The Beatles (74 page)

In all the months that they had worked together, through all the conferences and interaction, there was never an instance in which John felt either uncomfortable or threatened by Brian’s attention. There was plenty of talk
about it; plenty of jokes flew among friends. But for all of the clear signals, no line was ever crossed.

Until Spain. Something happened while Brian and John were in Sitges. In the privacy of their room, after an evening of drinking and sporting about, Brian initiated something that led to physical contact. The extent of their intimacy was never discussed, and all secret details died with the two men. Only John ever spoke of it, and then only cryptically, in an attempt to explain away the incident. “
It was almost a love affair
,” he conceded, “but not quite. It was not consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.”

Love affair… pretty intense… relationship…
These phrases provide enough clues to paint a pretty persuasive picture. And yet if John participated in some sort of a homosexual act, it follows that he played a passive role, allowing Brian an opportunity to probe his fantasies. A lot has been written about their impromptu seaside getaway, most of it imagined by a battery of creative historians. Several insist that Brian and John cruised the bars for unattached young men, even engaging rather impetuously in experimental sex. Albert Goldman is most emphatic: “
[John] and Brian had sex
,” he declares in
The Lives of John Lennon.
Pete Shotton, in his footloose memoir, claims that John told him: “
I let [Brian] toss me off
.” And in
The Love You Make,
Peter Brown and his coauthor, Steven Gaines, go so far as to construct an intimate bedroom scene, complete with cartoonish, overheated dialogue, in which “
John lay there, tentative
and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment….” As far as it is known, the issue of homosexuality never surfaced again in John’s life. Curiosity may well have gotten the better of him in Spain. He may have been experimenting, nothing more—or just in an extremely vulnerable state. It had been less than a month since Julian’s birth; John not only felt trapped in marriage but did not want to deal with being a father. It stands to reason that his dalliance with Brian was impulsive, more of a reaction to his situation than from any emotional attraction. Away from home, in a beautiful resort with a man—certainly a father figure—who was devoted to taking care of him, John was relaxed and open enough to let it happen unconditionally.

Still, it set a dangerous precedent. Brian came away from the vacation brimming with exhilaration, overjoyed that John had opened up to him and poised for something more. He told friends that their time together had been “
something to build on
” in the months ahead. The other Beatles were aware that something consensual had gone on between John and Brian. In retrospect, Paul referred to it as “
the homosexual thing
” and suggested
that it was John’s way of exercising power over their manager. But if power was part of John’s strategy, he was also exercising it over Paul. More influence with Brian also meant more control of Paul—and ultimately of the Beatles. It was a currency he would collect for the rest of his life.

Chapter 22
Kings of the Jungle

I
t was at this pivotal moment that the Beatles influenced an event that was to shape the pop music scene for decades to come.

The day after returning from vacation—before hitting the road again, with Roy Orbison—a promoter enlisted George Harrison to judge a talent show, the Lancashire and Cheshire Beat Group Contest, at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall. It was one of many such shows that summer designed to flush promising young talent out into the open. Thanks to the Beatles’ riotous success, record labels were hot on the prowl for amateur jive bands, and local contests like this one provided excellent showcases throughout Britain. Liverpool proved especially attractive to high-ranking A&R men, convinced that the local water supply had been spiked with something, some rare gene-smashing agent that produced a mongrel breed of rock ’n roll act geared to make young girls swoon.

Anyone who could carry a tune turned out for the contest. The prize was the brass ring: a contract with Decca Records. And on hand to present it to the winner, none other than “the man who turned down the Beatles,” Decca’s president, Dick Rowe.

Rowe and his aides arrived at Lime Street Station as dusk fell on May 10, to be greeted by the ever-gracious Brian Epstein, who guided them past the Adelphi Hotel and up the hill to Hope Street, where a crowd thronged the Philharmonic steps. Inside, Rowe somehow got seated next to George, of all people, and as the show wore on, the two men chatted amiably about the music business. “I… told him how I’d
really had my backside kicked
over turning the Beatles down,” Rowe recalled years later, and as it was water under the bridge, George laughed it off good-naturedly.

Flashing a winning smile, Rowe prodded George to point out the groups he considered the most talented of the lot. George did not reply for
a long moment, waiting for a wave of applause to die down. Then he said: “As a matter of fact, we heard a great group down in London called the Rolling Stones. They’re
almost as good as our Roadrunners
.” Rowe instantly lost interest in what was happening onstage, and less than halfway through the contest he got up and left without saying good-bye.
He took the next train back
to London, picked up his wife, and drove directly to see the band that had captured George’s attention.

The Rolling Stones. It was only a month earlier that the Beatles had first laid eyes on them. Following the taping of
Thank Your Lucky Stars,
an experimental filmmaker and part-time jazz promoter named Giorgio Gomelsky had approached the Beatles in Twickenham, with the intention of making a documentary film about them. Brian, who was already fantasizing about Hollywood, gave him a polite brush-off. Nevertheless,
Gomelsky invited the boys
to hear a great “
full-bodied R&B” band
playing at the Crawdaddy Club, which he ran in a room behind the Station Hotel in Richmond, later that night.

Although largely ignored by the trad-jazz-obsessed Soho “mods” who flocked to the Flamingo, the Crawdaddy Club was one of the linchpins of the rapidly changing pop music scene. It still catered to the stalwarts each Monday with Johnny Dankworth’s cool quintet, but on Sundays it featured the Dave Hunt Band, fronted by their wild-ass singer, Ray Davies. Gradually, however, R&B muscled its way in, led there by a rash of white British teenagers whose sole ambition was to imitate urban American Negro blues heroes. Georgie Fame, John Mayall, Herbie Goins, and Chris Farlowe were among the small group of British missionaries who had already brought the new gospel to the London club scene. Hip to the trend, Gomelsky booked the ragtag Stones in February for the relatively generous fee of £1 per musician and watched jubilantly as they proceeded to set the Crawdaddy on fire.

The Beatles had been hearing the buzz for some time. After dinner Neil Aspinall drove them to the club, only three miles from the TV studio, where they quite unexpectedly came upon a tumultuous scene. The place was mobbed with a wild and woolly bunch, mostly art students from the Kingston College of Technology. “It was a real rave,” George remembered. The audience shouted across the din and screamed and danced on tables. At one end of the room, a cluster of couples demonstrated the Shake, which was catching on all over the country. Many of the kids stripped off
their shirts to compensate for the almost palpable wall of heat. The Beatles heard right away what a “great sound” the band was making. “The beat the Stones laid down was so solid it shook off the walls and seemed to move right inside your head.”

Led by the talented but unstable Brian Jones, whose intensity generated a potent charisma, the Rolling Stones pumped out ambitious versions of grassroots R&B. They bounced effortlessly between Bo Diddley, Billy Boy Arnold, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed classics, backlit by dueling red and blue spotlights that seemed to accent the appropriate mood. The Beatles, dressed in identical knee-length suede coats, stood in the back of the club for the remainder of the set, grooving on the vibe. There was, according to Ringo, an instant attraction. “
Keith and Brian—wow!
” he recalled years later. “They just had
presence.
” Moreover, those two had chops:
both boys did nothing all day
but sit around a grubby, infested flat, working on riffs and alternating on leads until they could intuit what the other was about to do. John, Paul, and George certainly identified with that. Mick Jagger, the vocalist, seemed more than stylish playing the maracas. Everything sounded just right, and John couldn’t help feeling that they were “doing things
a little bit more radical
” than the Beatles.

Later that night, as the two bands talked until dawn, none of the musicians could have dreamed of the incredible fame that awaited them or the cultural revolution brewing in Britain. But there were already signs of a musical undertow that was pulling uniquely talented and expressive youths into the onrushing tide of change.

In London even the most die-hard mods—next-generation beatniks who took their name from
modernist
and were devoted to modern jazz and existentialism—were clambering aboard the rock ’n roll bandwagon, stumbling from scruffy basement clubs under the influence of R&B. They gorged on Sartre, Magritte, Buñuel, and Man Ray during the day, but at night, in sweaty clubs like the Flamingo and the Scene, the intellectualism gave way to John Lee Hooker, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, and Solomon Burke. Besides the Beatles and eventually the Stones, inroads were being made by the Yardbirds (featuring Eric Clapton), the Pretty Things, Long John Baldry, and Zoot Money, among others. And everywhere the momentum was building. By mid-1963, caught up in the red-hot flush of the nascent underground club life, these and other artists had begun to reverse the force of colonial rock ’n roll in Great Britain.

Despite the impact of Merseyside bands and the movement’s roots in a working-class sensibility, London still remained ground zero in terms of
an exciting creative base. Bands were forced to rely on the record companies, whose magnetic force drew talent south to the capital, not only from Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds but from across the country. If you wanted to be a rock ’n roller, there was only one place to be, where it was all happening—London.

Brian had already gleaned as much from his endless excursions there. The combination of business contacts, abundant culture, wonderful restaurants, and especially anonymity—the ability for him to live however he pleased—was a powerful incentive to spur a move south. In such an unrestrained, stimulating environment, Brian could easily flourish. But he feared that such a move would distance him from the honeypot—from Liverpool—which to date was the source of all his “artistes.” There were still plenty of young Merseyside acts that were ripe for the picking, but knowing how Scousers frowned on pretense, he suspected a London address might well scare them off. Meanwhile, his absence would allow others—outsiders—to horn in on the action, which would be a major tactical error. Thus, he decided to begin laying the foundation for a London-based firm, a company that would handle everything in-house—personal management, booking agency, public relations, the works—whose operation he would guide from afar.

On May 1, 1963, Tony Barrow opened Brian Epstein’s first London office, a seedy little one-and-a-half-room affair above a pornographic bookshop on Monmouth Street. Its previous tenant, Joe “Mr. Piano” Henderson, had been a colleague of Dick James, and the space impressed Barrow as “
a cozy little setup
, complete with casting couch and subdued lighting.” The largest of the rooms showcased a superb custom-made desk, with a cocktail cabinet built into the front of it, stocked with hand-cut crystal and a soda siphon. On Brian’s instructions, Barrow installed cheap draw blinds and half a dozen plastic potted plants, which he spaced along the windowsills; by the building’s entrance, he nailed up a plaque that read:
NEMS ENTERPRISES—PRESS OFFICE—UPSTAIRS.