The Beatles (57 page)

“Where are we going, lads?”

“To the toppermost, Johnny!”

“And where is that?”

“The toppermost of the poppermost!”

They had lusted after this for so long that, finally in hand, it hardly seemed real.

While the Beatles had rescued John from a murky home life, nothing had rescued Cynthia Powell from hers. In February Cynthia’s mother had emigrated unexpectedly to Canada, renting out the family house and leaving her daughter, who was only nineteen, to her own devices.
Unable to make ends meet
while continuing her art studies, Cynthia bounced from place to place like a foster child, surviving a disastrous, short-lived stint as one of Mimi’s boarders, followed by a month with her aunt Tess, commuting
from the remote Wirral peninsula, interspersed with nights on the couch of her friend Phyllis McKenzie.

By late spring, the turmoil of Cynthia’s life had reached an unprecedented pitch. John was gone, her mother situated halfway across the world. Rather than resuming classes at art school, she now taught all day at a high school in darkest Garston, where the kids were such savages that it was said “
they played tick
^*
with hatchets
.” A feeling of “isolation” began to take hold. To complicate matters, Cynthia’s “
money had run out
,” forcing her to accept public assistance. Despite finding her own flat, she felt vulnerable, desperate. Convinced that control was slipping from her grasp, Cynthia began to worry herself sick—literally. In the mornings she woke up feeling nauseous, lethargic; it took an effort just to get out of bed. When her “
period got later and later
,” the wild card fell.

Cynthia feared the worst: she was pregnant. At a hastily arranged exam, the doctor confirmed it, delivering a stern lecture on responsibility and birth control. “
The horror of it
was almost too great to take in,” she recalled. Afterward, Phyllis McKenzie attempted to console her, but there was more: on the way to the examination, Cynthia tore open an envelope from art school that had arrived in the morning post to discover that she’d failed her exams.
Bursting with shame
, she admitted to Phyllis that the situation had gotten beyond her.

With her mother gone and John in Hamburg, the only person Cyn could discuss things with was Dot Rhone. The girls had grown inseparable since the Beatles had left. Both naive, both insecure, both overshadowed by manipulative boyfriends who exploited their naïveté and insecurity, they clung to each other like two orphans. Neither girl had much of a life outside her relationship; they were as needy as nestlings—John and Paul provided everything that had been missing from their lives. Now, alone all these weeks, there was a sense of real intimacy between them. They spent most nights scraping together “
crummy” meals
, then stretched across Cynthia’s bed until late, smoking and giggling about the boys. Unexpectedly, in May the flat next to Cynthia’s became vacant. Dot says, “I couldn’t afford it, but Paul volunteered to pay the rent.” She moved in the next day. Like Cynthia, Dot flirted with fantasies of Paul returning, making a home with her, and eventually proposing marriage. The whole setup seemed ideal: the two Beatles living next door to each other, their girlfriends best of pals.

When Cynthia became pregnant, Dot naturally came to the rescue. “She was so scared,” Dot remembers. “She wanted to marry John—very definitely—it just wasn’t the right time. She realized they weren’t ready for it, but there was no other solution.”

Against the rise of irrational fear, Dot tried to calm her friend, offering copious emotional support. She knew better than to treat Cynthia’s pregnancy with neglect. Certain precautions had to be taken, sensible diets observed. Dutifully, Dot tended to Cynthia, reassuring her that everything would turn out all right. She filled the nights with advice and companionship, even rehearsing ways with Cynthia of how to break the news to John. When that moment finally came, however, it was more difficult than either of them had anticipated.

On June 2 the Beatles returned to Liverpool amid a torrent of expectation.
Mersey Beat
stirred up excitement about their homecoming, which caused a great tidal wave of joy in the hearts of faithful fans. There was even an “official fan club” that beat the drum in the clubs. Word buzzed through the city that “the Beatles [were] back.” There was a clamor to see what innovations Hamburg had handed them, what breakthroughs they’d made, what new goodies they brought home.

Brian met the boys at the airport and suggested an impromptu meal to celebrate, but everyone was eager to get home.

John, especially, wanted to see Cynthia and their new flat. He made a beeline to the dreary building and
took the stairs “two at a time
,” bursting into the room with flowers, food, and a rakish smile. The silence that followed was painfully awkward. Cynthia decided not to beat around the bush. John hadn’t been in the flat more than a moment or two when she blurted out the news.

Pregnant: it must have felt like an ambush to John, who initially had trouble digesting its meaning. Frozen in place, he stared at her, dazed, unable to fire off a customary glib remark. “
As the words sunk in
I saw the color literally drain from his cheeks,” Cynthia recounted. “He went white.” She did her best to put an ironic spin on it, but John’s disappointment was impossible to ignore.

His concern went straight to the Beatles. “
I thought it would be goodbye
to the group…,” John admitted later, when the shock had worn off. After all the hard work, the years of endless garbage gigs and enduring disappointment, the idyll was shattered. Just like that, just when a breakthrough
seemed inevitable. Now it appeared that fate had dealt him a timely blow, and blowing it big-time would surely be his fate.

Resignedly, he proposed
they do the right thing and get married.

For a short time, Cynthia remained hopeful. There was plenty of Beatles business to distract John from this latest blow. It’s unclear whether he even confided in Paul, who always showed pragmatism in such matters. “
John didn’t share much
with anybody,” recalls Bill Harry. “He was more comfortable playing the loner. He seemed very secretive, as though he were unwilling to trust people—or unsure how to go about it.”

Despite such emotional upheaval, the Beatles were distanced from it somewhat by their audition, which raced up blindly on June 6, 1962, only four days after their return from Hamburg. Dazed and punished by exhaustion from the seven-week bacchanal, the Beatles were cautiously optimistic about their chances with George Martin, believing, as Brian himself wished, that the contract provided by the label led directly to a recording session. Still, the grim specter of Decca hung over them: nothing could be taken for granted anymore, especially by Brian, who implied that this “
was [their] last chance
” as far as record companies went.

If kismet was any indication, then they were already in a hole. The studio Brian directed them to proved nearly impossible to find. For more than half an hour, Neil Aspinall steered the van, loaded with the Beatles and their equipment, haltingly through the sleepy north London suburb of St. John’s Wood, searching for the entrance to EMI Studios. Somehow, they wound up in an upscale residential area whose weave of streets held extravagant Edwardian mansions set off by ample lawns, lilac hedges, and bushes trimmed to the flatness of tables. “
Where’s the recording studio
?” the Beatles jabbered impatiently as the van slowed in front of 3 Abbey Road, at the intersection where it meets Grove End. Neil checked the location against the address he’d been given. It matched, but the place seemed utterly wrong. “
It’s a house!
” Pete Best recalled saying, staring at the squat two-story structure surrounded by a fenced-off wall. There was no sign, nothing official that announced EMI’s proprietary claim. “This has got to be it,” Neil concluded, pulling into a forecourt behind the gates. But as they unloaded the van, a fissure of uncertainty took hold. “What
is
this place?” they wondered. “Where’s [George Martin] going to record us?”

Their noisy fluster was no coincidence. Abbey Road wasn’t meant to look like a recording complex, much less
a facility
like EMI’s other studios at Hayes, which adjoined its record factories.
It had originated in 1831
as a
nine-bedroom residence, with five reception rooms, servants’ quarters, and a wine cellar, before being converted in 1928 into
the world’s first “purpose- [or custom-] built” studio
. For all the building’s unpretentiousness, much of the modern technology found in the more imposing high-tech studios was first designed by EMI engineers in one of its boxy, low-ceilinged rooms.
The fundamentals of stereo
were developed here, as were moving-coil microphones, large-valve tape recorders, and an amusing battery of sound effects that gained industrywide use throughout the war years and beyond. None of that, however, would have impressed the apprehensive Beatles, who were growing increasingly anxious to make their own mark.

Be that as it may, they were momentarily awed, entering the building and
“stepping into… another world
.” The scope of the interior plainly unnerved them. “
Coming into Abbey Road
for the first time… we thought, ‘This is a small place,’ ” Paul recalled, “but it just kept going on and on.” The homespun facade, as it turned out, was just for show. The place was immense. Like a Chinese puzzle box, a block of buildings had been erected, one behind the other, in what was formerly the garden, with corridors leading off at right angles to more studios and offices. Lugging their equipment like porters, the Beatles struggled to maintain their composure. It was awesome. And the library
stillness
inside was terrifying.

Brian came rushing up to meet them as they trundled inside. Laughing, probably relieved that they’d turned up within a reasonable time frame, he attempted to answer their scattershot questions while herding them toward Studio Three, the “
corner suite
,” which had been reserved for their test. There was a feverish excitement in the air, and as two EMI assistants accompanied the band down the hall, the Beatles established a kind of frisky onstage rapport, joking and “firing [off] quick one-liners” at one another to take the edge off their nerves. “
We were nervous
,” Pete Best acknowledged. “We were feeling the old butterflies.” Still, defensively, they threw up a clownish smoke screen so as not to let on about their fears. “We were arrogant, cocky. You know:
We’re the Beatles
. We weren’t about to let anything show.”

All that changed, however, when they pushed through the doors to Studio Three. “
Look at the size of this place!
” they beamed to one another, thinking it resembled “a football pitch.” The room was wide and airy, with a faint hospital-like smell. Errant wires snaked along the floor, and there were some chairs stacked routinely in one corner and a sound booth off to
the side; otherwise, it was empty of the sound paraphernalia they had seen at Decca or even the Polydor sessions with Tony Sheridan.

While they set up, George Martin wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The Beatles were talked through the technical process by Ron Richards, another Parlophone producer, who brought along a couple of sound engineers to check out the band’s meager equipment. Eventually, the boys were escorted downstairs to the canteen, where Martin sat having tea. In his subsequent revisions of their meeting, Martin liked to skip directly to the session, where “
it was love at first sight
.” No doubt he was drawn to them in some instinctive way, charmed by their personalities, cowed by the length of their hair (which he considered “shocking”). But in fact, the introductions were more businesslike than romantic. It all boiled down to this: he wanted to hear what they could do. Then he would evaluate their potential and determine the next move.

In the meantime, the Beatles spent all afternoon running material for Ron Richards. They had polished a set of thirty-two songs that Brian had selected from their prodigious repertoire, and barely stopping to catch a breath between numbers, they breezed through them all, as though they were playing a breakneck lunchtime session at the Cavern. Richards says that he took an immediate liking to the boys themselves but “
wasn’t terribly impressed
” with what he heard. Their songs bored him, and their musicianship was “adequate” at best. If it were up to him, Richards says, “I probably wouldn’t have signed the Beatles.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t his call. Martin had instructed Ron only to put them at ease and find two or three songs that might be suitable for a record. Right off the bat, Richards chose “Please Please Me,” which the band had started performing at the Star-Club. But the song was too slow and plaintive—
John had patterned it after
Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”—with a repetitive guitar phrase that drove Richards nuts. “They had a riff going”—the two instrumental bars that prefigure “Last night I said these words to my girl”—“all the way through,” he recalls. It was overkill, an amateur’s mistake. Politely, Ron suggested that George “just play it in the gaps,” which immediately refocused and energized the song. He also liked the starkly primitive “Love Me Do,” cowritten by John and Paul when they were still Quarry Men, for the way they spun out “so plee-ee-ee-ese—love me do” at the end of each verse.

After sifting through the band’s material, Richards decided to break for dinner before recording four songs—the two aforementioned Lennon-
McCartney originals, along with another, “Ask Me Why,” and the old Latin chestnut “Besame Mucho,” which the Beatles had learned from a Coasters single.

As an audition, the session brought mixed results. Ron Richards thought that “they handled themselves pretty well in the studio” but heard nothing that excited him. His engineer, Norman Smith, agreed. “
They didn’t impress me at all
,” he recalled.
George Martin shared their reservations
when he listened to a playback of the tape at the end of the session. While he quite enjoyed the Beatles’ voices, it was the material that troubled him most. “Besame Mucho” spoke for itself—it was a slippery little retread—but their original songs just didn’t cut it. “
They were rotten composers
,” Martin thought at the time. “
Their own stuff wasn’t any good
.”