The Beatles (48 page)

What’s more, it was Harry who now decided that Brian needed some kind of stabilizing influence to ensure against his son’s further unhappiness. Brian was already beating himself up over the Mr. X affair. To keep his son’s spirits up, Harry suggested expanding the small record department they’d opened in the Great Charlotte Street store and letting Brian manage it in any way he saw fit. Clive, in turn, would take over the appliance department, thereby establishing a clear division of responsibility.

The result was an unqualified success. In no time, Brian built the record department from a nook in the ground floor into a solid, full-scale enterprise that challenged NEMS’ much larger and more well established competitors. It wasn’t location or floor space or special pricing that did the trick as much as it was Brian’s wide-eyed ambition. Instead of stocking a selection of current hits and staples, as was the custom among Liverpool’s retailers, he resolved to carry
every record in print
on demand, so as not to have to special-order one when a customer requested an obscure title. That meant keeping a huge inventory on hand, as well as a system for constantly updating it. Had he bothered to run this scheme past Harry, it is likely to have been dismissed as too speculative or grandiose. But as he was promised free rein—and seeing as his parents were reluctant to dampen his happiness—no effort was made to check the hasty growth, and as a result, the department expanded and flourished.

More important, Brian seemed to thrive in his new role. No one worked harder or showed more determination. Every minute of his day was given over to the demands of his precious record department. He ordered every record himself, stayed in contact with the major distributors
in Manchester, trained and supervised the young staff, and handled the books. Along with Peter Brown, he even worked the counter on a regular basis. John Lennon’s boyhood friend Mike Rice, who worked at Martin’s Bank, where NEMS had its account, recalls how Brian was always at the store, always working no matter what the time of day. “
My girlfriend and I
would usually stay late in Liverpool, and walking past NEMS, we always saw him slaving away. It became a joke between us. We’d phone each other late at night and say, ‘I’ve just been past the record store and—
he’s still there!
’ ”

By the end of 1960, NEMS had become “
the most important record outlet
in Liverpool, if not the whole North of England.” Teenagers thronged the three stores each day to stay in the swing of things. Says Brown: “
There was really no radio
[for them] to listen to; the BBC didn’t play rock ’n roll and Radio Luxembourg was spotty. So, if these kids wanted to hear new music, they had to come in[to NEMS] and listen to it.”

Promoters were encouraged to put up posters in the stores, while NEMS always handled tickets to local events and sponsored transportation. For a teenager in Liverpool, NEMS was the pipeline for reliable information. Someone hanging out there always knew what was going on. And if all else failed, you could always go there to pick up a copy of
Mersey Beat.

Mersey Beat
was the brainchild of John’s art school mate Bill Harry, who’d been pasting up magazines since he was old enough to hold a pencil. Frank Hesselberg commissioned him to start a newsletter reporting on the local club scene, which they called
Frank Comments.
It folded after a few issues, but Harry wasn’t deterred. He made further half-baked attempts with
Storyville
and
52nd Street,
to keep tabs on the jazz movement, but with dwindling financial support, they both lapsed into a precipitate decline.

He scrounged up another £50 from a friend and persuaded his girlfriend, Virginia, to leave her accounting job at Woolworth’s. Together, they rented attic space in a building on Renshaw Street, near the art college, and with a single Olivetti typewriter began compiling material for the first issue.
Mersey Beat,
which made its debut on July 6, 1961, broke no new ground as far as appearances went, looking too much like a dense student newspaper. But its copy leaped over a cliff. No one in the North had devoted more than a line or two to rock ’n roll, and here was a whole magazine full of the stuff.
A grainy picture of Gene Vincent
grinning graced the cover, along with an article about “Swinging Cilla,” a local, throaty-
voiced girl named Cilla White who sang on and off with the Dominoes, Hurricanes, and the Big Three.
^*
And most peculiar, and perhaps just the irreverent edge Harry was striving for, a disjointed piece of nonsense called “Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles” as “Translated from the John Lennon.”

Harry cranked out a print run of five thousand and hit the streets running. Most newsagents and bookshops agreed to sell his funky rag, but only one or two copies each. (
He split the cover price
– threepence a copy—with the retailer.) At the Whitechapel branch of NEMS, Harry asked to see the manager and was shown directly into Brian Epstein’s office. “
He looked extremely smart
, was very polite, talked posh—everything about him was precise and impressive,” Harry recalls. “Straightaway, he agreed to take a dozen copies of [
Mersey Beat
].”

Brian was waiting when Harry returned the next week to collect the receipts. “
I can’t understand it
,” he told Bill, pointing to the empty paper bin near the counter. “They sold out in a day. Next time, I’ll take twelve dozen copies.” Harry was stunned, but not as much as Brian was when the second issue sold out. Harry arrived at NEMS at noon with the next allotment and kids were queued up, waiting for it. He had a phenomenon on his hands.

“The next week,” Harry recalls, “[Brian] invited me upstairs to his office and offered me a sherry. I thought: how civilized of him.” Civilized indeed, but with an underlying purpose. “He wanted to know all about what was happening—who was buying the newspaper and what the music scene was like in Liverpool.” The front page was devoted to a breaking story:
BEATLES SIGN RECORDING CONTRACT!
accompanied by an Astrid Kirchherr photograph of the band. “
This is actually in
Liverpool?
” Brian marveled, thumbing through
Mersey Beat.
“Who are all these groups?” He couldn’t get over it.

When the third issue appeared, it carried a new column—“
Record Releases by Brian Epstein
of NEMS”—that flaunted his newly acquired enlightenment about Liverpool’s beat music scene, gleaned almost verbatim from the pages of
Mersey Beat.
Eventually, he got around to the question that would change everything. Sitting owl-eyed across from Bill Harry, he held up a page of
Mersey Beat
and wondered: “
What about these Beatles
?”

What about these Beatles?

Legend has it that Brian
stumbled inadvertently over the Beatles when folk hero Raymond Jones confronted him at the NEMS counter sometime on October 28, 1961, and demanded a copy of “My Bonnie.” In his autobiography, Brian wrote: “
The name ‘Beatle’ meant
nothing to me…. I had never [before] given a thought to any of the Liverpool beat groups then up and coming [sic] in the cellar clubs.” It made for nice copy later, when the press began to call, but as far as the truth went, it was hogwash.

Epstein knew all about the Beatles from his careful scrutiny of
Mersey Beat,
and what that didn’t tell him, Billy Harry did. What’s more, there were posters plastered everywhere around NEMS announcing various Beatles appearances. “
He would have had to have been blind
—or ignorant—not to have noticed their name,” Harry contends. Besides, his salesgirls knew the Beatles and made a fuss over them when they came into the store.

A month or two later, interrupting a routine inventory at NEMS, Brian confronted an unsuspecting Alistair Taylor. “
Do you remember that record
by a band called the Beatles?” he asked out of the blue. Taylor had, indeed; “My Bonnie” enjoyed an embarrassment of sales and was constantly on reorder. “They’re playing at this place called the Cavern. We ought to go see them.”

Without further delay, Brian phoned Bill Harry at the
Mersey Beat
office. “
The Beatles are at the Cavern
,” he said. “Could you arrange for me to go and see them?”

What an odd request, Harry mused. No one needed help getting into the Cavern, especially for a lunchtime session; all you had to do was stand in line and pay the shilling. But he recognized Brian’s appetite for protocol. A call to Ray McFall, placed by an intermediary such as Bill, would set Brian apart from the hoi polloi. With his perfectly sculpted hair, his blue, pin-striped suit furling like drapery, and of course a black, calf-skinned briefcase clutched rather powerfully in his hand, he’d stride into the club as if he owned the place.

Any suspicions Harry had about Brian Epstein’s motives were no longer in doubt.

In early October, shortly before John’s twenty-first birthday, he had received a £100 gift from his aunt Elizabeth (whom John called Mater) in Scotland and had taken off with Paul for a spontaneous two-week jaunt.
A letter from Stuart had indicated
that their exi buddy Jürgen Vollmer now lived in Paris, working as an assistant to photographer William Klein. When John and Paul turned up unannounced outside his tiny hotel on the rue de Beaune, Vollmer was thrilled to see them, delighted that they had come, as they’d explained, to hang out and soak up whatever it was that made him unique. One of those idiosyncrasies was his groovy clothing. Even in Hamburg, they’d known of Vollmer’s frequent excursions to the Paris flea markets, where he put together that wardrobe. Now, they encountered him wearing bell-bottoms a good five years before the rest of the world would catch the trend. That look wouldn’t fly in Liverpool, where sailors were derided unmercifully for their flared legs. But the Beatles bought corduroy jackets, wide-striped “grandfather” shirts, and the sleeveless sweaters that were staples of the Left Bank exis.

“
I showed them all the places
where I hung out with the artistic crowd,” Vollmer remembered. They couldn’t take their eyes off these people, who seemed so exotic and fascinating, even more so than the colorful Hamburg natives. Finally, after a few days on the prowl, John and Paul asked for a special favor. “We want our hair like you have it,” they said.

In a room at the back of the Hôtel de Beaune, John and Paul sat patiently, nervously, on an unmade bed while Jürgen took a pair of scissors to their greasy manes. According to Vollmer, “I cut their hair [so that it was] more to the side, [although] forward nevertheless, until it looked like mine.” Hardly bowl-shaped, it was sleek and soft-looking, swept to one side, with the hint of a tail that bounced delicately on their shoulders. The Beatles had always possessed half of the equation. Now the whole package was in place.

No one was more surprised than Alistair Taylor when Brian invited him to see the Beatles at the Cavern. He’d been in that dungeon before—“dozens of times”—when it was a jazz club. “
We both detested pop
music,” Taylor recalls. “The music was totally alien to us. Even though we’d sold all those records [of “My Bonnie”], neither of us played it, nor particularly liked it.”

Brian had no idea how to get to the Cavern, even though it was two hundred yards from NEMS. And once inside, he was awestruck. “It was nothing like what we’d expected,” Taylor remembers. “The place was packed and steam was rolling down the walls. The music was so loud, we couldn’t hear ourselves think.” Both men were uncomfortable in ways that had nothing to do with the physical surroundings. “We were way out of our element. We were both in suits and ties, everyone was staring at us. We were very self-conscious.”

To make themselves less conspicuous, Brian and Alistair took seats near the back. Both men sat stiffly, with their hands folded across their chests. And the band—why, they were shocking, disgraceful. “They could barely play,” Taylor says, “and they were deafening and
so
unprofessional—laughing with the girls, smoking onstage, and sipping from Cokes during their act. But
absolutely magic!
The vibe they generated was just unbelievable.” Halfway through the set, he glanced over at Brian and noticed they both were doing the same thing: tapping their hands on their legs.