Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  My song was fine up to the middle-eight: I had one but wasn’t happy with it. John started telling me what I needed, which I thought was out of order because I’d been writing songs a year or more and he was some upstart with no professional experience.

  But he came up with something, sang me what he had and I was impressed. “We know that—we’ll get by / Just wait and see / Just like the—song tells us / The best things in life are free.” It just flowed, and I thought it was great. I used it in the song.22

  As Gentle points out, there was no question of Lennon being given a credit for his contribution, let alone payment. It was just one of those things, and the moment passed. John may have forgotten about it, because he never mentioned it.

  A clear highlight of the week was the thrill of signing autographs. Two extant sets from this week were obtained in the same place at the same time, when the tour Dormobile collided with a car at the crest of the hill coming down into Banff. It was Sunday evening and the entourage, temporarily relocating from Inverness, was en route to Fraserburgh twenty-four hours early. Gentle had the wheel but rough was the impact: everything inside the van was sent flying, and while most emerged merely shook up, Tommy Moore was hit full in the face, losing teeth and receiving other injuries. The sound of the collision brought people out of their houses, and, seeing from the van’s decoration that its passengers were entertainers, two teenage girls ran to fetch autograph books. While waiting for an ambulance to speed Tommy to the hospital, everyone signed. These are the first known Beatles signatures, the first of tens of thousands and maybe more. One set extended over five pages:

  The Beatles. Paul Ramon. Johnny Lennon. Carl Harrison

  love Stuart‖

  Thomas Moore, Drums

  Love Johnny Gentle

  With best wishes, Margie xxxx

  In the other book the autographs are spread across two pages. As the star, Johnny Gentle got one to himself, and the five Beatals (as Stuart has written it) are crowded on to the other: Stuart, Johnny Lennon, Carl Harrison, Paul Ramon and Thomas Moore Drums.

  This was stardom. They had made it. Hi there honey, want my autograph? Though not too incapacitated to sign his name, Moore was also seeing stars in another sense. The ambulance rushed him down the hill to Chalmers Hospital, and the four guitar-playing Beatles waved it off, not knowing when they’d see him next.a

  At the fishing port of Fraserburgh, in the northeast corner of Aberdeenshire, they checked into the Station Hotel for two nights knowing they’d no means of paying the bill. The advance given to the Beatles by Allan Williams had evaporated, and so quickly was the tour arranged they didn’t seem to realize they’d only be paid at the end of the week. Larry Parnes would enjoy relating a tale (possibly partly true) of a reverse-charge phone call received from Scotland on the Monday morning—Johnny Lennon asking, “Where’s the bloody money?”23

  They hung around all day in Fraserburgh before playing in the evening. Paul sent another postcard home—“It’s gear. I’ve been asked for my autograph”24—and Stuart sent one to “Rod, Diz, Ducky” at Gambier Terrace, omitting any mention of how he was being bullied: “Going like a bomb, love every minute, Scotland beautiful, here particularly. See you Monday. I hope.” By mid-afternoon, when it seemed they might have to play without a drummer, someone went off to Banff and fetched Tommy Moore from the hospital. He sat behind his kit that night battered and bruised, his face inflamed, his lip stitched, his mouth missing teeth—and, as he would relate, every few minutes John turned around and howled with glee at his misfortune. How Moore hated him.25

  Away four days now, the bloom of being on the road long gone, the Beatles were missing home comforts and a measure of human kindness … but found both here in Fraserburgh, and as a consequence it became the place they would most remember. Situated near the harbor, Dalrymple Hall—a compact ballroom with a seated balcony—was half empty because the town’s young men were out on the boats, but there were some particularly enthusiastic young lasses present. Although just 17, Margaret Jack had passed her driving test and had the use of her father’s car; it had already been arranged that during the dance she would stand with Mrs. Gentle—the object of much attention—and, in the event of any hysteria at the end, drive them away to safety. As the evening progressed, though, Margaret and her friends thought Johnny nowhere near as edgy and exciting as His Group.

  After it was over she was waiting behind the wheel for Mr. and Mrs. Gentle to appear when, chased by an excited pack of girls—and very much loving it—the Beatles came running down the Dalrymple’s back stairs and jumped in. Mr. George Jack’s red and brown Vauxhall Estate was the first step on a road that would lead them, five years later, to a Wells Fargo armored truck. Margaret ended up taking everyone back to her parents’ house, 145 Strichen Road. “They were highly entertaining and filled the house with music, playing the piano and offering autographs for all the family. I liked Paul most: he introduced himself to me as Paul Ramon and was lovely, a really nice person. I ran them back to their hotel at the end of the evening and made arrangements to see Paul the next day.”26

  While Paul was out and about with Margaret Jack in her dad’s car, John piqued the interest of her friend, 15-year-old Margaret Gauld. She was sitting on a sand dune with another friend who suddenly said, “Look, there’s the group that was on last night.” They made to approach them in a way that seemed casual.

  We started chatting and after a while they asked if there was a café nearby. We said we’d show them, then they asked us to join them; I had a chilled orange and so did Johnny Lennon—that’s what he called himself—and he insisted on paying for me with what turned out to be his final shilling.

  We sat in the café for ages and it was great fun. Johnny was a character, a really funny guy, cracking me up all the time. I told him he looked like “Sach,” one of the Bowery Boys. He said his shirt had been torn the night before by some girls grabbing at him, so I took it home, up to my bedroom, and mended it, and then I went back with some softies [bread rolls] with strawberry jam which I made for them. I was smitten.27

  Paul and Margaret Jack didn’t have long together, but she showed him around some local villages and they went to look at Cairnbulg Castle. Here was the fresh air to restore his tired mind. The two had a sweet moment of time together, enjoying each other’s company before parting with an innocent kiss. “He was the perfect gentleman,” says Margaret, “and when I dropped him back in town he asked if I would go to see them in Peterhead on the Saturday. I said I couldn’t because I knew I was going to be away.”

  By late afternoon they’d been booted out of the Station Hotel, when it was realized they’d no money. They were moving back to Inverness. Margaret Gauld says, “My friend Alison and I went to see them leaving Fraserburgh in their Dormobile. John came across and pleaded with me to go with them but I was only 15 and wouldn’t have been allowed. They gave me their autographs: To Margaret, with love Johnny Lennon and To Margaret, with love Paul Ramon.”

  The second half of the week had a straight run of engagements: Wednesday night in a small church hall in the distillery town of Keith; Thursday in the sizable Town Hall ballroom at Forres; Friday in the big Regal Ballroom in Nairn; and then, finally, Saturday back beyond Fraserburgh to Peterhead. Here they played in the compact side street Rescue Hall, where a furniture exhibition was cleared away just in time for the locals to jive. Margaret Jack in Fraserburgh was very much an exception: young people hereabouts didn’t have cars, and because public transport ended early the promoters arranged free buses from the outlying villages and slate-gray dwellings that dotted the farmlands.28 For many, the bus to the dance was the excitement of the week, getting dressed up and collected from tiny hamlets and taken to a slightly bigger town where a hall was lit up and lively. Musicians passed through week after week after week, and one time it just happened to be the Beatles; it was so low-key it’s little wonder there are no more photographs. As George would remember, with only some exaggeration, �
�We were playing to nobody in little halls, until the pubs cleared out when about five Scottish Teds would come in and look at us. That was all. Nothing happened.”29

  The train delivered them back into Liverpool on Monday, May 30, ten days after leaving. Mostly, the tour had been plain awful; George, for one, never had a good word to say about it. But, as Paul would reflect: “It was a vital experience for us, because after that we knew it was no breeze—you’d have to work hard and sort out where the money was coming from. It taught us a lot of lessons. It gave us an insight into what it could be like.”30

  The Beatles had played seven times in eight days—more than in the previous five months combined—and they’d learned plenty. They now knew themselves and one another better, and while Tommy Moore remained with them only another week or two, the others stayed put, and where the dust settled was who and where they were.

  Two years later, the tour would be described on a Beatles management handout as “rough and hard stuff, but it led to a beginning.” Less poetically, it was the beginning. Unlike the other groups who’d auditioned at Allan Williams’ empty Wyvern club, the Beatles had little stage experience, and as a rock group, as a five-piece band with electric guitars and drums, they had none. The tour happened the wrong way round for them: they went on the road and found out about one another before they’d performed any local bookings. It was only now, on their return, that they would play closer to their own backyard.

  * * *

  * Thomas Henry Moore, born Liverpool, September 29, 1931. He died there in the month he turned 50, having given only a couple of unchallenging interviews about his time in the group.

  † Allan Richard Williams, born in Bootle, north Liverpool, February 21, 1930.

  ‡ It seems none of the Beatles took a camera to Scotland.

  § Decca, Philips … it little mattered the advert was wrong, as they all were, the entire week. Larry Parnes wasn’t particular about such details.

  ‖ In both autograph books Stuart followed his signature with a monogram. Though difficult to distinguish, it doesn’t appear to be a blend of d and s for de Staël; it may be f, v and s for Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe.

  a The crash made the local press. Nestling among news of church jumble sales and the Townswomen’s Guild was a brief but detailed description of their Dormobile’s collision with a car. The other driver was George Merson, a “farm grieve” (estate manager). The Banffshire Journal of May 24, 1960, became the first newspaper in the world to write about the Beatles … and not the last to misspell it “Beetles.”

  FIFTEEN

  MAY 31–AUGUST 15, 1960

  DRIVE AND BASH

  The day the Beatles got back to Liverpool, the Echo ran a full-page editorial-ad for Nems. The store at 12–14 Whitechapel was the first occupant in a new-build, and Brian and Clive Epstein—but mostly Brian—designed every aspect of the interior in conjunction with architects. A lift and a mahogany staircase reached “four floors of magnificent showrooms featuring televisions, records and domestic appliances” … but the emphasis was on records, Brian’s preserve: classical on the ground floor, popular, jazz and “Continental” in the basement. As the Echo stated, “The ambition of Nems is to supply ANY record that is named—and to produce it almost immediately.” Nems of Whitechapel promised to be the best record shop in the north and, from the moment it opened, it was. Now 25, Brian wasn’t interested in second best.

  It wasn’t just that he knew how to manage, it was the unabashed relish with which he went about it. The boy who’d been such an abject failure academically held his head as high as any who prospered. The ground floor featured a 42ft length of U-shaped counter and a suspended ceiling covered with more than a thousand LP sleeves—it was the first time in Britain such a ceiling had been created and was soon copied by others.

  Delegating was always difficult, Brian struggling to accommodate standards that didn’t match his own, but he chose staff well. He kept Peter Brown as manager of the Great Charlotte Street branch and among the thirty or so new appointments at Whitechapel was a full-time secretary, Beryl Adams. They all learned, the hard way, to live with his insistence on perfection, and to recognize his mood swings. Mr. Brian’s behavior earned their loyalty but kept them ever wary; arrogant and adorable, cutting and charming, flawed but fair, here was a man they could love and hate in the same breath. He operated between the shop floor, a small office in the basement and a big one above the shop: he’d taken a good chunk of the Whitechapel development’s upper-story offices too, enabling him to add the Nems name in four huge letters on the fascia, emphasizing (tastefully, of course) its preeminence.

  Not everyone realized that his RADA London voice, refined air, immaculate appearance, manicured nails and use of male fragrance (at a time when barely no man in Liverpool touched it) indicated a “queer”—people simply weren’t used to thinking that way—but to those who knew he was patently identifiable. It was precisely two years since his harrowing ordeal in Sefton Park at the hands of a violent blackmailer, and his assailant had been released from jail. Brian’s friend Yankel Feather would never forget a certain conversation they had in the shop: “I said, ‘Brian, I wish you would look at me and not over my shoulder when we’re talking.’ He said, ‘I am looking at that young man on the corner. He has just come out of prison and he is the young man who attacked me.’ I said, ‘You’d better ring the police then,’ and he said, ‘Oh no, I am taking him out to lunch.’ ”1

  The opening of the new Nems on May 31 brought traffic in central Liverpool to a standstill. Brian had excellent relations with the record companies (both Decca and EMI provided paid ads for the Echo’s special page) and he arranged with Decca for the actor-musician Anthony Newley to make a personal appearance and cut the ribbon. There was a huge turnout, spilling across the width of the street. Brian had met several pop stars but it hadn’t quite been his scene before: he was shy, blushed in their presence, and was overanxious not to bore them. But he got along famously with Newley, and so did Queenie and Harry when Brian drove the Londoner back to Queens Drive for cocktails and dinner. Brian thought it was great that Newley was normal, natural and without pretensions, concluding this was “how a real star should behave.”2

  In its first trading month, Nems Whitechapel achieved twice the turnover of the Walton Road store’s record counter for all of 1959. Such retail muscle deserved a special discount and Brian made proposals to Decca, EMI and his other main accounts, as a consequence of which he became one of the first visitors to EMI House, the great organization’s new purpose-built London headquarters. A businesslike discussion ensued with R. N. (Ron) White, EMI Records sales manager, Brian asking for a 2.5 percent discount if Nems achieved EMI record sales over £20,000 a year. White insisted this wasn’t company policy but Brian won the day: White consulted the EMI directors and came back with a convenient fudge—they would call it a “Cooperative Advertising Allowance.” Such was EMI’s fear that others in the retail trade might learn of it, prompting a flurry of similar requests, White asked that whenever Brian wrote to him about it he marked the envelope Strictly Confidential. The secret was safe with Brian, whose initiative and polite perseverance saw EMI write a check to Nems for £564 at the end of the first twelve months.

  Five years after EMI appointed (Sir) Joseph Lockwood as chairman, its image had grown in parallel with its fortune: the British company was a global player in its many fields of operation. At 20 Manchester Square, just off Baker Street, EMI House was among the first office blocks of a new postwar epoch, a bright light Sixties building with eye-catching architectural features, such as an open balcony on each story that looked down to the main entrance. Once-scattered staff came together for the first time in the offices. The popular A&R departments, formerly in Great Castle Street, occupied a wing of the fourth floor. The Parlophone setup was typical: George Martin and his assistant Ron Richards were in separate outer offices (as the boss, George’s had the piano for routining musical arrangements) and their re
spective secretaries Judy Lockhart Smith and Shirley Spence shared an office in between. George and Judy maintained, too, their love affair, of now perhaps four years’ standing; the utmost discretion remained essential because Sheena was refusing to grant George a divorce.

  The man who’d delivered rock and roll to the masses was now out of the army, his tour of duty done. The pelvis-thrusting, hip-swiveling, lip-curling young Elvis Presley who’d sexually terrorized America stood tall as a model patriot, tolerated and for the most part tolerable. He looked leaner and fitter than before, in fact he looked just great, but he just wasn’t the Elvis they’d drafted back in ’58. Three weeks after returning as a civilian superstar he was in Miami, wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie in a TV special with Frank Sinatra, who’d never before had a good word to say about him. Everything was fine now because rock was tamed … wasn’t it?

  In Liverpool, diehards were struggling a little: his new single “A Mess of Blues” was all right, but it wasn’t “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Baby Let’s Play House,” though surely his next one’ll be great. Other wonderful records were coming out of America anyway. Rock was missing in action at corporate level, but the robust, vitally unconventional independent labels across the States—the bravura blend of two immigrant classes, blacks and Jews—continued to pump out great new R&R, R&B and more. Prize masters were picked up for Britain by Decca’s London label and lapped up in Liverpool, where groups of young men stood in browseries at Nems and elsewhere, absorbing every note before going out to play them in the clubs and ballrooms.

  It seems everyone was blown away by “Money (That’s What I Want)” by Barrett Strong. Disc’s review half got it—“Girl group and jungly rhythm group make plenty of noise and half the time it seems as if Barrett’s struggling to overcome them”3—but more yet was excitement, beat, riffs, an irresistible sparse arrangement, soulful vocals and a lyric that announced the singer didn’t want sex, he wanted money. The London label revealed the source of the recording as “Anna, Detroit,” and it was only later that the full implication of this was realized: it was the first spark from a new musical expressway, the moment when the black urban Detroit sound jump-started across the Atlantic, a pulsing production line of Motor City rhythm and melody. “Money” was the second Tamla (or Tamla-related) record released in Britain, and though it wasn’t a hit, it was heard, and things were never quite the same again.