Beatles vs. Stones (5 page)

In the late 1950s, Brian’s dad launched NEMS (North End Music Stores) and hired his son to run the record department. Brian was a demanding, fastidious boss, and his regal bearing could rub some people the wrong way. He insisted that his employees should always look their very best, and that they address every potential customer as “sir” or “madam”—even the four particularly disheveled lads in jeans and leather jackets who were always dropping by in the middle of the afternoon to listen to records but rarely to purchase any.
“They used to drive us crackers,” an employee said about the group she later discovered was the Beatles. Often they were looking for “way-out American music” that was not in stock.

Epstein had a policy of ordering any record that a customer asked for, and in late 1961, he was briefly stumped when requests started trickling in for a new single called “My Bonnie,” supposedly by “the Beatles.” Brian searched hard for the record, but it simply didn’t seem to exist in any of his ordering catalogues. Finally, he was able to determine that the disc people were seeking, which was recorded in Germany, was actually put out by the English singer-guitarist Tony Sheridan, who had merely used the Beatles as a backup band. What’s more, the Beatles weren’t properly mentioned on the record; instead, they were listed as the “Beat Brothers,” because the company that produced the single thought “Beatles” sounded too much like
peedles
, German slang for “penis.” Nevertheless, Epstein ordered twenty-five copies of “My Bonnie,” which sold out in a day. Then he ordered fifty more discs, and very quickly they, too, disappeared from his record bins.

Epstein usually claimed that this was the fated episode that brought the Beatles to his attention and piqued his curiosity so much that he decided to attend one of their lunchtime engagements at the Cavern Club (which happened to be only about a three-minute walk
from his store). This could be so, but it’s hard to believe. Since July 1961, the Beatles were regularly featured in Bill Harry’s
Mersey Beat
, a music newspaper that Epstein not only distributed at NEMS, but that also featured his own record reviews. Even though Brian’s personal tastes were more for Mozart and Shakespeare than rock ’n’ roll, it seems likely that the enterprising record store manager would have at least recognized the name of one of Liverpool’s most popular bands—especially since they played regularly just around the corner.

In any event, it was on November 9, 1961, that Brian and his trusty personal assistant Alistair Taylor ventured down the stairs into the Cavern, where they saw the Beatles for the first time.
“Inside the club it was as black as a deep grave, dank and damp and smelly and I regretted my decision to come,” Epstein later wrote in his memoir,
A Cellarful of Noise
. The Beatles, though, impressed him incredibly favorably. He was
“fascinated” by their “pounding bass beat” and “vast engulfing sound,” and he could not help but notice the charged enthusiasm of their audience, which numbered about two hundred. He was also struck by the group’s rough exterior and devil-may-care attitude.
“They were not very tidy and not very clean,” he remembered. “They smoked as they played and ate and talked and pretended to hit each other. They turned their backs on the audience and shouted at them and laughed at private jokes.” Some have speculated that it might have been exactly this behavior—the Beatles’ scrappiness—that Epstein found
most
attractive. Though Epstein was as dapper and debonair as they came, sexually he went for “rough trade”—tough, unpolished, working-class greaser types. But Taylor sharply disputes the notion.
“This accusation has been put up so many times,” he complained. “It’s bullshit. He signed the Beatles because they impressed us.”

As for the Beatles, it’s clear why they went with Epstein. First, as John Lennon put it,
“he looked efficient and rich.” Second, Epstein was the type to think
big
, and big is how the Beatles were beginning to think as well. Though devoid of pop management experience, Epstein worked evangelically on the Beatles’ behalf, championing them to
music industry insiders with measures of loyalty, pride, passion, and grit that were exceptional by any standard. Numerous sources suggest that the old story about Brian meeting an audience of nonplussed record executives and angrily blurting out,
“The Beatles are going to be bigger than Elvis Presley!” is probably true. He
really did
go about saying that. But before that could happen, Brian always maintained that his boys would have to clean up their act.
Except for on one slightly infamous occasion, when he was probably very drunk, Epstein would not dare try to interfere with the Beatles’ music, but as their manager, he worked closely with them on their presentation. As a result, he was finally able to exercise some of his longstanding creative and theatrical impulses.
“Brian wanted to be a star himself,” producer George Martin speculated. “That was the essential part of Brian. He couldn’t do it as an actor, and now he was able to do it as a man who was a manipulator, a puppeteer, if you like. He loved this role of being the power behind the scenes.”

The Beatles went along with Brian’s desire to tidy up their performance, not because they ever wanted to get into spiffy suits, but because they gradually became convinced that he was right.
“It was a choice of making it or still eating chicken on stage,” Lennon remarked. Still, their metamorphosis did not happen overnight: first went the leather jackets, and then the jeans were replaced with smart-looking trousers.
“After that . . . I got them to wear sweaters onstage,” Brain recalled, and only afterward, “very reluctantly,” did they begin wearing their trademark grey collarless suits, which were inspired by Pierre Cardin. (Eventually the Beatles’ main tailor, Dougie Millings, would make about five hundred garments for the group.) Meanwhile, Epstein had his secretary type up memos spelling out exactly what the Beatles must not do:
They must “stop swearing on stage, they must stop joking with the girls, they must stop smoking or carrying cans of Coke onstage,” and so forth. Even some of their offstage behavior was regulated. For instance, it was fine if they smoked, but only filtered cigarettes. Harsh, unfiltered Woodbines, or rollies, were considered
déclassé
and strictly prohibited. The Beatles were instructed to trim their guitar strings and to bow deeply from the waist after each number.
“He was a director. That’s really what he was,” Paul said about Brian.

Eventually, Lennon came to despise the Beatles’ anodyne image, but it’s not clear when that began to happen. Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, dismissed Lennon’s
“posthumous, wise-after-the-event” objections to the Beatles makeover. “They didn’t mind at the time,” he said. “They were making more money that way.” When the Beatles were filmed for the very first time—on August 22, 1962, at the Cavern Club, for a Granada TV program called
Know the North
—Harrison recalled,
“It was really hot and we were asked to dress up properly. We had shirts, and ties, and little black pullovers. So we looked quite smart. . . . and John was into it!”

But Lennon remembered feeling differently:
“there we were in suits and everything. It just wasn’t us.” Even though they played old standbys, like “Some Other Guy” and “Kansas City” / “Hey Hey Hey Hey,” Lennon said “that was where we started to sell-out.” Cynthia adds that when Epstein began sprucing up the Beatles, John was always differently minded than the others.
“Paul was keen on the changes and George was happy to accept them,” she recalled. “But it wasn’t easy for John. When Brian asked them to wear suits and ties, John growled for days. That was what the Shadows—the group John most despised—did.” Still, knowing Lennon’s ambition, one gets the impression he would have had the group dress up in clown suits if he thought it was necessary.

Later on, though, when the Stones showed it was possible to become very successful while acting like hooligans, Lennon became a little annoyed. “He always believed the Stones had hijacked the Beatles’ ‘original’ image,” said Chris Hutchins, who was friendly with both bands. Without the Beatles, Lennon reasoned, the Stones never could have gotten away with so much.
“Brian Epstein made them behave, conform, perform, wear suits, be polite, [and] made them do Royal
Variety Shows,” Hutchins noted. “That really left the field open for Andrew to say ‘Fuck that, the Stones don’t do that.’ As Lennon so correctly observed, Brian left the way open for the Stones to occupy a very large vacancy.”

•  •  •

It may say something about Andrew Loog Oldham’s ego, as well as the richness of his life, that in the first of his three memoirs, nearly two hundred pages breeze by before he describes his first exposure to the Rolling Stones, which happened at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, Surrey, on a Sunday night in April 1963. Nevertheless, he narrates the occasion in nearly mystical terms; it was not only pivotal, but epiphanous.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. “All my preparations, ambitions and desires had just met their purpose. . . . Everything I’d done up until now was a preparation for this moment. I saw and heard what my life, thus far, had been for.” At the time, he was nineteen years old and still living with his mother.

Whatever he lacked in resources, though, he compensated for with style, ambition, and an almost otherworldly amount of chutzpah. His love for the glamorous life was apparent by the time he was a young teen. Oldham was so enchanted by show biz and celebrity culture that just about every month or so, a friend said,
“a new public personality would take pride of place in his young heart.” A favorite Hollywood icon was Laurence Harvey, the Lithuanian-born actor who found international stardom in
Room at the Top
(in which he played an inveterate social climber) and
Expresso Bongo
(where he played a sleazy talent scout). Another favorite was Tony Curtis, who portrayed the gangsterish press agent Sidney Falco in
The Sweet Smell of Success.
None of these protagonists brought much good into the world, but Oldham wasn’t interested in these films for their social messages. Instead, they fueled his ambition to become, as he put it,
“a nasty little upstart tycoon shit.”

Though of a very different temperament than Epstein, Oldham
was also theatrically handsome, and he shared Brian’s love of fashion and
haute couture
.
“He was the most concerned-about-clothes person I’ve ever met in my life to this day,” claimed an old business partner. “He was meticulous.” At age sixteen, after getting only three O-level passes, he strolled into Bazaar—the famous, youth-oriented boutique operated by Mary Quant—and sweet-talked his way into a job as an errand boy for £7 per week. His main responsibilities involved preparing tea, taking messages, and walking dogs, but sometimes he helped Quant dress the storefront windows, and she recalled
“he had all the confidence in the world.” For Oldham, the experience was invaluable.
“I will always thank Mary [and her business partners] for teaching me about fame, fashion, money, and how to have fun getting it done,” he said. Every evening after work, Andrew would venture over to Soho, where he held a second job waiting tables at a Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. Though not musically gifted, he briefly tried to find an agent or a manager who thought he might be able to make it as a pop star. That didn’t go anywhere, though Oldham was able to conjure some bright-hued aliases for himself: he wanted to be known as either Chancery Lane or Sandy Beach.

During this period, Oldham usually managed to constrain his dark side, but not always. His ex-wife Shelia Klein recalls the time when he’d enthusiastically arranged for her to visit a modeling agency. He helped her get styled by Vidal Sassoon, and had her professionally photographed, but then, on the morning of her appointment, his thinking made an abrupt U-turn.
“He didn’t want me to be a model anymore,” Sheila remembered. “There was no discussion; he just locked me in the cupboard and wouldn’t let me out. That was the end of my modeling career. Andrew definitely was different. His way of handling a situation was very effective.”

After a brief sojourn to the South of France, Oldham returned to London and found work in public relations. As a result he was able to meet Phil Spector, the legendary pop producer who, even then, struck
a foreboding presence. Spector made an overwhelming impression on young Andrew. The two of them
“were a nightmare together,” a friend recalled. “Andrew got hooked on Phil’s not behaving very well.” Riding together in darkly tinted limos and dining under the protection of bodyguards, Andrew plied Spector for advice about how to make it in the music industry.

Another very important person Oldham met was Brian Epstein. They crossed paths in January 1963 at the taping of the Beatles’ second national television appearance, on ABC-TV’s hugely popular
Thank Your Lucky Stars
. “Brian merely stood watching his boys, yet his belief and their talent permeated the room,” Oldham recalled. In a conversation, Oldham persuaded Epstein to hire him as a London-based PR man for a monthly retainer of £25. Mostly, Oldham worked for two of Epstein’s recently acquired acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, but sometimes he helped drum up publicity for the Beatles in music weeklies, teen magazines, and daily papers. On one glorious occasion, he even got to chaperone the Beatles to
some radio shows and press interviews. Another time, he saw the Beatles play the Granada Theatre in Bedford, just as they were beginning their glide path to superstardom.
“Onstage, you could not hear the Beatles for the roar of the crowd,” Oldham rhapsodized. “The noise that night hit me emotionally, like a blow to the chest. . . . When I looked at Brian, he had the same lump in his throat and tear in his eye as I.”

Andrew craved these sorts of heady experiences, but it was a routine lunch that changed his life. Peter Jones, of the pop periodical
Record Mirror
, mentioned that one of his colleagues had just written enthusiastically about the bourgeoning R&B scene and favorably mentioned a new band, “the Rollin’ Stones,” even though they hadn’t yet made a record. “It looks like rhythm ’n’ blues will make it big soon, so why not have a look at them?” Jones said. Oldham wasn’t particularly enthused by the suggestion, but since he wanted to curry
favor with Jones, he figured he should at least appear to be interested in his advice. The next Sunday, Oldham traveled to Richmond, where, he said,
“I met the Rollin’ Stones and said ‘hello’ to the rest of my life.”