The Beatles (52 page)

As Brian was packing up to leave, he said, “Well, I’m in the midst [of] trying to arrange an audition with Decca.” Barrow asked who was acting as his go-between and Epstein mentioned Selecta, the local Decca distribution company in the Northwest. Barrow waited until Brian had left, then called Sidney Beecher-Stevens, who ran the label’s sales department, and described his meeting with the record-shop owner. “Epstein… Epstein…?” Beecher-Stevens wracked his brain for a connection. “Sorry, never heard of him. They must be pretty small.” When Barrow explained that it was NEMS, he could hear the huff on the other end of the phone. “Oh, they’re one of our biggest customers! Yes,
yes,
the band
has
to have an audition.”

A week later, just days before Christmas, Mike Smith, one of Decca’s young “
bright lights
,” turned up in Liverpool to catch the Beatles at the Cavern. Right off the bat,
Brian was “very taken” with Smith
, who wasn’t at all the kind of record-label hotshot he’d expected. A tall, slim East Londoner with slicked-back black hair, Mike was outgoing and polite and didn’t lord his position over them. Moreover, Brian could tell from observing Mike that “he liked the boys.” He didn’t stiffen up or attempt to remain poker-faced at their show; his expression flashed excitement from ear to ear. It hit all the right notes.

After a rousing lunchtime session
, Mike went across Mathew Street to the Grapes, where he and the Beatles hoisted a few pints and promised to meet up again for the evening performance. Then Brian and Alistair Taylor took him out to eat at Peacock’s, in order to gauge the extent of his interest.
“
Right,” Smith said without any ado
, “we’ve got to have them down for a bash in the studio at once. Let’s see what they can do.”

That was all Brian needed to hear. Alistair Taylor would never forget how his boss’s face turned beet-red. “He was barely able to contain his excitement—and it bled right through any presumption of coolness. We dropped Mike off at the Adelphi Hotel, then went straight back to Peacock’s and had a few too many gin and tonics to celebrate. Brian was in a splendid mood. He felt this was it. This was the break that would vindicate him.”

If Brian needed any vindication, it was not so much for his taking up with the Beatles as it was for the unlikely time he’d scheduled their Decca audition—January 1, 1962, a day not suitable even for singing in the shower. As a result, New Year’s Eve parties were out of the question; both John and Paul had been looking forward to celebrating with their girls, Cynthia and Dot, with whom things were growing progressively serious, but the appointment required they travel to London that night, a long, difficult trip that was discouraging from the get-go. Dot Rhone recalls the boys’ “
ill humor
” at what should have otherwise been an extremely joyous occasion for the Beatles. They celebrated the New Year over drinks early that afternoon and were on the road to London well before nightfall.

It had already begun snowing before they left Liverpool. Neil Aspinall drove the old Commer van through the wintry squall, an unsteady ride under optimal circumstances, with the four Beatles crammed clumsily in the back among the stack of loose, shifting equipment. The roads, dusted with fresh powder, wound circuitously south. Crawling and lurching along what was then the major motor route—the ponderous A5—they often spent long, frustrating stretches stuck behind long-distance trucks that heaved like elephants up the hillside to Carthage. At Birmingham, where the roads zigzagged through isolated farmland, they went east, following lonely roads that were rutted and in this weather largely impassable—not even divided highways—and then down, down, down through the outskirts to London.

The trip took nine hours. The Beatles were cold and grumpy upon their arrival at a hotel in Russell Square, and when someone suggested that they hoist a few in relief, there wasn’t a man among them who was inclined to protest.

It was late when they got to bed—and “
very late” the next morning
when they arrived at Decca Studios, in the north of London. Brian, who had come down by train on his own, was pacing figure eights in the corridor, furious with them. “
He was frothing at the mouth
,” Pete Best recalled. “I’d never seen him as angry as that.” John, in defiance, told him to “bugger off.” To make matters worse, Mike Smith hadn’t arrived.
He’d been out late at a party
and wandered in at a leisurely pace, a good hour late, which only wound up Epstein into a tighter knot.

Everyone was on edge. The guys were sleepy, hungover, nervous. To make matters worse, the
studios were “freezing cold
”; they hadn’t been used between Christmas and New Year. The Beatles, “
ill at ease
,” were left bumping about, waiting for a skeleton crew to set up inside the control booth.

History has held Brian Epstein largely responsible for the selection of songs performed at the audition. “
[He] believed that the way to impress Mike Smith
was not by John and Paul’s original songs,” Philip Norman concludes in
Shout!,
“but by their imaginative, sometimes eccentric arrangements of standards.” In cloudy hindsight, even John blamed Brian for picking “
all these weird novelty things
” that were “O.K. for the lads at the Cavern… but don’t mean a thing when you do them cold in a recording studio for people who don’t know the group.” To some extent, this is true. The standards no doubt pleased Brian, who regarded them as legitimate crowd-pleasers, but while he may have weighed in with his opinion, the decision of what to play was left entirely to the Beatles.

In fact, they’d taken a cue from Mike Smith, who encouraged the band to “play the whole spectrum of music” he’d heard at the Cavern. “
We thought hard about the material
we were going to play at the audition,” recalled Pete. And even though in hindsight Paul dismissed it as a “
fairly silly repertoire
,” the set they chose was significant principally because it indicated the band’s versatility and was an accurate cross section of their material.

The flip side was a lack of consistency. The fifteen songs wander from genre to genre, like a minstrel looking for a crowd. “Till There Was You,” “The Sheik of Araby,” “September in the Rain,” and “Besame Mucho” were the kind of corny, melodramatic standards that young British bands continued to sprinkle throughout their sets as concessions to the naysayers of rock ’n roll; eight other songs covered an array of pop records they’d been performing over the years—“Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” “Memphis,” “Money,” “Searchin’,” “Sure to Fall,” “Three Cool Cats,” “To Know Her Is to Love Her,” and “Take Good Care of My Baby,” the latter of which had just been a number one hit for Bobby Vee and was included late in the
process at George’s insistence; and finally there were three Lennon-McCartney originals: “Hello Little Girl,” one of their earliest compositions, “Like Dreamers Do” (which incidentally would reach the charts in 1964 on a record by the Applejacks that was produced by Mike Smith), and the future Cilla Black hit “Love of the Loved.”

The songs hardly mattered, however;
their performance was flat
across the board. There is none of the spark, the exuberant personality, that characterize all future Beatles recordings. In fact, the soaring vocals so familiar to generations of fans sound halting in some places, too deliberate in others. Paul certainly was off his game; he repeatedly reached for notes that were well within his range and experienced some fluttering in his voice that sounded like nerves. John lost his way momentarily in the middle of “Memphis.” And Pete’s leaden drumming produced the same expression in every song, be it a ballad or an all-out rocker.

John knew right off that the performance was not up to par. While he held his tongue at the time, he later confided to a friend that their style was cramped by
too many “pretty” numbers
. “We should have rocked like mad in there and shown what we’re like when we’re roused.”

Nevertheless, optimism ran high. The band felt their
work had been “productive
.” And as far as they could tell, Mike Smith seemed elated. He flashed them a rousing thumbs-up sign from the control booth and, afterward, threw them an unexpected compliment. “
Can’t see any problems
—you should record,” he imparted. “I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks.”

“You should record!” The three magic words hung in the air for everyone to savor. The Beatles practically floated out of the studio on a cushion of pure exhilaration. Over a celebratory lunch, hosted by their new and ecstatic manager, the Liverpudlians toasted the New Year and all its promise in grand tradition.
Brian surprised them by ordering
a bottle of wine, a touch that, in most of their families, was reserved for funerals. Clinking glasses, they howled with delight over the prospect of a brilliant future. “
What a great way to start 1962
,” someone proposed at an opportune moment, “right from day one. Here were go!”

Immediately after returning from London, there was good news—and bad.

On January 4,
Mersey Beat
announced the results of its first popularity poll and, to no one’s surprise, the Beatles came out on top of the list.
“No doubt about it, they were the
best group in Liverpool
,” says the paper’s editor—and the band’s longtime friend—Bill Harry. But the contest hadn’t come off as squarely as anticipated. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes actually got more votes, but whether out of fairness, loyalty, or good judgment, Harry had doctored the final results when, during the tally, he suspected Rory had filled out hundreds of his own ballots. Little did he know that the Beatles had done the same thing. In any case, it was official: their supremacy was announced in bold type just inches below
Mersey Beat
’s innocuous banner. And the next day it was rubber-stamped by the release of “My Bonnie,” at long last, on Polydor’s English label.

Brian had spent almost two weeks trying to force a proper release. Alistair Taylor overheard the effort that went into it as he passed his office four or five times a day and heard Brian frantically pleading the band’s case. “
He was always on the phone to Polydor
, insisting, ‘Something is happening here! [NEMS has] to import this on your German label, which is ridiculous. You ought to have a listen.’ At first, they just told him to get knotted, but after so much persistence they finally gave in.”

On January 5 the record arrived and the Beatles were now—officially—recording stars. Immediately, Brian shot off copies of “My Bonnie”—now correctly labeled by “Tony Sheridan
and the Beatles
”—to all the London record labels, requesting an audition for the band. Meanwhile, his tiny Whitechapel office, once devoted entirely to updating the NEMS stock, had been converted into Beatles Central, his own role now suggestive of a full-time press agent. “
It became hard, right off the bat
, for Brian to juggle his growing responsibilities,” says Peter Brown, who often picked up the slack out of consideration for his friend. By now, Brian was more interested in artist management than retailing. As the Beatles required more attention, he began to offload NEMS business matters to assistants and other underlings—or just ignore them, the effect of which was not lost on the exacting Harry Epstein.
“Whatever you do,” Brian pleaded with Alistair Taylor, “don’t tell Daddy
about any of this. If he comes in, just make up some story.”

The instructions Brian had given the Beatles about arriving at a show on time, not smoking or swearing onstage, doing tightly programmed sets, and bowing were having a residual effect on their image. He could see it, even at the Cavern, where they fought the grungy ambience. They were making strides, but there was a long way to go yet. Lunchtime shows were still too disorganized. Guitarist Colin Manley, who had hung on to his day
job, used to take an extended lunch hour in order to catch their act and remembers marveling at the “anarchy” that rumbled through their set. “
Nine times out of ten
, when they kicked off the show, George hadn’t even arrived. He’d have been out late the night before or his bus wasn’t on time. Occasionally, I’d have to get up and play a couple songs until he showed. And if Lennon broke a string, he’d have Paul do a song while he put on a new one, going
dwoiiiiiinnng dwoiiiiinnng
[winding the string] right through the vocals. Nothing they did was polished.”

And attitude was a tough nut to crack. Onstage, the Beatles continued to take requests shouted from the audience, acknowledging them with a rude remark designed to get a laugh. Sometimes, however, it got out of control. John, more than anyone, had trouble knowing where to draw the line, often saying things just to be contrary. When he was in a foul mood—or drunk—he could terrorize people with a cutting remark, abusing fans verbally. “
Shut yer fucking yap!
” It wasn’t unusual for him to unleash a string of obscenities at a visitor to the Cavern or snarl at a backstage guest, then dedicate a song to his victim.

Brian was smart enough to realize that John couldn’t be tamed. In that respect, he avoided issuing ultimatums that might provoke a confrontation. But he tried to head off certain situations before they backfired. One thing particularly troubling was John’s trail of personal effects. They were littered across the city—letters, articles, poems, notebooks, drawings, and pictures in which he’d held nothing back. He may have been a loose cannon onstage, but many of these items weren’t fit for public consumption. The most incriminating stuff was a packet of “
rude photos
” from Hamburg he’d given to Bill Harry for use in upcoming issues of
Mersey Beat.
Nothing that was scandalous, but rather off-color: pictures of Paul in the bathroom, John with a toilet seat around his neck. Not long after Brian got involved with the band, Bill Harry recalls, “John rushed into the office and said, ‘Brian insists I’ve got to get them back—the pictures, everything you’ve got. I must take it all with me now.’ It wasn’t enough to change their image; he was getting rid of the evidence as well.”