Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  67 All documents in the Epstein files.

  68 “I’ve never enjoyed playing so much” quote in Mersey Beat, October 4, 1962. Echo ad dates: “Merseyside’s biggest heartthrob!,” September 3, 1962; “Ex-Beatle,” September 19. Best rebuke to Flannery from interview by Spencer Leigh.

  69 Liverpool Echo, September 20, 1962.

  70 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  71 Author interview, July 24, 2007.

  72 A Cellarful of Noise, p110. Marshall (1926–2003) wrote about Publicity Ink in the Allan Williams autobiography he ghosted in 1975, The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away (pp222–3)—a book that indicates the kind of writer he was. Derek Taylor, who ghost-wrote A Cellarful of Noise, also drank in the Press Club and knew and liked Marshall, describing him as “perilously unpredictable” in Fifty Years Adrift, p250. Additional information from author interview with Allan Williams, August 28, 2006; he further says that Brian Epstein became a member of the Press Club and went there regularly. A contemporary example of what would have been Publicity Ink’s stock-in-trade for the Beatles hit the Daily Mirror front page on October 18, 1962—four columns in which Bill Marshall (without a byline) reported a stunt bullfight staged by Allan Williams inside the Blue Angel nightclub.

  THIRTY-TWO: Friday, October 5, 1962–The Sixties Start Here

  1 Interview by Mike Hennessey, Record Mirror, March 20, 1971.

  2 Interview by Spencer Leigh.

  3 Author interview, June 9, 2005.

  4 Scene and Heard, BBC Radio 1, March 25, 1970. Final sentence from The Beatles Anthology, p77, and interview by Elliot Mintz, April 18, 1976.

  5 Author interviews—Norman Jopling, February 22, 2006; Judith Simons, July 7, 2005.

  6 New Society, October 18, 1962.

  7 The Beatles: The Days in Their Life, 1981 Canadian radio series, part 2.

  8 Interview by Spencer Leigh. Liverpool-born Alma Warren was really Alma Roza, younger sister of Decca’s singing star Lita Roza, who was personally close to the Epstein family. Alma sang too, and George Martin signed her to Parlophone in 1954. She had a good voice but none of Lita’s success, and after five Parlophone releases up to 1956, all produced by George Martin, she was most gainfully employed by EMI in “exploitation.”

  9 George from The Beatles Anthology, p77; Louise from Davies (1985), p19. She described the program as late-night; the latest-scheduled EMI show on Radio Luxembourg was Ray’s On …, presented by the London-based Canadian DJ Ray Orchard, Mondays to Fridays 11:30 to midnight. The likelihood that this show was the first to play “Love Me Do” is increased by John detailing it on a scribbled card he gave his aunt Harrie at this time. (He also mentioned Sam Costa’s EMI show, which Luxembourg aired every Tuesday evening.) The card is illustrated in The John Lennon Letters (edited by Hunter Davies, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2012), p59.

  10 Both ran in The World’s Fair on October 6, the first by Mary Smith of Music Hire (Yorks) Ltd., the second by columnist Joe Bronkhorst. He called the Springfields “very successful” but they hadn’t yet done much in Britain—their main breakthrough at this time was in America. His reference to “the now almost inevitable harmonica” was also something of a stretch, but after “Hey! Baby, I Remember You” and “Sealed With a Kiss,” it was easy for reviewers to intimate a trend.

  11 Disc, October 6; New Record Mirror, October 13, 1962.

  12 Mersey Beat, October 18, 1962. Disker’s review ran in Liverpool Echo on September 29.

  13 October 4, 1962. “A new group from the Liverpool area. Their first record but they already have a strong following and this seems to be the strongest outsider of the week.” (Rated three stars, meaning “Possibly” in terms of hit potential.)

  14 Interview by Los Angeles DJ Elliot Mintz, April 18, 1976.

  15 Author interviews—Brown, July 5, 2007; Kelly, March 28, 2003.

  16 Author interview, December 6, 2004.

  17 A Cellarful of Noise, p12. The Beatles did a record-shop signing session, their first, in Widnes on the Saturday, to capitalize on the fan base they’d created with several local performances; they signed at one—probably two—Widnes shops, and may also have done a signing session in Warrington. There’s no known explanation for the Beatles not doing a “Love Me Do” signing session in Liverpool, not even at any of Nems’ three stores.

  18 Interview by Jim Steck, August 26, 1964. Final two sentences from interview August 28, 1963, for The Mersey Sound (BBC-tv, October 9, 1963).

  19 Confirmation of the methodology of record chart compilation in Britain in this period comes from an array of senior sources, including John Fruin (EMI sales director), Brian Mulligan (EMI press office and founder/editor of Record Business magazine), Derek Johnson (NME chart compiler), Norman Jopling (New Record Mirror), Nigel Hunter (Disc) and John Mair (record distributor traveling salesman). Sight of an original 1962 NME chart return form confirms everything—it asked only a shop’s bestselling records in ranked order, not sales figures. (The precise process by which Billboard and Cash Box compiled their charts at this time is explained well in Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneers, by John Broven [University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2009], pp200–2.)

  It’s also unlikely EMI even pressed ten thousand copies of “Love Me Do” to begin with. It was easy to produce additional records to meet demand, and the initial “stamper” run—for a debut act of no national renown, and a record EMI certainly wasn’t supporting in any special way—would not have been great, probably no more than four thousand. EMI Archives has not retained its Hayes factory documentation that would prove the precise number, but this was standard form.

  Some have not only published the hype story but embellished it. Shout! author Philip Norman put into print the extraordinary assertion by Joe Flannery (manager of Lee Curtis and the All Stars) that Paul McCartney told him Brian forced the Beatles to pay for the ten thousand records, an act so harsh that it temporarily reduced them to starving penury on the streets of London. A TV producer then allowed Flannery to assert his chart-falsification anecdote in a “documentary” (Love Me Do: The Beatles ’62, BBC4, October 7, 2012), where his comments were curiously reinforced by Liverpool musician Billy Kinsley. Such was the editorial desire to push this line, it was then claimed that “Love Me Do” only “made a brief appearance at number 17 in the charts [and] dropped out after a couple of weeks.” Its actual chart life was eighteen weeks, October 1962 to February 1963 … but saying this would have sunk the story.

  Some do have a need to say things, and most people swallow what they hear or read, but the time has come for this half-century-old smear to be definitively dismissed.

  20 Nuneaton Evening Telegraph, October 9, 1992. The Beatles were the middle act on an advertised bill nominally headed by Buddy Britten and the Regents.

  21 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, January 20, 1988.

  22 Their line-up this night, July 12, was Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (Brian Jones), Dick Taylor, Ian “Stu” Stewart and, probably, Tony Chapman on drums. They were supported by Long John Baldry’s Kansas City Blue Boys. Two hundred miles north, the Beatles were playing the Majestic Ballroom, Birkenhead.

  23 October 4, 1962.

  24 No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, by Robert Shelton (Beech Tree Books, New York, 1986), p152. The Beatles didn’t hear Bob Dylan at this time. Paul had one folk LP, Joan Baez’s first, issued in Britain in January 1962. Nearly thirty years later, in 1990, he recorded a strong cover of one of its tracks, the traditional “All My Trials”—which had exerted a minor influence on a song he wrote with John in 1963.

  THIRTY-THREE: “We’ve Got It, and Here We Are with It”

  (October 6–31, 1962)

  1 Interview October 28, 1964, by Jean Shepherd for Playboy, February 1965.

  2 John from interview by Jann S. Wenner, December 8, 1970, for Rolling Stone; Paul from interview by Janice Long, for Listen to What
the Man Says, BBC Radio 1, December 22, 1985; George from The David Frost Show (American TV), December 3, 1971; Ringo from interview by Horst Königstein, Hamburg, September 29, 1976, for Ringo und die Stadt am Ende des Regenbogen (Ringo and the City at the End of the Rainbow), West German NDR-TV, June 9 and 16, 1977. In late 1963, Paul told writer Michael Braun, “As soon as people heard ‘Liverpool’ they thought we were all from the docks with sideboards. And the name—practically everybody who knew told us to change it. ‘Beatles? What does that mean?’ ” (Love Me Do! The Beatles’ Progress, p31.)

  3 Author interview, October 1, 2004. All Tony Calder quotes in this chapter are from here.

  4 Interview by Ray Coleman, Melody Maker, November 14, 1964; last section from interview by Larry Kane, September 2, 1964.

  5 Cliff Richard in Liverpool Echo, September 22, 1961; John from Sydney press conference, June 11, 1964; George from interview by Larry Kane, September 8, 1964.

  6 Author interview, June 1, 2005. His Mersey Beat pieces ran in issues November 1 and 15, 1962.

  7 Author interview, February 2, 2005. The Pop Weekly ad for “Love Me Do” was in the October 6 issue.

  8 Craven House, 234/238 Edgware Road, the east side, close to where the Marylebone Road flyover would be built (it opened in 1967).

  9 Interview by Chris Welch, February 11, 1973.

  10 John told Ray Coleman a year later (Melody Maker, November 16, 1963), “People kept coming up and asking who the leader was. We said, ‘Nobody.’ They said, ‘There must be a boss,’ so the others said to me, ‘You started the whole thing, you’re the leader.’ ” No reminder was necessary, but here was Beatle policy-making in action.

  11 He can only have been speaking of “Please Please Me,” a version of which they taped at EMI on September 11; John might have thought that recording would be issued, or perhaps he simply meant the song would be their next release, but the decision was not his to take, and at the time he made this remark George Martin still intended to issue “How Do You Do It” as the Beatles’ next record. John seemed quite sure that wouldn’t be happening.

  12 Interview by Andy Neill, February 23, 2007. Ian Samwell (1937–2003) was one of Cliff Richard’s original backing group the Drifters. He wrote hits for many artists and was an important and successful producer.

  13 Quoted in Belmo’s Beatleg News, October/November 1989.

  14 Capitol vice president Alan W. Livingston was promoted to president in October 1962 in place of company cofounder Glenn E. Wallichs, head of Capitol before and beyond EMI’s 1955 takeover.

  15 Letter from Roland Rennie to Joseph Zerga, December 11, 1962. Formerly assistant to managing director L. G. Wood, Rennie had been promoted to manager of a new department, Licensed Repertoire. EMI was taking this business seriously.

  16 Davies, p278.

  17 It’s Love That Really Counts: The Billy Kinsley Story, p54. La Scala Ballroom—Milan meets Runcorn, strictly in name only. John, Paul and George twice played here as Japage 3 in 1959, and Brian twice promoted the Beatles here in 1962.

  18 “It wasn’t for him [George] but soon as I’d written it I thought, ‘He could do this,’ ” John told Playboy interviewer David Sheff, September 24, 1980. John always claimed “Do You Want to Know a Secret” as his song, but Paul—in the 1997 book Many Years From Now, p95—said it was 50:50. He also called it a “hack song,” implying it was written to order, but it was composed in a period when it wasn’t actually needed for anything.

  19 Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown, London, 2005), pp422–3.

  20 Reviewer, Chris Hutchins; October 12, 1962. Sounds Incorporated were a six-piece instrumental group from Kent, with three saxes.

  21 November 15, 1962.

  22 Ibid.

  23 In his biography of Sam Cooke (p427), Peter Guralnick says Richard’s constant writing in his big bible intrigued everyone on the nightly British tour. Don Arden sometimes took his children to the shows (David, nine, and Sharon, ten—later Sharon Osbourne, wife of Ozzy), and on one occasion David got to see it. Richard was writing a graphic sex diary in his bible, rating lovers for their skills. See also The Life and Times of Little Richard, by Charles White (Omnibus Press, London, 2003), pp114–15. Mike McCartney from Remember, p108.

  24 Author interview with Les Chadwick, June 10, 2005. Wooler taking bets described by Karl Terry in interview by Spencer Leigh. Pete and Beatles not exchanging a word or look from Beatle!, p175.

  25 John from interview by Barbara Graustark, for Newsweek, September 1980. The autographed program is illustrated in Davies (1985), p29.

  There’s also a second photo, in which Little Richard and the Beatles are joined by Derry Wilkie (Liverpool’s original Little Richard–like singer) and two of Liverpool’s only black group, the Shades; they were a vocal quintet, doo-wop style, and in November renamed themselves the Chants.

  26 Interview by Mike Ledgerwood, Disc and Music Echo, December 5, 1970.

  27 Interview by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld, September 1971.

  28 The Big Three interrupted Billy Kramer with the Coasters’ set at a Nems Enterprises Showdance—see November 13, 1962, written apology from Brian Epstein to Ted Knibbs in Let’s Go Down the Cavern, by Spencer Leigh (Vermilion, London, 1984), p131.

  29 “Liverpool Today” by Nick Nye, February 5, 1963. Details from Liverpool Echo, July 17, July 18, October 18, October 25 and November 13, 1962, and from Sphinx, Spring 1962. Unemployment in Greater London was 1.1 percent of the population, on Merseyside 4.8, a figure of 29,602; 4,449 local “youths and girls” had no work. The Minister of Housing, Sir Keith Joseph, spent a day in Liverpool in July 1963 and toured the slum areas. One house he visited—in Upper Canning Street, Toxteth—had thirty-three occupants. Elizabeth “Bessie” Braddock (1899–1970) was Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange, 1945–70, a remarkable woman and probably the British people’s greatest ever Parliamentarian. Her slogan was “When you need ‘Bessie’ she’ll be there,” and she was.

  30 Interview by Spencer Leigh; Record Collector magazine, issue 54 (February 1984), except “it immediately got a laugh and at the end they all applauded,” from interview by Colin Hall, Shindig! magazine, issue 8 (January–February 2009).

  31 Mersey Beat, June 11, 1964. The Tenabeats supported the Beatles at Aintree Institute on October 28, 1961, and St. John’s Hall, Bootle, on March 2, 1962. Gorman from interview by Spencer Leigh.

  32 Author interview, November 4, 2004.

  33 In His Own Write, pp16–19. It’s a fascinating piece, open to interpretation and full of such characteristic Lennon lines as “Yea, though I wart through the valet of thy shadowy hut I will feed no norman.”

  34 A Twist of Lennon, p80, and John, p132.

  35 A Twist of Lennon, pp78–80.

  36 Liverpool Weekly News, October 11 and November 1, 1962.

  37 A Twist of Lennon, p82.

  38 Author interview, October 29, 2004.

  39 Marie left Merseyside in 1963 (“Life wasn’t the same with the Beatles gone”) and went to London where she became a fixture of the music clubs. She bumped into Paul a couple of times, and in 1967 met the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward at the Bag O’ Nails club. They married in 1970 and remain together.

  40 Author interview, April 24, 2012. The first Bond film was Dr. No, premiered at the London Pavilion cinema on Friday, October 5.

  Thelma Monaghan went on to marry poet Roger McGough and have a flourishing career as a TV producer (among much else, she made the highly successful 1980s show Blind Date, with Cilla Black). Her son, Nathan Monaghan, aka Nathan McGough—two years old when she was dating Paul—became involved in the music industry and managed Happy Mondays and White Lies.

  41 Author interview, July 24, 2004. All Iris Caldwell quotes in this chapter are from here. Sing Along With Joe played Liverpool Empire Monday to Saturday, September 17 to 22. The Beatles were free two nights that week.

  42 All Vi Caldwell quotes from interview by Johnny Beerling,
January 1972, for BBC Radio 1.

  43 Frank Ifield played Liverpool Empire from October 1 to 6. The Beatles were free three nights that week.

  44 From “The Fingletoad Resort of Teddiviscious,” In His Own Write, p48. Another name John had for People and Places was Peotle and Plaices, and Granada presenter Bill Grundy was Big Grunty. The Sex Pistols had much worse names for him fourteen years later.

  45 Domestic video recorders hadn’t been invented and wouldn’t begin to become commonplace until the end of the 1970s. The audio recording of the Beatles’ first TV show was made by Adrian Killen, a 16-year-old fan in Kirkdale, Liverpool, on a reel-to-reel deck wired direct to the TV speaker, the tape running at 3¾ ips. (The recording is unissued, not in circulation and now owned by the Beatles’ Apple.) There are no photos to confirm Killen’s “almost certain” memory of the Beatles wearing uniform polo-neck sweaters for their TV debut instead of suits and ties.

  46 Interview by Albert Goldman, Charlie, July 1971.

  47 Author interview, June 30, 2003; George’s “Liverpool Leg” from author interview, October 23, 1987.