Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

The next few days turned up further intriguing events. The Floral Hall show went well the following Tuesday, but it would be remembered for another reason—because it was here, in the dressing-room, that two of the Beatles smoked marijuana.

  Pete kept well out of it, and it’s unlikely Paul tried it on this occasion because he never mentioned it, but John and George—the usual two experimenters—were game. John had already smoked “pot” once, around 1960, but this was the first time it was had by a couple of them together. It was grass, from the drummer in another group. Whether it was the weed’s influence or not, they were soon doing the Twist, madly, in the dressing-room, while shouting, “This stuff isn’t doing anything!” George later likened it to the old joke about two hippies at a party, floating on the ceiling and saying, “This stuff doesn’t work, man.”39 John, however, talked it down in his one interview comment about the occasion—“A guy brought us some grass but we didn’t know anything about it and anyway we were already pissed.”40 It would be a while before they had the chance of a repeat experience.

  The following day, two of the Beatles were sitting in the Kardomah café. Their Wednesday-night Cavern residency was preceded this week by a lunchtime session, and John and Paul were still in the habit of staying in town on such days, idling away afternoons in “the KD.” This time they were chatting to one of John’s old mates from art school, who then said, “I believe Brian Epstein is managing you—which one of you does he fancy?” It was just a bit of lads’ banter, something that often came up behind Brian’s back, along with digs about him being Jewish.

  Nothing more would have been said about it if one of the two Beatles (or both) hadn’t then relayed the comment to Brian’s face. He was mortified. It was a stain on his character; it was combustible, in view of homosexual acts being illegal; and, because he was still denying this side of his life to the Beatles, it was a direct challenge for him to respond. Forty-eight hours later, Brian turned the matter over to his lawyer; and seven days after passing the comment, John’s friend from art school was dumped deep in it.

  We have been consulted by Mr. Brian Epstein who instructs us that on the February 21st last in the Kardomah Café, Church Street, Liverpool, you uttered a certain highly malicious and defamatory statement concerning him to two members of the Beatles.

  We are instructed that in the course of a conversation you said, “I believe Brian Epstein is managing you. Which one of you does he fancy?” The unwarranted innuendo contained in that remark is perfectly clear and is one to which our client takes the gravest possible exception and the damaging nature of which has caused him considerable anxiety and distress.

  He is not prepared to tolerate the utterance of such remarks by you and we accordingly have to require that we receive by return your written apology together with an undertaking that this or similar remarks will not be made by you in the future.

  The apology and undertaking arrived by return of post and that was the end of the matter—but it was another hard and damaging episode for Brian. The man who craved “rough trade” for gratification was being fulfilled, mentally, by managing the Beatles … while, physically, he continued to risk life and limb by cruising for it—the rougher and straighter the better. He’d just rented a bachelor flat on Falkner Street in order to conduct private liaisons, and it would be naive to think his overnight London visits on the Beatles’ behalf didn’t include sex. These trips essentially replaced the overseas expeditions that had been a feature of his life in 1960 and ’61, trips he was now having to postpone because, in 1962, it was Beatles before Barcelona. It also happened that they (inadvertently) put paid to Brian’s closest female relationship. Rita Harris, his platonic companion for two years, could no longer accept playing second fiddle to his Beatles absorption and stormed off one night, wounding him by announcing, “I’m not going to compete with four kids.”41

  • • •

  Toward the end of February, Richy Starkey returned from his gig in Hamburg. He got back a little earlier than expected, having played seven weeks instead of two months.

  After that initial delay at snowbound London Airport, Ringo began his stint as drummer in the Top Ten house band on New Year’s Day, just as the Beatles were reversing their van away from Decca’s back entrance. It was his second time in Hamburg, but now he was the only Liverpool boy in town, part of a four-strong English lineup with pianist Roy (“England’s Little Richard”) Young, bass player Colin Crawley and Tony Sheridan. The singer-guitarist had been in Hamburg since the summer of 1960 and his girlfriend Rosi Heitmann had given birth to their baby, Richard, in October 1961, the same month “My Bonnie” was released. The record had put Sheridan in the charts but this didn’t pay the bills—he still bunked down with his musicians in the attic above the Top Ten, the Beatles’ quarters the spring before. The line of John Lennon’s caked-on green gob had probably since been cleaned off the wall by Mutti, the caring Toilettenfrau and Preludin peddler.

  Ringo—like John, Paul and George—found that a diet of booze and Prellies was the only way to fulfill the Top Ten’s playing time, seven or eight hours a night, and still have energy left for experiences outside. He coped easily with this new lifestyle. More so than being here with the Hurricanes, more than any Butlin’s season in northwest Wales, Ringo felt free. “It was tough but we didn’t give a damn; it was fabulous. This was opening your eyes, this was leaving home, this was leaving the country. Hamburg was fabulous. To me, Hamburg felt like Soho.”42

  Soho was a little like that, but its white-jacketed waiters didn’t gang up on customers and drag them outside for vicious beatings, not routinely anyway; and no Soho criminal brandished his lethal weapon quite as openly as his St. Pauli counterpart. One of Ringo’s main memories of these Hamburg weeks was watching gangsters in the Top Ten cleaning their guns while the band played. As he’d recall, when one of these hard men shouted “Spielen What’d I Say” it was pointless shouting back “We’ve just played it” because the response would be, in a noticeably stern imperative, “Spielen What’d I Say!”43

  Then there was Tony Sheridan himself. George had seen how he was “always getting into fights” and now Ringo saw it too: “If anyone in the club was talking to his girl he’d be punching and kicking all over the place while we’d just keep on jamming. Then he’d come back and join us, covered in blood if he’d lost. But he was a really good player.”44 Sheridan, in turn, came to appreciate Ringo’s talents, not having known him much before now: “Ringo was a very good drummer with us, though he seemed perpetually bored. He was slightly depressed all the time, a melancholy character, but he had his own charisma in a way.”45 Colin Crawley also enjoyed playing with Ringo—“He was the best drummer we’d had, not because he was technically gifted but because he could keep the beat like clockwork.”46 It was what everyone who played with him always said.

  The weeks passed in St. Pauli’s boozy blur of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Ringo learned a new musical trick—how to play boogie-woogie piano, though he could only do it with his left hand. This was taught him by Roy Young, who also went away for a few days with Horst Fascher on that trip to Liverpool, the one that clinched the Beatles for Hamburg’s new venue, opening April. When Peter Eckhorn realized what was happening, he tried to prevent Sheridan defecting by getting him to sign up to a DM6,000 penalty clause if he broke his Top Ten contract. Such a sum, it would soon transpire, was chicken feed to the coming Mr. Big-Shot, Herr Manfred Weissleder.

  The worst part of Ringo’s Hamburg stay was the January–February weather. He was used to the cold and damp of home, but this coldness was damn persistent: the temperature barely rose above freezing throughout the opening weeks of the year, and then, in catastrophic circumstances, climatic events brought his stay to an end. The night of February 16–17, 1962, would be infamous in Hamburg’s history: hurricane-force winds over the North Sea brought flooding to large areas of the city, buildings collapsed, twenty thousand people were made homeless and 343 died. The British Sailors’ Socie
ty, that popular musicians’ hub, was deluged, and though the water never reached the Reeperbahn (it was uphill) there were power failures, food shortages and fears of typhoid. After a night or two when the musicians played acoustically by candlelight, the Top Ten closed for several days. Ringo might have stayed, extending his two-month contract, but he took the opportunity to go home, because his beloved grandmother had died.

  Annie Starkey, tired out at 72, had a fatal heart attack on February 7. Richy may not have been entirely sorry to miss her funeral—the horror of grandad Johnny Starkey’s burial had never left him—but Annie would be a big loss in his life. She was there at his birth, her hot toddies and witchy remedies had tended him through his sickly childhood, her singing and playing had enlivened family parties, and she was the superstitious “voodoo queen of Liverpool” who’d turned him from a left-hander to a right-hander, the switch that had given him his unusual drumming style, what he would call his “rock lope.” His left hand was just staging its fightback (being dominant in his boogie-woogie piano playing) when she died.

  Her death brought Richy face-to-face with his dad for the first time since his infancy. The elder Richy Starkey was 48 now, remarried, living in Crewe, working part-time as a confectioner and part-time as a window-cleaner. His son’s anger over being deserted had subsided somewhat as he’d grown older, and the two men stood side by side together and looked at Little Richy’s big Ford Zodiac. A few simple and not unfriendly remarks were exchanged, they parted, and (as far as is known) never met again.47

  Now he was back, Richy didn’t rush to rejoin the Hurricanes. They’d been using “dep” (deputy) drummers since he left them at the end of December, and they could continue using them. A third consecutive Butlin’s summer season was coming up in June, although it wasn’t yet clear where, and Rory and Johnny were trying to get them a gig playing American air bases in France. Richy might join them for these. For the moment, he just hung around, marking time—he signed back on the dole; he again contemplated becoming a freelance hairdresser, or perhaps even opening his own salon; and he went on long late-night solo drives with no particular place to go.48

  It probably wasn’t until March that Pete found out they hadn’t got the Decca contract. Brian told him the news, and assured him he was doing everything he could to get them a deal somewhere else. When Pete asked John, Paul and George why he’d not been told this earlier, they said they’d felt he would take the news badly, and they didn’t want to dishearten him.49 Pete divulged these details in later years but not how he rationalized his bandmates’ behavior; he suggested only that he felt secure in his position through his popularity among the fans. He continued to turn a blind eye to the ever-present scenario, which was that it was a royal pain for the Beatles’ front line to be whooping it up on stage only to turn around and find their drummer with his head bowed, unsmiling, making no eye contact, bringing to the stage the disconnectedness that existed off it.

  Bob Wooler would describe how “At times, Pete would be like a zombie on the drums: it was as though he was saying ‘Do I have to do this?’ He had no show about him—he always looked bored.” Mersey Beat editor Bill Harry wasn’t about to rock the boat in print, but what he actually saw was that “Pete never said anything. He’d sit by himself. If somebody talked to him, he’d just grunt or nod—but I always liked him.” And Neil Aspinall certainly recognized how his best mate operated outside the core: “John, Paul and George were always a three. They were the tight ones.”50

  They were the same tight ones who’d shown no tact or remorse when dumping Pete’s pal Ken Brown—he was never really “one of the group” and they’d considered him musically limited—and now they compelled Brian to address the Pete situation. In his autobiography, Brian said that John, Paul and George wanted to sack Pete “sooner or later,” and that he urged them “to leave the group as it was.” This was no time to upset the applecart. He said he’d have a quiet talk with Pete about his drumming, “without hurting his feelings.”51 Brian knew nothing about drums but was probably fed some words; Pete made no noticeable change afterward.

  It was yet another tricky situation for Brian, who was finding group management more complex than he could ever have anticipated. What he understood well, however, was stability and timing. Much was going on for the Beatles, in every sphere, not least that he was selling them around London as this award-winning four-piece group as shown in this publicity photograph. It would have been unhelpful if they suddenly differed from what he was marketing.

  It was also only just over a month until their seven-week season in Hamburg, its signed agreement specifying the names Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Best. It was a good contract that they should honor, not try to amend. Not only that, Brian had booked air tickets for them and for himself—this was fixed once Horst Fascher confirmed that groups would be able to use the still-unnamed club’s own amplifiers, meaning the Beatles would have to take only their guitars and drums. Each Hamburg trip represented a progression: a cramped minibus the first time, boat and train the second, air travel the third. This was style, and this was Brian Epstein, though it also required nerve. Still relatively early in the history of passenger aviation, a week rarely passed without news of a fatal crash—the headline splashed across the front page of the Liverpool Echo on March 1, 1962, just when Brian booked the Beatles’ tickets, was 95 IN CRASHED JET: NO SURVIVORS.† The Beatles (George in particular) would be edgy fliers for some time to come.

  Brian had yet to decide if they should take their suits to Hamburg—but so many times had the jackets and trousers been sent back for alteration, they still weren’t ready. He’d hoped they would wear them at Floral Hall, but instead they played this important show in leather jackets and jeans, Brian lifting his ban against them. This was their usual outdoor gear too … and a look that, to considerable amusement, had latterly been sported by Brian himself. The longer he spent in their company the more self-conscious he’d become about being so conventional when they were so casual, standing out when he wanted to blend in. So at the same time as encouraging the Beatles to get smart and wear suits, Brian turned up once or twice in jeans and leather jacket—though where theirs were well worn and broken in, his were clean and new. Bob Wooler looked at Brian and thought, “There’s another Beatle.” The Beatles themselves found it hilarious, and not all their laughter was behind his back. Brian rapidly ditched his new outfit, but did occasionally, as they did, wear a polo-neck sweater, or a leather jacket over shirt and tie.52

  The suits were finally ready on Tuesday, March 6, and they trooped over to Birkenhead once more, to Beno Dorn’s shop. Walter Smith again had to remind them to curb their language, and he also had the malodorous task of supervising the final fittings. “The Beatles’ boots had a lining,” he remembers, “and with them sweating so much on stage, their feet stank to high heaven. I had to spray air freshener after they’d left the shop.” The four young men did so carrying a zipped red tartan-pattern plastic suit-bag with a handle. The Beatles had a new look.‡

  It was on display the next day, when, back at the Playhouse Theatre in Manchester, they made their debut BBC radio recording. The show was called Here We Go—informally known as Here We Go with the NDO because the last three words were said in the opening announcement. The NDO, Northern Dance Orchestra, were the show’s mainstays, nineteen sight-reading musicians playing punchy big band pop—in this particular edition it was “Twist Around the Clock.” BBC producer Peter Pilbeam remembers the men being “initially displeased at the prospect of sharing the airwaves with untutored beat musicians, but it was bread and butter, keeping them in work; we kitted out the NDO’s different sections with different color chunky sweaters, to make them look like teenagers.”53

  In this period, Here We Go went out on Thursday afternoons at five in Teenagers’ Turn, the Monday-to-Friday half-hour slot that featured “live” BBC music sessions. There was still only the Light Programme radio network to showcase “pops,” under eighteen hours’
airtime a day shared with other kinds of music that the entire population, all ages and tastes, expected for their license fee—and such fare was shoehorned into the schedule along with comedies, drama serials, topical talks, religious programs, enriching children’s entertainment, magazines, news and sport.

  Britain first heard the Beatles within a show that was part of the typical daily pop diet of about two and a quarter hours. The BBC would be justifiably accused of steering pop too safely down the middle of the road—its staff, like record company A&R men, were detached from what moved young people—but it was powerless to solve what would one day become its main criticism: to provide pop with more airtime. It wasn’t within the BBC’s influence to conjure up new stations, and it was already running at the maximum end of the “Needletime” restrictions imposed by record companies and the Musicians’ Union. Despite all the difficulties, however, the BBC always made room for artists to perform live … and for a Liverpool rock group without a recording contract to be given national bandwidth and be paid for it.

  Pilbeam had the job of producing Here We Go on a £75 budget, and the Beatles were paid almost a third of this, £26 18s, plus expenses. It was more than they got for playing to 270 people in Liverpool, but if they expected greater reward for entertaining 2.7 million radio listeners, they never said anything. Pilbeam remembers the Beatles this day as “just four Liverpool lads chuffed with the fact they were getting somewhere and had been recognized by the national broadcasting organization.”54

  On March 7, 1962, 250 young and youngish Mancunians were dressed up for an evening out and had free BBC tickets for the Playhouse. They were the first to see the Beatles in their narrow-lapel, tight-trouser dark-blue mohair suits with bright white shirts and slim ties. With the greaseless, clean, combed-forward, fringe-falling hair worn by three of them and the Cuban-heel flamenco “Chelsea” boots worn by all four, no band of musicians looking like this had ever stepped up to the microphone in the BBC’s forty-year history.