Do the Right Thing[I]
With recording efforts at a standstill and the Beatles breathing down his neck, Brian Epstein gained something of a reprieve when the band left Liverpool in April for a third extended appearance in Hamburg. The Beatles were just as eager to leave as Brian was to be free of them for a while. “The Beatles were home in Hamburg,” says Adrian Barber. “It was their town.” Plus it would be great to see old friends: the exis, Tony Sheridan, Stu and Astrid, the ceaseless flow of musicians that funneled through neighboring clubs. Hamburg would help take their minds off the sorry state of affairs back home.
Brian had considered sending them overland with Neil Aspinall in the van, but as their departure loomed, he surprised the band with plane tickets, paid for out of his own pocket. The Beatles were clearly excited. Among them, only Paul had flown before. There was a sense of adventure from the get-go, but in more appreciable terms, it was reassuring that Brian had elevated their status, that they were to be treated more respectfully than in the past, in a manner befitting true artistes.
And yet, for all Brian’s attempts at accommodating them, the Beatles could not ward off misfortune. An omen presented itself when George came down with the measles, forcing him to miss the scheduled flight from Manchester. The rest of the band left without him. Clearing Customs in Hamburg, they charged through the airport, spotting Astrid Kirchherr across the hall. It was hard to miss her; she was majestic, a full sail in black linen. John, pulled into her orbit, windmilled his arms comically in greeting.
“Where’s Stu?” everyone wanted to know.
Her face was blank, still. Noting the guarded blur of her gaze, John asked, “Oh, what’s the matter?”
“Stuart died, John. He’s gone.”
The room went silent, out of focus. A vacuum gathered around them, beyond the uproar, the announcements, the multitudes hurrying past. Paul and Pete stumbled backward on their heels; unable to check their emotions, they caved in to the grief. John, seemingly impervious, had been dealt a sideways blow. He didn’t know how to process this news. Death: it took everything he loved—Uncle George, Julia, now Stuart. His grief was numbing. Nothing registered. Later, myth would have it that he “burst into laughter,” but laughter was beyond him. It was enough that he gave voice to a single word: “How?”
Astrid was forthcoming with details. Since their return from Liverpool, Stuart’s headaches had increased in intensity. They struck like electrical storms, sudden and scary, without warning. It was like “a bomb going off in his head.” There were times, she said, that he lapsed into such black swoons that nothing she did could dislodge him from the excruciating pain. It paralyzed him to the point of crippling agony. In a letter to his mother, he expressed the fear that “he was going blind.” There had been spells when he couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Creatively, physically, emotionally, Stuart was falling apart. The fancy clothes and sunglasses couldn’t conceal his haggard face, his sunken eyes, or his ghastly pallor. His nerves were shot. He couldn’t function in school; his work suffered. Once, he keeled over in class, which alarmed the other students, particularly because he was helpless during these attacks. Astrid was limited in her capacity to sit with him, reduced to stroking a hand or shoulder while he suffered wave after wave of pain. She spent many afternoons that way, with Stuart’s head cradled in her lap, scared for his safety. Other times, she struggled to hold him down, often with her mother’s help, to keep him from endangering himself.
Finally, in order to keep a close eye on him, Astrid insisted that he move into her house. She and her mother dressed up the attic so that it functioned as both a bedroom and an art studio, where Stuart could paint, but that, too, had its drawbacks. According to one account, he’d blacked out and fallen down a flight of stairs. What’s more, it was cold upstairs; he was constantly shivering.
On April 10, a day before the Beatles left for Hamburg, Astrid was summoned home from work by her mother. Stuart was convulsed with pain, she said, and needed immediate attention. “He has to go to the hospital right now.” There was an adamant alarm in her voice; Astrid reacted to it as she might to an air-raid signal, with fear condensing into swift, definite action. An ambulance was already waiting, and without a word, Astrid leaped into the back a moment before it sped away from the curb. Stuart was inside, curled up into a ball. Somehow Astrid managed to bundle his frail, dishrag body into her arms, and it was there, pressed against her, that Stuart died—of a brain aneurism or other disorder, it would never be certain—before they ever reached the hospital.
The Beatles were stunned, confused. No one that close in age had died so tragically. It was “a real shock,” especially for John, who “looked up to Stu” on so many levels.
But the Beatles were determined to open in Hamburg on schedule. Even Astrid insisted that they go on the next night, promising to be in the audience, as Stu would have wanted it.*
The Grosse Freiheit had changed remarkably in the six months since the Beatles had left Hamburg as a versatile but struggling rock ’n roll band. It was still sleazy, still an outpost devoted to the kind of wanton, vulgar behavior that demanded a rock ’n roll soundtrack. Nightclubs still provided the biggest take, and the most opulent of these was the Star-Club, set to open its doors with a bill called the “Rock ’n Twist Parade” headed by the Beatles.* Its owner was a former pig farmer from Munich named Manfred Weissleder, who had risen to prominence by building the most efficient—and most fearsome—organization in Hamburg and eliminating the competition, one by one, so that by the spring of 1962 “without [his] approval you did not work on the Grosse Freiheit.” Weissleder, who stood over six foot seven and “spoke English with a typical German World War II accent,” and his partner, a “ruthless” pit bull named Paul Mueller, passed themselves off as impresarios, but their business was prostitution. Under various fronts and guises, they ran sixteen strip bars in the district—the Rote Katz, or Red Cat, among the largest—and a string of three hundred young girls recruited from across Eastern Europe and as far off as Mongolia.
The Star-Club was on the site of an old cinema, “an immense, cavernous rock ’n roll cathedral,” decked out in plush carpeting, an expanse of dark, polished wood, and, around the perimeter, a grouping of taupe-colored upholstered settees where people lounged between numbers, sipping from stubby bottles of local beer and plying the aggressive pickup scene. Sweating, wandering through a cloud of dense cigarette smoke, around-the-clock revelers explored the many levels of a hedonistic universe. The floors were diverse planets, each with its own stellar personality: music and dancing downstairs, a small “twistin’ base” situated in an overhanging U-shaped balcony, a strip joint—the Erotic Film Night Club—above that, featuring movable, transparent panels that beheld a cinematic smorgasbord of sexual perversion, an old projection room with a sliding peephole that served as Manfred Weissleder’s private lair.
The Beatles took one look at the Star-Club and saw paradise. It seemed tailored to showcase their music, “the first real theatrical setting [they’d] ever seen devoted to rock ’n roll.” The stage was huge, with a spangled backdrop of the Manhattan skyline suspended from struts and lit from behind by a rotating light box. There were enough microphones for a symphony orchestra, and a full arsenal of extraordinary American gear (the amplifiers were all Fenders, which the Beatles had only heard of, never seen). Paul’s eyes bugged out at the equipment specially installed for his use: a Fender Bassman head and two 15-inch speakers in an open-backed cabinet. Even the spotlights were clever: the electrician had coupled car headlights to a twelve-volt transformer and strung them along the front of the balcony. No expense had been spared. “There was a fucking curtain, brother!” recalls a duly impressed Liverpool musician. “We’d never seen one before and didn’t know what to do with it, so for the first few days everyone kept pushing the button, making it go back and forth.”
To keep the place operating efficiently, Weissleder had hired Horst Fascher as his chief of security. Fascher, a short, fair-haired man known for eerie politeness, had performed similar duties as enforcer at the Kaiserkeller and the Top Ten, which made him something of a fearsome legend on the Grosse Freiheit. “The beatings he gave to people were unbelievable!” says a musician with awe nearly forty years later. “He’d absolutely batter someone until they were senseless. In some of the fights I saw, his men hit guys with wooden chairs, barstools—hit them five or six times over the head, with blood pouring out. They could have easily killed someone, but it never seemed to bother Horst. He’d just throw the person outside and leave him.” Rumor had it that the missing three fingers on his right hand had been cut off by gangsters.
The musicians, especially the Beatles, loved Fascher. He doted on them like a favorite uncle, practicing his precious English, which he spoke in clipped, precise tones, and chauffeuring them around town in his prized gleaming-white 1957 Chevy convertible. But there were other advantages to his stewardship. “Horst made sure we were protected,” says the Merseybeats’ Tony Crane. Every musician was provided with an artful Star-Club badge—gold typescript on a pin featuring a prominent blue star—which “gave [them] immunity” anywhere in the district. “Horst warned us never to go out without it,” recalls Ray Ennis. “We knew that no one would bother us as long as we had it on—and no one ever did.” Liverpool groups could abandon the old, naturally honed fears that stalked them back home. It was a relief not to have to fight their way out of a gig after work, or constantly worry that equipment would be nicked. Out of appreciation, they put up a sign backstage, renaming the club “Manfred’s Home for Itinerant Scousers.”
The opening of the Star-Club on April 13, 1962, was an unmitigated sensation. The dance floor was packed, according to Don Arden, the London promoter who held a small interest in the place, with “roughly 850 to 1,000 people, depending on how we wanted to shift the tables around and lie to the police about capacity.” And the Beatles kicked out the jams. George had arrived on time, chaperoned from Liverpool by Brian Epstein, and he seemed fully recovered, ready to play. Except for the wall-to-wall crowd that made it difficult to see the band and “got too rowdy and aggressive at times,” Weissleder had pulled off something of a coup: overnight, he had knocked the Top Ten off its enviable perch. Thereafter, all Liverpool bands played the Star-Club, “a step up” on the German rock ’n roll circuit, while the Top Ten relied on booking Scottish bands, a factor that eventually doomed it to oblivion.
During the next few weeks, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the Big Three, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and the Searchers all joined the Beatles at intervals during their triumphant residency. It was, from beginning to end, a Liverpool phenomenon. There was no mistaking that a distinctive sound was developing: chord patterns that repeated in their repertoires, a penchant for exquisitely modulated phrasing and sudden downshifting into minor chords, deliberate Everly Brothers references in the harmonies, ways of punctuating lyrics with dynamics, all of it creating a unique, idiosyncratic pop style. It would be another year before those features coalesced and became identified the world over as the Liverpool or Mersey sound, but the essential aspects of it were already in place.
In the almost two months the Beatles were in Hamburg, their sets bulged with new songs: the soulful “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” Ritchie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy,” a trio of Shirelles’ songs—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Mama Said,” and “Baby It’s You”—plus crowd-pleasers like “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Nobody But You,” “Please Mr. Postman,” and “Mr. Moonlight.” To spotlight Pete, they incorporated “Boys” and “The Peppermint Twist” into the repertoire, and for George a pair of Goffin-King songs—“Don’t Ever Change” and “Sharing You”—as well as “Devil in Her Heart,” which was unearthed from a single by a little-known girl group, the Donays.
From the outset, the Beatles had a great ear. They could listen to something that was either raw or somehow never got off the ground and know instantly how to breathe new life into it. Such was the case in early 1962 when they stumbled across records by an American R&B singer named Arthur Alexander, one of the pioneers of the Muscle Shoals soul sound. Only one of his songs, “You Better Move On” (covered by the Rolling Stones in 1964) managed to nick the Billboard charts, but there was something powerful about his material that captured the Beatles’ imagination: it was direct, heartfelt and earnest, infused with great melodies. “We wanted to [sound] like Arthur Alexander,” Paul reflected in 1987. And for a while his songs dominated their nightly sets—lean, soulful versions of “Soldier of Love,” “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues,” and “Anna (Go to Him),” the latter of which was recorded for their first album.
With the new songs came a new round of drugs, for the Beatles and the other Liverpool bands. Combined with ridiculous quantities of beer, the speed produced harrowing exploits of drunkenness—smashing guitars onstage, driving insanely, fighting, terrorizing women, behaving rudely at boisterous parties. To keep it all from collapsing necessitated more and more speed. Conveniently, there was no shortage of suppliers right on the premises. Mutti, who followed Horst Fascher to the Star-Club, doled out pills from her stall outside the toilets. Otherwise, Tony Sheridan functioned as the Johnny Appleseed of uppers. He had a bottomless supply, which flowed generously from band to band. When a musician voiced a concern about supply, one of the resident gangsters proudly and swaggeringly drove him out to a farm in the Hamburg countryside. As the eyewitness recalls it: “He opened the barn door and there was the trailer of a semi, with its doors flung open and a cascade of boxes and bottles stretching from the back of the truck to the barn door. He’d hijacked the entire supply of amphetamines for northern Germany for a year—just so they could furnish them to us for free.” The craziness that a beer-and-Prellie binge brought on was neither accidental nor arbitrary. The Big Three’s Adrian Barber remembers that Manfred Weissleder deliberately promoted both substances to musicians, not for profits from the drug trade, per se, but because “it kept us stoned and dependent.”
Deliberate or not, John Lennon managed to fuel his rage in a stupor of uncontrolled intoxication. He’d begun blowing off steam in Hamburg from the moment the Beatles arrived, drinking steadily. At an early-morning party following their opening shows, he doused an annoyed Brian Epstein with warm beer. That established a pattern for the next seven weeks. No one complained when John showed up drunk onstage or played in animal skins or “foamed at the mouth” following a “Prellie sandwich,” but it had a cumulative effect. Gradually, the antics grew wilder and more destructive. John began to pick fights he couldn’t win, storming friends in a hail of insults. He told Adrian Barber that “all people [were] basically shit” and deserved abuse. It seemed that anyone who crossed his path was fair game. Gerry Marsden recalled how one night, without any provocation, John crowned a fellow with a bottle during a friendly card game and got a beating in return. The guy “knocked hell” out of John. “And all of us just stood there and let him do it.” He had it coming, they agreed, and got what he deserved.
John’s spring was filled with similar binges and brawls. It became “a trend [for musicians] to bounce around and do inexplicable, outrageous things,” but John took on audiences without regard for the consequences. One night he danced up to the microphone and announced: “Hey, remember the war? Well, we fuckin’ won!” Then, grabbing his crotch, he screamed, “Sieg heil this!” In case that hadn’t gotten their attention, he dropped his pants and pranced across the stage in his underwear.
Friends from Liverpool, who were used to John’s belligerence, thought he’d gone “a little bit mad.” John, in a harsher self-evaluation, later insisted he was “out of my fucking mind.” But the anger and self-hatred were the result of something much more rational. Wounded by the real world, he preferred to face it drunk. Drinking was an excuse, a way to bury the pain of Stu’s death. Drunk, he wouldn’t have to deal with the loss or his unresolved feelings.
If the other Beatles were concerned, they did nothing to intercede. As far as anyone could tell, they never acknowledged that John was out of control, never suggested he take it down a notch or two. It may have seemed perfectly normal to three twenty-year-olds that a comrade would blow off steam in a place like the Grosse Freiheit. Liverpool lads were known to “let loose like maniacs.” And it wasn’t too far afield from John’s usual hostile behavior—only more pronounced and enduring than before.
Part of it, no doubt, could be traced to frustration. It was a word he grappled with repeatedly in later recollections of Hamburg—frustration over the Decca rejection, over the Beatles’ image, over their lack of a topflight drummer, over an indefinite future. Now, news from Cynthia added to his frustration. She had moved into a one-room flat, a “shabby little… bedsit” with a shared bath, in a terrace house near Penny Lane, where John looked forward to setting up permanent residence with her following the band’s return to Liverpool. (This, despite the fact that John had begun a torrid relationship with Bettina Derlin, one of the Star-Club’s raunchier bartenders.) Until then, however, Cynthia had invited Dot Rhone to keep her company there. Instead of applauding her self-sufficiency, John dashed off a letter to Cynthia, barely disguising his displeasure. He urged her to “find another flat” for Dot so that it wouldn’t infringe on their privacy. He viewed Dot, who was even more fragile and insecure than he was, as a threat to their relationship. “Imagine having her there all the time when we were in bed—and imagine Paul coming all the time—and especially when I wasn’t there. I’d hate the idea.”
Aside from music, Cynthia was the one bright spot in John’s life. Now, too, those sands had begun to shift, and everything under their feet started to give way.
[II]
By the beginning of May, Brian Epstein was desperate. He had run out of options as far as record-company contacts were concerned and dreaded facing the Beatles empty-handed when they returned home in a few weeks. “The pressure was really getting to him,” recalls Alistair Taylor. “He’d grown increasingly distraught.” With his back to the wall, Brian relented and went back to see George Martin about his open-ended offer to audition the Beatles.
It seemed like an exercise in futility, but Brian put on his most charming face for the meeting, determined to win the producer’s friendship as well as his support. Apparently, the approach paid off. During their amiable meeting at EMI Studios on the morning of May 9, Martin not only honored his offer for an audition but proposed issuing a recording contract for the Beatles before even meeting them. It was an extraordinary development and, no doubt, one that Brian hadn’t anticipated. He must have been astonished, not to mention giddy with excitement.
And yet, while the gesture appeared magnanimous, it was little more than an insurance policy for Martin, should the Beatles live up to expectations. The contract, in effect, guaranteed the band nothing, least of all a recording session. Instead, by signing it, the Beatles gave EMI a lock on their services if the audition showed promise, at which time Martin only had to countersign the document for it to be binding. Otherwise, it would be worthless.
Brian, who surely recognized the drawbacks, responded quickly, believing that any contract was better than nothing at this point. So, on May 9, 1962, he arranged an audition date for a few days after the Beatles returned from Hamburg, then rushed off to the nearest post office to telephone his parents and wire two cables. The first was to the Beatles in Hamburg—an incisive announcement that set the tone for everything that eventually happened. It read:
CONGRATULATIONS BOYS. EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION. PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL.
A second message, delivered to the Mersey Beat offices the same day, said:
HAVE SECURED CONTRACT FOR BEATLES TO RECORDED [SIC] FOR EMI ON PARLAPHONE [SIC] LABEL. 1ST RECORDING DATE SET FOR JUNE 6TH.
It was a stunning piece of news. None of the Beatles had been forewarned of new developments on that front, and only George had held out hope for such an outcome. By way of celebration, they clapped one another on the back and reprised a popular chant:
“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.”
After the playback, Martin and Norman Smith rather mercilessly critiqued the tape. The fury of their response surprised the Beatles, who listened, crestfallen, as the two men “laid into them for about an hour and… were pretty forthright” about their performance. They went over everything, from the lack of “suitable material” to “embellish[ing] the sound” to their presence, which had somehow, incredibly, disappointed the record men. Despite laying things bare, however, they decided to hold back one criticism. Ron Richards had complained privately to Martin that “the drummer was no good and needed to be changed.” They’d labored in vain over the beat, trying to bring Pete up to speed. Richards coaxed him through the session, clapping out a fairly straightforward bass drum pattern—boomp bah-boomp / boomp bah-boomp—which he exhorted Pete to play with his left foot. “I thought it moved the song along better,” Richards recalls, “but he just couldn’t do it.” All Pete could do was play “fours”: boom—boom—boom—boom. If they intended to record this group properly, “he’d have to go,” Richards told Martin, who promised to have a word about it with Brian Epstein. But even without dredging up this fault, the producer’s overall response had been brutal. He’d given them a real raking-over. When the final blow had been delivered, there was a long, anxious silence. Almost apologetically, Martin asked the Beatles if there was anything theydidn’t like. After a well-timed beat, George Harrison sneered: “I don’t like your tie.”
The room went silent. For a split second, nobody breathed. A line had been crossed. Martin fixed George with a stern look, not certain what tack to take with this boy, when he noticed the flicker of a smile at the corner of George’s mouth. A joke! He’d been making a joke! What a perfect ice-breaker. Martin’s grin flashed approval ear to ear.
As Norman Smith recalled: “That was the turning point.” The band clicked into Beatles mode, cutting up and peppering them with wordplay and double-talk in a manner reminiscent of the Goons. “During that one conversation, we realized they were something special.” It was exhilarating stuff. The three of them—Pete never uttered a word—worked off one another like comic pros. Martin and Smith laughed so hard that tears soaked the inside collars of their shirts. “We’ve got to sign them for their wit,” Smith told Martin after the band had packed up. Martin promised to think about it—but he’d already made up his mind. The Beatles were a go.
The Beatles returned to Liverpool feeling reasonably optimistic. Martin had promised to see them again soon, and he’d given Brian encouragement that a proper recording session lay ahead. A pledge that he’d look for material for the band seemed proof enough of Martin’s interest. Suddenly everything seemed to be breaking the Beatles’ way.
But there were unforeseen complications. For one thing, the Beatles had contracted gonorrhea in Hamburg. There was so much sex on the fly that it seemed almost quid pro quo that they would eventually have gotten it for their efforts. Now, however, it was Brian’s problem—to help them and hush it up. Brian had asked his solicitor, Rex Makin, to refer the band to a venereologist, and the lawyer urged discretion. By that time, John and Cynthia had taken out a marriage license, and gonorrhea was prima facie evidence of adultery and automatic grounds for divorce. Also, if John passed the clap on to Cyn, she could dissolve their relationship and lay claim to his earnings. It was an unlikely scenario, but Brian wasn’t taking any chances. Makin, who handled his share of dicey matrimonial cases, had a team of what he called “tame venereologists” on file who treated such cases with extreme confidentiality.
All things considered, this situation paled in contrast to the problem that soon confronted Paul. One evening shortly after returning from London, he picked up Dot, who had spent the afternoon being examined by a girlfriend’s doctor. In the damp spring night, he took one look at Dot’s face and knew. He leaned against her and whispered: “You’re going to have a baby.” Dot could only hang her tiny shoulders and nod, trying not to drown in despair.
Wordlessly, they drove out to the Mersey ferry and rode the choppy river in darkness, searching for answers. They held each other, reassured but suspicious. Cruel hours passed. Neither was prepared to tell the other exactly what they were feeling. “[Paul] was trying to be good about it,” Dot recalls, “but he was scared. At first, he said we shouldn’t get married, we were too young. I wanted to get married, but I couldn’t tell him that.” Against all impulses, she had already made an appointment with a local adoption agency. He hushed her lips with two fingers: no. That wasn’t the right way. There was honor to think about—his and hers.
Clutching each other, they went off to face the music. Together, they confessed to Jim McCartney, who, to their surprise, “was delighted.” They should have this baby, Jim urged, irrespective of the fact that Paul wasn’t ready and Dot even less so; she was only eighteen. Jim loved kids. Besides, since Mary’s death, he was lonely.
It was settled: Paul and Dot would get married before the momentous event, after which they’d move in with Jim. Paul would be the second of the Beatles to settle down: Lennon and McCartney, as it should be. Before there was any more discussion, Paul marched down to City Hall and took out a marriage license. Dot already wore the gold band he’d given her in Hamburg.
If only Paul had wanted to get married.
Between the Parlophone audition, on June 6, and another rock ’n roll extravaganza set for the Tower Ballroom on June 21, Brian booked the Beatles into an unrelenting twelve-performance marathon at the Cavern, kicked off by a “Beatles Welcome Home Show” that squeezed nine hundred screaming fans into that foul, cramped cellar. They did two sets daily for six days, back-to-back, broken up only by a stray appearance on a BBC radio program broadcast from Manchester.
All of this was carefully coordinated by Brian, whose meager NEMS office, above the record shop in Whitechapel, became “the Eppy-center” of a fringe operation devoted almost entirely to his management business. Suddenly the roster doubled as he took on Gerry and the Pacemakers, and the staff expanded—and expanded again.
Everyone was crammed into an orderly two-room suite. Brian was tucked away behind a glass-walled office, beyond which sat two young women who typed contracts, wage slips, and letters to promoters confirming various dates. Brian, driven himself, worked them like slaves. “He was very meticulous about how things were handled,” says Frieda Kelly Norris, who was sixteen when she joined the firm. “If you made any kind of mistake, his face would get flushed until he lost it completely and came down hard on you.” Letters were fired off in every available spare moment, and “he couldn’t wait” to see it on paper. He got very angry if they weren’t ready for his signature after what seemed like an unreasonable interval. After he dictated one—or sometimes a string of them, in a rapid, staccato style, stopping repeatedly mid-sentence to change direction—it was scrutinized for form, and God help the typist who let an error slip through. “Once, I transcribed a very long letter and took it in to him to be signed,” recalls Frieda Kelly. On inspection, Brian found a spelling mistake and, sputtering with fury, flung it back on her desk to be retyped. In the next draft, she left out a comma. “Now, all I had to do was insert it at the end of the line, where it belonged, but he inked around the entire paragraph so that it couldn’t be corrected, forcing me to type it over again.”
Style was supreme—and diligence. It infuriated Brian if the staff wasn’t constantly busy. “Sometimes, I’d move papers from one side of my desk to the other, just to avoid his scorn,” says Beryl Adams, his earliest assistant. “If I stopped to blow my nose, he’d appear over my shoulder, staring hard at me until it was clear I’d gone back to work.” If anyone got done with her assigned tasks, which wasn’t at all likely, there was plenty of fan-club material to keep her occupied.
Even before the group’s first recording session, the Beatles Fan Club had swung into full flower. A teenager named Roberta Brown, who followed the Beatles from gig to gig, had started it in 1961 as a means to ingratiate herself with the band. Each month Bobbie sent out a chatty mimeographed newsletter to mostly local girls who paid the five-shilling dues and wrote in periodically requesting intimate information about the lads—“the color of their eyes and hair, their height, their ideal girl, car, and food [in that order], and also their upcoming appearances.” This was a small, passionate group—perhaps thirty-five or forty in number. But by mid-1962, the mail descended on her home in bulging sacks, and as each day passed, the demand on her time—and the drain on her bank account—seemed more daunting.
Frieda Kelly had pitched in to help before she went to work at NEMS, then persuaded Brian to get involved. This opportunity, as he read it, was a blessing. It gave him a pipeline directly to hard-core Beatle fans that he could flush with propaganda. “He said that if we gave him the postal orders, he would pay our bills for the postage and stationery,” she says. As a businessman, Brian recognized the value of a loyal consumer base.
He also knew how to motivate people. “We’d talk in his office every afternoon, at teatime,” Bob Wooler recalls. “He usually kept a bottle of brandy there. If we were in a real drinking mood—in other words, gin—we’d meet at the Beehive, in Paradise Street, just so he could keep me up-to-date.” Every move the Beatles made was reported back to Wooler so he could cajole their fans and keep the home fires burning. It was a tactic Colonel Parker had employed while Elvis was in the army, studied with envy and admiration by Brian. “Sometimes he’d rub his hands. Oh, great news, Bob, great news. They’re going to do a BBC radio broadcast in Manchester. Do you think you could organize a coach trip from the Cavern?” As incentive, Brian offered to pay for the whole thing.
The Manchester show would be a turning point. Brian had talked the Beatles into riding the bus home. It was a gracious gesture to their fans who had clapped like crazy during the band’s performance. Inside the Playhouse Theatre, the Beatles had played their hearts out. The response was phenomenal, better than anyone had anticipated. Afterward, as they made their way out, a crowd had gathered in the parking lot, not a big crowd but a spirited one intent on getting a closer look at these long-haired rock ’n rollers from Liverpool. The Beatles had to push their way through a gauntlet in order to board the bus. Bill Harry, who accompanied the band from backstage, recalls: “It was an amazing scene. The Beatles managed to climb into the coach, but the girls were mobbing Pete and he couldn’t get on.” Everyone on the bus had to wait—and watch. John, Paul, and George watched expressionlessly in the dark. Few friends who observed them realized what this grave demeanor concealed—how, in fact, it was a mask worn to conceal a bitter dissatisfaction. So hard were the lines of their lips and the set of their jaws that they might have been statues for a garden display. Outwardly, their composure never cracked, but inwardly they smoldered as Neil Aspinall extricated his friend from the crowd’s adoring grip. The Beatles never said a word—it was Jim McCartney, of all people, who angrily accosted Pete and accused him of trying to upstage the others—but they had already made up their minds to make sure that it never happened again.