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

by Tim Riley

  The playfulness they brought to fame was more than appealing; it was probably the only sane reaction to an audience hyped up beyond all imagining. If the Profumo affair sponged off Lady Chatterley fumes, Beatlemania had a distinctly American-influenced, forward-looking twist. Even before they broke stateside, the Beatles trumped that sovereign American export known as celebrity: here was Valentino- and Sinatra- and Presley-style hero worship cranked up a few notches, multiplied by four; and it quickly shot Lennon’s life soaring into a parallel universe of celebrity privilege and detachment, as far from ordinary as Alice was through the looking glass. Surprising even themselves, the Beatles had a knack for it—they made all the chaos seem like the tail of a cultural comet. Even in the beginning, they behaved as if their centering the culture’s vortex wasn’t just inevitable but richly deserved; and the more their records stormed the charts, the less audacious that seemed. More than a few commentators dismissed them as a passing fad, which only fed their determination to outlive their own hype. And all of this fed the “meta” aspect of Beatlemania, where everybody was not only experiencing its hurricane force but talking about it, analyzing it, aware of it as a unique moment in cultural history.

  By the time the Americans jumped aboard, the band’s momentum had made their act irresistible. As cultural critic Greil Marcus put it, “Excitement wasn’t in the air, it was the air.”7 When this 1963 storm whooshed into America in 1964, it gained speed and intensity as it crossed the Atlantic. After a youth spent in thrall to rock ’n’ roll culture, which sprang from Elvis Presley winning over black audiences in the Memphis Beale Street clubs, getting the United States to catch up to them—with music forged on the crucible of American racism—was an irony Lennon savored.

  As 1963 began, the Beatles returned from their hangdog New Year’s Eve gig in Hamburg only to slog anticlimactically north again to Scotland on January 2 for a five-day tour. After a storm canceled their opening gig in Keith, Banffshire, Lennon flew home for a few hours with his pregnant wife, returning the next morning for the gig in Elgin, Morayshire. This was the first time the band had been this far north since backing Johnny Gentle in 1960; and for all the gains they had made in the fall, there were still major questions chasing them as they pressed on. Now that Lennon and McCartney were writing songs Dick James would publish, their material was quickly in demand: Epstein wanted numbers for Billy J. Kramer, the Liverpool singer he’d plopped in front of a Manchester band, the Dakotas. Lennon and McCartney passed along “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” and eventually “Bad to Me,” “I’ll Keep You Satisfied,” and “From a Window,” an early draft of Lennon’s “No Reply” narrative. Kramer tracked “Secret” and another Lennon/McCartney number, “I’ll Be on My Way,” in March. Epstein’s ambitions had grown with his band’s: as a retailer, he intuited how the Beatle tide could lift other Merseyside boats. (Many years later, Kramer remembered Lennon’s apology demo for “Secret”: “After he played the song, he apologized and said he’d looked all over the building for an empty room and this was the only place he could find. Then a toilet flushed.”)8

  Television would be the final push for their next single, and Epstein and the Beatles all knew it could mean the difference between a hit and a lost opportunity. After finishing the short tour, on January 8, they visited Scottish Television in Glasgow to mime “Please Please Me” for local broadcast, a warmup for some UK appearances in the coming weeks that would break the song wide open. On January 13 the Beatles were in Birmingham for their first Thank Your Lucky Stars appearance, and Andrew Loog Oldham caught the rehearsal.9 A shark who was not easily impressed, he described the scene as it unfolded:

  Watching in the wings, I was spellbound by a new British group making their first appearance on national television. . . . I can clearly recall the buzz of watching them rehearse. They weren’t that different in appearance from the other acts—they were all wearing suits and ties. What was unusual was their attitude: they exuded a “Fuck you, we’re good and we know it” attitude. You normally didn’t see that in an act making its first TV appearance.

  In Oldham’s mind, the Beatles’ music and personal presence seemed both “omniscient and naïve” and gave off something “hypnotic and life-giving.” The act reminded him of Bob Dylan, the young American singer he’d met during a brief BBC appearance the previous year.10 “I realized these sixties were not only happening to me,” Oldham thought. He was particularly impressed with Epstein, who wore an immaculate overcoat with a paisley scarf and hired Oldham on the spot. “Maybe they did need somebody pounding the pavements for them in . . . London,” Oldham writes, “which he pronounced like a man getting rid of phlegm in his throat or a stone from his shoe.”11

  Oldham was known in London circles as a comer, a brash stylist with game who literally knocked on everybody’s door asking for work. He had bounced around the fashion industry and found pop music managers positively Neanderthal. The Beatles fleshed out his mission to bring the flash and daring of fashion into pop. Epstein was just a couple of steps ahead of him. “When you sat down with Brian,” Oldham recalled, echoing many descriptions of this manager’s maniac faith in his act, “you knew you were dealing with a man who had a vision for the Beatles and nobody was going to get in the way of that vision. He was convinced that eventually everybody was going to agree with him. That gave him the power to make people listen.” Oldham noted how Epstein’s polished persona enveloped his whole enterprise: “That he was somewhat to the manor born gave him both a self-assurance and an entrée with the stubbornly middle-class label managers he had to deal with.” Epstein’s personal luster and the Beatles’ musical daring fed off each other. Simply standing to watch his “boys” at Thank Your Lucky Stars, Epstein’s belief in them seemed to permeate the room. “In those early days,” Oldham wrote, “Brian’s presence, the Beatles’ irreverence and their mutual pleasure all conveniently merged.”12

  The first week in February the Beatles went out on a package tour as a supporting act to Helen Shapiro, then promoting her top-forty hit “Queen for Tonight.” “I had a huge crush on John,” Shapiro remembered, “but I was only sixteen! He treated me like a little sister.”13 The previous spring, Shapiro had starred in director Richard Lester’s It’s Trad, Dad, singing her top-ten hit “Let’s Talk About Love.” Lester’s film took place in a television studio and now screens like a working draft of A Hard Day’s Night, with Shapiro performing alongside Chubby Checker, Del Shannon, Gene Vincent, and others. Lennon and McCartney saw opportunity: they offered her a new song, “Misery,” which she turned down. No matter, as George Harrison recalled: “That tour was when we first did the Moss Empire circuit, the biggest gigs that there were in England at the time, other than the Palladium. We were quite happy with that.”14

  The Shapiro tour began in Bradford, Yorkshire, and continued on to Doncaster, with a short break for two Cavern gigs: headlining an all-night “Rhythm and Blues Marathon” on February 3 and their last lunchtime slot the next day. Epstein had interspersed January’s live gigs with TV appearances on People and Places and the BBC radio’s Light Programme’s Here We Go, and more work on the BBC’s Saturday Club and The Talent Spot and Radio Luxembourg’s Friday Spectacular. All this activity sharpened their ensemble for the big day: their first album recording session, which came right after finishing the first five-night leg of the Shapiro dates. They briefly dropped out of the tour after the February 9 show in Sunderland, Durham, to make the 275-mile, five-hour drive down to London for a good night’s rest.

  They arrived at the EMI studios on the morning of February 11 to deliver the “live” album they had discussed with George Martin. He had heard them at the Cavern, knew what they could do, and decided to simply roll tape. “Let’s record every song you’ve got,” he told them. “Come down to the studios and we’ll just whistle through them in a day.” They started around eleven, finished ten hours later, and Martin grabbed his “live” album for EMI.15 Historians have stressed the mad rush of this sess
ion as if it were somehow unusual, but it simply stacked two three-hour sessions into a single day, and the Beatles stretched things out. If absolutely necessary, a producer could bring singers or guitarists back in to redo a part or two, but live-to-tape was the standard.

  The goal was simply to record the best parts of their live show, which the Beatles had been doing sometimes twice a day on stages a hundred miles apart. And Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison had been chomping at the bit for this opportunity since forever, from their “That’ll Be the Day” demo in Percy Phillips’s living room as Quarrymen to their Decca audition on New Year’s Day of 1962. Thirteen months later, standing still in a studio suddenly held out new promise, as well as aesthetic appeal—the chance to listen to one another more closely as they played.

  Lennon was shaking off a bad cold, nursing tea, milk, cigs, and Zubes cough lozenges throughout the day to soothe his aching throat; you can hear his threadbare vocal cords straining to reach notes, as if a live wire were shorting out his larynx. The long Hamburg nights color the attitude in the sound: tired, yes; game, absolutely. They opened with ten takes of “There’s a Place,” then nine of “Seventeen” (which became “I Saw Her Standing There”).

  The first myth to puncture about this session is that it was a slapdash affair. “We told them we were having a break,” engineer Richard Langham told Mark Lewisohn, “but they said they would like to stay on and rehearse. So while George, Norman [Smith] and I went round the corner to the Heroes of Alma pub for a pie and pint they stayed, drinking milk. When we came back they’d been playing right through. We couldn’t believe it. We had never seen a group work right through their lunch break before.”16

  Dogged persistence yielded effortless spontaneity; this kind of focus made it all sound easy. After lunch came seven takes of “A Taste of Honey,” eight of “Do You Want to Know a Secret?,” overdubs on “There’s a Place” and “Seventeen,” and eleven takes of “Misery.” After dinner they continued with thirteen takes of “Hold Me Tight,” three of “Anna (Go to Him),” one of “Boys,” four of “Chains,” and three of “Baby It’s You.” To finish, a group huddle settled on one of their Cavern staples, “Twist and Shout,” of which they chose the first of two takes.

  These session details unveil previously hidden priorities. They believed in “There’s a Place” enough to pour out ten takes of it first thing in the morning, only to return for three more overdubs later that afternoon. Building on the flirtatious silences that dimpled “Love Me Do” and “Ask Me Why,” this number began with a tricky stop-time vocal duet at the top of each verse, like a musical double take—an exquisite pirouette that lifted the entire song with a giant wink. This gesture had both daring and fragility, and seeded one of the most beguiling aspects of their music as a whole: those mercurial Lennon-and-McCartney vocal duets, which suspended increasingly quixotic promises, musical flights soaring into emotional koans. The narrative space Lennon and McCartney retreat to is the singer’s mind (“and there’s no time”), the imaginal realm where romance rides waves of idealism. In song, this riddle spins out as a metaphor for rock ’n’ roll’s ideal state, where melody transcends its backbeat and joy doubles down. After so much gigging and pressing on despite hard luck, this music chases down smiles toward sweet arrival.

  So a one-day session yielded ten of the fourteen tracks for the band’s debut with “Hold Me Tight” getting held for the next record. Workmanlike time pressures yielded a well-sequenced set of tracks. Since recording “Please Please Me,” they had written “Seventeen”—“I Saw Her Standing There”—which Martin would surely have jumped on as a single if he’d known about it. You can hear them start to purr in this song, as if the songwriting begins to catch up with their vivid, roomy ensemble. The most obvious hook was the flatted-sixth chord on the final word of “I’ll never dance with another . . . Oh!”—which tickles the title phrase right out of its skin at each repetition. The song quickly got singled out as the perfect album opener, a short fuse triggering an indefatigable originality. This was the song they had been trying to write ever since Martin sent “Love Me Do” back for a rewrite the previous June. Lennon rewrote McCartney’s opening lines from “Well she was just seventeen . . . She was no beauty queen” to the infinitely more suggestive and expansive “. . . You know . . . what I mean,” injecting a pause like a lump in the throat. To set off your debut album with an original number that nodded knowingly toward Chuck Berry’s narrative swagger launched a sequence of thrilling proportions. And by the end of side one, the album introduced the entire band through lead vocals (Paul with “Standing There,” John with “Misery,” George with the Cookies’ “Chains,” Ringo with the Shirelles’ “Boys,” a number he had done with the Hurricanes). The era’s typical pop album put hit singles at the top of side one and slid downward from there. The Beatles’ unerring confidence withheld their hit single as the opening track for side two, boldly holding back even stronger original material to sustain a long-playing album. Along the way, they handed off “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” to George for a droll dash of inscrutability. The sequence alone on this debut album sent grandiose conceptual signals. As much thought had been put into sequencing as song choice—and they had been stewing about song choice ever since that dreadful first day of 1962 at Decca.

  As a closer they might have picked any number of their slew of covers: “Long Tall Sally,” “Money,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” “That’ll Be the Day” (sentimental favorite), or “Johnny B. Goode,” all of which they had learned to close with in Hamburg. Lennon’s choice on “Twist and Shout” creates a giant tipping point: with a throat so sore others noticed the blood staining the milk in his bottle, he could easily have handed off closing vocal duties to Paul (“Long Tall Sally” was more dynamite in reserve). But “Twist and Shout” shows just how hard Lennon had fought over material behind the scenes, and how determined he was not to make the Decca mistakes that had held the promise of this session so far in the distance.

  “Twist and Shout” is one of those pregnant microcosms of rock ’n’ roll; like “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen or “Wild Thing” by the Troggs, it binds together forces at play in the sound that ridicule simplicity. Bert Berns (aka Bert Russell) and Phil Medley wrote the number for the Top Notes, who recorded it with Phil Spector on an Atlantic session in 1961 and then vanished. Enter Cincinatti’s Isley Brothers, looking to tailgate on Chubby Checker’s 1960 “Twist” craze, itself a cover of a B-side by the saucy Hank Ballard and his Midnighters (“Work With Me Annie”). Checker never escaped the Twist: after the original hit returned to the number one slot in early 1962, he turned in “Let’s Twist Again (Like We Did Last Summer),” “Slow Twistin’,” and “Teach Me to Twist” through 1962, the same year he married Miss World Catharina Lodders and starred in Twist Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Twist.

  But Checker himself seemed incidental to the Twist’s life force; as a black, his talent was Teflon (“[He] sounded uncannily, on record, like a white man imitating a black man,” wrote Jonathan Gould.)17 His first Twist song had set off an early pop explosion, a portent of Beatlemania that began as a dance, morphed quickly into a metaphor for an attitude less stodgy than swing, and then into a worldview, smirking at the establishment through mainstream coverage in Esquire and Time. Joey Dee and the Starlighters became the house band at the Peppermint Lounge in Midtown Manhattan on the crest of their “Peppermint Twist,” a massive hit in early 1962. Dell comics followed with a comic-book series. If “Camelot” was JFK’s official Broadway theme music, “The Twist” cued his “secret” mobster-moll and movie-star trysts.

  British listeners never knew the Isleys’ number until the summer of 1963—the Beatles copped it from Radio Luxembourg, on the Wand label import. (In one of many reversals, the Beatles’ album track launched the Isley Brothers single in Britain.) The Isleys, a gospel trio retooling doo-wop, were following up their modest RCA hit “Shout (Part I),” which reached number forty-seven in September of 1959
and reappeared at number ninety-four in March 1962. A song’s reappearance like that means the audience clamors for more. The obvious move was to jump onto that Top Notes song, which had tried to siphon more gas out of the Twist. Since Berns and Medley had simply merged “Twist” with “Shout” using the “La Bamba” template, the Isleys rushed to cover it as a way of tailgating their previous hit: it worked, breaking into the top twenty in June 1962.18

  The Isleys’ arrangement dramatizes how punctual and stylized black acts needed to be in those days. After dumping the original’s awkward bridge, the Isleys simply added a cornball horn-and-handclaps arrangement, broken up with a standard-issue rave-up to work the crowd—if you didn’t know it was the same band, you’d swear it was a cynical takeoff of their own “Shout!” Few listening to the original Top Notes track would have predicted its ultimate success; it was a tightly wound cultural conundrum, a white-penned novelty piggybacking on a rip-off of another novelty, one of those miraculous mistakes that mutates from obscurity into a cultural virus.

  Who knows what Lennon heard in Ronnie Isley’s lead vocal on “Twist and Shout”—but he must have heard an opening, an idea about freedom that cried out for a tougher, leaner beat. The Beatles’ attack alone carried symbolic force: as a garage band, they filtered the Isleys’ high-tone horns and handclaps down into guitars and vocals alone, which turned the entire project into an ideal of self-sufficiency, a sound that said, “This thing will cut water if we trim its sails.” Where the Isley Brothers kicked Berns and Medley’s sketch into a song, the Beatles both compressed it and fleshed it out, turning it into a much larger idea. When you listened to this new band cover the track, the Isley Brothers version suddenly sounded both quaint and pregnant: Ronnie’s wriggling lead rang out all the more pronounced for the square frame it had to squirm through. Everybody hearing the Beatles do this song heard faint echoes of the Isley Brothers in their heads, and the marvel lay in how the Beatles conquered the track without patronizing their models. The Isleys’ arrangement wore pressed shirts, cuff links, and polished shoes; the Beatles sound wore leather. They also did the Isley Brothers’ “Shout!,” of course, the gospel sing-along with Lennon hurling expletives into its coda (“We’re fookin’ shoutin’ now!”)19 But in both songs, the racial politics in the music didn’t disappear so much as turn metaphorical—the Brits pouncing on this style escaped cynicism and landed on the far side of beatific. In “Twist and Shout,” Lennon made the Isley Brothers’ sexual subtext overt, lacing a cynical play on Chubby Checker’s “Twist” with irony and subterfuge.