† Dick James was born Isaac Vapnick on December 12, 1920, in Whitechapel, in the East End of London, the youngest of five children of parents who’d fled Poland (near the Russian border) after suffering appallingly in the Pogroms. In the Second World War, entertaining troops with Henry Hall’s orchestra, Isaac sang as Johnny Sheridan (and later wrote songs as Lee Sheridan). When he sang with Geraldo in 1945–6 he changed his name to Dick James, and formally to Richard Leon James. His recording career at EMI began at this time, and George Martin produced his solo records for Parlophone from 1953 until they ceased in 1959.
‡ John and Paul’s publishing income would come separately—they weren’t due their first statement from Ardmore and Beechwood before up to ninety days from December 31. Brian could already work out, however, that they stood to earn at least £325—which, after deduction of his 20 percent commission, would give them £130 each, opening a wealth gap with George and Ringo.
THIRTY-SIX
DECEMBER 18–31, 1962
AND WHO KNOWS!
There was one huge difference with the Beatles’ fifth Hamburg season: they knew it was the last. They were scanning new horizons for 1963, not revisiting old ones—besides which, they’d had a bellyful of the place and all its sordid squalor. Those two November weeks had been a real imposition—“a DRAG,” George wrote—and these final two were worse: he told Sue Cement Mixer “Hamburg’s a smelly hole.”
It was paying them better than ever: three thousand marks a week (about £268) was DM637.50 (£57) each, in cash, after the deduction of Brian’s commission. Manfred Weissleder’s free accommodation was also the best they’d had: four single rooms in the Hotel Pacific on Neuer Pferdemarkt, a ten-minute stagger from Grosse Freiheit. They only had to play two or three forty-five-minute sets a night, and the two weeks entailed only thirteen working days because the club closed Christmas Eve.
They were second top of the bill. Below them were, from the ‘Pool, the Strangers and King-Size Taylor and the Dominoes, plus Tony Sheridan and Roy Young in the Star-Club house band, and Carol Elvin, a London girl who sang and strummed electric guitar in a skimpy costume; above them were Johnny and the Hurricanes, the instrumental band from Toledo, Ohio, still big in Germany though the hits had dried up at home and in Britain. Thanks to Adrian Barber’s running of the club’s sound system, the Beatles brought only their guitars and Ringo used the Trixon kit that stayed on stage.
Hamburg loathing was hardened by the weather. It was bitter throughout these two weeks, by far the coldest they’d known here—the Alster lake froze and the Elbe River was an ice cube fifty centimeters thick. The Beatles arrived unprepared and the arctic temperatures stalled their wanderlust: they mostly stayed in the hotel or the club, cooped up and bored. John and Paul needed to write maybe six more songs for the LP (to be recorded seven weeks from here) but they did nothing at all, pushing the problem into a crowded January. They were all grateful recipients of long black woolen scarves knitted for them by Astrid, identical to the one she’d given Stuart. She’d started to make them before the weather turned bad, so her timing was perfect. They socialized, a little though not a lot, with Astrid and Klaus, and with Icke Braun. Icke drove Paul out to his house, a country cottage northeast of the city, to encounter frozen water pipes, no heating, and—save for a few millimeters—another car: his VW Beetle went into an icy skid and came close to a head-on collision.
The Beatles always had incidents in Hamburg—fewer this time than usual, although one would become notorious. They went on stage one night as a trio, lacking John, so Horst Fascher went to hunt him down. In the spring, he’d felt the need to urinate on John while he was fickte a Fräulein; this time, finding John receiving oral sex in a backstage toilet cubicle, he doused the hot couple in ice-cold water from an adjacent shower. John came bursting out of the stall in a raging temper and Fascher ordered him to get out zere and verk; John tore the toilet seat off its hinge and went on stage dripping wet, in Beatle boots, underpants and, around his neck, the toilet seat.*
No incidents are mentioned in letters back to Liverpool—but, again, there were fewer of them than before. George sent the best one, to Sue Cement Mixer, after she visited his parents with flowers and chocolates, got invited in for tea, and offered to wash his car.
A letter arrived at my house from Hamburg and I recognized George’s writing. I thought he’d be saying “Please don’t bother my parents,” but no—he’d phoned home, his mum said Sue Cement Mixer had been around, she told him my offer, and he sent me a long letter with a seven-point instruction about how to clean his Anglia. And when to clean it—“about the 8th of January,” just as they were getting home from Scotland.
It was a great letter, three pages. I was to wash the car inside and out with warm soapy water, polish it with two separate dusters (in “a circular motion”), vacuum the carpets, do both sides of all the windows, everything. He timed two tea breaks into my schedule, and the seventh and final instruction was “Proceed to 20 Forthlin Rd with about 6 buckets full of dirty muddy greasy water, where a shiny Ford Classic will be seen. Spread contents of the buckets evenly, so as to leave a nice film of muck over the car.” He was suggesting I dump his dirty water on Paul’s car!1
“Love Me Do” had gone up, not down, last time they were in Hamburg—and now, incredibly, it happened again. Record Retailer’s Top Fifty of December 27 (shop sales 17th–22nd) took the Beatles to their highest place yet, 17, and jukebox plays spun it to 19 on The World’s Fair 100—again, best yet. This longevity was exceptional. Records that entered the chart after “Love Me Do,” and went higher, had now disappeared while it still hung around. The Beatles were the first group to have any size hit on their debut and here they were in the top twenty, and all this happened without exposure on Juke Box Jury, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Saturday Club. Sales to the end of November had been an impressive 36,868 and in December added another 30,000, and not even Brian or the Beatles could have expected that. Their second EMI royalty statement (due after February 28) would be better than the first, and it now seemed certain that “Love Me Do” would still be on the charts when “Please Please Me” was released—they’d have two records charting at the same time.
The excitement at this moment wasn’t with the Beatles in Hamburg, it was without them in London, building through the Epstein-James axis. Brian was using the James office as his base, and while Dick was busy on one phone, fixing airplay for “Please Please Me” or for the group themselves, Brian was on an adjacent phone to ballroom promoters around the nation, plugging between-tours gaps in the Beatles’ January-to-March diary, and filling April with one-nighters—including, for the first time, headlining shows in London.
Dick James now followed George Martin in using Brian’s term of affection for the Beatles—“the boys”—and it was with his guidance that their nightly fee shot up several times in a short period. On November 21, when fixing a February contract, Brian asked for £50, just increased from £30. This was already a competitive rate, but on December 8, negotiating a date in March, he made it £75 with a rider that if “Please Please Me” went into the Record Retailer top five before the show, it would be £100—and by the end of December the Beatles’ fee was a flat £100 regardless of chart performance. This was getting into the upper limit of affordability for promoters, ensuring they had to present the Beatles in bigger venues. Dick was encouraging Brian to be ever more bold, and he could, because—quite evidently—a grassroots, word-of-mouth reputation for the Beatles was growing fast. For his part, Dick got a promise that “Please Please Me” would be reviewed on Juke Box Jury on January 5, which must have been another major cause of celebration. As he would recall, “From when we met in November, an enthusiasm was building up between Brian and myself. I was only too happy to cooperate with him as much as possible, and we were in close proximity all the time.”2 He’d known Brian and the Beatles under a month and was already experiencing the most excitement in all his years in publishing.
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p; Five months earlier, when George Martin told Dick James he was giving “How Do You Do It” to a group from Liverpool, Dick had jokingly replied, “So what’s from Liverpool?” Here was what. Through the talents of John Lennon and Paul McCartney he saw a catalog of new songs—formidable, authentic, British—blossoming before his very eyes. It was quite possibly the publishing opportunity of a lifetime, and also a predicament. These two street-smart young composers had already left Ardmore and Beechwood to come to him, and they could just as easily leave him and wander away someplace else. He had to think of a way of enticing them to stick around.
His solution was to propose a new music publishing company, half-owned by John, Paul and Brian, or however they decided it, and half-owned by Dick James Music. John and Paul would have an exclusive contract with the new company for an agreed period of time, and instead of forfeiting their copyrights, as everyone did and as they had done until now, they’d maintain joint ownership. They would still sign individual agreements for each new song, for the standard royalties on sheet music sales and broadcast and mechanical fees, but, on top of that, they’d be entitled to 50 percent of the company’s profits. The bottom line was that Dick James was giving away half his claim on the copyrights, and half his earnings, in order to keep Lennon and McCartney on his books. The deal would pay them much more than royalties alone, and be tax efficient, allowing them to keep more of what they earned.
Transparency was shown by Dick’s suggestion that Brian’s solicitor draft the contract. The process was started by David Harris in the days after Christmas, an agreement dated January 1, 1963, but the product of 1962 thinking. It would be considered and tweaked in the opening weeks of the year, but as it stood here and now:
• The new company had no name, but the agreement was between, on one side, Dick James Music, and on the other John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Nems Enterprises, with provision for Jim McCartney to sign for Paul, who was still a minor.
• The company would have £100 capital, divided into 100 £1 shares—50 “A” shares for Dick James Music, 50 “B” shares divided 20 to John Lennon, 20 to Paul McCartney and 10 to Nems Enterprises. (There was no difference between “A” and “B” shares, it was only for ease of understanding.) Dick James and Brian Epstein would be the directors.
• Dick James Music would receive 10 percent of the new company’s gross receipts for providing its office, staff, bookkeeping, stationery and basic running costs, along with daily supervision and management of its activities.
• John and Paul would assign all their song copyrights for the next three years, not less than eighteen compositions deemed acceptable to the company.
It wouldn’t be the first such venture—joint-publishing companies were rare but around—but what was a first was that it was offered to songwriters whose biggest chart hit was 17. The speed with which Dick James saw the need for his idea was astonishing, and from John, Paul and Brian’s perspective, sensational. Subject to contractual agreement, they were ending 1962 with their own publishing company and a chance to make serious sums of money for the first time.
It’s unlikely John and Paul knew of this yet. The Beatles were enduring a Hamburg Christmas they already wanted to forget. George seems to have been the most vocal in his intolerance: whenever fed up with something, he’d miss few opportunities to grumble or wish an end to his ordeal, and in Hamburg this extended even to the date Christmas was celebrated. In a letter to one of his regular Liverpool correspondents, Margaret Price of Edge Hill, George complained about the Germans having it on the 24th, and then concluded, “We have 5 more days to go, then we’ll be away from this place for good [I HOPE].”
It was among these circumstances that, for the only time in their five visits here, the Beatles were recorded on stage. Ted “King-Size” Taylor happened to have bought a reel-to-reel deck, and Adrian Barber positioned it on a table, plugged in a microphone and set it running over several nights at slow speed (3¾ ips). Other groups were recorded too, but the Beatles dominate. In subsequent court testimony it would be claimed they knew they were being taped and didn’t care. “OK Ted, just get the ale in” is the probably apocryphal line; it would also be sworn they didn’t know. What’s clear is that the recordings weren’t made for commercial use—the sound is rough lo-fi and the Beatles were already under exclusive worldwide contract to Parlophone.†
At thirty-seven songs and one hundred minutes (with perhaps a little more still unknown), this is the only substantial live recording of the “early Beatles” known to exist, and certainly the only one in the public domain. Through Taylor’s and Barber’s efforts, there is this historic and highly welcome tape of the Beatles in performance at the precise moment their first phase was ending, a nick-of-time capture of the Beatles as a rock and rolling club band.
Their playing is adept and hyper-energetic, and the microphone catches many important moments. The tape’s value has been downplayed on the basis that the Beatles are musically sloppy and perhaps even lazy, knowing they’ve one foot out of the door, but this is to ignore its virtues. The Beatles did hate being in Hamburg this last time … but the recording shows them still cutting the mustard on stage. They’re sloppy because, here, they can be, but they’re not lazy, and they’re not playing with extra care because they’re being recorded: this is an authentic eavesdrop on their club act, not something fizzed-up for the tape machine.
At least three sets were recorded, and because the Beatles rarely repeated themselves in Hamburg, there are only five duplicates among the thirty-seven songs. The repertoire is a real surprise. The only self-written pieces are “Ask Me Why” and “I Saw Her Standing There” (twice), so there’s no “Love Me Do,” “PS I Love You,” “Please Please Me,” “One After 909” or any of several other possibilities, and there are few of the songs from the spine of their all-conquering 1962 stage sets—no “Some Other Guy,” “Soldier of Love,” “Please Mr. Postman,” “Don’t Ever Change,” “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues,” “Devil in Her Heart,” “Baby It’s You,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” “Hey! Baby, A Picture of You,” and so on. What’s here is an idiosyncratic selection of old rock numbers all played at breakneck speed—Prellies pace. The nights of half-hour “What’d I Say” marathons are past: everything is high velocity, only three numbers tipping into three minutes. It’s Hamburg ’62 but could just as easily be Huyton ’61.3
The lineup throughout is John on rhythm, Paul bass, George lead and Ringo drums, the front line singing solo and in harmony. By nothing more fortunate than microphone placement, John’s rhythm guitar is unusually upfront, heard to be a hard, driving engine slicing through the songs. Also here, constant in all hundred minutes, is the difference between Ringo and Pete. Ringo is solid and spot-on in every style, even though—since they’d not played many of these songs in a long time—he can’t have drummed them with the Beatles before. They weren’t doing “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Nothin’ Shakin’ ” and “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” in Nuneaton, Peterborough or Widnes, any more than they were still playing them in the Cavern. But Ringo knows the numbers, and his musical synergy with John, Paul and George is complete. They can wing it, he can swing it, and their combination defines tight.
They sound nothing like the Beatles who calmly and effectively dispatched a studio session at Abbey Road only a month earlier—this is the old big-beat Beatles with bum-notes and personalities flying. John and Paul duet with great energy on the early Elvis number “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You)” and Ringo is right with them in frenzied overdrive. Paul belts out “Long Tall Sally” and “Kansas City” in fantastic voice and does a good “Red Sails in the Sunset.” “Matchbox” is sung by John, not Ringo or Pete; there’s a cloddy “I Remember You” with John on “gob iron,” and a messy “Falling In Love Again” with Paul’s made-up words and George’s lackluster solo. There are harmonically tight renditions of “Twist and Shout” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” the la
tter already confident and strong, like something out of the future—though, inevitably, John gets the words wrong almost every time he comes in on a chorus. He makes no mistakes in a blistering “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and George launches himself into an ultra-fast “Red Hot.” No other recording shows him as an out-and-out rocker quite as much: he sings lead and then trades fast lines with John, Ringo drums like a man possessed, and here’s the first stage recording of keyboards on a Beatles track, when John slings the guitar around his back and plays a solo on Roy Young’s electric organ.
All the while, everything is bubbling in a well-seasoned St. Pauli soup, the authentic Hamburg flavor of jeers, cheers and drunken hecklers. Here are the Beatles backing the tough little boxers: “Be-Bop-A-Lula” is sung by Fredi Fascher, and “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” by his eldest brother Horst. Both sing well and in impressively good English: they’re clearly big rock fans, living the life. “Watte für die Ohren können Sie bei der Toilettenfrau haben,” Manfred Weissleder announces (in a harsh, hard voice) before Horst sings, “Cotton for the ears can be obtained from the toilet lady.” Here is John’s ubiquitous Edinburgh accent and his lecherous macho bay for BETTINAAAHHHH. She’s felt but not heard: Paul dedicates “Your Feet’s Too Big” to her, at which she’d have knifed the foam from a beer, nodded her beehived blonde mane, jiggled her vast bust and set the bar lanterns swinging.
This is an important record of John Lennon in Hamburg. He’s surely drunk and/or speeding, and there’s a beguiling belligerence to his humor, a dominant cynical goading to his between-songs banter and the way he deals with hecklers. Like a stuck record, he several times tells the audience “I don’t know whether you can understand me or not,” even saying it twice while Paul is singing “Your Feet’s Too Big,” and on one occasion he concludes it with “but piss off. You got that? Christmas or no Christmas.” Paul is much more polite: he calms John’s storms and speaks German impressively all the way through, vocabulary schooled in the Liverpool Institute’s dark Dickensian classrooms and knocked hard into shape under St. Pauli neon.
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