Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Eckhorn’s ulterior motive in going to Liverpool was to book the Beatles for a return season at the Top Ten. Last time he’d become embroiled in their spat with Allan Williams, this time he found they had another manager. Brian knew the Beatles were keen to go back to Hamburg, and he wasn’t against the idea, but he felt they’d been selling themselves too cheaply and was determined to fix the right price. Eckhorn had paid them 1,225 marks a week in the spring (245 each for five Beatles) and this time kept it about the same, 300 each for the four. Brian insisted on 500; Eckhorn protested and was dragged to 400 but not a pfennig further. They “provisionally agreed” the Beatles would return to the Top Ten for one or two months from March 1, subject to continuing the negotiation by phone and post.34

  Eckhorn and Sheridan left Lime Street station on the 30th with Ringo and his drum kit, starting a horrendous journey back to Hamburg. Britain was now snow- and ice-bound, and all flights from London Airport were delayed or canceled. Ringo was nervous anyway, waiting to fly for the first time, and here were workers scraping ice off the runway and airplane wings. Buddy Holly had been killed in such circumstances. The three young men, all solid drinkers, fortified themselves in the airport lounge, and when Eckhorn tried to sleep he was kept awake by Ringo nervously drumming his fingers on the table.

  The Beatles’ “rehearsal” before their Decca recording test was three Cavern dates in four nights, capping a year when they’d played 349 times. Still, London was looming in their minds. Before leaving Liverpool, Eckhorn had an alcoholic night with them and gathered there was “one thing worrying them—they had a recording test coming up. It was making them nervous. George asked me if I had a tranquilizer to help them do a swinging test.”35

  They weren’t the only Merseysiders heading for “the smoke.” Alan Smith, the young Cavernite and trainee journalist from Birkenhead who wanted to work for a music paper, had landed a job on the NME. The Beatles’ last Liverpool show of the year, December 30 in the Cavern, was his too.

  Someone said to Paul, “Have you met Alan? He’s joining the NME next week.” Paul’s eyes widened and he said, “D’ya think you could get us a bit of a write-up?”

  Paul had a passion for the Beatles to be big, and because John’s psyche knew no bounds they unquestionably saw themselves as having the world at their feet, once a few buttons had been pressed. That meant getting out of Liverpool. I find it almost impossible to describe the feeling, even though I remember it well, but these guys were something with Destiny written all over them.36

  South again, for the second time in three weeks. They met at 11AM on New Year’s Eve at the Jolly Miller, a huge roadside pub in West Derby: John, Paul and George got there by green Corporation buses that slipped and slid over unplowed roads; Neil and Pete had the van (a bigger one, hired for the occasion, Eppy paying); Brian was there in his smart Zodiac but would be traveling south by train. They’d rendezvous again at the hotel he’d booked for them.

  Their mecca was Decca, and they were nervous—they hadn’t been in a British recording studio before, just the suburban Hamburg auditorium the Germans called a studio. All the same, there was a sense that the prized recording contract was within their grasp. They’d read about Decca’s souped-up A&R department, and Mike Smith surely liked them or he wouldn’t have invited them to the studio. It was just sod’s law that their two-hundred-mile journey would be so atrocious, affected by snowdrifts, blizzards, ice, dense fog and abandoned vehicles. Neil did it in eleven hours and they got lost somewhere near Wolverhampton.

  Brian’s train journey was similarly troubled. He stayed with his Aunt Freda, who still lived in a block of mansion flats in Marylebone, just off Baker Street. He met the Beatles around 10PM, when they arrived at the Royal Hotel on Woburn Place, checking in and then leaving again to find food and action. They climbed back in the van, and Neil—on his first visit to London—was guided by Brian to Charing Cross Road, where four years previously he’d worked in a book and record shop.

  While Neil drove off to find parking, the others fell into a pub; then Neil returned with a tale of two men who’d asked if they could “smoke pot” in the van. Having no idea what they were talking about, he’d said no. They sat down in a café and were shocked at the London prices—six bob for a bowl of soup!—and so persistently did they challenge the waiter about it, he ordered them out. Paul (who was again missing his family’s Hogmanay party) has a memory of going to the Nucleus Coffee Bar on Monmouth Street and being amazed to see people passing around speed pills. Neil also said Brian took them to a discreet club in St. Giles, and that they went in just for a laugh, knowing it was the kind of place where the “women” had eight o’clock shadows.37

  Not even the bitter cold prevented them window-shopping. On Charing Cross Road (just by Dick James Music) was a row of musical instrument shops even better than Hessy’s back home—and farther down, at 96, was the theatrical and ballet shoe-shop Anello & Davide. Their attention was held by a pair of Spanish flamenco ankle boots, “Chelsea”-style in black leather, with black elastic sides, a tag at the back, pointed toes and Cuban heels, £3 15s a pair. As they’d shown with the leather suits, cowboy boots and twat ’ats, the Beatles could be collectively enthused about clothing, all wanting to wear it—and here was another such moment. Details were committed to memory, and after returning home they contacted Anello & Davide and ordered four pairs.38

  The Beatles knew the tradition was to gather in Trafalgar Square at midnight, by the giant Christmas tree, to ring out the old, ring in the new, sing “Auld Lang Syne” and watch a few hardy souls jump in the fountains—but because of the weather it was the smallest crowd and quietest New Year’s Eve in London in more than forty years.

  They fell into their beds exhausted, the biggest moment of their lives just hours away. They’d soon be back in Liverpool boasting of a recording contract. Needing to be at Decca’s West Hampstead studio before ten in the morning, they set Eppy’s alarm clocks and slumbered as 1962 settled in.

  YEAR 5, 1962

  ALWAYS BE TRUE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  JANUARY 1–FEBRUARY 5, 1962

  CHOICES

  “We knew we could make it,” John said. “We simply wanted to be the biggest. We dreamed of being the British Elvis Presleys, and we believed it.”

  The Beatles kept their ambitions in focus. They had “specific little aims, a series of goals: to get a record made, to get a number one …” Appropriately, on this ice-cold New Year’s morning in London, the next step was the slippiest. “All we wanted to do was make a record,” George later said. “We thought, ‘If we can make a record we’ll show Cliff and the Shadows.’ ”1

  They had only to pass a test, to show once again their dazzling abilities, and they would become—in the words of the day—Decca artistes.

  A mile north of the EMI studios on Abbey Road, Decca’s facility was in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead. Britain’s recording business was just as it had been for decades, and staffed by many of the same men: the companies ran their own studios and the contracted talent had no choice but to work there. Daily life functioned more like a government department than a branch of the entertainment business—everyone was on the payroll, producers and balance engineers worked in lounge suits, technical engineers wore white lab coats and janitorial staff wore brown. Decca and EMI were global conglomerates, and so closely did their industrial interests overlap, there was often talk of a merger. The City of London was buzzing with rumors at this precise moment: in the last days of 1961 it seemed EMI would be mounting a takeover bid for its great rival. The story went away a few days later, but the situation would have been the talk of the studio this first morning in January.*

  There was a problem the moment the Beatles set up. The amplifiers they’d lugged down from Liverpool, banging about in the back of the van, were unsuitable. They were good on stage, loud enough to blast calcium from the Cavern bricks and pin back the brawling Teds at Hambleton Hall, but they didn’t sound good her
e. Studio 2 was 36ft by 21ft—a large oblong basement, windowless but for a same-level control room—and the boom and oomph of a Merseyside night simply wasn’t needed; at lower volume, though, the amps hummed. John, Paul and George had to defer to the decisions of the balance engineer assigned to their session, Mike Savage, even though he was only 20: the three guitars were plugged into some studio amps, and they had no control over their sound. Also, Pete had to set up his drums behind isolation screens, so his sound wouldn’t dominate the other microphones.

  The key word of the day was “test.” Among themselves, the Beatles seem to have called it “an audition,” but to the studio staff it was a Commercial Test. The Beatles were here because Mike Smith had already assessed them in the Cavern and knew they were good enough; now he wanted to test them in studio conditions. The standard procedure was to record between two and five songs and then usher the artiste off the premises; as the Beatles taped fifteen at Decca, this strongly suggests that (if offered a deal) their first single, and perhaps others after it, would be taken from this tape. It was a long trek down from Liverpool and having a choice of numbers in the can would save hassle for everyone. This situation is further indicated by the session’s duration—it began late in the morning and extended after a lunch break into the afternoon. (The precise times aren’t known because session paperwork has not survived.)

  The Beatles were to start at 10AM with Mike Smith taking charge. Despite his elevated position within Decca’s loudly touted A&R revamp, the 26-year-old Smith earned £13 a week and lived at home with his parents. He had talent and good technical training but was relatively inexperienced. As he acknowledged, when he watched the Beatles in the Cavern it was one of the first rock gigs he’d seen. And in the studio, while he was bright enough to have earned promotions, Smith lacked skills common to others in his position. “I couldn’t read music, but nobody at Decca sussed that. The producer was held to be God Almighty and it was taken for granted that I knew what I was talking about.”2

  God was bigger than the Beatles this bitter Monday morning. He was late. As the minutes passed so, inevitably, Brian Epstein took it as a personal slight and got hot under the collar, saying the Beatles were being undervalued. And when Smith arrived he was nursing not only a New Year’s party hangover but also cuts and bruises from a car crash three days before Christmas. Suddenly, then, these blokes from Liverpool were standing in front of him, awaiting his instruction. Pete remembers George drawling “Happy New Year, Mike—we didn’t see you in the fountain last night”; and then, with a smile and no more time to lose, the session started. The Beatles were in a basement in London, standing for the first time on their own in a recording studio. They watched from the wooden floor while men behind the glass made technical adjustments, and then the red light went on.3

  RECORDING SESSION

  Monday, January 1, 1962. Studio 2, Decca, London.

  RECORDING: Money (That’s What I Want); The Sheik Of Araby; Memphis, Tennessee; Three Cool Cats; Sure To Fall (In Love With You); September In The Rain; Take Good Care Of My Baby; Till There Was You; Crying, Waiting, Hoping; To Know Her Is To Love Her; Besame Mucho; Searchin’; Like Dreamers Do; Hello Little Girl; Love Of The Loved. Order of recording not known.

  Running to fifteen songs, thirty-five minutes, the Decca tape allows the first real opportunity to listen to the Beatles, to hear them at the moment they were striving for the success they felt their due.4 But while they’d experienced incredible progress and so many triumphs, this was an instance when they signally failed to put across their magic.

  For a band so brimming in confidence and cockiness, they could also fall prey to nerves. John later said of this day that they were “terrible … we were terrified, nervous.”5 They allowed an “us and them” chasm to come between the studio floor and the control room, failing to adapt to the goldfish-bowl environment, of being judged from behind glass. It was also too early in the day to make music, and they started and stayed physically cold. Outside was the sharpest New Year’s morning in London since 1887 (19°F/minus 7°C), and inside wasn’t much warmer. They could do nothing to alter or improve any of this, having no choice but to put behind them one below-par performance after another and pitch into the next, almost forcing themselves to go better.

  It isn’t certain if the Beatles were aware they’d be recording as many as fifteen songs and so chose them in advance, or whether Mike Smith just kept wanting “one more.” As the years passed, it would become accepted “fact” that the Decca selection was made by Brian Epstein, riding roughshod over the Beatles’ own opinions. This is untrue, and John made the point clearly: “We virtually recorded our Cavern stage show, with a few omissions of a repetitive kind.”6 Eleven of the fifteen still figured when they played an important booking a month later and the other four resurfaced to stay in the Beatles’ set throughout 1962. If there was a considered plan here at Decca, it might have been to project what the Beatles demonstrated in Liverpool as often as eight times a week: that they were musically versatile and that three of them sang—this was a unique strength, well worth emphasizing.

  The song selection fell into four categories:

  • Five numbers that dipped into the previous five years: the Teddy Bears’ harmony ballad “To Know Her Is to Love Her”; Chuck Berry’s chugging “Memphis, Tennessee”; Carl Perkins’ country and western “Sure to Fall”; Buddy Holly’s catchy “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”; and a nod to the Detroit R&B sound in Barrett Strong’s “Money.”

  • Four humorous rock numbers: three by the Coasters—“Searchin’,” “Three Cool Cats” and “Besame Mucho”—and Joe Brown’s adaptation of “The Sheik of Araby.”

  • Three recent hits, to show they could cover—and sometimes creatively rearrange—contemporary chart material: Bobby Vee’s poppy “Take Good Care of My Baby”; Peggy Lee’s ballad “Till There Was You”; and Dinah Washington’s bluesy version of the jazz standard “September in the Rain.” (None of these pandered to the current obsession with Twist records. Probably no other group in the country would have left a Twist song, or an instrumental number, out of a presentation at this time.)

  • Three Lennon-McCartney Originals, those songs they’d only just introduced into the Beatles’ set: two of Paul’s from 1959, “Like Dreamers Do” and “Love of the Loved”, and John’s 1957 number “Hello Little Girl”, his first “keeper.”

  If Brian did have a hand in the selection it was surely to impose John and Paul’s songs into the fifteen, because they themselves were still hesitant about playing them, especially outside the Cavern. Brian’s attempts to market the Beatles as “something new” would always include a strong push for John and Paul’s writing—even though, in the climate that prevailed, he couldn’t have been certain of its recognition as a virtue. The current issue of Disc had an article headlined SINGERS SHOULD NOT PEN THEIR OWN SONGS, its writer (Don Nicholl) “spotlighting a trend that could spell disaster for pop music.” This appeared the same day that veteran bandleader Jack Payne went on TV and complained that pop records were the product of “souped-up sound,” that there were too many noises cooked up by studio engineers at the expense of musicianship.7 This was the setting the Beatles and plenty of others had to work against as the third year of the Sixties got under way.

  The salient feature about the fifteen songs is that John sang only four—and one of these jointly with Paul. George also sang four, and Paul seven. John’s compliance with this is surprising. What undercuts everything, though, is that the real Beatles barely turned up at Decca. The Beatles who mach Schaued in Hamburg and grabbed the rapt attention of Liverpool audiences were neither caught rapturously on tape nor much enjoyed through the West Hampstead glass on New Year’s Day 1962. This was a lackluster performance, restrained, subdued, the handbrake on.

  Paul’s nerves are palpable on “Till There Was You,” where he seems so hung up on having to put himself across as a romantic balladeer, and budding star, and musician to be reckoned with, that h
e forgot how to read the song and put across nothing. It would be the number they’d always talk about—John later said Paul’s voice went so high “he sounded like a woman.”8 Paul is also so careful to enunciate properly that he over-enunciates and introduces odd affectations, singing musicck in the line “and then there was music.” He does it again elsewhere in the session, singing a hard lookk (in “each time I look”) in “Love of the Loved.”

  John wasn’t much better. He later said he sang “Money” “like a madman.”9 This could suggest he gave it his usual full-on blistering voice—but actually he meant he was crazed. Far from belting it out, he audibly pulls back, playing safe, ending up neither one thing nor the other, in no-man’s-land. Where was the Lennon soul, edge, bite? It isn’t on “Money” or “To Know Her Is to Love Her” or “Memphis.” Only once in John Lennon’s life would he be heard timid, and it was here today.

  George performed best. His guitar playing in “Besame Mucho” is sharp and precise, and his middle-eight solo in “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” is good. However, at other times his playing was below the standard this questing perfectionist would have wanted from himself: his solo on “Searchin’ ” is quite terrible in its stumbling twanginess, and it isn’t much better in “Hello Little Girl.” As a vocalist, George is enthusiastic and mostly free of nerves—“Take Good Care of My Baby” is particularly good. However, “The Sheik of Araby” is perhaps the most misjudged of the day’s work. It required the Cavern audience’s response to John’s and Paul’s pulled faces, wacky dances and strange not arf! interjections. On tape, in cold surroundings, it just sounds mad.

  Worst is Pete’s drumming. He, particularly, was on test here, having been shown up in the Hamburg session six months earlier, when Bert Kaempfert found his drumming so poor he stripped away half his kit. Pete hadn’t been able to give his guitarists the sound they needed—the sound that, just five days before this Decca test, John, Paul and George had experienced and enjoyed with Ringo in their larky Christmas party. At Decca, Pete had the full kit at his disposal and did little with it. He was just as nervous as the others, and being behind isolation screens must have been strange, but they didn’t manufacture his erratic tempo (audible in several places, notably “Till There Was You”) or his playing of the same tip-tap hi-hat beat and snare-drum shuffle on virtually every song. His drumming on “Money” is good, but the rest of the time it’s weak and rudimentary: there’s no cohesion with Paul’s bass, and never any attack—at no time does Pete’s drumming bind the group or drive them on. Mike Savage remembers being deeply unimpressed. “I thought Pete Best was very average, and didn’t keep good time. You could pick up a better drummer in any pub in London. If you’ve got a quarter of a group being very average, that isn’t good. The drummer should be the rock, and if the rock isn’t good then you start thinking, ‘No.’ If Decca was going to sign the Beatles, we wouldn’t have used Pete Best on the records.”10