Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Lou Steen

  I could never get on the first three rows in the Cavern. One girl would get there first and save them for about fifteen others. It was a clique and they all used to take turns. The closest I ever got was the fourth row—and I was probably the second person to arrive that day.

  Barbara Houghton

  The all-night sessions really heated up but they could begin cold; one time somebody wanted to borrow George’s leather jacket but he said no because “the people will wonder who that skeleton in the corner is”—he thought he was that skinny.

  Beryl Johnson

  Pete used to crack a one-liner, not often but every now and then, and make the others laugh. They could hear what he said but we couldn’t. But otherwise it was definitely three and one. The impression was that he wasn’t there, really, like the invisible man.

  Lindy Ness

  One time a rat ran down the stairs into the Cavern. Everyone was screaming and Paddy Delaney was chasing it with a long stick, and then the Beatles came on and you forgot everything. It was so exciting.

  Bobby Brown

  Paul was my favorite (he had the eyes) but Pete was handsome and wonderful. He was sizzling, sexy and quiet—very shy, very understated. He wasn’t one of the Beatles in that he kept himself in the background and wasn’t a womanizer, whereas Paul and John talked to everybody, especially at the coffee bar. Pete didn’t have the humor and he wasn’t forthcoming. It was them and him.

  Barbara Houghton

  I never got off with boys at any Beatles show—your whole focus was on the stage.

  Lou Steen

  In “Memphis,” John sang “Hurry-home drops trickling from her sty” instead of “trickling from her eye.” But despite all his mucking about, whenever John sang—it didn’t matter if it was rock and roll or a love song—he delivered complete emotional intensity.

  Lindy Ness

  Lots of girls thought George was lovely, though mostly to mother him.

  Liz Tibbott-Roberts

  Their signature tune was “What’d I Say,” the final number. It often lasted ten minutes or more, with all the fans involved in the frenzied and extended Huuuuh and Hooooh calls.

  Clive Walley

  When they did “Honey Don’t” they used to do a little foot shuffle in the middle.

  Lou Steen

  When the Beatles first started to do their own songs there was a little bit of hostility, a barrier—playing new numbers is always a bit tricky—but then we were won over. They were breaking down prejudices.

  Geoff Davies

  Paul was my favorite because he was so pretty, so angelic. But I watched John. I knew I could take Paul home to meet my mum but if I took John home she wouldn’t be best pleased.

  Liz Tibbott-Roberts

  George sang [Buddy Holly’s] “Raining in My Heart” as “raining in the yard.”

  Lindy Ness

  When Pete sang, the other Beatles played but from the side, leaving the stage to him. He looked like he used to hate it because he was so self-conscious.

  Barbara Houghton

  Paul was my favorite. I went with him to the Grapes, not as his girlfriend although I think he must have fancied me, to ask me like that. I found him the nicest of the four. When he was on his own he could be quiet, but put him with the other three and he was loud, as if he was keeping up with them.

  Ruth Gore

  “Young Blood” was another one where John did a spastic imitation while singing—always the bit where he sang “Well what’s your name?” And during the guitar solo he used to do the cripple walk around the stage.

  Lou Steen6

  The Beatles were our secret. Some of us had a contempt for the fact that people in the “poncey south” hadn’t heard of them, but partly we wanted that secret to be known.

  Alan Smith

  I loved Pete. He was so very quiet and moody and handsome and clean-cut. He never actually said anything—I was his fan and I never heard him utter a word—and that’s why I liked him: he wasn’t as forward as the others.

  Vivien Jones7

  For those who wanted to be seen and counted, there was the Beatles Fan Club. Despite their best intentions, however, founding officers Maureen O’Shea and Jennifer Dawes never quite got it off the ground. Being offered the chance to manage the Beatles was a distraction, in fact it probably overloaded them because they soon dropped out of both positions. Paul was rightly sharp to the need for such a club, one that the Beatles themselves could be involved in and enjoy, and he offered the job of running it to Roberta “Bobby” Brown. A bright 18-year-old from Wallasey, she was the girl who looked after Dot on the occasions when Paul’s girlfriend went down the Cavern. Fan club secretary was an honorary position, unpaid, but Bobby was flattered to be asked, and up to the task. It meant, of course, constant close access to the Beatles, which was payment enough. “My friend Anne and I got in free everywhere. The lads would say ‘They’re with us’ and Paul would always say to Neil, ‘Make sure Bobby gets home.’ ”8

  Bobby took over the Beatles Fan Club during the first week or two of November, just before Brian Epstein became involved. When he did, he almost immediately asked her to suspend its activities. He recognized the club’s virtues but wasn’t happy with its structure and intended to refresh it with a clear, clean organization. Bobby, however, was too valuable to lose: she and Brian quickly formed a close working partnership built on trust, respect for each other’s abilities and a desire to see the Beatles reach the top.

  Straightaway, Brian got Bobby to apply a little well-placed tactical pressure with a view to achieving one of his objectives: a British release of “My Bonnie.” He gave her the name and address of Bert Kaempfert’s Hamburg associate, the music publisher Alfred Schacht, and she typed a professional letter of inquiry, stressing the record’s “very high demand from Merseyside’s teenagers.” The biggest step toward achieving this goal, however, came on December 5, the day Brian was able to first introduce the Beatles to someone from a London record company.

  Graham Pauncefort, assistant sales manager at Deutsche Grammophon (Great Britain), was making one of his occasional visits to Liverpool’s record dealers, but Brian—his biggest seller and already a friend—wanted to talk Beatles. It was Pauncefort who’d been with him in Hamburg earlier in the year, when they’d stepped along the Reeperbahn and, as he uncertainly remembers, probably dropped into the Top Ten Club. Epstein and the Beatles had come fantastically close to meeting that night; now, seven months later, he could speak of little else, and wanted to show off his discovery. Pauncefort has two abiding memories of the moment: he says the Beatles were performing in leather and jeans, and they were “surprisingly reverential” when Brian introduced them. “I was very ambitious for Polydor to expand into pop and keen to hear what Brian had to say. We had lunch afterward and he told me about the Bert Kaempfert situation. I said that when I got back to London I would do what I could to help. I dictated a memo to my boss and told him ‘My Bonnie’ should be issued in Britain, that we should ‘take it forward.’ ”9

  The combination of Pauncefort’s push and Epstein’s commitment to order a large quantity for Nems persuaded DG to schedule “My Bonnie” for British release on January 5, 1962. The Beatles would have a record on the catalog, on sale not just in Nems but all over the country. And it would be the Beatles—Brian told DG it should say the group’s real name after Tony Sheridan’s, not “Beat Brothers.” While he still planned to get the Beatles away from the Kaempfert contract as soon as possible, it would help their prospects considerably if “My Bonnie” was a hit. Given that Polydor had paltry promotional muscle in Britain, he knew this was unlikely, but still it was worth striving for.

  Brian Epstein’s energies seemed limitless when driven by passion and purpose. He juggled the job of managing the Beatles with his responsibilities as a company director, employer of around forty staff, and city-center store manager in the month of Christmas—the retailer’s busiest—and took it all in his
stride. He also expected his secretary, Beryl Adams, to do likewise. Brian was a hard boss to work for, always demanding perfection. He generally dictated his letters onto tape (a new office gadget), then she typed them to his particular wishes—his correspondence was clean, contemporary and distinctive.

  Simultaneous too was the development of Brian and the Beatles’ personal relationships. There wasn’t a great difference between them by age: he was 27, John 21, Pete had just turned 20, Paul was 19 and George 18. Crucially, though, in all that was important to them, the Beatles were war babies, teenagers in the mid-1950s when rock and roll burst through, whereas Brian spent his mid-teens in the dour 1940s, kicking helplessly against the buttoning-up of boarding school. He’d done National Service and they’d escaped it—the list went on and on, and these perceptions pervaded, on both sides. “Brian was a grown-up, we weren’t,” Paul says, “a major difference.”10

  Brian’s name for them reflected this. Affectionately, conversationally, and in all but the most formal of circumstances, they were the boys—and, through his use of this phrase, everyone else in their organizational orbit came to call them “the boys” too. In turn, they called him Bri to his face and Eppy among themselves, and wanted whatever they could get from him. Pete remembers a night in the Cavern when they said, “Let’s go and buy some Cokes—you’re the manager!” and Brian realized he had to pay, like an easy uncle tapped up at the seaside. At all times, though, he showed them only politeness, prefacing every request with “Could we …” and “Would it be possible …,” which no doubt is how he first suggested they become more professional in their attitude.11 If they really did want to get somewhere they had to stop eating, drinking, smoking and cussing on stage and start to put a little more care into their presentation—and, above all else, they had to turn up for bookings on time.

  It was because of this age-gap perception that Brian visited the Beatles’ parents—to introduce himself, explain something of what he had in mind for the group, and answer any questions they might have. History records few details of these meetings, only a positive consensus. One visit was to Mendips. John personally took Brian to meet Mimi, even though, being 21, he was the only Beatle free to make contracts without parental consent. How great was the irony that John was resting his hopes for fame and fortune on a queer Jew, two of the mainstays in his canon of cruelty. From the surname Epstein, at least the latter of the two characteristics was probably realized by Mimi. She found him impressive and charming and expressed one concern only—that management of John could be just a plaything for him, that it might matter a lot less to him than to John and his friends if it all fizzled to nothing.12

  Brian also paid a visit to Hayman’s Green. No parent had done more for the Beatles than Pete’s mighty Mo. Whether or not she ever had designs on being their manager, she’d acted as one—and in good faith—since the moment her Peter returned with them from Hamburg twelve months before.

  These were momentous times in the Best household. Pete was potentially on the cusp of “stardom” and Mona, about to turn 38, was pregnant. She’d conceived, perhaps, in the first half of October, while the Nerk Twins were in Paris. A biological clock was ticking, with seven months remaining before Pete got a baby sibling fathered by his best mate Neil. Mona couldn’t manage the Beatles now even if John, Paul and George had wanted her to—the possibility was over, and Brian’s arrival in their lives was ideally timed. More than this, Mona realized he was just what they needed: “He was so keen and full of enthusiasm. He was also young and certainly seemed to be the type of person who could do something for the Beatles. I could see nothing but stardom ahead for the group. They were fantastic.”13

  This manager needed a contract. Brian had two diary appointments on Wednesday the 6th: at 2PM with E. Rex Makin (his solicitor, friend and neighbor) and at 4:30 with Keith Smith (the Beatles’ accountant). Makin would always say Brian wanted him to draw up an unbreakable contract, so perhaps the heartfelt advice of Allan Williams was still ringing in his ears. Makin said there was no such thing, and was generally high-handed about Brian’s commitment, dismissing his enthusiasm as another daft folly … and, in the process, he floated himself out of a potentially lucrative position.

  Brian smarted and pressed on, confident in what he was doing. That same afternoon, he and Keith Smith knocked together the essence of a management contract. Smith is able to provide the earliest reliable insight into the kind of deal Brian wanted to make with the Beatles, and it so surpasses all the expressed opinions of “fairness” that he was now close to beating himself up. “We drew up a sketchy Heads of Agreement,” Smith says, “the nutshell being that he would get something like 10 percent of any extra income he could earn them. He only wanted a share of whatever he could additionally make them, so we spent time discussing what they might make. I liked Brian. I could see he was going to bring them order and organization.”14

  On the Friday of this crowded week, Brian sent a letter to Ron White at EMI, on the pretext of being disappointed not to have had word since their meeting seven days earlier. His real motive was to gee up EMI by summarizing events rapidly unfolding without them. The Beatles had been seen by Deutsche Grammophon, and, added Brian—divulging news probably just received—next week, A&R men from Decca would be coming to Liverpool to see the Beatles. “As you may appreciate,” he added, truthfully or otherwise, “if we could choose, it would certainly be EMI.”15 His letter crossed in the post with one from White, returning the original Kaempfert contract together with a typed English translation, provided at no cost as an EMI courtesy. Now Brian could see the extent of the Beatles’ commitment to the German producer, and register (as White also pointed out) that if notice was properly served then they would be free of it by the end of June 1962. This was enough for White to reassure Brian he’d now bring “My Bonnie” to the attention of EMI’s A&R men.

  Concurrent with Brian’s efforts to cajole London music men up to Liverpool, the Beatles played a booking down south, and shrewdly he mentioned it to no one. Sam Leach’s plan to show off the Beatles in the capital—as part of his scheme to make them rich and him their manager—went more than slightly askew. On Saturday, December 9, the Beatles played for the first time in the south of England … in the Palais Ballroom, Aldershot. Leach had posters, handbills and tickets printed, booked an ad in the Aldershot News, and hoped that, though it was almost forty miles southwest of London, a few star-spotters would drive out to see them. For the Beatles, it entailed a 420-mile round-trip in a clapped-out van and hired car—no motorways, at least nine hours on the road each way. Neil Aspinall didn’t go because Leach used his own driver. It was a mad day out, a big fat last hurrah before the Epstein era. By tidy coincidence, before leaving home that morning, Paul had a letter in the post from Charles Munro, his solicitor. Allan Williams’ case against the Beatles had lapsed; it was over. From his £10 advance, £2 13s was returned to Paul with thanks. Managers …

  The Beatles were supposed to be headlining over three other groups in Aldershot, the evening running 7:30 to 11:30 … but no one else turned up. Leach had fabricated two of the groups, to make the poster look better, but the main named support act simply failed to show. And so too did the general public. The newspaper hadn’t run Leach’s ad. All manner of reasons have been given for this, at least some of them fanciful, but the one salient fact for the Beatles was that they’d traveled 210 miles for a £20 gig and no one was there to see them.

  By going around pubs and coffee bars announcing themselves, Leach and the Beatles managed to rustle up a few customers—eighteen is the unverifiable number that has gone down in legend—and, to their great credit, the Beatles played almost the entire four hours. Never had so much been played to so few. “We didn’t walk off,” says Paul, “we did our whole thing for about twelve people. We always did this, on the unspoken understanding that if we ever came back then those twelve would have told other people ‘I saw this quite good group the other day …’ ”16

&nb
sp; A photo of the Beatles playing while ten people danced and four more stood around was taken by Dick Matthews, who’d come along for the adventure and brought his Zeiss camera. Before the night was out it also captured a shot of Pete singing and mugging, John and George waltzing around the dance floor, John pulling two monstrous crips, and John, George, Leach and Matthews glugging from bottles of southern Watneys Brown Ale. They were in the middle of a boisterous game of bingo-ball football when the police arrived, inquired who they were and what they were doing there, and ordered them out of town.

  From here the story gets especially cloudy. They drove forty miles into central London, perhaps in search of a particular person or a particular Soho club, but it was long after midnight and even here places were bolting their doors. Leach says they went to the All-Nighter Club in Wardour Street and that John and Paul got up on stage and played a couple of numbers. The Nerk Twins Go To London? It’s a nice story but maybe not much more.17

  No food was provided, nor lodging—they slept in the van parked in a lay-by. Leach says the Beatles’ driver (his pal Terry McCann) had to siphon gas to get them back to Liverpool. Pete says Leach was unable to pay the Beatles their £20 and could scrape together just £12, so they ignored him all the way back to Liverpool, “treating him to one of our Beatle Silences, which could be quite frosty, with solemn, sour faces gazing vacantly into space.”18 Leach says he still thought the Beatles might choose him as their manager … but if they weren’t already committed to going with Brian (which they were), the Aldershot fiasco did it for him.

  Their Sunday booking was at Hambleton Hall in Huyton, one of their last remaining Merseyside venues, rough but regular. Bob Wooler’s Echo ad announced Big Beat Beatle Boppin’ with three exclamation marks, five support groups and fifteen bus routes helpfully detailed so people could get there. Brian was present too … but the Beatles let everybody down. So late back were they from Aldershot, they arrived only a quarter of an hour before the night’s end. With quaint symmetry, there were maybe eighteen people left to see them.