Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  48 Author interview, June 13, 2005.

  49 Author interview, July 28, 2003. All Kim Bennett quotes from this interview.

  50 The broadcast date is unknown and the production files no longer exist, so it isn’t clear if this was the first TV broadcast of “Love Me Do,” before the Beatles did it in person on People and Places, or a later one. Watson was an Australian, working in England for ATV. He was responsible for starting the company’s long-running soap opera Crossroads, which starred Lunch Box “hostess” Noele Gordon; he later returned to Australia and created Prisoner (aka Prisoner: Cell Block H) and Neighbours.

  51 Brian Epstein blamed Kim Bennett for losing the Saturday Club airplay, but in time must have told the Beatles the bigger story, because two years later John said to an American interviewer, about “Love Me Do,” “When they [Beatles fans] wrote in requests for it to radio programs, they wouldn’t play it because they thought it was a cheat—because all the requests came from Liverpool.” (Interview by Jim Steck, August 26, 1964.)

  52 Rory story told by Vi Caldwell to BBC radio producer Johnny Beerling. “She was just seventeen / She’d never been a beauty queen” from Many Years From Now, p93, and other places.

  53 Author interview, April 24, 2012. Paul, for whatever reason, has never talked about this London trip, but it did happen.

  54 Paul has told this a few times, with unique details. The quote is collated mostly from interviews by Alan Freeman (Rock Around the World, US syndicated radio show, April 11, 1976) and Mike Read (October 13, 1987, for BBC Radio 1); the remainder is from an interview by David Jensen (Capital Radio, London, mid-August 1986).

  55 Document in the Epstein files.

  56 Quoted by Graham Knight, New Record Mirror, November 10, 1962. Little Richard further told Alan Smith (Mersey Beat, November 15) that the photo of him and the Beatles was one of the most treasured souvenirs of his British visit. Brian Epstein had two enlargements made: the other hung on his office wall at 12–14 Whitechapel. The photo Little Richard said he wanted, in which he’d be flanked by Sounds Incorporated and the Beatles, never happened.

  57 Davies, p33. Little Richard’s return to gospel announced in Disc, November 10, 1962.

  58 Ringo from Davies, p179, and from Ringo Starr—Going Home, Disney Channel, April 18, 1993. Wooler from interview by Johnny Beerling, January 13, 1972, for BBC Radio 1. He said Sounds Incorporated were the main problem, demanding more stage time, but—in spite of his exacting reputation—their manager Don Arden isn’t likely to have been calling for the Beatles to be cut down or out: he knew the whole show was being staged by Brian Epstein for their benefit.

  59 Wooler, ibid.

  60 Wooler, ibid.; Freda Kelly from author interview, March 28, 2003.

  61 Author interview, November 25, 2005. Douglas and the Beatles probably played five numbers, American hits he’d made into British hits: “Only Sixteen” (his biggest, a 1959 number 1); “A Teenager In Love”; “Pretty Blue Eyes”; “Oh, Lonesome Me” (his latest record); and “When My Little Girl Is Smiling” (written by Goffin-King). Craig Douglas was really Terence Perkins, born on the Isle of Wight in 1941.

  62 Author interview, November 6, 2007.

  63 They performed “Love Me Do” and “A Taste of Honey” for the November 2 edition of People and Places, seen by a similar number to their debut, around two million. Though recorded for broadcast, the studio video tape was wiped and reused—common practice at British TV companies in this period. Adrian Killen made an off-air audio recording of “A Taste of Honey” only, not in circulation and owned now by the Beatles’ company Apple.

  THIRTY-FOUR: “Show Me I’m Wrong” (November 1–15, 1962)

  1 Davies, p179; last section from interview by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld, September 1971.

  2 The Beatles Anthology, p78.

  3 The Life and Times of Little Richard, p116.

  4 Memories of John Lennon, (edited by Yoko Ono, HarperCollins, New York, 2005), pp219–20.

  5 Billy Preston interviews by Ben Fong-Torres, Rolling Stone, September 16, 1971, and Mike Ledgerwood, Disc and Music Echo, February 8, 1969; John from interview by Scott Muni, WNEW-FM, February 13, 1975.

  6 Letter to London impresario David Stones, late October 1962, which led to a double-shuffle for the Beatles in Birmingham on November 19.

  7 The news was reported in the November 30 NME and December 1 Disc.

  8 Author interview, July 28, 2003.

  9 Illustrated in The Beatles Album, by Julia Delano (Grange Books, London, 1991), p22.

  10 The Beatles Anthology, p78.

  11 Hamburg Days, pp160/162.

  12 Author interview, July 5, 2007.

  THIRTY-FIVE: New Look, New Sound

  (November 16–December 17, 1962)

  1 Author interview, February 22, 2006. Jopling was the first to say this in a national paper but Bob Wooler had mentioned the Beatles’ pre-Paris long hair in Mersey Beat in August 1961.

  2 Interview by Paul du Noyer, Paul McCartney World Tour program (1989–90), p41.

  3 New Record Mirror, November 24, 1962.

  4 Author interview, April 6, 2004.

  5 Davies, p171.

  6 Ibid.

  7 “I encouraged the Beatles to keep using the harmonica sound after ‘Love Me Do’ ”—author interview with George Martin, June 9, 1995.

  8 Disc also November 24, though it announced the date of the Beatles’ recording session incorrectly as November 27. Mersey Beat had it right in its November 15 issue.

  9 Mersey Beat, January 3, 1963.

  10 George Martin’s Liverpool visit has been widely given as Sunday, December 9, but it was three days later.

  11 January 3, 1963.

  12 Author interview, June 9, 1995.

  13 Illustrated in Thank U Very Much, p113. The Beatles drew this same antennae motif on the backs of envelopes when replying to fans, or else they replicated the inky doodle beetle sometimes drawn in autograph books.

  14 From John Lennon’s review of Spike Milligan’s book The Goon Show Scripts, New York Times, September 30, 1973.

  15 Davies, p168. “A sense of well-being, of being happy” from author interview, August 31, 2000.

  16 Letter in EMI Archives.

  17 All You Need Is Ears, p127.

  18 Author interview, July 28, 2003.

  19 Combined quote, from interview by Mike Read, October 13, 1987, for BBC Radio 1, and 1969 interview broadcast by David Pritchard on CHUM-FM, Toronto, May 1970. (Also quoted in The Beatles: An Oral History, by David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght [Stoddart, Canada, 1998], p72.) Paul said much the same in a conversation with John, filmed over John’s shoulder at Apple on January 29, 1969, and included in the film Let It Be.

  20 Sounds, December 6, 1975. Waterman, who went on to become a music producer and songwriter of 1980s and subsequent successes, was not quite 16 in November 1962.

  21 Author interview, October 29, 2004.

  22 The Elvis record was his new single, “Return to Sender.” Twelve O’Clock Spin on November 22, 1962, and Two-Way Family Favourites on the 25th were the third and fourth BBC plays of “Love Me Do.”

  23 Author interview, August 24, 2011; Melody Maker, December 1, 1962. In his autobiography (Part One—From Congregations to Audiences, pp52–3), David Frost wrote, “The tribute to Norrie Paramor … was tough, in a way the clearest declaration in the whole of the show that TW3 intended to be different.” TW3 producer Ned Sherrin said Paramor was furious about it (That Was Satire That Was: The Satire Boom of the 1960s, by Humphrey Carpenter, Victor Gollancz, London, 2000, p219). Paramor died in 1979, his knowledge of who was behind his TV assassination a question apparently unasked by interviewers, though he must have worked it out: George Martin produced the TW3 theme music as a single in January 1963 and made a cast LP soon after.

  24 All You Need Is Ears, p130.

  25 Author interview, July 5, 2007.

  26 All You Need Is Ears, p130.

  27 “They laughed at me�
� from interview by Derek Johnson, NME, June 7, 1963.

  28 Mersey Beat, January 3, 1963.

  29 “Noddy Paranoid” remembered by Ron Richards in author interview, September 23, 2003.

  30 Letters in EMI Archives.

  31 Interview by Johnny Beerling, early 1972, for BBC Radio 1. All Dick James quotes in this chapter are from here.

  32 From 2004–5 author interviews with Stephen James, Perry and Pilbeam.

  33 Author interview, July 11, 2005. Linda Duque was Dick James’s secretary for five years from 1960, starting with him at Bron’s. “… the most honest” from A Cellarful of Noise, p107.

  34 From the raw transcripts of interviews for A Cellarful of Noise.

  35 The Paris was a BBC radio studio seating an audience of close to four hundred. Originally an art-house cinema, it was converted to BBC use during the Second World War, its deep position—two floors below street level—an advantage when Berlin’s bombs were falling.

  36 Categories won by, respectively, the Springfields and the Shadows. The Beatles didn’t figure in the World Vocal Group section, won easily by the Everly Brothers. The definition of “group” was just weeks away from changing forever but at this time still meant anything beyond solo artists. The Beatles’ score in the two sections was 3906 and 735, and as every vote was given three points, they’d received 1302 and 245.

  37 Interview by Richard Skinner, July 14, 1986, for McCartney, BBC1, August 29, 1986.

  38 Author interview, November 6, 2007.

  39 Davies, p179.

  40 December 7, 1962.

  41 Author interview, July 11, 2005.

  42 Author interview, December 15, 2004.

  43 Author interview, September 30, 1987.

  44 First part from author interview, May 2, 1991, second from interview by Richard Williams, for The Times, December 28, 1981.

  45 Author interview, March 26, 2003. Brian employed no Jews at Nems; John could have been thinking of Dick James and maybe his secretary. Nems employed several gay men, including Peter Brown and Brian’s new personal assistant, Barry Leonard, who started at Whitechapel in the last weeks of 1962.

  46 Those not watching TV but listening to the radio, to the BBC Light Programme, heard the Beatles on The Talent Spot, making that first broadcast of “Twist and Shout.” The two programs coincided. Tuesday Rendezvous wasn’t recorded—it went out live, its pictures gone forever.

  47 So remembers chatty London cabbie Danny, who told me on October 12, 2006, that he saw the Beatles on Tuesday Rendezvous and immediately thought “What on earth’s this?” He’d never seen a guitar-group sing before.

  48 Davies, p171.

  49 Author interview, June 20, 2005.

  50 “We wrote it on guitars and a little bit on the piano”—Paul to author, September 30, 1987. Mike’s photo is best seen in Remember, p107. Another 1962 photo he took of his brother playing this guitar (some say it’s a Framus) became the cover of the Paul McCartney album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005).

  Celia Mortimer’s relationship with Paul ended in the last weeks of 1962: “As the Beatles spent more time in London, Paul was there and not in Liverpool so much, and our situation just fizzled out. There was no time for it.” She went on to become a big player on the London fashion scene, with her own label and studio on Great Portland Street, just along from where she spent a few hours with Paul in 1962. In between times, she went out for a long time with Mike McCartney and was part of the Liverpool poetry scene. (More in volume 2.)

  51 First part from author interview, September 30, 1987, second from interview by Derek Taylor, March 3, 1965.

  52 Interview by Mike Read, October 12, 1987, for BBC Radio 1.

  53 Interview by Tony Webster, Beat Instrumental, September 1964.

  54 Author interview, June 9, 1995; “water” from All You Need Is Ears, p125; Wooler from The Best of Fellas, p193.

  55 A Cellarful of Noise, p72.

  56 Ibid., p76.

  57 Mersey Beat, August 1, 1963.

  58 Mallory Curley in Beatle Pete, Time Traveler, p22. “Randolf’s Party” published in In His Own Write, p29. Telegram illustrated in Beatle!, p176.

  59 Beatle!, p175. The second occasion was a Nems Enterprises promotion at Queen’s Hall, Widnes, on October 22.

  60 Interview by Tony Barrow, Beatles Book magazine, issue 98 (June 1984).

  THIRTY-SIX: And Who Knows! (December 18–31, 1962)

  1 Author interview, June 20, 2005. Sue and her friend Jenny Bale cleaned George’s car on the desired date, but stopped short of lugging the dirty water to Paul’s house.

  2 Interview by Johnny Beerling, early 1972, for BBC Radio 1.

  3 The Beatles were probably recorded on December 25 and days immediately after, but establishing this precisely is a task still taxing expert minds—as is firm verification of the song order. (The original claim, that the tape was made on only one night, December 31, has been proved incorrect.)

  4 The best-researched information about the Beatles in Canada is in a series of books by Piers A. Hemmingsen, The Beatles Canadian Discography (1962–1970), published 2003–11; www.capitol6000.com.

  Zola “Ray” Sonin was born in London’s East End in 1907 to Russian immigrant parents; he died in Toronto in 1991, aged 84, having just recorded his latest Calling All Britons. The Queen awarded him the MBE in 1984 “for services to the British community in Toronto.”

  The record-keeping of US and Canadian radio output was (is) so incomplete and scattered that making “first” claims is a perilous indulgence. But it does seem likely that this was the Beatles’ first North American airplay.

  5 January 5 and 12, 1963. Cash Box had an invaluable weekly editorial/comment page, Billboard didn’t.

  6 Letters (in EMI Archives) from Roland Rennie to Joe Zerga, December 11 and 28, 1962; Zerga telegram to Rennie, December 27, and letter, January 4, 1963.

  7 Author interview, August 3, 2012. Garrett was born in Dallas, Texas, in July 1938; his given name is Thomas. “Garrett was the best-known brand of snuff in the South in the 1930s and ’40s,” he says, “so my schoolteacher started calling me Snuff and the name stuck.” Garrett had already made many fine records by 1962 and would continue to do so in a well-respected career.

  8 Doug Morris, a 24-year-old record company rookie, was in charge of Laurie A&R when the Beatles were turned down. It isn’t clear if the rejection was his idea or that of the label’s owners, Gene and Bob Schwartz. My direct question to Morris in July 2012 received no response—which doesn’t prove it was his decision. As chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group (1995–2010), he went on to become arguably the biggest chief of the global music industry. He fulfilled the same roles at Sony Music Entertainment from 2011.

  9 “… rock and roll can last” from Cash Box, December 22, 1962. The comment alluded to the success of “Twist” music.

  10 Interview by Brian Innes, October 11, 1966; unpublished.

  11 Interview by Mike Hennessey, Melody Maker, August 5, 1967.

  12 Interviews by Ray Coleman, Melody Maker, October 12, 1963; and Kenneth Harris, The Observer, May 17, 1964.

  13 Author interview, March 28, 2003.

  14 Cliff Bennett interview by Simon Wells, February 14, 2002. John and Paul got a particular kick out of watching Bennett sing because he could replicate Richie Barrett’s tooth-whistle in Some Other Guy, the trick that continued to elude them. Frank Allen quote from his autobiography, Travelling Man (Aureus Publishing, Cardiff, 1999), pp26–7. He bumped into John Lennon on the Beatles’ final night, New Year’s Eve, and told him how good he thought they were; John thanked him and then said the Rebel Rousers were good too, but Allen’s harmonies were “fucking ridiculous.” Allen stood with his mouth agape, stunned by this new kind of directness.

  15 Interview by Sue Masterman and Anton Korne, Observer Foreign News Service, April 3, 1969.

  16 Interview by David Sheff, September 15, 1980, for Playboy.

  AN APPEAL FROM MARK LEWISOHN
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br />   RESEARCH FOR ALL THESE YEARS—Can You Help?

  INFORMATION

  I’ve already uncovered much fascinating material to explore and explain the history of the Beatles, but no one can ever say they’ve seen everything. There’s plenty more out there—in private collections, libraries, archives, attics, everywhere—that could enable this extraordinary story to be more accurately told and understood.

  If you have, or know of, anything that could possibly shed new light on any element of the Beatles’ history—and that includes their many associated areas and topics—please contact me through the HELP page at www.marklewisohn.net.

  There’s no limit to what these things could be—photos, films, recordings, anything at all—but documents are my main priority. Scans, photocopies or photos should be enough to convey the content—you needn’t part with anything of value.

  I’ll be pleased to acknowledge in print the source of any information provided by any contributor (unless they request anonymity).

  WITNESSES

  If you were a firsthand witness to any part of the Beatles years—up to, say, 1980—or know someone who was, I’d like to hear about it, and might want to include that story in one of these books. Again, please contact me through the HELP page at www.marklewisohn.net.

  CREDITS

  I work quietly and alone, the fewer distractions the better, but a book like this requires reaching out for support, advice, answers and friendship, for people to share information, laughs and bits of news, and I’m overjoyed so many are there for me. Everyone named below has helped make this book happen—and they have my deep gratitude.

  Richard Buskin, Jay Donnelly, Harry Klaassen, Andy Neill, Dave Ravenscroft, Piet Schreuders, Adam Smith and Jeff Walden did me the honor of vetting the draft chapters and offering vital feedback in the form of challenges, corrections, clarifications and tidbits of new information. Each brought a particular expertise to the task and came up with unique points, and my confidence in the finished product is due in no small measure to their help. To this list I happily add Thorsten Knublauch, who read everything relating to Hamburg and whose feedback was comprehensive and perceptive. I must also thank Harry Klaassen again for planting the idea of a multivolume Beatles history in my head in the first place.