Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Mr. Martin had been a lot of bother to Mr. Wood in recent weeks. The managing director was unhappy about being pressed so hard over the no-royalty policy, indeed by the entire tenor of that contract renewal process; he was unhappy with the way he’d been so airily thwarted over the Bernard Cribbins LP, causing him to disappoint the chairman; he was now irate to discover Martin was having a liaison with his secretary; and he may even have picked up on that particular attitude to Mr. Paramor.19

  Dismissal was out of the question—George Martin was brilliant at his job and personally respected by Sir Joseph—but Wood did find at least some small way to show his disfavor. It came during a routine meeting with Sid Colman, general manager of EMI’s music publishing company Ardmore and Beechwood. Colman asked again why Wood had blocked the suggestion—conceived by his plugger, Kim Bennett—that they be allowed to make a recording of the Liverpool beat group, the one that wrote its own songs. Wood, as was his way, still held firm about it … but an alternative thought, a compromise, developed in his mind, as Bennett explains:

  Time went by since I’d floated my Beatles idea. Weeks. Then one day Sid came to my office door with a grin on his face, and rubbing his hands. He said, “I’ve just been talking to Len Wood on the phone: we’re going to get our record made after all.” After a short, stunned silence, I asked, “Oh? Who’s gonna do it then?” [and he said] “George Martin.”

  The Beatles record was going to be made as a gesture to Sid, to give Sid Colman a sop. Len was going to bow to our wishes at last.20

  Wood’s motive, as Bennett noted, was not to give the Beatles a recording contract so much as to grant Ardmore and Beechwood the means to get what it wanted, the copyright on “Like Dreamers Do,” the Lennon-McCartney song that Bennett happened to feel had hit potential. The upshot was that one of EMI’s A&R managers would be recording the Beatles, which meant putting them under contract, and George Martin was the man Wood singled out for the chore. No matter who at EMI signed them, the cost was still the company’s to bear, not the A&R man’s personally, but the sum was trivial and there might be publishing income as well as record sales.

  It was a little embarrassing for George, but no big deal. He hadn’t seen the Beatles and “wasn’t knocked out at all” with what little he’d heard of them—but, instructed “You have to sign them,” he would. Ron Richards was aware of the situation: he knew George’s arm was being twisted into taking the Beatles “because of his affair with Judy.” And Norman Smith, a balance engineer at Abbey Road, heard it too: “L. G. Wood didn’t approve of people having affairs, and he certainly didn’t approve of George going off with his secretary. Not at all. I think it offended his moral standards. L. G. virtually ordered George to record the Beatles.”21

  None of this would have happened without what John Lennon called Brian Epstein’s “smarming and charming everybody” in London—specifically, in this instance, on his visit to the HMV shop where he had discs cut, and his no doubt politely hopeful meetings with Sid Colman and George Martin. But while Brian remained determined to make something happen to get the Beatles a record contract, those particular labors were receding in his mind—they were February events and it was now the end of April, beginning of May.

  And yet, for this whole fantastical and fortuitous combination of reasons—which Brian possibly never knew and the Beatles certainly never knew—the door of Parlophone Records, previously closed to them once, and maybe even twice, was sliding open.

  When Astrid returned home from Liverpool and the ordeal of Stu’s funeral, John and George went to see her, visiting again the tall, spacious house at 45a Eimsbütteler Strasse in the suburb of Altona. Pete didn’t go because he didn’t go anywhere with them and had never been to the house; Paul didn’t go because he couldn’t.

  Astrid showed them Stuart’s painting studio, and the photo she’d taken of him here, one side of his face illuminated by light from the attic window, the other in shade. John said, “Could you take a picture of me there?” and Astrid did. He stood in the very same place and posed like his dead friend; she directed him to turn his head until the angle matched and then triggered the shutter on this most moving of stills, a then-and-almost-then photo that will always speak volumes.22

  Several other remarkable photos were taken this afternoon—of John sitting alone, his face in half-shadow; of George the same; of John and George standing together, and George standing while John sat, their Beatles haircuts and style looking very sharp. Astrid surveys the photos today and sees truths. John was “a little lonely feller” and George, 19, “had so much strength in his face, like he was saying to John ‘I’ll look after you’.” She gave them prints that, John said, “made Paul mad with envy.”23

  Astrid didn’t go back to work for two months, but George and John encouraged her to drop into the Star-Club to see them play. “The first time I saw them on stage without Stuart they did all they could to make me laugh,” she remembers, “and John sang “Love Me Tender” that night, which Stuart had sung.”24 In the depths of their suffering, John and Astrid conversed more now than at any other time, and she found further qualities his abrasiveness tended to obscure.

  We had long, long talks about life, about relationships, about him and Stuart, about our loss. He said to me, “You have got to decide: either you die with Stuart or you go on living your life. Be honest and decide. You can’t just cry all the time, you’ve got to get on.” It was the real John talking—he said it not nice and sweet but very straight, with a strong voice, and he made me think about it. He really helped get myself together again. It was the first time he really showed his love for me.25

  Astrid also craved warmth with Millie Sutcliffe. Their terminally bad relationship flickered into life for just a brief moment after the funeral. She wrote letters to Millie and her daughters, asking them to excuse her English, which, while fractured, was impressive considering its non-existence a year earlier. She drew them pictures, described herself to Pauline and Joyce as “your big sister” and called Millie “mum”; in one letter she wrote “So mum I hope you not angry with your little Astrid. I have not do anything wrong.”

  John—O mum he is in a terrible mood now, he just can’t believe it that darling Stuart never comes back. He just crying his eyes out. The Beatles specially John and George are very good friends of Stuart. They try so hard to give me a bit of happiness. I never know that I had so many good friends. Cynthia writes to me all the time very beautiful letters but John is marvelous to me. He says he know Stuart so much and he love him so much that he can understand me. Klaus still looks after me for his friend Stuart. He never let me go out alone.

  George’s mum hath tell him all about the funeral and send the papers. I think George still can’t believe it. Why can’t we go for other people to heaven? John asks me that—he said he would go for Stuart to heaven because Stuart was such a marvelous boy and he is nothing.26

  John didn’t mention Stuart in his numerous dispatches to Lindy Ness. She received an immediate reply to her first letter, and their friendship fast gathered another interesting dimension through correspondence. Her letters were full of wit and wordplay and John could respond in kind, scribbling the kind of pages he’d sent to his lost friend. It gave him continuity, and only slightly did he moderate his language for a 15-year-old girl, though she was smart enough to take it and wasn’t going to complain or be offended. John sent her several written rambles packed with non sequiturs, jokes, funny lines attributed to blacks, Jews, cripples and God, deformed drawings and crucifixion images. One cartoon showed a little figure on a huge cross, with a salesman looking up to inquire A size smaller sir? At the bottom of the cross was a door.

  In his first letter, John also wrote, “It’s a drag this Hunland—well its not all that bad. I bet there’ll be hardly any Beatle fans when we get back—maybe you und Lu (Louy? Louie? Louey? Lumpy).” He was, as usual, fretting that the girls might stray in their absence; Lindy assured him they wouldn’t and reported that some Bea
tles fans had set up an informal meeting group every Wednesday evening in the Odd Spot coffee bar, to swap photos and compare the letters and cards they’d received. Collectively, as members of the fan club, they’d all got a Hamburg bulletin; individually, they scrutinized one another’s letters for extra information, compared the numbers of kisses and jostled to be top of their idols’ affections. “Give my love to the Odd Spotters,” John said in one of his numerous postcards. “I hope you can read this—I was away for writing.” Odd Spotter Margaret Douglas sums up the way they all felt: “We thought it was lovely that the Beatles wrote to us like that, drawing us funny faces and everything. It was very considerate of them. We’d talk about the letters and cards we sent them, discuss what we’d say to them when they came home, and imagine how they must be loving it in Hamburg. We assumed they were living in luxury there, and it was a long time before we found out they were hellholes.”27

  As the weeks passed in sinful St. Pauli, the Beatles reconnected to previous feelings of having had enough. Their only escape was the occasional run out to the coast. Manfred Weissleder loaned them his third car, a Fiat, and, while the weather wasn’t warm enough for swimming, they tootled around the beach and cleared Hamburg from their nostrils. “George or I drive,” Paul explained in a letter to Bobby Brown, which meant they squabbled over the ignition keys; Paul hadn’t passed his driving test, so George generally won, speeding them along the German highway in their little Italian car.

  Pete was never part of these road trips and continued to exist independently. On their first Hamburg visit, the other Beatles might have understood that new boy Pete would want to peel off and do his own thing. By their second trip, he’d been in the group long enough for them to know this was simply the way he was. Another year on again, in spring 1962, the pattern was set rock-solid. Even their common off-stage interests—drinking and women—were pursued separately. Odd occasions excepted, Pete drank with birds, not Beatles.

  Sex was easily had. Pete called the Star-Club “good turkin’ ground” (a phrase from “turkeys” and “stuffing”), but there were always three concerns. One, as he remarked frankly in a letter to a Liverpool friend, was VD: “Over here you have got to be so damn careful if you go for your oats. The only snag is that, the way they throw it at you, it’s just impossible to resist—especially after you have got a few bevvies inside of you. Anyway I’m trying my best at the moment not to bring home any ‘you know whats’—come to think of it, it’s worth the risk because I’m dreading coming home to those ‘things’ that call themselves girls in the clubs.”28

  The second fear was pregnancy, although little care was taken to avoid it. Paul cooked up a long-term stew during this Hamburg trip when he was intimate with a St. Pauli waitress named Erika Wohlers, also 19. In December 1962 (two months prematurely, it would be claimed) she gave birth to a daughter, Bettina, and two years later she insisted Paul was the father. It would transpire that he wasn’t, but could so easily have been.†

  The third concern was Horst Fascher. For all the supposed liberality of St. Pauli, German statute books still contained an old law called the Kuppeleiparagraph. This gave courts the power to punish anyone caught facilitating sexual intercourse between unmarried individuals, like those who rented or owned the building where the act occurred. Vigilance was exercised only sporadically but one such period appears to have been spring 1962. Out on sex-sentry duty one night, Fascher caught John screwing a girl in the Beatles’ apartment. Apparently unable to separate the horizontal couple by any other means, he unzipped himself and urinated on them, peeing on a Piedel. John jumped up livid—but, even in the heat of the moment, knew better than to square up to a man who’d been jailed for manslaughter.29

  The prime meeting place for musicians and the girls who did was a little area of the Star-Club demarcated by the girls themselves. “There were maybe twenty, twenty-five of us,” says Marga Bierfreund, “and we stood in a place near the stage we called Ritzenecke, or ‘Cunt Corner.’ The bands changed every month and before they knew what happened we’d sort them out between us—‘I’ll have him, she can have him.’ ”30 Marga didn’t care much for the Beatles—she found them bad-mannered and scruffy and didn’t understand their sense of humor—but plenty did.

  There were also the Star-Club barmaids, who generally stayed in their own zone and kept clear of the Ritzenecke. Several were close with Beatles. Paul was with Heike Evert, known as Goldie, and John struck up a situation with Bettina Derlien. Known to the English musicians as Big Betty, she was beautiful and massive: for reasons never definitively established, her weight had ballooned to twenty stone (280lb; 127kg). Pete says she used to put his head between her enormous breasts—“It was a nice way to go deaf for a few seconds”—and Bettina herself always spoke of the way Paul got her to comb his hair, every night, again and again and again. But John was the love of her life, her special one, and rumors about them became the talk of the town. People seemed to think the relationship was one-way, that mostly it was Bettina lusting after John, but no one really knew. As Tony Sheridan says, “I never thought they were lovers, but then nobody could figure them out. People would say to me, ‘What’s he doing with her?’ ”31

  Bettina was big in every way: she had a giant beehive hairstyle, a huge personality, spoke a bit of English, had a strong sense of humor and a voice that boomed across the room, bar to stage, surfing all other sounds. She also had money, buying John clothes, shoes and Prellies … and every once in a while his voice would call out over the Star-Club microphone, a dirty, throaty, smoky, innuendo-pregnant “BETTINAAAHHHH!”

  There’s no reliable guide to the songs they were singing here. In a long letter to Bobby Brown—incorporated in the fan club’s Newsletter No. 1—Paul reported that “The Germans like mainly rock tunes—’What’d I Say,’ ‘Say Mama,’ ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy,’ ‘Hey! Baby,’ etc.,” the last of which indicates that John played harmonica to the Hamburg audiences. For the first time in their three visits, the Beatles had the benefit of a musical lifeline from home—Brian sent them the NME every week and Mersey Beat every fortnight and he also sent records. As usual, the Beatles intended to catch up on all the missed new releases by crowding into a browserie at Nems when they got back, but there were two new-minted 45s Brian felt confident in mailing out to them, by the Shirelles and Joe Brown and the Bruvvers.

  It was through this dispatch that the Beatles introduced “A Picture of You” into their set. It was the fifth Joe Brown song they played, though this wasn’t a comedy record but a catchy, attractively rhythmic country and western number. George sang it, of course, and was thrilled to read he’d soon be meeting his musical hero: in a letter enclosed with the record, Brian said he’d booked Brown and the Bruvvers to play two shows on Merseyside in July and the Beatles would be the main supporting act.

  The other 45 sent across from Liverpool was just as much a banker—it was another blast of double-sided dynamite by the Shirelles, produced and cowritten by Luther Dixon. John’s urgent need for something new meant that he grabbed both songs: the A-side was “Soldier Boy,” in which a girl promises to be faithful while her army boy is away (the Beatles didn’t bother to alter the gender), the B-side was the Ray Charles–like groove “Love Is a Swingin’ Thing.”

  The arrival of the post was an important moment in every day, bringing the Beatles not just records, papers and news from Brian but letters and cards from parents, girlfriends and fans. Whoever woke first would pad across to the club and fetch it, and mid-afternoon on Wednesday, May 9, it was George who made the trip. He returned clutching a telegram with the most fantastic news of all time: they’d got a recording contract.

  • • •

  The Beatles’ absence from Liverpool allowed Brian uninterrupted focus on their future.

  He was realizing his ambition to become a promoter of his own shows: those two July nights showcasing Joe Brown and the Beatles would be preceded, five weeks earlier, by his first venture, a June 21 dance at the huge
New Brighton Tower Ballroom starring the American star Bruce Channel. The Beatles would be second on the bill again, their name featuring almost as prominently in the advertising materials. He was also filling the Beatles’ diary with bookings right through June and July, six or seven nights a week, and piecing together a skeleton itinerary as far ahead as October—and he was doing all this single-handed, because his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, left Nems during April.32

  In a letter to Neil Aspinall on Monday, May 7, Brian had two hot pieces of information. One was that he’d got the Beatles another booking from the BBC in Manchester, which meant they’d be appearing on national radio a second time. The other was that he was about to visit the capital again—“I am going to London this week to see EMI and very sincerely hope that when I see you on Friday I’ll have good news.”33