Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Martin now recommended a business associate to Epstein to improve their publishing arrangements: Dick James. James had started out as a singer, and written a couple of songs with Martin. After an early deal for “Love Me Do” with the firm Ardmore and Beechwood, Epstein sought more aggressive presence for his songwriting team. An acetate of “Please Please Me” persuaded James to take on Lennon and McCartney, and when he played the song over the phone for a contact at Thank Your Lucky Stars, Epstein left his office with a TV booking for January 1963. This was just the type of publishing action Epstein sought. James soon set up a new company, Northern Songs, to handle the Lennon and McCartney catalog, and Epstein granted James the then standard 50 percent royalty rate. The other half was split between NEMS, Lennon, and McCartney in lieu of Epstein’s management commission.29

  After finally getting some traction with recordings, and watching “Love Me Do” make the charts, Epstein insisted the act meet all their previous obligations, even if it meant two gigs in a single day and hustling back from Wales for a Cavern lunch set. This meant more and more slogging even as they began to hear themselves on the radio almost daily. With “Please Please Me” in the can, Martin and Epstein knew they had a hit single at the ready, and an album needed scheduling amid a relentless performance calendar. December saw them mime “Love Me Do” and either “P.S. I Love You” or “Twist and Shout” for three decisive TV broadcasts, first from Bristol, Somerset, then London (ITV’s Tuesday Rendezvous), and then Granada’s People and Places, which beamed their surging confidence to their largest audiences yet. The Beatles surfed on a moment that caught an inexplicable serendipity between band, material, and audience. Playing “Love Me Do” after nailing “Please Please Me,” the knowing glances they gave one another got bolstered by the increasing authority in their ensemble—had rock ’n’ roll suddenly turned so irresistible so quickly?

  Martin traveled up from London to catch the band at the Cavern on December 12, a year after Decca’s Mike Smith had made the trip. But he decided against recording them there, because the space was too tight for the players, let alone engineers, and the acoustics were decidedly unworkable.

  The next week, celebrating their second-year win topping the Mersey Beat poll, they played a regular gig at Birkenhead and then raced back to the Cavern at four in the morning for an all-night blowout thrown by Bill Harry. This all led to an anticlimactic final run of thirteen nights to close out 1962 back at the Star-Club in Hamburg, with the ghost of Sutcliffe haunting their return; they honored the engagement despite all their momentum back home. The pay was decent, 750DM (£67) per man per week, but they resented the grind, and another agent might have weaseled them out of it somehow. On their home turf their music had finally busted loose; in Hamburg they were a big deal playing yesterday’s rooms.

  Tapes of these Hamburg gigs, recorded off a single microphone hanging over the stage, only came to light in the late 1970s, when Allan Williams shopped them for release after years in local musician Ted “Kingsize” Taylor’s collection.30 The Beatles never approved publication, as much for the patchy, unsympathetic fidelity as for the uneven performances. But the tapes reveal many ongoing developments in the Beatles’ progress, including Ringo’s assimilation into their ensemble, Harrison’s rockabilly verve, and some stray songs that never found release in any other form. When the tapes actually deliver several songs in a row, without choppy breaks, the pacing has a sloppy geniality; the band yaps at the audience and trades inside jokes between songs, with the bedraggled insouciance Epstein had tried to sift from their Cavern shows.

  At some points, botched lyrics drive songs right into the ditch: a game attempt at “Road Runner” simply stops before erupting into a magnificent “Hippy Hippy Shake,” which comes to an abrupt finish only to erupt again, as if they can’t help themselves. Having too much fun in Hamburg sounds like a good excuse to conquer the world, or at least grab the brass ring within their reach and swing for a good long time. There are moments, especially atop Chuck Berry’s “Talking ’Bout You” and “Little Queenie,” Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big,” and a new Lennon-McCartney number, “I Saw Her Standing There,” where the world sounds tantalizingly theirs, so sure is their mastery of unhinged rock ’n’ roll. Elsewhere, they blend right in with an audience determined to get trashed. It’s an off-night with clues to how they mined later greatness.

  For one of these sets, bouncer Horst Fascher and his waiter brother, Fred, lead off singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and “Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So,” Lennon and McCartney vocal platforms by turn. Then the band lights up “I Saw Her Standing There,” complete with Lennon’s lower harmonies and Ringo’s tom-tom swirls, and the number sounds finished down to the most particular detail, from the way they hit their trademark “ooh”s to the closing kicks. It has the uncanny feel of an original that might turn into a standard. Starr jacks their ensemble up several notches: each song section gets heightened definition, from corners and transitions to several jokey cutoffs. It’s hard to imagine Best giving this number all it deserves.

  Lennon and McCartney cast such long shadows in Beatle history, it’s striking to hear how prominently Harrison sings and plays throughout these sets. His Carl Perkins rockabilly numbers, “Nothin’ Shakin’ (but the Leaves on the Trees),” “Matchbox,” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” have a more frenetic pace and feel than any of the BBC or EMI takes, raising the question as to whether his talent ever translated well at all in the studio. Even singing the midtempo “Matchbox,” which became a Ringo number, Harrison dominates the band as both singer and guitarist. He ambles around through the lyrics like he’s taking Old Paint out for a trot, and his solo digs into the grooves like a rusty spur. Overall, Harrison’s guitar work has more fluidity than it does on some early recordings, especially on “Long Tall Sally.” Everywhere, his guitar stings and sails, goads the ensemble into taking reckless rhythmic risks. When he sings as he plays in “Roll Over Beethoven,” he spits the curl to ride waves of ambition. If you came to this music unaware, you might not count Harrison out as a third front man. There’s a chemistry between him and Starr here that unfolds in the way the guitar overtakes McCartney in Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” and Ringo leaps into the mix as if Harrison’s the hand and he’s the happy puppet. This juices McCartney to crank up the final verse into a tirade.

  The many and various vocal harmonies from the stage cement the Beatle band ideal, embedded in both guitar and voice. The McCartney ballads prove he always was a bit too fond of sentimentality—“Falling in Love Again,” the Marlene Dietrich staple, works only because he fakes such a winning lyric. Three versions of “A Taste of Honey” exist, all mimeograph copies of one another, each with full-throated commitment from the lead and backup vocalists. Perhaps the cost of such literal sincerity helped them cut loose more on faster numbers; perhaps McCartney really thinks the song has some charm only he can squeeze out. Or perhaps it was a crowd favorite, an easy way to win girls, something they did without thinking. Every bar band has numbers they can relax through as a mental break. When McCartney turned to “Till There Was You,” Lennon minced his sincerity into hash, answering every doe-eyed line with a riposte (“He never saw them at all/Wonderful roses . . .”). The harmonies get all the more impressive when you realize how faintly they could hear themselves.

  Several stray songs reveal abiding affinities and lost chances. Lennon sings “Where Have You Been,” another Arthur Alexander number, to make you wish they had at least done it for the BBC. “Your Feet’s Too Big” finds McCartney doing Fats Waller in a beguiling example of garage-band compression. Waller defined himself by his heft at the keys; his piano anchored his recordings with lofty twitters and growling chuckles. Mounting the number onstage with only guitars takes nerve; what comes through is not just the band’s maniacal belief that such translations can work but how quickly they’re forgotten amid the delirium.

  Several other numbers give off palpable heat, almost enough t
o forgive the poor sound. This final Hamburg stint, their fifth, may have yanked them backward to where they had paid their dues, but the momentum in these numbers propels them forward, into a future that starts to approximate the music’s capacity for meaningful thrills. Lennon turns in Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” another BBC highlight, and “Talking ’Bout You,” which drops from their set shortly after this. These grooves have the inexplicable primacy of later studio recordings like “Money,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” and “I’m Down.” This is the sound Lennon spoke of when he proclaimed, “There was nobody to touch us in Britain.” It doubled as the sound of a nation on the verge of renewal, clawing its way back from war, looking to pop-culture youth for a new image of itself.

  Chapter 10

  Hold On

  The Conservative Party’s Harold Macmillan came to power as prime minister in 1957 by proclaiming, “You’ve never had it so good.” The average UK income was finally on the rise, and discretionary spending began to pump up the economy. By 1963, this optimism hid its customary blind spots: Britain’s balance of payments, propped up in the past by tributary products from its former colonies, still led to wage freezes in 1961, which cost Conservatives substantially in the 1962 parliamentary election. Panicking, Macmillan flushed out his cabinet that July by sacking eight junior ministers—“the night of long knives.” (If only he had sacked John Profumo . . . )

  Musically, Britain’s charts leaned heavily on American product. Exceptions proved this rule: Cliff Richard and the Shadows stole space from predominant Yankee acts like Roy Orbison, Del Shannon, and Ray Charles. Tellingly, the Temperance Seven, George Martin’s stiff, 1920s-style jazz outfit, found success briefly as beat groups readied their onslaught—the type of last-gasp popularity that tipped off how irrefutably passé trad jazz had become.

  Rising fortunes suddenly brought about enormous cultural flux, shifting the tectonic plates between public and private life that had been in place since the Victorian era. London had spent the early stretch of Macmillan’s term consumed by the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial at the Old Bailey courthouse. D. H. Lawrence’s novel had been banned in Britain since its private publication in 1928, but had sold widely with the naughty bits chopped out. Prosecuting the new Obscene Publications Act, solicitor Mervyn Griffith-Jones became one of those unbearably bewigged foghorns of propriety. The outrage over “frank” depictions of sexuality in fiction seemed simply farcical to many; the defendant, Penguin Books, sold two million copies of the novel in the ensuing months. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Beatle scholar Jonathan Gould points out how D. H. Lawrence’s characters prefigure John Osborne’s “angry young man” sensibility, which packed mid-fifties West End theaters:1 Lawrence’s plot revolved around a genteel lady who beds down with her gamekeeper—a servant named Oliver Mellors. The court case labored on about what people were flocking to see and read.

  Now, as 1963 began, the same prosperity fueled a juicy political scandal, the worst news for politicians since the Suez crisis in 1956. The story began with the arrest of a young black Jamaican named John Edgecombe, who in December had fired shots into the Wimpole Mews front door of a wealthy London doctor, Stephen Ward. There, twenty-year-old Christine Keeler was visiting her friend Mandy Rice-Davies, who happened to be living with Ward, which was racy enough; Edgecombe’s shots were part of a love triangle between Keeler and another Jamaican lover named Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon. If this had been the extent of it, it would have made for a racially charged blip on the inside pages. But once it hit the news, a Sunday Mirror check for £1,000 inspired Keeler to talk, and the story unraveled from there. Keeler boasted of a 1961 affair with John Profumo, Macmillan’s secretary of state for war, then married to a former movie star, Valerie Hobson. Keeler also let it drop that she had attended some of Ward’s wild orgies, complete with marijuana, for an elite set of socialites at Lord Astor’s estate, Cliveden. Roll over Lady Chatterley.

  This was scandalous not just because Keeler was an unrepentant “showgirl”2 or because Ward’s scene underlined all those clichés about the decadence of the rich, but because Keeler had also been dallying with a Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov, at the same time she was seeing Profumo.3 Keeler’s account of all this spooled out later beneath Lewis Morley’s coolly seductive front-page photograph of her posing naked on a designer chair, camouflaging her breasts, seducing viewers into questioning their own “proprieties” in one of the era’s iconic images. Her expression mixed pride of notoriety with contempt for her exploiters—in her victimless eyes, the whole thing was simply luscious. Lennon would draw a cartoon of Keeler for his first book, In His Own Write, and included a cryptic pun on her name in a salutation at the end of “A Letter”: “We hope this fires you keeler . . .”4 To Lennon, Keeler might as well have been transplanted from Hamburg, a service worker to the ruling class.

  Keeler’s Mirror gaze stared down Macmillan’s Tory government as an emblem of corruption. The scandal sold many, many newspapers, and laid waste not just to Profumo but to the entire Conservative administration. Called before a House of Commons inquiry in March 1963, Profumo held that there was “no impropriety whatsoever,” but by June he had recanted his perjury, and in July he resigned, with many calling for Macmillan’s resignation as well.

  Suddenly, “You’ve never had it so good” boomeranged with irony. After a summer of sensational revelations that rocked Parliament, Macmillan looked more and more as if he didn’t know about things he should have and hadn’t acted swiftly enough to control the damage. He stepped aside at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool that October, and the Labour Party won the next general election.

  Sparked by this upheaval, Beatlemania’s entrance on the scene played like a comic-relief valve to political cynicism; the band’s ascent was woven into the Profumo scandal as if mapped out by a clever screenwriter. At the beginning of 1963, the Beatles had not yet entered the top ten or appeared on BBC television; by the end of the year they were a runaway phenomenon, dominating all the British charts, newspapers, and radio with two long-playing albums and a barrage of singles, each one better than the last, that turned them into pop Olympians. That fall they consolidated their success on national television, first on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a cornerstone of the British entertainment establishment, and then on the telecast of the annual Royal Variety Performance, in front of the old guard’s prim and dignified Queen Elizabeth II.

  By autumn, of course, this was simply Buckingham Palace’s way of hitching its wagon to the runaway train of adoration and mayhem that followed Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr wherever they went. Although Epstein didn’t receive the royal invitation until August, by that point the ruling powers simply genuflected to fate. It was quickly understood, even by the older generation, that whatever you made of these Beatles, this act transcended show business and created the kind of heat even royals ought to rub up against. These political and cultural gusts vied with one another so that it was quickly hard to distinguish between teen screams and tabloid headers; the band’s immense symbolic aura quickly turned into cultural semaphore for England’s modern era. “This isn’t show business,” Lennon told his quickie Love Me Do! biographer, Michael Braun, that season, “this is something else.”5

  As if there were any doubt, the Royal Variety Performance went beyond established show-biz blessing in Britain: it conferred surpassing, supercelebrity status. The hypocrisy of the ruling class had reached such heights that the Beatles seemed not just a necessary tonic but an all-conquering elixir. With their winning comic charisma and clear disdain for show business as usual, it was almost as if the Beatles led the way out of a public crisis, relegating Profumo to the tawdry clichés of political potboilers, with an unmistakable subtext: “What do you expect from a bunch of . . . stuffed shirts?” There are very few examples in pop-culture history where the establishment and the radical agents of change shook hands so eagerly. The British government needed a distraction even
more than the Beatles needed joke material. Right from the beginning, there was a very self-conscious aspect to Beatlemania that held up this collision of past and future—and there was very little question who the winner was. It made the band’s cultural sovereignty both swift and absolute; and at key moments, like his Royal Variety Performance “rattle your jewelry” quip, Lennon’s smirk summed up its attitude.

  Getting swept up in such a pop explosion is disorienting, even if you’ve been working as hard and waiting as long as the Beatles. The most appealing thing about their breakthrough, and the most important thing they had internalized by the time they landed in New York in February 1964, was a steadfast yet charismatic nonchalance about the mania. Their ambivalence about show business only made the act more tempting. To understand the scale of this breakthrough, bear in mind how northerners were held in even lower esteem by ruling-class Londoners than Tennessee boys were by the New York elite.

  The term “Beatlemania” didn’t enter the Fleet Street lexicon until the fall; but beginning in May 1963, all the papers charted the phenomenon as the world’s most hard-bitten cynics swooned in unison. Beatlemania was even better than a scandal: an episodic rags-to-riches story about a slap-happy band of northern rubes whose energy and ideas announced a postwar boom. As rich as the Beatles were in musical terms, they may have been even richer in this symbolic sense: as an umbrella metaphor for youth, change, dynamism, aggression, lust, passion, and healthy irreverence. Each successive Beatles record became synonymous with this new national spirit, a souvenir of how good things might still get. Before they became “imaginary Americans,” in literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s enchanted phrase, the Beatles were intensely British, not just an emblem of the national spirit but its economic stimulant.6