Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Other elements of Vincent’s character they were less keen about. For some reason, he zeroed in on Paul and kept offering to knock him out cold by touching two pressure points on the back of his neck, a trick he said he’d learned while serving in the Marines. Paul didn’t fancy this one little bit, and though Gene kept insisting he’d only be unconscious for a few seconds, Paul made sure his neck stayed beyond the American’s reach.60

  Then there was Vincent’s fascination for guns. In America, he toyed with the real thing; in England, where there were hardly any weapons, it was just toys; in Hamburg, weapons could be bought easily and Gene was very quickly back in his strange comfort zone. One moment George was in the Star-Club with him, the next they were speeding in a taxi along the Reeperbahn to Vincent’s hotel, where he suspected his wife was having it off with Henri Henriod. “He opened his coat and handed me a gun saying, ‘You hold this.’ He started banging on the door, shouting, ‘I know you’re in there!’ … I was holding the gun he was about to shoot her with. It was just like that—one minute you’re somewhere and five minutes later you’re in that situation. I quickly gave the gun back to him and said, ‘No thank you, see you around, squire,’ and left.”61

  Vincent also liked knives. (Would all their American heroes be like this?) Intriguingly, John would recall how “Everyone was always stabbing, everybody had knives … really wild scenes it was.”62 There are photos of the Beatles and Vincent from these few days and one shows John and Pete brandishing knives. Pete does so with a laugh but John’s eyes are wide, his tongue is pushed hard inside his cheek to effect another crip face, and he appears like the arch pantomime villain, about to plunge his dagger deep into Vincent’s chest. The American, who would have been loaded on pills and whisky, seems oblivious; John looks off-his-trolley, like he does in another photo that shows four Beatles and two tubes of Preludin. Pete points enthusiastically to one (though he’d not taken the pills), Paul, George and especially John broadcast an intimate knowledge of them.

  This is the only known photograph explicitly tying the Beatles to “drug taking,” and it’s from a set of at least fifteen shots that are their earliest color photos, probably taken by Manfred Weissleder. They pose with a smiling Horst Fascher in one, and there are eight excellent stage pictures. Pete looks happy, as do they all—and here too is the Star-Club audience, dancing and standing close to the stage, Hamburg’s young couples dressed for a night out at St. Pauli’s raucous new club. The Beatles had opened it in memorable style and now they were leaving—having added something like 144 hours to their St. Pauli stage experience.§

  Previously, they’d left Hamburg with better guitars and amplifiers, this time they had nothing like that—but they had some new clothes, Paul had bought a Rollei camera for his brother, and John had Stuart’s art school scarf, the only one of his friend’s possessions he’d wanted from Astrid. He was also smuggling as many Prellies as he dared salt away in his luggage, which was quite a lot. They were going home to unfamiliar arrangements: John to find Cyn in her bedsit, Paul to Dot in the adjacent room to Cyn, and Pete to a domestic life-and-death situation—his mother was more than seven months pregnant, but her mother, Pete’s live-in grandmother, there throughout most of his life, succumbed to cancer four days before his return, on May 29.

  More than anything, the Beatles were leaving Hamburg with a tangible sense of being on the verge of something. Klaus Voormann would recall one last Fiat drive out to the coast with George and Paul, when George talked about how he was going to make plenty of money: “He was going to buy a house and a swimming pool, and then he’d buy a bus for his father, as he was a bus driver.”63

  They were flying back as EMI artistes. Four days after getting home they had a London recording date they did not want to foul up, and five days past that there was another BBC broadcast. It was turning-point time for them all—not least John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had new and exclusive songs ready to roll and were going to put them firmly on the line for the first time. Hamburg’s “exciting season” was finally over. Once again, they needed to calm down and step up.

  * * *

  * Word had reached the grapevine anyway. Lindy Ness’ diary entry for April 12, 1962, reads: “Went to Cave. Joined again. Group called Dakotas on. Kate told us Stu of the Beatles has died.”

  † Several such instances would arise in the years that followed, most of them batted away with confidence, others dealt with more circumspectly. Because of the strong possibility Erika Wohlers’ claim was legitimate, maintenance money was paid (without prejudice or admission) from about 1966. The arrangement remained confidential until the daughter went public with it in 1981, seeking much greater reward. She demanded Paul McCartney take blood tests—he did, and was found not to be the father.

  ‡ The missing 15 percent was “to cover records returned and/or damaged in transit and/or used for demonstration or advertising purposes.”

  § Because the Beatles’ playing time varied on this trip, and the nightly specifics aren’t known, it isn’t possible to calculate their stage hours with any certainty. If 144 hours over forty-eight nights is about right, it made the Hamburg running total something like 1,062 hours in thirty-four weeks, or just under four and a half hours every night for almost eight months.

  TWENTY-NINE

  JUNE 2–6, 1962

  UNDER MARCHING ORDERS

  It was so different this time. On their first return from Hamburg the Beatles were in disarray: two kicked out, two sent home, no bass player, only half the gear, the leader unsure he’d carry on. Second time, they came back a man light to rejoin a violent north Liverpool jive circuit they’d already conquered. Third time, this time, they returned to organization, order and promise.

  Late evening on Saturday, June 2, when Neil collected them at Manchester airport, he handed each Beatle a large manila envelope from Brian. These contained the latest Mersey Beat (reporting news of their EMI contract) and two typed sheets listing line-by-line their bookings for the next forty days and nights. Weekly bulletins would follow with fuller details and instructions, this was only an overview: thirty-one engagements (the odd gaps would be plugged by eight more) plus a secondary list of four notable dates on the horizon. At Christmas, Brian had given them traveling alarm clocks; this document, as John would describe it, was another kind of wake-up call: “Brian put all our instructions down neatly on paper and it made it all seem real. We were in a daydream till he came along. We’d no idea what we were doing, or where we’d agreed to be. Seeing our marching orders on paper made it all official.”1

  First on the list was a two-day private rehearsal in the Cavern—as much as three and a half hours on Sunday afternoon and however long they wanted on the Monday night, when the club routinely closed. They’d gone to Decca with no proper rehearsal except gigs, this time there was concentrated preparation.

  Brian hadn’t known John and Paul were returning from Hamburg with new material, fresh Lennon-McCartney numbers they wanted put on top of the pile—but, as an eager advocate of their songwriting, he’d have been delighted, and equally keen to see them given prominence. With a mixture of pride and amusement, Paul would always be able to imitate Brian’s exact reaction whenever he or John played him something they’d just written, emitting a theatrical mid-range Uh!, words alone being insufficient for Brian to express his pleasure. This could have been the first of many such great moments.2

  Brian also talked to John, Paul and George about what other songs they could play to Parlophone. The intent was to impress, so they assembled a strong list of thirty-three that defines the best of the Beatles at June 1962 and distills their tastes at the time Lennon-McCartney resumed writing songs. There’s pop, rock, R&B, rockabilly, dance, comedy and ballads, with harmonies throughout, six of the songs coming from long before the rock era; it’s the music of nineteen artists from America, two from Britain and one from Italy.

  Brian jotted down all the titles and the result was a two-page document, typed on
crested BE notepaper, that he gave or quickly sent to George Martin’s office. Because the producer said he wanted to assess the Beatles’ singing individually, the list showed who sang what, and its first item was a “Suggested opening medley” of “Besame Mucho,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “Open (Your Lovin’ Arms)”—Paul, John and George singing strong numbers in turn.3 Otherwise, the most rehearsed numbers in these two Cavern sessions were “PS I Love You,” “Love Me Do” and “Ask Me Why.”

  They set out for London on Tuesday the 5th, a repeat of their New Year’s journey except darkness and blizzards had yielded to summer brightness and a rare June heat wave. It still took about seven hours, sweltering their way down England’s spinal A-roads, slowed by every urban hindrance. Brian traveled by train and met them at the Royal Court Hotel, where he’d booked them into twin-bed rooms for two nights. How they paired isn’t remembered, but the idea worked so well that twin-bed rooms would be the way for most of the Beatles’ travels from now on. The hotel was on Sloane Square, in a part of London they hadn’t seen before; Belgravia lay behind them and Chelsea before, starting just across the square at King’s Road. It wasn’t yet the King’s Road of later renown but there was an essence, enough to catch an inquisitive provincial’s eye: bespoke shoe shops, restaurants, pubs, clubs and one or two fancy boutiques for wealthy young gals. Bazaar, where Mary Quant was turning out designer clothes, was just down there on the right, and beyond that, on the left, was Chelsea Manor Studios, haunt of artists and photographers.

  The EMI session wasn’t until 7PM Wednesday so they had more than twenty-four hours—a day and two nights—to explore “the smoke.” Their free time in London at New Year had been spent sheltering from Siberia, but on June 5–7, 1962, London stretched before the Beatles in vivid color: black taxis, red buses, green trees on leafy squares, smog-free streets in Derby Day sunshine, office secretaries in summer dresses, the capital at its glorious best. Prosperity was evident here in a way Liverpool never saw; London’s bombsites were almost all gone—they were not the open sores of home but new offices, houses and flats, many furnished with consumer luxuries. Poverty-free cities do not exist and much of the housing in London was bad, but its people—by and large, and as Prime Minister Macmillan so famously declared—had never had it so good.

  Here was the promise of something new, the Beatles’ first visit to London in the knowledge their contract would be returning them at least twice more … and, if Brian achieved his goals, at other times too. To begin with, however, it was intimidating. The Beatles were never hicks but they were outnumbered, enough to provoke an even greater closeness than usual. As Paul would remember it, “We didn’t know London and we didn’t know anybody in London, so we really did stick together. It was like fellows down from the north for a coach trip.” John would recall their first London visits as “pretty nerve-racking—we were all putting on the ‘we’re from Liverpool and we’re tough’ bit [said while squaring his shoulders] but there were some hard knocks down in London.”4

  The Beatles always wanted to know what was going on, and they and Brian were late-night people, never the staying-in kind. What could London offer them? Paul says of these initial visits that they were excited to explore places known to them only by name—Kensington, Chelsea, Soho, Tottenham Court Road and especially around Tin Pan Alley: “Whenever we came to London we went to Charing Cross Road for the guitar shops. It was like going to Santa’s grotto.”5 Otherwise, where they went and what they did on June 5, 6 and 7 would become blurred by everything that followed.

  They certainly didn’t find rock music, because there wasn’t any—not unless someone happened to be strumming down the 2i’s Coffee Bar, which was still the only such venue in town. London had nothing like the Cavern and no live scene like Liverpool. Society Londoners danced the Twist to a buttoned-up band at the Saddle Room club, just off Park Lane; well-heeled Londoners danced the Twist to a buttoned-up band at the Peppermint Lounge, a Trafalgar Square imitation of the New York nitery; hoi polloi Londoners danced the Twist to buttoned-up bands in their local palais de danse.

  London’s music landscape was changing, however. At La Discotheque, in Wardour Street, revelers danced not only to live bands but sometimes to records spun by a DJ—a novel idea. And while the postwar jazz clubs had been able to resist rock, in summer 1962 they were conceding ever-greater stage time to R&B. The new sounds arrived in the West End at the start of May, when the Marquee, which advertised itself as the London Jazz Centre, gave Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated a Thursday-night season. The group’s manager was Ronan O’Rahilly, an original, enterprising 22-year-old Irishman bustling round the Soho scene, and their guest vocalist this first night was a young beanpole who called himself Long John Baldry. Two weeks later, Disc reported that a 19-year-old London School of Economics student, Mick Jagger, had joined them to sing and play harmonica.6

  It happened with speed. By August, Melody Maker was headlining R&B BOOM HITS LONDON CLUBS—prematurely perhaps, but something was rumbling. The piece named the main men (including drummer Ginger Baker and bass guitarist Jack Bruce) and quoted Korner predicting “there’ll be a hell of a lot more R&B bands by the end of the year.”7 One new one (as yet unnamed) had been started by Brian Jones, who was rehearsing with Mick Jagger and his mate Keith Richards.

  The Beatles’ EMI arrival also coincided with timely record business developments. The supremacy of the 45rpm single was confirmed in June 1962 when EMI and Decca deleted every last 78rpm disc from the catalogs. Shellac—the sole format from the 1920s to ’50s—was dead, gone, and vinyl was king. And on the day of the Beatles’ first session, June 6, the NME launched its album chart.

  Lagging behind Melody Maker and Record Retailer, the NME gave its newcomer no fanfare, but the arrival of LPs in the best-selling music paper underscored a slow-rising status of the format and slight shift in its marketplace—not much, but a perceptible twitch. “No adult over here ever buys a single,” avowed Capitol Records’ Dave Dexter, Jr., in one of his hundreds of individual letters rejecting British EMI masters in America—and, right across the world, the reverse was also true: teenagers seldom bought albums. They were priced beyond pocket-money and their content was pitched mostly at grown-ups. But the times were changing: the first number 1 on the first NME album chart was Elvis.

  One new release that didn’t trouble the charts, on either side of the Atlantic, was Bob Dylan’s debut album (Bob Dylan), out late March in America and June 29 in Britain. But it was noticed—the NME’s weekly US column, Nat Hentoff’s American Airmail, gave Dylan his first name-check in Britain on May 25: “… folksong fans watch out for the release of a CBS album by Bob Dylan. He’s the most startling of all the American city folk singers.”

  Any one, or none, of these matters might have figured in George Martin’s mind at lunchtime on Wednesday, June 6, as he walked in his shirtsleeves down a hot dry Oxford Street with Ron Richards. They could also have been discussing the prospects of Leo Maguire’s record, about to be unveiled on TV. They definitely discussed the Beatles, the Liverpool beat group George had signed to Parlophone unseen, and who were coming in tonight. Ron says George delegated the session to him but said he’d drop by at some point to take a look. They really did need to establish how they’d restructure them, which of the two contenders to make lead singer. “I desperately wanted my own Cliff,” George says. “I was so hidebound by Cliff Richard and the Shadows that I was looking for the one voice that would carry them.”8 Ron would retain a clear memory of their conversation as they strode along, suit jackets slung over shoulders in the sunshine: “George and I were walking along, talking about what the group should be called. Was it going to be John Lennon and the Beatles or Paul McCartney and the Beatles? We still weren’t sure. I remember saying to George, ‘Bloody silly name that is, Beatles. How corny can you get?’ ”9

  The group with the corny name were on their way. Neil steered the van from smart Chelsea to leafy St. John’s Wood. EMI commissio
naire John Skinner, straight-backed and strait-laced in his worsted uniform and polished war medals, guided them through the gates. “They pulled into the car park in an old white van,” he’d remember. “They all looked very thin and weedy, almost undernourished. Neil Aspinall, their road manager, said they were the Beatles, here for a session. I thought, ‘What a strange name.’ ”10

  RECORDING SESSION

  Wednesday, June 6, 1962. Number 2 studio, EMI, London.

  RECORDING: Besame Mucho; Love Me Do; PS I Love You; Ask Me Why.

  The entrance was up front steps, but because the Beatles helped Neil lug in the gear they entered the building down the left side, behind the old house. A turn right, a turn left, and they were in Number 2 studio, 60ft by 38ft, a big room with a high ceiling, no windows, parquet flooring (covered in places by rugs) and all the technical necessities of a recording session. For Paul, and the others to some extent, Decca’s brittle anxieties made an unwelcome return. “[It had] great big white studio sight-screens, like at a cricket match, towering over you, and up this endless stairway was the control room. It was like heaven, where the great gods lived, and we were down below. Oh God, the nerves.”11

  They were in the Beno Dorn suits, but still there was enough about them to startle the staff. Norman Smith, the balance engineer assigned to the session, peered through the control room glass at the activity below and muttered Good God, what’ve we got ’ere? “It was,” he would remember, “a double-take job: you’d look and have to look again.” His colleague, technical engineer Ken Townsend, recalls how “they dressed a bit differently and all had what we thought was very long hair. They had broad Liverpool accents. We didn’t have many people from Liverpool recording at Abbey Road.”12