Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  They’d need a B-side, and chose “Ask Me Why.” It was manifestly good enough, yet it was another song that, until this point, George hadn’t rated too highly, not hearing the unusual qualities that others did. He and Brian then conferred about the release date for this record and settled on the second week of the new year, Friday, January 11. The Beatles would fly back from Hamburg on the first day of 1963 with a solid new single to plug on the national tours, ballroom bookings, broadcasts and interviews Brian was setting up.

  This was all great news, and then George Martin floored them with his next suggestion. He wanted to make an LP.*

  It was a stunning announcement, genuinely mind-boggling. They’d released one record, and though it was now in several top thirties, many top-name artists with bigger hits were never asked to make an album, and almost every Parlophone singer was restricted to singles. The LP wasn’t the Beatles’ natural market: the twelve-inch format, though tilting toward youth, was still dominated by music for the more mature listener. The top sellers in Britain in 1961–2—bigger than Elvis, Cliff and Adam—were the George Mitchell Minstrels, who swamped the charts’ upper reaches with three LPs of olde-time music from The Black and White Minstrel Show.

  The LP decision seems mystifying but has the purest and most obvious of explanations. A year and a week after Brian Epstein first was bowled over by the Beatles, George Martin was similarly struck—he, too, the ideal receiver in the right place at the right time. His gift for recognizing unconventional artistry, and for cultivating that talent in the studio, had made him the most daring and inventive producer in Britain. No one else operated as he did, beyond the basic blueprint: he was a maverick experimenter, following instincts where others played safe. He’d created a bank of memorable left-field successes—records of above-average intelligence that also appealed widely—and now he’d invest his expertise in the Beatles, to find out what they could make together.

  His admiration was announced. “A&R manager George Martin sees a bright future for the Beatles—a new vocal instrumental group,” reported the Great Britain column of the US trade magazine Cash Box on November 24. The recording session two days later was prepublicized in Disc as well as Mersey Beat, and the decision to record an LP was revealed by the NME on the 30th, under the headline BEATLES LP FIXED.8 “The Beatles will record their first LP next month. Parlophone recording manager George Martin may tape the recent ‘Love Me Do’ chart entrants during a session at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. Most of the numbers would be written by members of the group.”

  As the NME intimated, it was to be a live album. Ten days after this meeting, at the “Please Please Me” recording session, George explained his ideas to journalist Alan Smith: “I’m thinking of recording their first LP at the Cavern, but obviously I’m going to have to come to see the club before I make a decision. If we can’t get the right sound we might do the recording somewhere else in Liverpool, or bring an invited audience into the studio in London. They’ve told me they work better in front of an audience.”9

  A certain amount of hurry-up was involved. George Martin’s 1962 diary includes an entry for just two days later—“Sunday November 18: 9PM, Cavern, Liverpool.” The Beatles would be playing their post-Hamburg Welcome Home, sure to be a crazy mad hothouse night, and George would do a recce. He’d assess the Beatles’ performance artistically, gauge their special audience rapport, and consider the technicalities of taking mobile recording gear down the humid cellar. But while the diary entry was never deleted, it didn’t happen: the trip to Liverpool was postponed three and a half weeks, rearranged for Wednesday, December 12—so although the NME anticipated the LP’s recording before the year was out, it slipped into 1963.10

  This “delay” would enable John and Paul to write the songs, because—as the NME made clear, based on what George told Alan Smith—“Most of the numbers would be written by members of the group.” Smith went into more detail in Mersey Beat: “George Martin added that the numbers on the disc would probably all be originals written by the group, but this hadn’t been finally decided.”11

  George’s idea that the Beatles should make an LP was extraordinary; that he wanted it packed with (and perhaps full of) John and Paul’s songs is even more so, and there can be no better barometer of both his transformed attitude and interest in seeing where it would lead. This was the man whose reflection on being shown “Love Me Do,” “PS I Love You” and “Ask Me Why” was, “I didn’t think the Beatles had any song of any worth—they gave me no evidence that they could write hit material.”12 Since then, he’d heard “Please Please Me” and “Tip of My Tongue” (much preferring the former) and that was it … but, nonetheless, he’d changed his mind.

  No doubt Brian was pushing the songs, as part of his separate management of Lennon and McCartney—but still this was a volte-face of immense proportions, and it was string-free: these wouldn’t be Lennon-McCartney-Martin songs. He wasn’t going to be inserting his name into the credit and his hand into the royalties, or pushing his own compositions onto Lennon-McCartney’s B-sides, like some other producers he might name.

  Accepting the songs of Lennon and McCartney would mean a whole new way of working. The production of pop music was rigidly fixed, and explained well by George Martin in a July 1961 Record Mail article. It entailed finding a singer, a song and an arranger; they’d work as a trio around his office piano, select the right key and tempo, then discuss the musical treatment, how it should sound and what orchestration it should have; then he’d book the session players, get the music written out for different instruments, and finally head into the studio. Such archetypal A&R functions didn’t apply when it came to the Beatles. Their sessions would start with one or some or all four of them demonstrating how the new song went, George would tidy it up as necessary and then they’d record it (along with at least one other title) in the allotted three hours. By letting the Beatles bring along their own songs, George was clearly accepting they were a self-contained group and not to be messed with—the very thing they most wanted. The songs were their songs and the sound was their sound, with a little help.

  “Another thing that’s worrying us is the title,” George Martin told Alan Smith. Us? Artists never had a say in their LP titles, and no EMI contract mentioned anything about involvement in creative decisions … but George invited the Beatles to kick around ideas all the same. As a result, here or soon after, Paul came up with a possible title, Off the Beatle Track, and a design idea to go with it. He roughly sketched out a square sleeve that had a photograph of the four of them, head and shoulders, the title running horizontally across the middle, two beetle-like antennae sprouting from the B in Beatle.13 George was entitled to disregard it, and did, but the Beatles made it known they had artwork ideas.

  This all made a tremendous impression on them. They had a manager dedicated to making them bigger than Elvis and now they had a recording manager (as they called him) to help achieve it. Even their erroneous belief that he’d never recorded rock and roll was considered an advantage. As John would explain, George Martin’s productions with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan “made him all the more acceptable”14—and beyond these was his cache of unusual and alluring 45s, which, though recent, were already ingrained in British popular culture, from “Goodness Gracious Me!” to “Sun Arise.”

  They also liked him as a man, very much, for his poise, presence, humor, talents and posh voice; he was the upright English schoolmaster they could rib, be rude to but still respect. If this meeting existed on film, one would see a group of people comfortable in one another’s company, laughing easily and openly, they enjoying his wit and impressions, he enjoying theirs; five men—six with Brian—of one mind, fixed on a common purpose, certain of their own ideas but receptive still to others. George experienced “a sense of well-being, of being happy” in the Beatles’ company; he found them attractive, talented and funny, and cared they thought well of him. “It shouldn’t really have mattered to me, whether they liked me
or not,” he’d explain, “but I was pleased they seemed to.”15

  They called him Big George to avoid confusion with their George, and also because he was: they were tall but he was taller, over six feet, and handsome, carrying a statesmanlike presence. The combination suggested Prince Philip, so they also called him the Duke of Edinburgh, and he played up to it delightfully. Though George was younger than many of his artists, to the Beatles he was clearly older, an avuncular or even fatherly figure—although, at 36, much more youthful than their uncles or dads. He’d been born in a different era, in London, and fought in the war; he was a grown-up who dressed well but old (turn-ups on his trousers), and who adopted Brian’s familial term of affection for them: to George Martin too now, the Beatles became “the boys.”

  So it was all working out. If the Beatles had signed to Decca they’d have had none of this. Chances are, they’d have been saddled with a producer doing a standard job, resistant to their views and pushing formulaic Tin Pan Alley songs on them to the exclusion of their own … perhaps until their contract wasn’t renewed. But instead of being with that multinational giant, they were with its greatest rival. On October 22, when Decca posted a healthy profits increase, EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood sent a letter of congratulation to his counterpart, Sir Edward Lewis, jokingly beseeching, “I wish you could show us how to do it in EMI.” Twenty-five days later, the answer was sitting right beneath his feet.16

  Not that it would be all gain for EMI. This fact became apparent in a second stage to the Beatles’ meeting, held either late the same afternoon or in the days immediately after. They weren’t present—it was just George Martin and Brian Epstein, shaping all their futures. The two men had liked each other in May and communicated well since, respecting each other’s integrity. Now they were becoming closer still, establishing a professional and personal rapport that would glue this whole remarkable thing together.

  Their meeting focused on how to maximize “Please Please Me” ’s potential, and George had a specific suggestion that would reverberate forever: that Brian should give the record’s publishing to another music company and not to Ardmore and Beechwood. Brian was already thinking of it. He’d been unhappy with several factors concerning the publishing of “Love Me Do” and “PS I Love You”: there was the unfortunate business of both songs being credited on the record labels to Lennon-McCartney after he’d expressly requested McCartney-Lennon, and there were the BBC disappointments: “Love Me Do” wasn’t in Juke Box Jury and had been withdrawn late from Saturday Club, which Brian felt was Kim Bennett’s blunder.

  In fact, Bennett was innocent of the Saturday Club situation, Juke Box Jury was an impossibility (and he’d had no less joy than Parlophone’s own plugger), and Ardmore and Beechwood mightn’t have been responsible for the wrong songwriting credit. Crucially, however, Bennett and his boss Sid Colman were not invited to defend themselves, and George Martin wasn’t going to do it.

  George would say, in print, “Ardmore and Beechwood … did virtually nothing about getting the record [“Love Me Do”] played,” but if he believed this, he wasn’t acquainting himself with the available facts.17 Kim Bennett had moved heaven and earth to help make “Love Me Do” a hit. No man could have done more, and George himself did a lot less. After extreme efforts, Bennett’s successes were beginning to mount up—but, one way or another, Brian would conclude that Ardmore and Beechwood had been lazy and of no use to them, and that he should take John and Paul’s business to a publisher who’d actually work hard on the songs.

  George was sidelining Ardmore and Beechwood. He needed to draw a line under the past and be free to work with the Beatles on his own terms—because he wanted them, not because he’d been forced to take them. He was, at a stroke, cutting adrift the awkward circumstances that had brought him to this point. It made sense in Brian’s mind: Ardmore and Beechwood must have been useless because why else would an EMI employee be steering a potentially lucrative contract away from an EMI office? Kim Bennett realized what was happening. “When a song’s been established in the charts, there’s no reason to change the publishing set up [on the next one] unless you want to be spiteful. George was very naughty in getting them away from us.”18

  It was a maneuver, no more or less, the kind of thing that goes on in business every day. There’s no saying Lennon and McCartney’s copyrights would have stayed with Ardmore and Beechwood anyway. Even if Brian had given them “Please Please Me” and “Ask Me Why,” he might have switched after that. Publishing assignments were always for individual songs with no options reserved on future work, and only the most astute music men had the wit to keep composers loyal to one company.

  Brian was thinking of taking John and Paul’s music to the London office of Hill & Range, the American company that (under that and other associated names) published most of Elvis’s records. George Martin didn’t exactly discourage him but put three other names into the frame: Dick James, David Platz and Alan Holmes. All were good Tin Pan Alleymen with years of experience, who’d published George’s own compositions. The key difference was ownership: Platz and Holmes ran the London offices of American corporations—Essex Music and Robbins Music—while James was British and proud of it. Born in the East End of London to immigrant parents, he flew the flag for British writers at a time when American domination of London was a red-hot potato up the Alley. While Brian was free to assess his options with any publisher, George clearly recommended Dick James and brought the two parties together over the phone before they first met in person on November 27—the morning after the “Please Please Me” and “Ask Me Why” recording session.

  There was no time off from here to their Hamburg Christmas—the Beatles had thirty-one consecutive workdays of every kind, requiring constant van and air travel up and down the country. Their 1963 calendar effectively began on November 17, 1962 … and not in the best of shape. Brian had urged them to stay sharp in Hamburg, anticipating the onslaught coming their way, but they’d allowed tiredness and boredom to take root. Stage-wise, not even the meeting with George Martin invigorated them. Their initial booking of this new phase was the Saturday dance in a big Coventry ballroom, their first £50 show. It was one Paul would always remember with a shudder, the night to cite whenever he needed reminding that things could be bad but hard work made them better. “We weren’t always good. You’d have these disastrous nights where you’re all out of tune, you forget how to turn the amps up, you forget where your levels are and exactly how near the mike it is you’ve got to sing. We’d have to do a week of that, in the ballrooms, before we could actually get around to doing any good shows—and then we’d be back in it and could go on forever.”19

  It says everything for how new-style the Beatles were that their impact this night was still powerful. Pete Waterman, junior DJ at the Matrix Hall in Coventry, would recall, “We mostly had stars playing there, but these guys were swearing, carrying their own gear, totally unstar. Their personalities just won you over straight away. They were different—Harrison was playing Chet Atkins [records] in the dressing-room and Lennon was wearing Levi’s. I’d never seen Levi’s before. The Matrix promoter said the Beatles would be the greatest thing the world had ever seen.”20

  Their popularity was building everywhere, boosted by the sustained success of “Love Me Do.” Even on Merseyside, where they’d been far and away the most popular group for almost two years, new fans were crowding in to see them. There were a great many boys, but mostly it was girls, kids who hadn’t been part of the Beatles’ development and were tuning in “late.” Generally, these girls behaved differently around them: they screamed more and were less respectful of distance, and they didn’t have—couldn’t possibly have—the same close relationships precious to their predecessors. For some, the many was way too much. Despite her special friendship with John, Lindy Ness decided to look elsewhere for her entertainment: “When “Love Me Do” came out there started to be big queues, and Louey and I began to see girls in the Cavern fro
m our school class. These were the girls who’d always pooh-poohed this whole thing, and now they were going along too. When we saw those queues, full of people who’d not been interested before, we just stopped going. We ‘moved on’ … horrible little girls that we were!”21

  This week’s sales pushed “Love Me Do” up to 21 on the Record Retailer Top Fifty, its highest place yet; it also sustained previous positions on Melody Maker, Disc and The World’s Fair and stayed all month in Liverpool’s Own Top 5. Unaware of the fate about to befall his project, Kim Bennett was suddenly picking up airplay with relative ease: he’d flown to Germany to beg “Love Me Do” into Two-Way Family Favourites and now it made what Tony Barrow (in his “Please Please Me” press release) claimed was “the fastest-ever repeat play.” BBC research indicates that this particular broadcast was heard by almost 40 percent of the measured audience, 18.8 million, with plenty more listening in West Germany. Then 5.4 million heard another play in Twelve O’Clock Spin, an occasion when the Beatles first shared the airwaves with Elvis.22

  It was for the BBC that the Beatles rushed back to London on November 23, to take the TV audition brought about by their young Preston friend, Letters Smith. Brian was doing his best to minimize the Beatles’ traveling but such demands were the inevitable consequence of running a chart group from Liverpool when virtually everything in the business happened two hundred miles away. Their appointment was close to Hyde Park, in one of the many church halls the BBC hired for auditions and rehearsals. Though no verdict was expressed at the time, Brian soon received a letter saying the Beatles might be offered a second audition “some time in the near future,” in a TV studio. It seemed like a rejection but was actually a standard response, and a few days later the Beatles were invited on a new-talent series, The 625 Show, starting in January. It would be aired live from the BBC’s Bristol studio—but the Beatles were already booked on the available dates. Their TV exposure would stay solely on the commercial channel for a time to come, because the more dates were in their diary, the harder it was to take advantage of late opportunities. This was Brian’s own brand of inevitable consequence.