John I mostly remember for his remark “If you’re not queer and you’re not Jewish, why are you coming to work for Nems?” I said, “I’m not, I’m not, and I’m not!” Ringo didn’t come over, I went and talked to him a little bit.
All the traits that came out at that initial meeting were consistent with what followed.45
Something big was happening every day now. They had another twenty-four hours in London before heading home and this was when they appeared on national TV for the first time, in the children’s show Tuesday Rendezvous. It went out live from a Wembley studio, was seen everywhere but Scotland, was most viewers’ first exposure to the Beatles’ sight and sound, and had a particularly captive audience because much of Britain was blanketed by freezing smog.46 It was the worst pollution experienced in London for twelve years; the Beatles had great difficulty getting into and out of Wembley in nose-to-tail traffic and gloom. The conditions didn’t lift for three days, by which time 340 people had choked to death on the toxic fumes.
For a £25 fee, the Beatles mimed all of “Love Me Do” and forty-five seconds of “PS I Love You,” their only TV performance of the song, and they made a strong impression—viewers had never seen a guitar-group who sang, and their long dark hair was effective in the black-and-white picture.47 The result was yet another spike in business for “Love Me Do”: it had just slipped from 21 to 26 in Record Retailer, but sales this week pushed it back up and into its highest position yet, 19. It was yet another milestone moment, for as George would relate, “The most important thing in our lives was to get into the top twenty.”48
In December 1961, at the moment Brian became the Beatles’ manager, John and Paul reluctantly faced up to regularly playing their own songs on stage. Twelve months later, they were motivated at every turn to write new ones and push them into the national spotlight, and it was probably in the last days of November that they completed the one Paul had started a month earlier. Its title would become “I Saw Her Standing There” but they weren’t yet sure of it—they also called it “Seventeen,” and “Just Seventeen,” and for a while it had no name at all. Beatles fan Sue Houghton (they called her Sue Cement Mixer, her identity when handing up Cavern requests) remembers it going straight into the Beatles’ live set, “but still without a title. One time in the Cavern, Paul announced, ‘We’re gonna do that I saw her standing there one which we do.’ ”49
Paul had been thinking up its lyric on his London day with Celia Mortimer—his girlfriend of 17, the one he danced with through the night at the Establishment Club. However, the song was completed only when he had a front parlor session with John at 20 Forthlin Road. They tried out little bits on Jim Mac’s Nems piano but mostly used guitars, working “eyeball to eyeball” just like when they’d first written together here as schoolboys. Mike took photographs of them sitting by the little tiled fireplace—important, historic images, the only such photos ever taken—so here we see these two sharp, ambitious, tuned-in young men looking down at an old Liverpool Institute exercise book in which Paul has written the words, complete with plenty of crossings-out. John is wearing his black horn-rim glasses and playing his Jumbo Gibson, Paul is playing a cheap Spanish acoustic of unknown history. Another Original, a McCartney-Lennon one, is taking shape right here, right now.50
The moment Paul started singing, John stopped him. The opening line, “She was just seventeen,” was good; the second, “She’d never been a beauty queen,” wasn’t. “John went, ‘What? We must change that’ … so we tried to think of another line which rhymed with ‘seventeen’ and meant something. We eventually got ‘You know what I mean,’ which means nothing, completely nothing at all.”51
The song as it emerged from here incorporated a number of ideas. “John and I used to nick a lot. ‘We’ll have this bit from the Marvelettes, we’ll have that bit from …’ If you really nick then it’s a disaster, but [the way we did] it just gets you into the song, and in the end you never notice where it was nicked from. You pull it all together and it makes something original.”52
Some nicks are conjectural. “I saw her standing on the corner” is the opening line of the Coasters’ “Young Blood,” and “she’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen” is from Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie”—both songs still in the Beatles’ set. “How could I dance with another / Since I saw her standing there” has a similar melody and meter to “I want to be in that number / When the saints go marching in”—the tune Paul learned on trumpet in 1955–6 and the B-side of their own “My Bonnie” record. Other nicks are definite. In a 1964 interview, Paul cheerfully admitted to the wholesale lifting of the bass riff in Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You” that runs throughout “I Saw Her Standing There”: “I played exactly the same notes as he did and it fitted our number perfectly.”53 But it wasn’t so much the parts that were important, it was what Paul and John did with them. Though the title wasn’t settled, their new song was dynamic, catchy, appealing, clever … and an instant favorite with audiences.
It was one of four new songs in the Beatles’ set, because they also refreshed it with infusions from the standard supply line—American records released by British labels, found in Nems. And it was perfectly in step with their current tastes that two of the three were Goffin-King compositions—interesting melodic love songs with appealing lead and harmony vocals, guitars and a great beat.
George homed in on “Chains,” by a trio of New York girls called the Cookies—his Liverpudlian accent pronouncing it “Cookies.” Producer Gerry Goffin’s arrangement so suited the Beatles that, once again, they’d no need to alter it. The front line sang—George had the lead, John and in particular Paul supported with upper-range harmonies, and where Goffin used handclaps to edge the beat, so did they: Paul and George clapped at head height, John clapped and cripped. It was another of those perfect Cavern songs—except that opportunities for playing it here were fast running out.
John took the lead on Goffin-King’s “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby,” recorded by Little Eva as her follow-up to “The Loco-Motion.” Ringo whipped them tightly in time, Paul and George sang harmonies behind John’s lead while doing the handclaps again, George played a twangy solo where the original had sax, and—in the Cavern at least—there was a vocal variation: George’s girlfriend Bernadette Farrell remembers John singing Keep Your Hands Off My Nigel.
John also grabbed “Anna,” recorded by their favorite R&B singer Arthur Alexander; it was a minor US hit and did nothing in Britain … except thrill several cognoscenti who’d long burn the flame. Named after Ann Alexander (Arthur’s real-life wife), Anna is a passionate plea from a man to his woman: she wants to go off with another man, he begs her to stay … but says if she really wants to leave, she should give back his ring and go. Alexander sang it with soul, Lennon did his best to be black and gave it his usual whole self: when he turned up the heat in the bridge he was electrifyingly close to screaming. It needed a fair degree of rearrangement—the original had piano, the Beatles had guitars, and Paul and George created a sustained aaaah backing vocal in place of the original’s string section. They loved playing it, and it was a particular favorite of George’s: Sue Cement Mixer handed up requests to John that read “Please sing Anna for George.”
It’s not known if they played any of these new songs when George Martin saw them in the Cavern, the night he came to assess conditions for recording the Beatles’ LP live in the Mathew Street cellar. George and Judy took the train to Liverpool on Wednesday, December 12, Brian treated them to dinner, and Bob Wooler watched the tall gentleman from EMI “walking around the empty Cavern, clapping his hands and testing the echo.” Dissatisfaction with this, plus concern at the amount of water condensing off the walls and ceiling, and alarm over general safety—a fainted girl was passed prone over George’s, and Judy’s heads while the Beatles played—made George decide this wasn’t a suitable venue for his needs. “The Cavern would have been a dreadful place to do it,” he’d explain. “It wasn’t a
very good acoustic environment—not a very comfortable environment at all really. Very grotty.”54
He confirmed his view the next morning at a meeting in Brian’s office … where, nonetheless, plans for the Beatles’ LP took real shape. They discussed George’s second idea, to create a live show in the studio by getting an audience into Abbey Road. He wondered if Brian might bring a Liverpool crowd down to London, members of the fan club perhaps, transported in a string of coaches—travel by Nems Enterprises; cakes, Cokes and tape courtesy EMI.
But very soon, probably now, the idea was rejected and the Beatles album became a studio project straight and simple. Vacant dates in their diaries didn’t match in January, and the first that suited both, and also the Abbey Road diary, was Monday, February 11, when the tour with Helen Shapiro was taking a break. The LP would require fourteen tracks and—in “Love Me Do,” “PS I Love You,” “Please Please Me” and “Ask Me Why”—George already had four. He’d book a double session in their usual Number 2 studio—10AM to 1PM, 2:30 to 5:30PM—when there was no reason why they couldn’t record the other ten. John and Paul knew they had two months to write as many songs as possible.
Disappointed as he was with the Cavern, George Martin’s evening was still productive, because—with Brian as his guide—he discovered Liverpool had other promising groups. Brian didn’t take him to the Cavern until about nine o’clock; first he drove him through the Mersey tunnel to see Gerry and the Pacemakers play at the Majestic Ballroom, Birkenhead. Though Brian had made arrangements for Gerry & Co. to be seen by Decca, here was George Martin, ready and willing to take a look now.55
He looked, he listened and he liked, and told Brian to bring them down to the studio in London; he would give them a Commercial Test, and tape it, so their first record could come from it—in which case there’d be a contract. Here and now, the session was set for January 22, 1963, at Abbey Road. And while waiting in the Cavern to see the Beatles, George was also impressed by support group the Four Mosts, formerly the Four Jays. He said he’d be happy to test them in the studio, news Brian put to them a day or two later when also restating his previous offer of a management contract. Still cautious about surrendering qualified jobs for a guitar income, they declined both opportunities.
Despite this, everything was clicking nicely for Brian. The Beatles had recorded a certain smash, Gerry and the Pacemakers seemed well set to join EMI, and the Big Three had a successful Artist Test at Decca just before Christmas, right after returning from the Star-Club. He was also moving ahead with his fourth signing, taking over management of the singer who called himself Billy Kramer. The Beatles supported Brian’s decision: one reason he wanted to sign him was that John said he had a good voice.56
All this time, Brian was still contending with the Pete Best difficulty, the threat of legal action over his “unwarranted and unjustifiable dismissal” from the Beatles. After an initial flurry of letters, however, with both sides robustly arguing their case, the exchange was slowing to what Brian’s lawyer David Harris would describe as “a desultory correspondence.” The threat of action wasn’t withdrawn and would remain active—but only just, because Pete’s level of push had gone off the boil.
The heat generated when he joined Lee Curtis and the All Stars had also cooled. Though the group’s general popularity was increasing, promoters’ ads rarely gave them prominence over others, and after Pete instructed manager Joe Flannery not to advertise him as an “ex-Beatle” he’d ceased to be mentioned at all. As the Cavern doorman Paddy Delaney remarked to Mersey Beat eight months later, “When Pete joined the All Stars, the limelight he had with the Beatles seemed to go.”57
Opportunities did seem to be opening up for him in his new group—BBC and London record company auditions beckoned in November 1962—but managerial bragging was generally greater in advance of these events than after. Pete had gone to Decca with the Beatles and returned with nothing (that is, once John, Paul and George finally told him); when he went with Curtis, producer Peter Sullivan tested the singer and the All Stars separately and was interested only in Curtis.
The Beatles continued to process the Pete fallout in their own original way. On the one hand, Brian was glossing over the troubles. On November 24, when Pete turned 21, Brian sent a telegram to the Majestic, Birkenhead, where Lee Curtis and the All Stars were playing, and Bob Wooler read it aloud to the crowd in front of Pete: CONGRATULATIONS MANY HAPPY RETURNS ALL THE BEST—JOHN PAUL GEORGE RINGO AND BRIAN. So, everything seemed fine between them all. On the other hand, John wrote a poem he called “Randolf’s Party.” He was never asked to explain it, so there’s no definite proof it was about Pete, but John was always one to express his feelings artistically, laying it down for all to see, and the piece rings true with Pete in mind. There’s the title (Pete’s first name was Randolph), the passing reference to a dad not living at home, and the no-word-wasted sentences “We never liked you all the years we’ve known you. You were never raelly [sic] one of us you know, soft head.” As a Best biographer would conclude, here was “the crux of Pete’s Beatles career, in one paragraph.”58
They saw him on Saturday, December 15, at the Mersey Beat Awards Night in Birkenhead. It was the third time Lee Curtis and the All Stars were on a bill with the Beatles since Pete had joined them—and the third time they passed by without a word.59 Curtis and his backing group were here because they’d come a creditable second in the poll, the Beatles because they’d won it again. The “Please Please Me” press release said their victory was achieved “by an overwhelming number,” which seems entirely likely.
There’d been no Awards Night for the 1961 poll, but this made up for it. Produced by Bob Wooler, it didn’t begin until midnight, so all the groups could play their usual bookings first. Brian went on stage to present a special Nems Enterprises award to Billy Kramer with the Coasters, as Top Non-Professional Group, and he also made a short speech before the Beatles came on. His words weren’t quoted and aren’t remembered, but a photo shows him saying something funny while Paul looks pensive and John hides mock embarrassment behind George’s shoulder, so it was clearly a Lennon comment. The hero of the night, Bill Harry, then presented the Beatles with their awards, and they ended the show at 4AM by playing three numbers. One was “Please Please Me,” let loose from the vault this onetime-only, to give people a quick first taste of 1963. All quoted witnesses say it went down great, then it was locked away again for three more weeks …
In the meantime, their first record was still delivering in every way. For—amazingly—a third straight month, the Beatles had the thrill of watching the weekly charts to see where it stood. It was now leading a curious yo-yo ride—up and down, up and down—that reflected their TV/radio dates and the nightly van dashes to new towns. Though the published charts were all different, sales in the week ending December 15 put “Love Me Do” at 22 across the board: it dropped to here on Record Retailer and New Record Mirror, and it climbed to here, its highest place yet, in both Melody Maker’s Top Fifty and The World’s Fair’s Juke-Box 100; it was out of the Disc chart (having peaked at 24) and also Liverpool Echo’s Own Top 5, but had only just entered Pop Weekly’s Top Thirty and was still rising.
One consequence of this activity was a surge in the amount of mail received by the fan club. It was getting too much for Bobby Brown, so Brian assigned her the help of Nems Enterprises typist Freda Kelly; this keen, 17-year-old Cavernite—efficient, helpful and a friend to all—didn’t need asking twice and happily immersed herself in the challenge. Brian also made a surprising and farsighted move by allowing the creation of a second club purely to serve Beatles fans in the south of England—it was an empty vessel he didn’t expect to stay empty for long. The idea was kindled by Bettina Rose, an 18-year-old from Richmond, southwest of London, who heard “Love Me Do” on Radio Luxembourg and wrote to EMI volunteering her services to the Beatles. She met Brian in London in mid-December 1962 and they decided to go ahead with the new venture. Never slow to put plans into
practice, Brian defined the club’s adjunct structure, agreed to shoulder its costs, and mailed the NME a new classified ad for The Beatles Fan Club (Southern Branch) to run in the first issue of the year.
The Beatles’ last British dates of 1962 were at the Cavern and on Granada TV, December 16 and 17. The atmosphere in Mathew Street was palpably end-of-term. Fan club members had seen a list of the Beatles’ bookings in January/February 1963, and these devotees could count just nine Merseyside appearances in those fifty-nine days; it was otherwise full of places like Scotland, Birmingham, Newcastle, Leicester and Oxford. Even Liverpool’s January 10 Welcome Home show—post–Hamburg and Scotland—was being held somewhere bigger, in the Grafton Ballroom. Still, the Beatles celebrated Christmas early with their fans, smuggling booze into the bandroom and going on stage well oiled and up for a laugh. Pat Hodgetts, a happy Cavernite from the south end of town (the Beatles knew her as Polythene Pat, because she chewed the stuff), has a particular memory of the last great Liverpool night of ’62: “John sang To Know Her Is To Love Her and he had the whole front row sniffling. I noticed that when they finished, he pretended to fiddle with his amplifier, turning his back on us—in truth, he was a bit choked up too. It was dead nice to see he was so affected.”60
The Beatles were back at Granada the next evening for another People and Places—a million and a half people watching them play “Love Me Do” for the third time and “Twist and Shout” for the first—and then they were off once more, resigned to the chore of making their final flying visit to the cold, old streets of Hamburg.
* * *
* “LP” was the term George and the Beatles used in 1962 and for some years beyond, not “album.” Same difference.
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