Shout! (36 page)

In one thirteen-hour session Martin pushed them through enough songs to complete the fourteen-track LP. The numbers were those, like “I Saw Her Standing There,” that John and Paul had thrown together long ago to get them through a Hamburg night, mixed with American soul songs like “Chains” and “Baby It’s You.” Martin, once again, confined himself to editing, shaping, rearranging, and dovetailing. He added a piano intro—played by himself—to “Misery,” and the double-tracking of Paul’s voice through “A Taste of Honey.” George and Ringo, in fairness, were given the lead vocal on one song each. George’s was a new Lennon-McCartney composition called “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” He sang it in thick Liverpudlian, barely managing its falsetto line. Ringo, with even less of a voice, still managed to give an infectious joy to “Boys,” the old Cavern show-stopper. The finale was “Twist and Shout,” the Isley Brothers song with which their stage act always closed. “John absolutely screamed it,” Martin says. “God knows what it did to his larynx, because it made a sound like tearing flesh. That
had
to be right on the first take.”

It was the same performance they were giving each night in a different English town, on tour once again for the Arthur Howes Organization. Howes had booked them—before “Please Please Me” reached number one—for the same eighty pounds per week they had got for the Helen Shapiro tour. By now, any promoter would have paid ten times that fee. Brian Epstein would not renege on his agreement with Howes.

Two American singers, Chris Montez and Tommy Roe, were supposed to be the tour’s joint stars. It soon became obvious to Arthur Howes that neither was getting applause on the same scale as the Beatles. Their wages did not increase but their billing did. The running order was changed so that they, and “Twist and Shout,” closed the show each night.

On March 22, the release of their album,
Please Please Me
, provoked fresh interest from the music papers. Even the jazz-oriented
Melody Maker
welcomed what every reviewer agreed was not the usual cash-in LP dross but a run of songs each in its own way different and surprising. For the first time it became apparent that the Beatles were songwriters on a scale unknown among performers of pop music. Record buyers
previously had cared little about who
wrote
the songs they liked. On the back of the
Please Please Me
sleeve were helpful notes (by Disker, the
Liverpool Echo
columnist) detailing which of the songs were the Beatles’ own and also acknowledging their debt to American groups like the Shirelles and songwriters like Goffin and King. The front cover photograph showed four figures in burgundy-colored stage suits, grinning cheerfully down from a balcony in what seemed to be a housing project. No one seen in the Top Twenty since Tommy Steele had made so overt a declaration of being working class.

By now their personalities as well as their records were reaching a national public. Two BBC radio pop shows,
Saturday Club
and
Easy Beat
, brought them to London during the Tommy Roe tour to play in the studio what they were to play onstage that evening a hundred miles away through the sleet and slush. In London, their faces were still unknown: They could walk as they pleased, with Dezo Hoffman, their
Record Mirror
friend, around Shaftesbury Avenue and Berwick Market, and eat at Hoffman’s favorite restaurant, the Budapest in Greek Street. Dezo also showed them how to work the new cameras he persuaded a Soho shop to give them in exchange for a signed photograph. Dezo Hoffman saw the same reaction everywhere that he had felt on his first trip up to Liverpool. The Beatles were something that pop musicians had never been before. They were witty, lively, intelligent; they charmed and tickled and excited all who met them. Brian Matthew, the
Saturday Club
emcee, strove in vain to keep up his usual BBC manner against John Lennon’s devastating ad-libs. “I was introducing them on one show, going through the usual thing of asking them about the music. I’d just come back from holiday in Spain. As I was talking John leaned across and said into the microphone, ‘Brian’s nose is peeling, folks.’”

To George Martin, John was like a precocious child, only half-aware of the joltingly funny things he said. “I remember we were having dinner out one night, and the waiter brought
mange-tout
[snow] peas. John had very evidently never seen such a thing before, but I said he ought to try them. “All right then,” he said, “but put them over there, not near the food.”

Brian, too, was spending much of every week in London. His father could hardly object to that now. The Whitechapel record shop ran smoothly under Peter Brown’s management, and the office upstairs in Olive Johnson’s charge. Olive was the McCartney family friend whom
Paul’s father had first consulted about Brian. She had afterward left her job with the Law Society to join NEMS Enterprises as his “personal assistant.”

In London he still had no base other than his favorite hotel, the Grosvenor House. “He’d walk into my office,” Dick James said, “and tell me he’d been offered this date for the Beatles at two hundred pounds. I’d say: ‘Tell ’em to double it.’ Brian would come back in amazement and say, ‘It worked.’‘Next time,’ I’d say, ‘tell ’em to double that figure again.’”

In early 1963, a South London impresario could still book the Beatles for thirty pounds to play for dancing at Wimbledon Palais. Brian’s chief concern seems to have been to ensure them a full summer’s work, even if the follow-up single to “Please Please Me” did not make the charts. He struck up a regular business arrangement with Larry Parnes, still a leading impresario despite the virtual eclipse of Billy Fury and the rest of his stable by the Mersey tidal wave. Parnes and Brian had Jewishness as well as concealed homosexuality in common and became good friends, though their mutual intransigence thwarted Mr. Parnes Shillings and Pence’s plan to build a series of Sunday concerts around the Beatles at the end of Great Yarmouth pier. “I was offering thirty pounds per show and Brian wanted seventy-five pounds,” Parnes remembered. “He told me that if I’d meet his price I could have an option to do shows with the Beatles and all the other NEMS acts for the next five years. In the end, he came down from seventy-five pounds to thirty-five. I went up to thirty-two pounds. I wouldn’t budge and neither would he.”

The Beatles unquestioningly went wherever Brian told them, however small the fee or insignificant the venue. Perhaps the most bizarre was arranged after a pupil at Stowe, the Buckinghamshire private school, wrote and asked if they could perform for him and his schoolmates. It helped that the pupil was David Moores, a scion of Liverpool’s Littlewoods stores family (and a future chairman of the Liverpool soccer club). For one hundred pounds, the Beatles performed two thirty-minute sets in the school’s Roxburgh Hall, watched by boys and teachers seated in orderly rows as if listening to a visiting bishop on Speech Day. Afterward, they were given tea and a conducted tour of the school. This with one hit already behind them and another single (“From Me to You”) due to be released the following week.

NEMS Enterprises, Brian decided, must have lawyers in London as well as Liverpool. Characteristically, he chose the most expensive and
fashionable of West End law firms specializing in show business clients. The Beatles were now on the books of M. A. Jacobs of Pall Mall, in company with such illustrious past litigants as Marlene Dietrich and Liberace. The firm’s senior partner, David Jacobs, was himself a fashionable figure, to be seen tirelessly ministering to his clients’ needs at the Savoy or Dorchester. He was, like Brian, cultivated, immaculate, Jewish, and a homosexual.

Already, a bit of trouble had arisen that required urgent consultation with Jacobs. The owner of a Hamburg club was threatening to hold a Beatle responsible for making his daughter pregnant. Jacobs referred the matter to counsel, who advised a quick settlement. It was the first of countless such claims, consultations, visits to counsel, and recommendations to settle out of court. With David Jacobs, Brian formed a shield around the Beatles that would not be lifted so long as he or Jacobs remained alive.

Early in March, every national and provincial newspaper in Britain received a publicity handout announcing the recording debut of a second group managed by NEMS Enterprises. Journalists who bothered to read the handout learned that the group was called Gerry and the Pacemakers, that it recorded on EMI’s Columbia label, that it shared the same management as another successful group, the Beatles, and that it came from the same city, Liverpool. For the first time since its birth in Britain’s industrial dawn, Liverpool was deliberately invoked as a source of excitement, glamour, and novelty.

Brian Epstein was hardly the first to see potential in Gerry Marsden, the ex–messenger boy from Ringo Starr’s neighborhood who had led a successful group on Merseyside since 1958. But no one before Brian had taken the trouble to harness Gerry’s boundless energy, nor to dress him in a suit instead of sweaters and jeans, and stop him from smoking Woodbines, and tell him to project.

Gerry’s first single was “How Do You Do It?” the song that the Beatles had rejected in favor of “Please Please Me.” He and the Pacemakers came across from Hamburg to record it, in blissful unawareness that the mutinous John Lennon version was anything other than a helpful demo. Gerry’s jaunty treatment confirmed what George Martin had said all along—the number was a natural hit. It reached number one on March 22. The music papers realized that two hits from the same source
constituted a “sound.” From now on there was constant reference to the Liverpool or the Mersey Sound.

The Beatles’ third Parlophone single, “From Me to You,” released on April 12, had a similarly stylish publicity send-off. The smallest local paper in Britain received the NEMS handout, written by Tony Barrow and designed much as Brian used to draw up his posters for dances at New Brighton Tower. Instead of the usual glossy studio pose the Beatles were shown with their instruments on the deck of a Mersey tugboat. Underneath was Brian Matthew’s potent declaration that they were “visually and musically the most exciting group since the Shadows.”

The song had been written by John and Paul on the bus during the Helen Shapiro tour. It was “Please Please Me,” a little slower, with the falsetto repositioned, and its reviews proved no more than lukewarm. Most of the music papers thought they had gone off since “Please Please Me.” Keith Fordyce said the new record was not even as interesting as “Love Me Do.”

On April 27, “From Me to You” was number one, well on the way to selling half a million copies and earning a silver disk. “How Do You Do It?” by Gerry and the Pacemakers was still at number three. Everyone who watched television or listened to radio in Britain had heard of the Mersey Sound.

Four days earlier, in Sefton General Hospital, Liverpool, Cynthia Lennon had given birth to a son. The labor was long and painful; the delivery became complicated when the umbilical cord was found to be wrapped round the baby’s neck. His father knew nothing of these anxieties, being still out on tour in the Chris Montez show. Not until a week later did John visit Cynthia, and even then he had to wear a crude disguise to avoid the fans waiting outside. He held his son in his arms, watched by a grinning crowd through the glass cubicle wall.

The baby was called Julian, the nearest John could get to his mother’s name, Julia. His obvious delight at becoming a father encouraged Cynthia to visions of happy domesticity in Woolton, where they were to occupy the whole ground floor of Mimi’s house. The visions evaporated when John told her that Brian had asked him to go away on a vacation to Spain. Cynthia, recognizing that she had no real say in the matter, assented with a show of cheerfulness.

This vacation, in May 1963, was Brian’s first and only public declaration
of his feelings toward John. It was made in the euphoria of seeing two of his groups in the Top Twenty, when all other impediments to happiness seemed to have been swept away; why not this last intractable one? Close friends like Olive Johnson advised against it, in vain. The two of them flew off to Brian’s vacation haunts, leaving Liverpool to gossip as it pleased and Cynthia to take care of the baby. Years later, John as good as admitted that, in their Spanish hotel, Brian finally plucked up courage to make sexual advances to him and that, with his kind and resigned heart, he did not resist. But matters went no further than “a hand job.”

Recently, Brian’s attention had become focused on another, far more conventionally beautiful young man. Billy Ashton—or Kramer as he was known in the dance halls—led a group of Bootle boys called the Coasters, rated third in
Mersey Beat
newspaper’s popularity league. Brian paid fifty pounds to acquire Billy from his original manager, an elderly gentleman named Ted Knibbs who had rehearsed the nervous Adonis by making him sing standing on a chair.

Billy J. Kramer, with the new suits and initial that Brian had bestowed on him, was then brought to London for a recording test by George Martin at Parlophone. Martin gave his opinion that for the first time Brian had made a mistake. Though the youth was undoubtedly good-looking, his voice was erratic and his personal magnetism rather slight. Brian, however, insisted that “my Billy” should be allowed to record.

Billy J. was duly taped, backed by a Manchester group, the Dakotas, singing the Lennon-McCartney ballad “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” If George Harrison’s voice had cracked on the falsetto line, Billy J. Kramer’s broke into smithereens. Martin concealed the worst of it by double-tracking the vocal and filling in the cracks with his own piano accompaniment. The record was released on April 26; by mid-May every Top Ten chart showed it at number two.

That Brian had no idea of what the Beatles were already becoming is amply shown by his activities with NEMS Enterprises during the summer of 1963. Formerly, his desire had been to become a Beatle; to merge his existence, if only spiritually, with theirs. Now he began to see them merely as brand leaders in an empire of Liverpool artists, founded and ruled over paternalistically by himself. One of the NEMS handouts, indeed, showed all of them, the Beatles, Gerry and Billy J., the Pacemakers
and Dakotas, as disembodied heads encircling Brian’s in a schoolmasterly mortarboard.