The Beatles never said if they were surprised that London people didn’t get them right away. The four weekly music papers, the ones they’d all read or leafed through since schooldays, took a while to tune in. Despite being mailed the record and up to three press releases, Melody Maker and the NME didn’t review “Love Me Do”; the other two did, but they made a point of logging all new records.
Disc. The Beatles sound rather like the Everlys or the Brooks [Brook Brothers] according to whose side you’re on. But in Love Me Do they have got a deceptively simple beater which could grow on you. Harmonica backing. PS I Love You weaves a little Latin into itself as the boys sing a letter ballad of everyday sentiments.
From Disc Date with
Don Nicholl, in a section of
brief reviews headed Short and
Sharp. Rated two stars, meaning
“Ordinary.”
New Record Mirror. Harmonica again starts off “Love Me Do” and then this strangely-monikered group gets at the lyrics. Fairly restrained in their approach, they indulge in some offbeat combinations of vocal chords. Though there’s plenty happening, it tends to drag about midway, especially when the harmonica takes over for a spell. Not a bad song, though. Fairly straight-forward group handling of a poorish arrangement for the flip. The song stands up well enough but things don’t happen frequently enough to make us interested.
Writer not identified. Rated
three bells, meaning “Average.”11
“Love Me Do” ’s most positive and supportive review was by Tony Barrow in the Liverpool Echo. Under the headline BIG DATE FOR THE BEATLES, illustrated with a session photo, he enthused about both sides, pointing out the “refreshing do-it-yourself approach”—the Beatles wrote it, they played it, they sang it. The most grudging critique ran in Mersey Beat. Brian had recently stopped reviewing for Bill Harry’s paper and these words ran without a byline: “Although ‘Love Me Do’ is rather monotonous, it is the type of number which grows on you, and I have found that whilst I felt disappointed when I first heard it, I enjoyed it more and more each time I played it. Of the two numbers, ‘PS I Love You’ is the side I prefer.”12
The most perceptive review was in Record Retailer, which (thanks to the press releases) flagged that the Beatles “already have a strong following.”13 Certainly this was worth mentioning. The Beatles were the first recording artists postwar (and probably prewar as well) launched with an already thriving sales base. The business had never been geared this way—singers were always “discovered” and then promoted in the usual clichéd ways. Britain’s biggest star by far, Cliff Richard, was a new performer with a new name when he made his first record in 1958; he had no preestablished fan following and almost no stage experience. The Beatles couldn’t have been in greater contrast: they’d done everything in every way for years, and in Liverpool had a core of support the envy of anyone, a lovingly loyal battalion of fans who swiftly made their presence felt. As Ringo would enjoy remembering, with only slight exaggeration, “The whole of Liverpool went out and bought it, en masse. They were proud of it: a group from Liverpool. It was fantastic—there’s a lot of that in Liverpool, they’re very close.”14
A few fans did hold out, gutted to think the Beatles would become famous and leave them, but the great majority couldn’t stop themselves and rushed right in. As Bobby Brown says, “I bought it at Nems. It was really exciting to buy ‘a Beatles record.’ We wanted everyone to buy it.” Club member and newly appointed Nems Enterprises secretary Freda Kelly was also among the first in line: “All the Cavernites bought ‘Love Me Do.’ I bought it and didn’t even have a record player. People bought it to get it in the charts.”15
“Love Me Do” began to sell the moment the boxes were opened—not just at Nems but all over Merseyside, and not just on Merseyside but in pockets of the northwest, in places the Beatles had played and places they hadn’t. This great news was conveyed to Brian by a regular business contact, John Mair, rep for the record distribution firm Lugton’s.
I was in Liverpool the day Love Me Do came out and was walking along Whitechapel as Brian was getting out of his car. I knew the record was already selling in box quantities but it was too soon yet for him to have heard this, so I broke the news to him. His face beamed—it was going to be a hit! I told him it was selling across the northwest—even in Lancaster, Morecambe, Barrow-in-Furness and Kendal—and it was, and he was delighted to hear it. “Oh really? That’s wonderful!” He was so excited—suddenly he was not the cool, imperious, arrogant Brian I knew, he was like a schoolboy. His reaction was one of “Oh my God, I’ve been right.” It was one of the nice moments in my career.16
Northwest sales this first Friday and Saturday—with the epicenter in Liverpool—sent “Love Me Do” straight into the Top Fifty, the one compiled for the following Thursday’s Record Retailer. It snuck in at 49. Big locally, small nationally—but enough to get them in and get them noticed. It was a dent, and a recognized victory: the Shadows hadn’t made the chart with their first record, or the Tornados. Brian called all these moments ultimates, and their rate was increasing … the contract, the record, getting into the chart.17
So freakish was all of this, rumors quickly took grip that Brian was hyping the chart, buying in boxes of “Love Me Do” to fake its position. The strongest story had him buying ten thousand. It was a rumor that clung despite Brian trying to shake it off—no one would believe he hadn’t, and denial only fed suspicion—and it wouldn’t be long before the whole business was talking about it, unfairly casting a blight on his integrity because it wasn’t true. As John Lennon would explain, “It [Love Me Do] sold so many in Liverpool the first two days—because they were all waiting for us to make it—that the dealers down in London thought there was a fiddle on. ‘That Mr. Epstein feller up there is cheating.’ But he wasn’t.”18
Many in Liverpool felt sure of it too. As the Beatles began to go national, so Brian began to find he’d fewer friends than he thought. Gossip about “the ten thousand” was traded maliciously and without proof by people jealous of his success or keen to claim “insider” status. No one considered Brian’s membership of a committee (within the Gramophone Record Retailers Association) that challenged suspicions of chart malpractice, or his resistance to faking “My Bonnie” into even his own shop’s published Top Twenty, or—most striking of all—the fact that, in 1962, it made no difference how many copies a shop sold of any record because the charts weren’t computed that way. Nems had been a “chart return” operation for years—it still provided data to Melody Maker and also now to Record Retailer—but those papers’ weekly phone calls or printed questionnaires didn’t ask for sales figures, only for a shop’s bestselling records ranked from 1 to 30; the papers awarded thirty points to the number 1 record down to one point for the number 30, and calculated an overall national total. All the charts were produced this way, as they still were in America. Brian Epstein had no need to buy ten thousand “Love Me Do”s to fake it into the charts; he didn’t even need to buy one. He did buy a couple of thousand copies, because the majority of Beatles fans wanted to buy it from Nems’ three stores, and because he was the manager and agent of this band and EMI had sent him one free copy.19
Beyond all the mud-slinging, however, one important fact remained, the one that counted: the Beatles were in the charts. They had a foot on the ladder. It was one small step, but they were going national.
2. NUNEATON, NORTH CHEAM AND NEW YORK—IT HAPPENED RIGHT HERE
The day the Sixties broke out, the Beatles were in Nuneaton, playing the art deco Co-op Ballroom. They were in the Midlands, a hundred miles south of Liverpool: different accents, another dot on Brian Epstein’s campaign map. It was standard format that at least one local act would flesh out the bills and on this occasion it was a Rugby-based group called the Mighty Avengers; as their drummer, David “Biffo” Beech, would relate, the Beatles dropped into their world as if from another planet. “We did our little bit—covers of Cliff and s
tuff like that—but as soon as they came on, the whole place stopped. They sounded so different to blokes like us who were doing the usual thing. People just stood there and thought, ‘Crikey, who are these?’ ”20
One hundred and twenty miles farther south again, at the same moment, a rhythm and blues group called the Rolling Stones were playing their tenth gig. It was, just, their first outside London, performing for two hours to an audience of two people in the back room of a pub in North Cheam, Surrey—a place called the Woodstock. Their £15 fee was split five ways, and the booking was fixed by Brian Jones because they didn’t have a manager.
The music papers wrote only about chart acts, so the Beatles didn’t know of the Rolling Stones—or the Rollin’ Stones as Jones preferred it—but the Stones were about to hear the Beatles and experience a shock. On a black-tie New York night twenty-five years later, when Mick Jagger made the speech inducting the Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (an institution ludicrously improbable in 1962), he said:
England was a real wasteland. England had nothing really to offer as far as pop music was concerned. The Stones were playing little clubs in London—doing Chuck Berry songs and blues and things—and we thought we were totally unique animals, [that] there was no one like us. And then we heard there was a group from Liverpool. They had long hair, scruffy clothes and a record contract, and they had a record in the charts, with a bluesy harmonica on it, called “Love Me Do”—when I heard the combination of all these things, I was almost sick.21
R&B’s popularity had been building steadily through 1962 in London and a few halls to its south and west—an area that would soon be coined “the Thames Valley Cottonfields.” The sound was as pure black as these white English boys could play it, not music from New York or Detroit but the hard-ground Delta states. The young northerners and young southerners in England shared an affinity for Chuck Berry, Arthur Alexander and Bo Diddley, but preferences beyond here deviated down the two accepted definitions of R&B over which Brian Jones had publicly argued in Disc: the kind the Beatles did and the kind the Stones did. The Beatles went for Motown, the Stones for Chess; the Beatles for Goffin-King, the Stones for Howlin’ Wolf; the Beatles for Richie Barrett, the Stones for Jimmy Reed; the Beatles for Luther Dixon, the Stones for Willie Dixon.
Alexis Korner was R&B’s focal point. A year to the day after Peter Cook opened his satirical comedy club the Establishment, the October 5 issue of its offshoot arts magazine Scene profiled Korner and his band, concluding, “They are, you might say, on the brink of a trend. What will happen next depends on the public outside of Central London. Alexis thinks they will like the music—once they get used to it. If so, the group could go a long, long way.”
But it wouldn’t be Blues Incorporated taking it the distance, it would be the group whose first booking filled their absence. Back on July 12, Korner and Blues Inc. made their debut radio broadcast, live in session on the BBC Light Programme’s Jazz Club. It was a Thursday night, Marquee night, so this week another group took their place, one the club’s Jazz News ad called “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.”
Jazz News continued to be the only R&B soapbox, and it was this magazine that announced the birth of the Rolling Stones. In a July 11 piece headlined MICK JAGGER FORMS GROUP (which must have galled Brian Jones), the singer and harmonica player leapt instantly to allay any fears their name might spark regarding their musical direction. The result is that this first-ever published quote by Mick Jagger about the Rolling Stones is “I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ’n’ roll outfit.”22
This same Friday, October 5, EMI released its first Beach Boys record. It’s there in the company’s Record Retailer ad, facing Brian Epstein’s full-page splash for “Love Me Do.” The song was Surfin’ Safari, an upbeat chunk of Chuck Berry–like guitar rock with appealingly unusual vocal harmonies. West coasters both, Los Angeles and Liverpool, the Beach Boys and Beatles were having simultaneous breakthroughs; they also shared some influences and were similarly self-contained, playing their own instruments and singing their own songs. “Surfin’ Safari” was written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love; Wilson—an exceptional talent at 20—was the eldest of the three brothers at the heart of the five-piece, and their father was the manager. Murry Wilson agreed to the Beach Boys’ contract with Capitol Records on May 10, the day after George Martin, in London, offered Brian Epstein a Parlophone contract for the Beatles.
In America, the Beach Boys’ first Capitol 45 was issued in a color picture sleeve showing them as five young lads with clean, well-brushed hair a little shorter than the Beatles’, wearing uniform blue check shirts over white T-shirts and jeans, and carrying a surfboard. No advertising or publicity value was perceived in electric guitars, and the “surfing sound”—in tandem with music for driving Hot Rod cars—had become big in southern California: guitar rock (mostly instrumental) for the idyllic male teen lifestyle of sunshine, surfing, beaches, cars and girls.
Surfin’ Safari caught on big in America, reaching 10 in Cash Box and 14 in Billboard, and EMI picked it up for British release. It attracted similar press reviews to “Love Me Do”—generally positive, hardly overwhelming—and had the same battle to be heard. Beyond a couple of Radio Luxembourg spins, it wasn’t, and it didn’t crack the charts, but it did confirm a change to the vocabulary. Record Retailer had the Beatles in mind when it commented on the Beach Boys being “Another group that is new to us.”23 It was a crystal-ball moment: groups were coming …
Flying high (at 13) in the Cash Box Top 100 of October 6, 1962, was “If I Had a Hammer,” by the acoustic guitar and vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary—but theirs was mostly a different market, a little older, one that had money to buy albums. The trio’s first long-player was in its second week atop the Cash Box chart—and a style of music that had been around forever burst right into the mainstream with a resounding strum. The coming buzzword was “hootenanny,” though when that odd appellation went away it would be recognized as the great breakthrough of folk music in America. Not pop, not rock, not R&B, not electric at all, but poetically written protest songs, songs acoustically performed for a literate and socially conscious audience, songs of dissent against the world’s ills and injustices, intelligently articulated in college campuses and coffeehouses. Folk was a musical explosion that detonated in San Francisco and in Greenwich Village, New York; it was music for beatniks—now, inevitably, folkniks. Peter, Paul and Mary were the first to have the hits, but another artist (like them, managed by Chicago-born entrepreneur Albert Grossman) was already shaping up to be its hero: 21-year-old Bob Dylan.
On Friday, October 5, Dylan was top of the bill at one of his earliest important New York shows, The Traveling Hootenanny, at the Town Hall on West 43rd Street. One could quibble about time differences, but Nuneaton, North Cheam and New York were in sync this night, united by voice, guitar and harmonica, played differently in each arena but from the heart at all, the sound of music young audiences hadn’t even known they wanted. The last of Dylan’s four numbers was new and not yet recorded, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” His future biographer Robert Shelton was present and would write, “Those who doubted Dylan’s poetic gift began to see what all the fuss was about.”24
Folk was already on the rise in Britain. Most of the new US recordings were picked up for release, where they were reinvigorating a centuries-old and always active indigenous scene, a fair number of the songs having old-world roots to begin with. The October 13 Melody Maker reported strong growth in the British folk circuit, with an estimated 150 clubs dotted around the country. On both sides of the microphone and on both sides of the Atlantic, the first postwar generation—young adults now—was ready to tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it.
* * *
* In October 1962, the BBC was in the process of negotiating an easing of Needletime restrictions, from the existing twenty-eight hours a week for the domestic radio services (twenty-two hours for the networks and six for the regions) to a who
pping seventy-five, which would have enabled a complete rethink of its approach to playing records. The Musicians’ Union was having none of it … and under the agreement finally reached in November 1963, the BBC ended up paying more for no extra hours. It would remain this way until other circumstances forced changes in 1964 and 1967.
THIRTY-THREE
OCTOBER 6–31, 1962
“WE’VE GOT IT, AND HERE WE ARE WITH IT”
RINGO: We went round to them at first, didn’t we?
JOHN: We went and said, “We’re a group and we’ve got this record out. Will you …”
GEORGE: And then the door would slam.1
Southerners aren’t mad about Scousers. It’s a fact, and often felt more forcefully the other way. Traipsing around London newspaper offices promoting “Love Me Do,” the Beatles met a sneering negativity they’d not forget. The hard times Brian had getting them a deal were bad enough, this latest reception toughened them again. They’d show these bloody softies …
JOHN: When we came down we were treated like provincials by the cockneys … looked down upon as animals. We were hicksville.
PAUL: We were told, “You’ll never do it from Liverpool, you’ll have to move down to London.” We stayed in Liverpool quite a long time just to defeat that rule.
GEORGE: In London they’d say, “From Liverpool? Khaziland!”*
RINGO: People were saying, “What’s your name, Beatles? From Liverpool? You’ll never make it. Get out of here.”2
They were in London for thirty-six hours on October 8 and 9, taking in John’s 22nd birthday. It was the Beatles’ first time in “the smoke” for something other than recording, and because Eppy still wasn’t fixing them London bookings until demand was proven, they were unknown here, able to move freely on the streets and stop in shops, pubs and cafés. After checking into the Royal Court Hotel they headed out to Marylebone, to Manchester Square, to record a personal appearance in one of their record company’s Radio Luxembourg shows, The Friday Spectacular.
Tune In Page 108
