Mike McCartney was again in the right place at the right time. He climbed the electricians’ gallery at the side of the stage, just behind the house tabs, and took a photo of John, Paul and George standing poised while Pilbeam addressed the one main vocal microphone … to which a BBC badge was clipped, reminding the performers where they were.55 The Beatles were to record four songs—“Hello Little Girl,” “Memphis,” “Dream Baby” and “Please Mr. Postman”—as agreed between them, Brian and Peter Pilbeam. Three (omitting “Hello Little Girl”) would be broadcast. Brian had successfully lobbied Pilbeam to relent from his original rejection of Paul as a vocalist and let him take one number, and show host Ray Peters gave him a broadcast name-check as the singer of “Dream Baby.” With Roy Orbison only entering the NME chart the day of the broadcast, the Nashville song was unknown to almost everyone, but the Beatles were already tight and confident with it.
The Beatles’ spot on Here We Go didn’t appear to herald anything exceptional. It wasn’t anticipated in the music press, they received a name-only billing in the BBC’s program journal Radio Times, and the broadcast won no retrospective notice as a special moment. But it was. After identifying John Lennon as the singer of “Memphis, Tennessee,” presenter Ray Peters labeled it “a rhythm and blues version.” Such words would have been unfamiliar to the studio and listening audience—in fact, so seldom was R&B heard on the BBC that, for many, this would have been their initial exposure to something new. And when John sang “Please Mr. Postman” it was both the first time this song had been broadcast and the first time anything from Tamla had been played on BBC radio. Without even realizing it (and they’d have been thrilled to know), the Beatles broke the Detroit “Motown sound” to the British listening public.
Plenty of teenagers didn’t turn to Here We Go at five the following afternoon. Some were playing outside, or still getting home from school, or doing homework, or watching television, or couldn’t listen because there was only one “wireless” in the house and an adult was tuned in to something else. Pete says John and Paul were at his house to catch the broadcast through Mona’s radiogram, which received the better-quality VHF (FM) mono signals. The Beatles’ three numbers gave them six minutes of national airtime, and the recording shows a group on their best behavior, packing more vitality than in their Decca test but still clearly in their early days as professionals. It’s also significant that, at first grasp, they won over an audience that didn’t know them: the Playhouse crowd cheered, clapped along and—at the end of all three songs—girls screamed.
It sounded just great through the speakers at Hayman’s Green, and was a major moment in their lives. “We were jumping about in the living-room listening to it,” says Pete. “We weren’t just recording stars but radio stars!”56
* * *
* Audition tapes weren’t kept, and this recording is certainly lost.
† A Boeing 707 had plunged from the sky shortly after leaving New York for Chicago and Los Angeles. Among the dead was Louise Eastman, wife of music business attorney Lee and mother of their four children. The eldest, John, was at Harvard, and in the summer holidays he was a yacht instructor in wealthy East Hampton, where his parents had just bought a house. Their second child, Linda, 20, had enrolled at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, but she spent more time riding horses than studying, and had just “dropped out” when the crash occurred. She became pregnant within days, married her boyfriend—geology student Melville See—on June 18, and gave birth to their daughter, Heather, on December 30, 1962.
‡ John also got new glasses about this same time, thick black horn-rims like those worn by Buddy Holly and Hank Marvin (and Brian Poole). John’s were decidedly not for public use, so he stayed stage-blind.
TWENTY-SIX
MARCH 9–APRIL 10, 1962
“US AGAINST THEM”
The suits were put away after the broadcast and kept hidden. Brian Epstein wanted their first Liverpool exposure to be a moment, maybe four weeks hence in The Beatles for Their Fans. For now, most of those fans were unaware of the coming change. Late at night on March 9, Lindy Ness wrote in her diary: “Beatles on at Cave. Got there just before 7.30. Had to run miles. Got seats at the front. They were great, especially John. He sang Baby It’s You again. Paul was cute, and George and Pete. John had a brown shirt on and black pullover and blue jeans. He was acting the fool with Paul. Paul said at the beginning of Dream Baby, ‘Here We Go With The NDO!’ ”
Some Liverpool groups had some female fans but the Beatles were producing addicts by the legion—supporters inspired to passion, devotion, wit and imagination, girls who loved all of them but one of them just that bit more, and whom the Beatles protected like brothers with kid sisters. Lindy’s diary for March 6 reads: “Went to the Cave. When I got there it was 4s 6d [to get in] and I only had 3s 6d. I saw John coming up with Cynthia. I asked him for a shilling and he lent me a shilling. Pete sang Matchbox and John sang Baby It’s You. I still owe him a shilling.”
Neil tried to keep the Beatles’ van nondescript, but failed: the bodywork was daubed with lipstick love messages, some of them rude. On the odd nights when John, Paul and George went straight home after a show, rejecting a late drink or some passionate activity, fans like Lindy and her friend Lou Steen, who lived in Woolton and Allerton, would be treated to a ride with their heroes. All the gear would be piled in the back and then, as Lou remembers, she and Lindy would clamber inside.
Nell drove—he was very nice—and otherwise it was John, Paul, George and us. I don’t know where Pete was. Nothing sexual happened, not even a kiss—when they dropped us off they’d just say “Bye girls!” We were fourteen and they were like grown men, a generation apart, so we never realistically thought we had a chance of shagging one of them. In those days you had to be reckless or brave to do it, and most of us were still virgins when we left school. Riding the van was fun anyway—the Beatles were always dead funny, and quite hyper after they’d done a gig.1
Cyn and Dot still made sporadic appearances at the Cavern, standing in their place under the first arch on the left, closest to the stage and bandroom, but it was beginning to get precarious—jealousy could prompt unwelcome gestures, more verbal than physical but sometimes both. Brian was also beginning to apply pressure on the Beatles to keep their girlfriends hidden—this certainly became his thinking as 1962 ran its course. It was a policy universally applied in the music business and reached back to Hollywood’s earliest days, when the popularity of male stars could be preserved only if they were seen to be available. The point had been proved as recently as 1959–60 when the hits of Larry Parnes’ boy Marty Wilde all but dried up the day he stepped down the aisle. The Beatles were a way yet from having hit records, but Brian asked them to maintain the illusion of availability. The logic seemed fair—it was nonsensical to shut down a key part of their audience—and it became another of Brian’s wishes that the Beatles, principally John and Paul at this point, could have rejected but didn’t. In the Cavern, anyway, there were no secrets.
Standing tall among the Beatles’ newest fans was Malcolm (Mal) Evans, a 26-year-old Post Office telephone engineer and Elvis nut who fell very keenly for the group after chancing on a Cavern lunchtime session. The first person he spoke to was Bobby Brown, and he and the fan club secretary became friends. “Mal was a really, really nice person, and because he was often saying how much he loved the Beatles and wanted to meet them, I introduced him to Paul. They got chatting, and every time after that Mal would either sit with me or stand on the side, close to them; Paul always spoke to him and then the others got to know him too.”2
Mal was unmissable: he stood 6ft 2in but was gentle and wore glasses, and John, Paul and George quickly cottoned on to those inevitable Elvis requests. “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” was his favorite, which George sang, lamenting “I’m so bloody lonely” in place of “I’m so blue and lonely.” They usually prefaced their songs for Mal with a play on his name—“This one’s for Malcontent” or
“This one’s for Malfunctioning” or “This one’s for Malodorous.”
In spring 1962, the Beatles’ world was not the globe but an underground club in Liverpool—but already here was an extraordinary domination, one that went far beyond the bounds of four young guys playing music. The Beatles were influencing and changing others around them, without even trying. They were stars to the next generation of Merseyside groups, like the just-formed Mersey Beats, and they caused people to go around doing the Beatles’ voice—not Scouse but a laconic Liverpudlian, cynical, droll, flat, hard, sharp, funny. Another act new to the scene, singer Lee Curtis, says, “They were so individual that they had their own way of talking, their own hairstyle, their own clothing … they had so many things worked out.”3
This was happening unaided by any hype and untainted by any commercialism—it was developing authentically, and so right was it that people naturally fell into copying it. As Bobby Brown remembers:
The Beatles looked German, French, more cosmopolitan than Liverpool lads, and they influenced how the Cavern people dressed. Because of them, most of the girls wore black—black polo-neck sweaters, black straight skirts, black stockings and flat shoes. Nothing was agreed between us, we just all wore the same. Then, because Paul had a corduroy coat and John had a corduroy jacket, a lot of people started coming in wearing corduroy. I bought a green corduroy dress.
I also went and had my hair dyed blonde. I wondered what the Beatles would say about it, and they were on the stage winking and pointing at me. A lot of us were blonde because the Beatles liked blondes. It wasn’t only done to please the Beatles, it was an image they set.4
Here was every kind of inspiration. Celia Mortimer, just turning 17, was newly enrolled at Liverpool College of Art and had a passion for making clothes. Exposure to the Beatles sent her straight to the sketchbook.
In my first year at art college everyone was wild about trad jazz, but then word came up the hill that “things were happening” at the Cavern; a few of us went down one lunchtime to have a look—and there were the Beatles. They wiped out all interest in trad: their music was a blast of the new—all that great R&B stuff—and so were they. It was the first time anyone in Britain had the black polo-neck, black corduroy, existentialist look. I instantly took their lead and started to make hip black corduroy things to wear.5
The Beatles also continued to influence Brian Epstein. By March/April, he wasn’t only dressing something like them, he was preaching their musical views. He wrote “Top Ten Tips” for Mersey Beat to run alongside his Nems chart, and here were John, Paul and George’s opinions of the latest black records, channeled Juke Box Jury–like through an impressed new receiver. The Marvelettes’ “Twistin’ Postman” (the follow-up to “Please Mr. Postman”) was “Probably not meant for the British charts but listen to it”; the rhythmic gospel of Etta James’ “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” was “a super spinetingler”; “Summertime” by New York girls the Chantels was “Another good American group who can’t make it here—in any case this is the wrong song …”; and the Miracles’ “What’s So Good About Goodbye” was “double-sided brilliance—a collector’s gem.”6
“What’s So Good About Goodbye” was something else too—it was the inspiration for John to write a song, which he called “Ask Me Why.” Discounting the instrumental “Cry for a Shadow,” it was his first new number since “One After 909,” written in the grimy Gambier Terrace days of spring 1960, and it followed closely Paul writing his first new number in a while, “Pinwheel Twist.” With interesting melodic key shifts and a Latin lilt, “Ask Me Why” was written in the first person: the singer so loves a girl that he could cry with joy. The lyric is corny but tender, never cloying or syrupy, and John’s literacy shows in the line “I can’t conceive of any more misery”—not many songs used the word conceive.7
Several, however, had misery: it could have come from “Oh misery, misery …” in Buddy Holly’s “Raining in My Heart,” sung on stage by George, but more likely it was from “All I’ve known is misery” in “What’s So Good About Goodbye,” which also happened to include the words “tell me why.” “Ask Me Why” had other echoes of Smokey Robinson’s artistry: both songs opened with similar guitar figures and had verses that ended in falsetto. But this wasn’t plagiarism; Smokey was just the springboard to John’s creativity, his song ending up different. The Beatles learned “Ask Me Why” in a private afternoon rehearsal in the Cavern (one of the benefits of Brian’s good business relationship with Ray McFall and Bob Wooler), and though it didn’t go into the regular set just yet, there’s an unconfirmed suggestion it was played in one of their last pre-Hamburg shows, at the start of April.
Further refinements to the Beatles’ developing sound were added in March courtesy of two records. One was the poppy “Hey! Baby” by Bruce Channel, recorded in Texas; the other—from Muscle Shoals, Alabama—packed the deep R&B groove of Arthur Alexander. His single, “You Better Move On” c/w “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues,” came out on Decca’s London label on March 9 and rooted itself in many fertile minds around Britain, not just in Liverpool.
A US number 1 and British number 2, “Hey! Baby” was more than just a good, catchy, danceable, bluesy pop song, it was yet another contemporary American recording to feature harmonica. There was suddenly a little glut of them, and the Beatles liked them all. For nine months, since Paul stopped playing piano and took up the bass, they’d kept strictly to three guitars and drums, but “Hey! Baby” changed that: Paul sang it and John introduced harmonica into the Beatles’ sound, reconnecting with one of his perennially favorite instruments.*
The harmonica added a new dimension to Beatles performances, one that few other groups could muster—it kept them different as well as current. While they didn’t go back and use it on “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody” or “I Just Don’t Understand,” the harmonica refreshed a 1956 song that, until now, the Beatles had played only occasionally: “Clarabella,” by the Jodimars. Paul sang this with fantastic energy, like one of his electrifyingly good Little Richard numbers, and John added bluesy harmonica where, on the original, there’d been saxes. They created, instantly, a new audience favorite and a track no other group even knew.
Arthur Alexander’s record was a hit in America but not in Britain, and it came with no information. Like James Ray before him, he was just a name on a record label, two songs without data or image but a sound most wonderfully black. He was in fact from Sheffield—Sheffield, Alabama—and he was John’s age, 21. One person remembers John singing “You Better Move On” in the Cavern, but it didn’t linger in the Beatles’ set. The B-side, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues,” stayed and became one of their best 1962 stage numbers. They weren’t the only Liverpool group to do it but they always felt they played it best: unable to replicate the original’s saxes, they recast it without a middle-eight—their version was carried by John’s powerful vocal, Paul’s harmonies, and a couple of guitar motifs by George.8
For connoisseurs, this Arthur Alexander bloke became the topic of fevered conversation. At this moment—as Paul would recall—the Beatles almost wanted to be Arthur Alexander: “If the Beatles ever wanted ‘a sound’ it was R&B—that was what we used to listen to, what we used to like, what we wanted to be like. Black. That was basically it. Arthur Alexander. It came out whiter because it always does—we’re white and we were just young Liverpool musicians: we didn’t have any finesse to be able to actually sound black.”9
The Beatles weren’t alone in calling this R&B. What else could it be if the record company and the music press said it was, and the song was called “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”? But an argument that it wasn’t R&B, not at all, was made public after Jack Good used his March 17 Disc column to advocate a WE CHOOSE RHYTHM AND BLUES campaign. So fired up was he by James Ray’s “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody” and this Arthur Alexander B-side (Good’s and the Beatles’ tastes were always uncannily though coincidentally similar) he was lobbying the BBC to bro
adcast more of it. Two weeks later, though, the same paper printed a letter that challenged Good over whether this was R&B at all.
“Rhythm and blues” seems to be a term which needs defining, judging by Jack Good’s column.
It is a genuine blues style, evolved directly from the earlier, less sophisticated country blues. R and B in turn gave birth to a commercial offspring, universally known as rock ’n’ roll. Billy Fury is a rock ’n’ roll singer—not an R and B vocalist.
I listened to all the records quoted by Jack Good in his article, and all except one were rock ’n’ roll records. The one exception was the Barbara George disc I Know.
Please will somebody play Jack Good a Muddy Waters or a Howlin’ Wolf disc so that he can hear what R and B really is?
The letter was sent in by Disc reader Brian Jones, of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and a week later Good posted a full response, part of which declared “It must be nice to be a purist, you don’t have to think or feel, you just apply a rule of thumb.” He wasn’t against what either man labeled R&B: Good welcomed every interesting musical development. Just the previous week, his main headline was about a new venue—the Ealing Club, in west London—devoted entirely to R&B, and this week he reported news that, from May, the man behind that place, blues guitarist Alexis Korner, would also be playing a weekly residency at the Marquee Club in central London, until now a jazz stronghold.10
It was at the Ealing Club, on April 7—the same date as Jack Good’s printed response to Brian Jones—that the fervent 20-year-old blues fan from Cheltenham met two 18-year-old blues fans from Dartford, Kent—Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. They’d come across London to check out the sounds, and Jones was in the capital every weekend from Gloucestershire to crash with Korner and play with his band, Blues Incorporated. This week their lineup included jazz drummer Charlie Watts and a singer calling himself P. P. Pond, both 20. Styling himself “Elmo Lewis,” Jones sat hunched over a guitar and played some slide: “Dust My Broom” by Mississippi bluesman Elmore James. A surprisingly accomplished musician, Jones made a deep impression on Jagger and Richards. They went back to Dartford, to their non-gigging group Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with something to think about.11
Tune In Page 87
