he played the climactic suicide scene “with some power and sensitivity.” It was only a year after he’d been actively contemplating his own. Fellow student Joanna Dunham was electrified by the performance: “It was obviously therapeutic to him, slightly frightening to watch. When Konstantin tore the bandage off his head and raged at his mother it was all too real.”23

  Students were given five weeks off at Easter 1957; Brian took a temporary job in the record department at book and record shop Ascroft & Daw on Charing Cross Road, bringing the experience gained at Nems and taking away new ideas for presentation and stock control. He spent the Wednesday evening after Easter, April 24, at the Arts Theatre Club, at the world premiere of Jean Genet’s The Balcony; afterward, returning by Tube to Swiss Cottage, something else was urging his mind.

  A few hours later, Brian wrote an eleven-page account of just the first stage of a harrowing nightmare, intended to be his explanation of events should he be sent straight to prison and/or (judging from the tone of the text) perhaps take his own life. The document chronicled how he’d found himself irresistibly drawn to a man in a public toilet inside Swiss Cottage station; how he and the man watched each other warily after leaving the station, loitering in the nearby streets; how they eventually talked and discussed a place suitable for action; and how this man, suddenly revealing himself as a plainclothes policeman and joined by a colleague, arrested him for “persistently importuning.” The likely sentence, as they probably enjoyed telling him, was six months in jail.

  It was a standard police trap—and, ever in thrall to danger, Brian had been an easy catch. The constables twisted his arm up behind his back and frog-marched him to a police station where he was charged with “persistently importuning several men.” “Several?” the duty sergeant inquired. “Four,” the arresting officer confirmed. Released on bail, Brian was compelled to appear at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court in the morning.

  I do not think I am an abnormally weak-willed person—the effort and determination with which I have rebuilt my life these past few months have, I assure you, been no mean effort. I believed that my own will-power was the best thing with which to overcome my homosexuality. And I believe my life may even have attained a public success.

  I was determined to go through the horror of this world. I feel deeply, for I have always felt deeply, for the persecuted, for the Jews, the colored people, for the old, and society’s misfits. When I made money I planned to devote and give what I could to these people.

  I am not sorry for myself. My worst times and punishments are over. Now, through the wreckage of my life by society, my being will stain and bring the deepest distress to all my devoted family and few friends. The damage, the lying criminal methods of the police in importuning me and consequently capturing me, leaves me cold, stunned and finished.24

  After this, Brian’s account (composed over several days) varies from the court records: he wrote that he entered a plea of guilty, the ledger confirms the opposite—he was remanded on bail and instructed to reappear four days later. He did this at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, where records show he again pleaded not guilty and was remanded a second time, pending the submission of a medical report. Four weeks after his torment began, Brian was sentenced at Bow Street to two years’ probation and directed to have medical treatment—probably psychiatric analysis, possibly electric shock therapy. In the meantime, Brian stayed at RADA for the summer term and tried to put the shattering ordeal behind him.

  The “Parlophone to end” rumors reached their zenith in February 1957, having gained such strength that EMI issued a statement insisting the story had “no foundation,” and that there was no truth “Mr. Martin [would be] leaving EMI.”25 It was a pleasing denial, but there was no smoke without fire and the directors’ vote must have been close. Chairman Lockwood prevailed: he said that as EMI needed to produce more British talent, it would be counterproductive to reduce the number of output labels. George’s position and Parlophone’s saving came at a cost, though. EMI reappointed the former Columbia A&R head Norman Newell with a unique brief to sign artists and produce records across all the company’s labels. No longer would every Parlophone recording at Abbey Road be a George Martin production; and from this point on, more than before, Parlophone was regularly in the charts, having many hits.

  George was creating successes with the Vipers, and also with his first rock and roll singer, the actor Jim Dale. The Vipers records were a particular influence on budding skiffle groups, including those in Liverpool. The Eddie Clayton group (Richy Starkey on drums) played several Vipers songs and Roy Trafford painted “The Cumberland Gap” on his tea-chest bass. In the Quarry Men, John Lennon sang both “Cumberland Gap” and “Maggie May,” a necessarily bowdlerized version of the nineteenth-century seaman’s ballad about a robbing Liverpool prostitute conducting her business on Lime Street.b

  Then there were the records George had to make. When the British music business had a few calypso-crazy weeks in spring 1957, a time when London recording studios swung almost solely to the sounds of sweet Jamaica, the head of Parlophone was cutting tracks with his black South
African singer Peter Lowe, his British-based Jamaican Ben Bowers, Eve Boswell, Edna Savage (“Me Head’s in De Barrel”), guitarist Bert Weedon, saxophonist Frank Weir (“Calypso Romance”) and the Kirchins jazz band (“Calypso!!”). None troubled the charts.c

  The Vipers and Jim Dale aside, George’s main success in this period was with a humorous novelty jazz record by Johnny Dankworth, “Experiments with Mice,” which had four weeks in the top ten. Dankworth’s music was really better suited to the new LP format, however, which—because of its higher price—was affordable more to adults and so targeted at that section of the market. Record companies expected LPs to be made in a day: twenty-five to thirty-five minutes of music to be rehearsed, recorded, mixed and prepared for mastering. George produced an album by Johnny Dankworth and his Orchestra in under six hours in EMI Number 2 studio in March 1957. It was achievable if the musicians knew their pieces and were adequately prepared; if it wasn’t achieved, if an LP took longer to make, the A&R manager could be reproached in an internal memorandum.

  Amid all this studio work, other areas of George’s daily life were complex. Sheena gave birth to their second child (a boy, Gregory) in January 1957, despite which this wasn’t and never had been, by all known accounts, a marriage abundant in joy and happiness. There was still a lot of old guilt flying around, Sheena suffered agoraphobia, and George was always working. At some point in this period, George and his secretary began a relationship. Judy Smith, the “Miss Lockhart Smith” who’d coolly greeted him on his first day at Parlophone, had become his ally, protector and promoter. Where once she’d been Oscar Preuss’s secretary so now she was George’s, and over time an affair began to develop—not one entered into lightly by either side, considering the consequences. Both parties could be—had to be—terribly discreet. “Judy had this incredible upper-class accent and George was clearly that way inclined,” says a former colleague. “She used to say a raised what? at the end of sentences. He was dazzled by her and by her upbringing, completely dazzled.” It was an office relationship, kept secret from almost every EMI colleague. George Martin had started to lead a double life.

  Brian Epstein’s horrendous court ordeal dragged on through the start of the summer term, but he continued to make progress as an actor. Entry to RADA’s second year was dependent on success in a Mid-Course Test, and Brian passed it. But he was now weary of the undiluted company of actors. “Nowhere,” he would write, “could one discover such phoney relationships nor witness hypocrisy practiced on so grand a scale, almost as an art.” The old restlessness was back again. “Was there, I wondered, no job I could stick for longer than a year?”26 Only Brian could have engineered such a complete turnaround.

  His withdrawal from the second year at RADA annoyed the academy and baffled his parents. Using the security of their wealth to change his mind midstream, and mess everyone about, was something he’d done since infancy. They knew the behavior pattern, but still this was a move they didn’t see coming. Brian told them he was returning to Liverpool to stay, to settle down; he wanted to throw himself into the family business “and make an increasing and lifelong success of it.”27 And so Harry and Queenie came up with another winning plan, one that might maintain his interest: instead of sending Brian back to Hoylake, Nems would expand into Liverpool city center for the first time, opening a three-floor shop on Great Charlotte Street, opposite Blackler’s department store. It would sell every kind of domestic appliance and boast a sizable record department: ground floor and basement. British record sales in 1957 were on course to top eighty million—a huge year-on-year increase fueled by rising teenage spending power.

  An attraction for Brian was that Clive (now completing his National Service) would comanage the shop with him, although Brian would keep exclusive control of the record department. He threw himself into the challenge, designing systems and policy, establishing contacts, choosing and overseeing the shopfitting, and ordering the stock. Several examples of his business correspondence survive and they all burst with energy, strength of purpose, dedication to duty, clarity of thought, attention to detail and an ability to express himself.

  The Liverpool Echo display announcement that Brian wrote—NEMS LTD COME TO TOWN!—ran on the front page on December 7, 1957, immediately under a classified ad for a Quarry Men appearance. They were maybe half an inch apart. The grand opening was performed by recording star Anne Shelton, and a photograph shows a large crowd of Liverpool adults pressed keenly forward, while Brian—an elegant young man, stylishly assured—stares with pride into the camera.d

  Nems in Liverpool was nothing less than the success it had to be. The business of selling records in the city center was competitive but Brian quickly generated good profits. He implemented the stock control system he’d observed at Ascroft & Daw, where each record was kept in a separate folder, and as copies ran low staff would let a string dangle, enabling him to see the ordering history at a glance, and which required restocking. Brian’s own experience of record shops often left him frustrated—product was frequently unavailable, the customer leaving the shop empty-handed. Brian shaped a policy where not only did Nems rarely run out, but when a customer wanted a record, no matter how obscure, he’d order at least two extra copies, because if one person wanted it, others also might. Nems at 50 Great Charlotte Street was quickly rewarded with a reputation as the shop where a customer could get anything, which made it the first port-of-call for many. After 4PM each day, a steady stream of blazered schoolboys washed in—Paul McCartney, George Harrison and plenty more—to check out the latest sounds in one of Nems’ three ground-floor listening booths, known in the business as “browseries.”

  Brian was in the shop from 6AM and left at 10PM or later. On Sundays, when it was closed, he’d be there ordering stock; on Wednesday afternoons, when like most shops in Liverpool Nems had “half-day closing,” he dressed the windows. Clive ran his “white goods” departments similarly. Male staff wore suits, the women wore white dresses with “Nems” embroidered on the breast pocket; customers were greeted as “sir” and “madam.” There were specific forms of management address too: Clive was Mr. Clive, Brian was Mr. Brian, and, when he dropped by, Harry was Mr. Harry. “Nems was an honest, hardworking, decent firm, dead straight, very much respected,” says Margaret Cooney, an employee from the start. “Brian could be temperamental, but he was a good boss. I wouldn’t say anything detrimental about him at all. He was always immaculately dressed, and you knew when he was in the shop because it smelled of aftershave.”28

  One of Brian’s routines, self-appointed, was to compile Nems’ own Top Twenty chart. He liked dealing with the pop side, and through relations with record companies felt he was maintaining an attachment to show business.29 He gathered fresh sales data and crunched the numbers twice daily, to keep Nems’ exhibited Top Twenty bang up to date, and he gave a weekly cumulative chart to both Melody Maker and The Record Mirror, which processed his ranked 1–20 positions, along with the same data from other shops, to produce national charts. (The Record Mirror also showed Nems’ chart separately within its spread of shop top tens.)

  George Martin’s second visit to America, his first after joining EMI, had a pronounced impact. He and Ron Goodwin had come up with “Skiffling Strings,” a brisk tune combining skiffle with a light orchestra; it did little at home but Capitol picked it up, renamed it “Swinging Sweethearts” (skiffle being only a British fad), and invited Goodwin over for promotion. George and the publisher Sydney Bron went too. It was October 1957.

  The party worked its way across the States, starting in New York, stopping in Philadelphia for the TV show American Bandstand, and ending in Hollywood, where George met Capitol Records’ director of international repertoire, the producer Dave Dexter, Jr. It was Dexter who received all the records mailed across from England and decided which ones Capitol would release. EMI expected pretty much all of them to be issued, and actively promoted, but from the hundreds of discs sent Dexter’s way in 1957, he picked just eighte
en and supported two at most. (Eight of the eighteen were George Martin productions—he was more “successful” in this regard than his colleagues.) So pathetically small was the figure, bad blood was already coursing between the parent company in London and its recalcitrant Hollywood teenager. EMI hoped George’s visit to the Capitol Tower might put family relations on a better footing, but actually they worsened: from five hundred British masters diligently offered in 1958, only sixteen were selected … and still some of Dexter’s colleagues thought this too many. As he’d note in his autobiography, “Capitol’s sales chief complained that I was releasing ‘too many damned British dogs.’ ”30

  Though hopping mad, EMI was fearful of forcing the issue because of anti-trust, the American law that regulates competitive business. Capitol laid it on thick, saying that if EMI was seen to be bossing them about, the English company could incur heavy fines and even be made to surrender its stockholding. Paul Marshall—probably the most respected US record business lawyer of his time, representing many companies—says this was quite false: “There was no provision in the United States for anti-trust laws which would have prevented EMI from instructing Capitol what to do, but Capitol’s lawyer scared the people in London into thinking there might be a problem.”31 With much embarrassment, EMI began offering its Capitol rejects to other labels—a policy announced by the NME on July 4, 1958. It was Independence Day for Capitol, and a bad one for EMI, since it was known throughout the US business that any tapes being hawked around the little league had already been rejected by a major.

  The day George Martin and Ron Goodwin were at Capitol, Frank Sinatra was in there to finish recording his album Come Fly with Me. Feeling like “the country cousins from England,” they watched as “The Voice,” with Billy May and Nelson Riddle, completed a masterpiece, and stood quietly while the star kicked up a stink over the album artwork.32 Days after returning to England, George set about finding himself a Voice—and quickly landed Jeremy Lubbock, a young London nightclub pianist/singer who sounded more like Sinatra than the real thing. George replicated the arrangements and production he’d heard in Hollywood and had no success at all.