Paul has said how they thought the rejection “was really very shortsighted … I think it just heightened our determination,” but John marked it differently. He knew the Beatles had underperformed on the day, and he also wondered if they’d shot their bolt. Both of Britain’s two great record companies, EMI and Decca, had slammed the door on them. “We really thought ‘that was it,’ that was the end. They always said it was too bluesy or too rocky. ‘Too much rock ’n’ roll and that’s all over now,’ they used to keep telling us.”12
It was a tough one to swallow. Rock was what they did, what they loved, what they believed in; being refused a contract was bad enough but it was a double-blow to also realize that the people who decided these things were against what they did. This was the wall they had to vault, and it wasn’t obvious how they could.
John was also gloomy about being too old, because stars were made young. As Tony Meehan was five days George Harrison’s junior (but already in the second phase of his career) so Cliff Richard, at 21, was five days younger than John Lennon and had been famous almost four years. As John would recall, “I was thinking ‘I’m too old. I’ve missed the boat. You’ve got to be seventeen.’ A lot of stars were kids, much younger than I was.”13
Pete Best had no opinion on the Decca rejection, because John, Paul and George decided not to tell him. Having already waited close on six weeks before getting the verdict, they just told Pete, whenever he asked, that they were still waiting. Their purpose in doing this has never been revealed, but clearly something was in their minds. Whatever the actual reason, or reasons, it’s plain that the three-and-one rift within the Beatles was becoming wider than ever, that conversations were being had by John, Paul and George that ended when Pete walked in the room.
They could, at least, get on the BBC. During the evening of February 8, the day Brian returned from his meetings at Decca, the Beatles were in Manchester for a second time in six days. Their destination now was the Playhouse Theatre in the southern suburb of Hulme, where they auditioned for radio producer Peter Pilbeam. At 33, Pilbeam wasn’t enamored of rock either (he preferred big band), but the job had befallen him to audition groups and he was up for the challenge. “Lumbered was usually the word,” he says. “With some of the groups, where noise could replace musical values, it did—I used to get home semi-deafened. Most groups also did lots of hip thrusts and gyrations you wouldn’t see on the radio, but there was a lot of talent too—there always has been in the north.”14
Brian had suggested Pilbeam hear three of the Beatles sing, but, on the night, only John and Paul were vocal and Pilbeam assessed them separately. They had a half-hour slot in which to tune up and allow the studio manager (engineer) to get a good sound balance on his tape, then they played four numbers.* These were all songs done at Decca the month before—“Like Dreamers Do,” “Till There Was You,” “Memphis, Tennessee” and “Hello Little Girl”—and Paul was again not at his best, probably suffering from the nerves that seemed to strike him on testing occasions. Pilbeam marked him down as NO but gave a YES to John. He also noted a “good solid backing” on “Memphis,” that John and Paul sang “Hello Little Girl” as a duet, and that (unusually for the period) the Beatles didn’t play him any instrumentals. All this was written on the blank back page of Brian’s typed application, and Pilbeam concluded with a summary he remembers as defining “high praise”: “An unusual group, not as ‘Rocky’ as most, more C&W, with a tendency to play music. YES.”
Where Decca had kept the Beatles in suspense almost six weeks, Pilbeam was quick to offer them a session on national radio. The date was fixed by phone with Brian inside the next forty-eight hours and a BBC contract was sent to Liverpool shortly after: the Beatles would record in front of an audience back in the same theater, the Playhouse, on March 7, for a program to be broadcast the following afternoon in the Light Programme. Here was instant success … and the prospect of catching the ear of at least two million listeners.
While George didn’t get to sing for the BBC, he did have most of the new numbers in the live set, which brought him parity with John and Paul as vocalists. The choice of songs demonstrated again the Beatles’ refined/unusual musical tastes. Their ears always pricked at an interesting melody, no matter its age or genre: if it was good, they noticed it, and influences came just as easily from the BBC Light Programme as the Nems browseries. Two of George’s new songs at the start of 1962 were “Dream,” written in 1944 by Johnny Mercer, and “Blue Skies,” written in 1926 by Irving Berlin. “Dream” is intriguing because it could be the only example of the Beatles taking a song from Cliff Richard … and it’s also one of the two numbers the Beatles can be seen singing and playing in their earliest-known film. Around thirty seconds of 8mm home-movie footage was shot—in color, but without sound—at one of their shows in February 1962. Precise date/place identification remains elusive but the songs (discernible through close study) indicate it was at this time, and the Beatles were still performing in leathers and black T-shirts, the suits not yet ready. Only the front line is visible; John and Paul play while George sings “Dream,” although Paul’s bass work is so animated that he attracts the eye. In the second number, George and John sing the backing (and John chews constantly, which would have wound up Brian if he was there) while Paul sings Gene Vincent’s “Dance in the Street” … or, more likely, the Beatles’ short-lived contemporary adaptation, “Twist in the Street.”15
The Twist couldn’t be ignored. It was the dance of the period and the Beatles’ primary role was still to play for dancing. They especially needed Twist numbers when they worked at new venues, where a good part of their set had to be songs in vogue. “Twist in the Street” was one of three Twist songs the Beatles did—and both the others were unusual. Pete had sung with the Beatles in times past—“Matchbox,” then “Wild in the Country”—but he’d been silent for a while before Brian (under pressure from Mona Best to give Pete microphone time) proposed his singing spot be reinstated and the others went along with it.16 His new number was “Peppermint Twist,” theme song of the worldwide Twist HQ, the Peppermint Lounge nightclub in New York City. Pete came out front to sing it and do a little dance while Paul relished a few minutes behind the drums and George picked up Paul’s left-handed bass and tried to find the notes as a right-hander. It was a cabaret moment.
The Twist also provided the inspiration for Paul to write a song—his first since 1960 or 1959. This breakthrough came with no apparent involvement from John. Paul would recall writing it so that the Beatles had its exclusive use, solving the perennial problem in Liverpool of many groups drawing from the same musical well. “Pinwheel Twist” wasn’t recorded, didn’t spend long in the Beatles’ set, and not everyone would recall it with fondness. Neil Aspinall said it was “a fucking awful song—it had a waltz middle-eight when the song suddenly dragged. It really didn’t work. I hated it.”17
Along with the vintage numbers and transitory songs, this period at the start of 1962 marked yet another important shift in the Beatles’ chosen music. Ever receptive to the latest sounds, eager to adapt to changes, they enthused for the new—and there was one casualty in particular, a man whose culling would once have been heresy.
Elvis would always be their God—the 1956–8 Elvis—but the Beatles couldn’t swallow his Hollywood sugar anymore. The lead single from his latest film Blue Hawaii—“Rock-A-Hula Baby” c/w “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—was a 45 of note in that the Beatles didn’t perform it. Not that they routinely sang all of Elvis’s records (they’d ignored several), but they never performed any new Elvis material again. Anything of his they played now was an oldie, often announced as such—and, as usual, they were of one mind about the rightness of their thinking. “I went off Elvis after he left the army,” Paul said. “I felt they tamed him too much. It was all wrong, GI Blues and Blue Hawaii.” John, who wore an Elvis badge (button) on occasion through the rest of his life, remarked, “They cut his bollocks off in the army. They not only shaved
his hair off, I think they shaved between his legs too … The rest of it was just a living death.”18
The new messiah was Luther Dixon, the producer behind the Shirelles’ sound. John sang “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “Boys,” Paul did “Mama Said,” and now John grabbed their latest release, “Baby It’s You,” out on EMI’s Top Rank label at the beginning of February. It wasn’t written by Goffin-King but was in their style, being a modern girl-boy love song wrapped in a sparse, quirky, jerky beat. The songwriting credit was Bacharach-David-Williams: music by Burt Bacharach, who also arranged it, lyric by Mack David (older brother of Burt’s usual lyricist Hal) and, masquerading as Barney Williams, Luther Dixon. It was the sound of New York 1962 and that vital immigrant mix, black singers and producer with Jewish songwriters and record company.
So attuned were John, Paul and George to this sound that they even picked up on something unexpected: a British song and recording that resembled Goffin-King. Jackie Lee & the Raindrops’ “There’s No One in the Whole Wide World” was New Bond Street, not New York—it was recorded in London for the British qualifying heat of the Eurovision Song Contest, where it flopped dismally. A second English song the Beatles added at this time was “What a Crazy World We’re Living In,” a cockney comedy piece by chirpy Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, written by a young Londoner named Alan Klein. George sang this, and he also picked “Open (Your Lovin’ Arms),” a bouncy pop song by the Texas country singer Buddy Knox. The Beatles claimed this before anyone else in Liverpool, and they earned bragging rights to Roy Orbison’s new single “Dream Baby” by doing it better than anyone else. As the Searchers’ drummer Chris Curtis would remember, “There were so many groups living in each other’s pockets when it came to songs that the first week Roy Orbison came out with “Dream Baby” everyone did it. Paul McCartney was the best, he was up for it, he was really right for the song.”19
And last, though really first, the Beatles’ most extraordinary new song was “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” by James Ray—first heard by Paul one afternoon in the original city-center Nems, the smaller one on Great Charlotte Street. It was, he says with evident enthusiasm, “the first time we ever heard waltz done in R&B!”20 This one had the lot—it was rhythmic and bluesy with the wow combination of tuba and wailing harmonica, plus it had stirring lead and harmony vocals, was done in 3/4 time and checked out inside two minutes. James Ray—a name not known to them, with no image either—was instantly a hero, as was the source of his magical sound, the also unheard-of New York independent label Caprice. Everything about this 45 was dark, even the deep turquoise and gold-lettered Pye International label, and Paul spoke for all the Beatles when he said such records represented “exciting little black moments for us.”21 They absorbed every nuance of both sides, and particularly liked the B-side’s title, “It’s Been a Drag”—a useful new American meaning for an old English word.
Stuart Sutcliffe was back in Liverpool for a few days around the third week of February. He’d not been home since August, when he’d returned for some hospital tests; now he was back to visit his mother who’d just had an operation. But while she was on the mend, he wasn’t.
Stuart’s recent letters home told of continuing strong headaches, and an “evil temper” that was upsetting Astrid. He ascribed this to his family’s characteristic, but clearly his mental state was being aggravated by acute pain. The letters didn’t only spell out a portrait of ill health, they showed it: his spelling had become erratic, some sentences were vague, and his handwriting—previously a handsome script—was sinking into scribble. Toward the end of January, Stuart had suffered a convulsive fit and was signed off college for at least three weeks. No doctor, not even a senior specialist, could find the cause. He stayed home with Nielsa and Astrid, he wrote long letters to John, he painted like a man possessed—canvas after canvas of a truly fantastic intensity—and, surprisingly, he borrowed a bass guitar and played a few dates with a Hamburg group called the Bats.22 Then he made his trip back to Liverpool … alone. Astrid knew she wouldn’t be welcomed by mother Millie.
The Beatles were shocked by Stuart’s condition. He went to see them in the Cavern and socialized with them at least a couple of times. He had a warmly pleasant time at George’s house in Speke; he told John he’d thought of jumping out the window, causing John to worry his friend was going mad; he told Mike McCartney he felt something bad would happen when he went back to Hamburg, and Mike realized Stuart “was obviously worried and nervous”; and when he said good-bye to Pete at the end of his visit he said, “This’ll be the last time I see you.”23
Allan Williams had a strange evening with Stuart and some or all of the Beatles at a bowling alley. Ten-pin bowling was the big new American craze sweeping Britain in 1961–2 and all the groups frequented the Liverpool lanes because the place sold booze and stayed open until 4AM. The Beatles often went, and this time they took Stu, with Williams joining them. It was the first time they’d seen their former manager since he’d started legal proceedings against them the previous summer, though that had fizzled out and was beginning to be forgotten. He took one look at his close friend Stuart and said, “Christ, you look really ill.” “He looked like death,” Allan remembers. “He had a death pallor.”24
From the Beatles’ old manager to the new: Stuart also met Brian for the first time. Little of this is known for certain—it’s said they had dinner, which is credible, but subsequent claims that Brian so enjoyed Stuart’s company he offered him a percentage of the Beatles’ management, perhaps in consideration for Stuart becoming the Beatles’ “art director,” are unproven and less believable. Stuart wasn’t hanging around in Liverpool—he was going back to Hamburg to regain his health, paint, hopefully resume his studies and be married to Astrid by the start of the summer.
When Brian Epstein first considered managing the Beatles he assured his parents—his infuriated father especially—it would distract him from Nems no more than two half-days a week. In his mind, since he saw the Beatles being the greatest stars ever, and was even thinking America, this statement was merely a sop to get them off his back. Just weeks into taking on the task, Beatles management had become a second full-time job. As well as running the family stores and their staff, and being the director of a company with multiple operations, Brian was pounding the London pavements one or two days a week and running around Liverpool trying to make things happen. This seriously tested the support of Queenie and Clive and the patience of Harry, who had every right to tell Brian—and certainly did—he was neglecting his responsibilities. They could see he’d become caught up in something, but still he had duties. And because Brian couldn’t abide being second best at anything, he was burning the candle at both ends, every working week. Something, inevitably, was heading for meltdown.
At the same time he was racking up out-of-pocket expenses—headlined by travel bills, hotel bills, entertainment bills and legal bills—that so outstripped his weekly Beatles commission of about £22 he had to fund the difference from his wallet. He was, in every sense, investing in a group of mentally tough rock and roll boys who, when he hurried to spend time with them, teased him, tested him, popped pills in his drink, and didn’t rush to say thank you.
By mid-February, Brian’s plans were plotted and progressive. The Beatles were about to play their three important dates for Liverpool University, and on the 20th they were booked into Floral Hall, Southport, a 1,200-capacity ballroom. Brian had designated this a flagship night not only for the Beatles but for his own ambitions. His personal scope was broadening at the same pace as everything else: he wanted to put on shows like this himself and needed to observe how it was done, so he got Ric Dixon of the Dixon Agency (and Manchester’s Oasis Club) to promote it and let him enjoy a close involvement. “I sometimes had the impression Brian was trying to find out, through me, the bits he didn’t know,” Dixon recalls. “Concert promotion is a money-motivated business but I never felt money was Brian’s motivation—living his drea
m was more important to him. He was the exception, and not the kind of man you expected to be involved in the music business, which was mostly full of sharp and untrustworthy operators.”25
The Floral Hall night was key to the future life of Brian the promoter. By mounting his own shows he could try out ideas for presentation and staging, controlling the environment to achieve maximum effectiveness for the acts. And some of these would be under his sole direction, because within three weeks of obtaining the Beatles’ signatures, Brian began offering his management package to others. Why not? Liverpool was awash with talent and no one else was doing much.
He took advice from Bob Wooler about the people and personalities, finding out who was reliable and who wasn’t, and during February showed interest in signing at least five groups—Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four, Johnny Sandon and the Searchers, the Undertakers and the Four Jays. Along with the Beatles, this represented four of the top five in the Mersey Beat poll plus those placed tenth and twelfth (the top-five exception was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, who, with Ringo still in Hamburg, were sliding, and didn’t appeal to Brian). He had no contracts for anyone yet, but to show goodwill he got them bookings and took no commission. Brian wouldn’t allow any of this to distract him from advancing the Beatles, and these other groups realized the Beatles would always be uppermost in Brian’s thinking and attention. Still, if anyone could improve their bookings and earn them more money, it was Brian Epstein, so they weren’t about to turn him down.
His principal involvement in the Floral Hall night was twofold: to help sell the 1,200 tickets and to book the talent that would provide continuous dancing for four hours—five groups headed by POLYDOR RECORDING STARS, THE BEATLES. He circulated typed leaflets among Beatles fans and on the record counters at all three Nems shops, announcing affordable coach trips: fans could pay 8s 6d for return transportation, admission to the hall and, afterward, the chance to mingle with the musicians and get their autographs. These special all-in tickets were sold only in the Whitechapel shop, outside which the chartered buses would leave. The Beatles were taking a Liverpool audience with them for a night out up the coast.
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