Shout! (29 page)

Mike Smith arrived and, after an expensive dinner with Brian, was conducted to Mathew Street, past Paddy Delaney and down the eighteen cellar steps to witness the Beatles in their stifling habitat. Their playing impressed the A&R man, not enough to sign them there and then but certainly enough to arrange a further audition for them as soon as possible in London, at Decca’s West Hampstead studios. This second test was quickly confirmed for New Year’s Day, 1962.

On New Year’s Eve, in cold snowy weather, the participants made their separate ways south. Brian traveled down by train to stay overnight with his aunt Frieda in Hampstead. The Beatles set off at midday by road, packed with their equipment in the freezing rear of Neil Aspinall’s van. Neil had never been to London before and, striking blizzards near Wolverhampton, lost his bearings altogether. Not until ten hours later did they arrive in Russell Square, near King’s Cross, where Brian had booked them into a small hotel, the Royal. For the rest of New Year’s Eve they wandered round, watching the drunks in Trafalgar Square and trying to find a place to eat. On Charing Cross Road they met two men who offered them something called “pot” on condition they could “smoke” it together in Neil’s van. The Liverpool boys fled.

At Decca’s studios the next morning they had to wait some time for Mike Smith to arrive. Brian, as ever punctual to the second, reddened at this implied slight, just because they were unknown and from Liverpool. The Beatles, already nervous, became more so when Smith rejected the amplifiers they had dragged with them from Liverpool and made them plug their guitars into a set of studio speakers.

Brian believed that the way to impress Smith was not by John and Paul’s original songs, but by their imaginative, sometimes eccentric, arrangements of standards. Among the fifteen numbers heard by Mike Smith—and preserved for posterity on bootleg singles, stolen later from the master tape—are Paul’s versions of “Till There Was You” and “September in the Rain’; “Sheik of Araby,” sung by George with jokey Eastern effects; and semihumorous versions of “Three Cool Cats” and “Your Feet’s Too Big.” From scores of Lennon-McCartney songs the only three
selected were “Hello Little Girl,” “Like Dreamers Do,” and the recently written “Love of the Loved.”

The Beatles were far from happy with their performance. Paul’s voice had cracked with anxiety several times; George’s fingers were stickier than usual; at certain points in Chuck Berry’s song “Memphis” John as lead vocalist seemed to have been thinking of something else. And Pete Best kept up the same drum rhythm, patient rather than cohesive. Only on “Love of the Loved” had the elements coalesced: Paul’s voice at its most appealing within an arrangement both neat and dramatic.

Mike Smith, however, reassured them that the session had gone well. So enthusiastic did the young A&R man seem that when the Beatles and Brian walked out into the snow that evening the contract seemed as good as signed. Before their hideous van journey with Neil back to Liverpool, Brian took them to a restaurant in Swiss Cottage and allowed them to order wine.

At Decca, meanwhile, Smith was beginning to have second thoughts. The main reason was another group, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, that had also auditioned that day and had put up a much better show. His boss, Dick Rowe, was prepared to let Smith have his head only to the extent of signing one new group.

“I told Mike he’d have to decide between them,” Dick Rowe remembered. “It was up to him—the Beatles or Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. He said, ‘They’re both good, but one’s a local group, the other comes from Liverpool.’ We decided it was better to take the local group. We could work with them more easily and stay closer in touch, as they came from Dagenham.”

On January 4, issue number 13 of
Mersey Beat
published the results of a poll among its five thousand readers to find Liverpool’s most popular group. The Beatles were first, followed by Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, and the Big Three. The whole front page was devoted to a photograph of the winners in their black leather, cropped to conceal their scruffy shoes, and captioned by the hand that always rendered Paul’s surname as “McArtrey.” In all four Beatles’ homes lay piles of December
Mersey Beat
s minus the voting coupon on which, like everyone involved, they had voted for themselves.

Mersey Beat
knew nothing, however, of the test for Decca in London.
Brian would not risk announcing it until the contract had been definitely awarded. The only mention was in Disker’s
Liverpool Echo
column, filed by Tony Barrow from inside Decca, where the signs still seemed good. “I said it was only a matter of weeks before they came down to record their first single.”

Barrow then learned to his astonishment from Dick Rowe’s office that the Beatles were to be turned down. The reasons given were that they sounded “too much like the Shadows,” and that groups with guitars were “on the way out.”

Brian fought Decca’s decision as hard as he could. He traveled to London alone to reason, unavailingly, with Dick Rowe and another Decca man, Beecher Stevens. He also went back to the salespeople, reminding them of his position in the retail world. “I heard afterward that he’d guaranteed to buy three thousand copies of any single we let the Beatles make,” Dick Rowe says. “I was never told about that at the time. The way economics were in the record business then, if we’d been sure of selling three thousand copies, we’d have been forced to record them, whatever sort of group they were.”

Someone at Decca suggested to Brian the possibility of hiring a studio and a freelance A&R man to supervise a session for the Beatles. He went so far as to contact Tony Meehan, formerly the Shadows’ drummer, and now an independent producer. But Meehan proved offhand; besides, the studio hire would have cost at least a hundred pounds. Brian was not yet prepared to go that far. He walked out of Decca having made the grand pronouncement that his group would one day be “bigger than Elvis.” The Decca men smiled. They had heard that one so many times.

On January 24, seven weeks after first approaching them, Brian was finally able to tie the Beatles down to a formal agreement. He had sent away for a sample management contract, and had modified and rewritten the terms in a praiseworthy attempt to make them fairer. The final document, though portentously worded and stuck with sixpenny postage stamps, had no legal validity. Since Paul and George were still under twenty-one, their signatures ought to have been endorsed by their fathers. And Brian forgot to sign his own name.

The four still slightly skeptical and uneasy Liverpool scruffs thus found themselves contracted to a real live organization. It had been Brian’s impressive idea to form a limited company, with his brother,
Clive, to administer his new charges. He called it NEMS Enterprises, after the family business. Over the Whitechapel branch was a suite of offices that his father allowed him to use, mainly because that would enable him to continue running the record shop downstairs. Harry was determined Brian should keep his promise that managing the Beatles would take only two afternoons each week.

His brisk executive efficiency foundered the moment he first tried to fix the Beatles a booking. Only then did he realize he had no idea how to talk to the rough, tough Liverpool dance promoters on whom they depended for regular work. Tommy McArdle, the ex–middleweight boxer who ran New Brighton Tower Ballroom, was one of many puzzled local impresarios whom Brian suggested should “come across and have lunch.”

The first booking he managed to arrange was at a tiny seaside café on the Dee Estuary over in Cheshire. The profit to NEMS Enterprises, after paying for posters and Neil Aspinall’s gas and sundry expenses, and giving each Beatle his share, was slightly over one pound.

Nor had Brian yet realized the quality for which the Beatles were notorious up and down the Mersey—their dedicated unreliability and unpunctuality. He realized it one day when Ray McFall rang up to say that only three Beatles had turned up for the Cavern lunchtime session. Freda Kelly, who worked for NEMS Enterprises as wages clerk and fan club organizer, saw Brian go into one of many subsequent transports of fury. “There’s only
three
of them!” he kept saying. “Gerry Marsden’s singing with them, standing on an orange box so they needn’t bother to let the microphone down to his height.”

At night he would drive in his Ford Zodiac to wherever the Beatles were playing—to Neston Women’s Institute Hall, to Birkenhead, Wallasey, or New Brighton. Since everyone wore dark suits and white shirts to dances in those days, he was not too conspicuous as he walked in. Approaching the Beatles still threw him into a ferment of embarrass-ment—a circumstance that John Lennon was quick to spot. The more John stared at him, the more Brian would blush and stammer his way into some shaming faux pas. Sam Leach, all innocence, advised John to accept Brian’s proposal that they should fly together for the weekend to Copenhagen. “John nudged me in the ribs,” Sam says. ‘Shut up,’ he went. ‘Can’t you see he’s after me!’”

All the time, he was regularly traveling to London to try to interest
other record companies in the Beatles. He now had a dozen of their songs on tape from the Decca audition—“Sheik of Araby,” “Hello Little Girl,” “Three Cool Cats,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

Decca, at least, had given them two auditions. At Pye, at Phillips, at EMI’s two prestige labels, Columbia and HMV, interest did not even extend to that. The fad now was for solo singers—Helen Shapiro, Jimmy Justice, Frank Ifield. Often, the mere mention of Liverpool was sufficient to glaze over the A&R man’s eye. “You’ve got a good business, Mr. Epstein,” one of them said with a show of kindness. “Why not stick to it?”

The Beatles would be waiting for him when he got off the train at Lime Street, tired and deflated by yet another supercilious turndown. He would break the latest disappointing news to them over coffee at the nearby Punch and Judy cafeteria or at Joe’s, an all-night greasy spoon where Brian kept a reserved table as grandly as if it were the Ritz. The boys did not reproach him for his continued lack of success; on the contrary, they did their best to lift his spirits and reassure him that next time he was bound to get lucky. John Lennon would joke that, if no one else wanted them, they’d have to settle for Embassy, the despised cheapo label sold only by Woolworth’s. Then John would pump up the other four with a time-honored routine, performed in the cheesey American accents of some 1940s showbiz movie starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney:

“Where we goin’, fellas?”

“To the top, Johnny!”

“And where’s that?”

“To the
toppermost
of the
poppermost
, Johnny!”

One night, as Brian drank with the Beatles at the Iron Door Club, a tall, dark-haired man came over and shyly introduced himself. It was Joe Flannery, his companion in the nursery and in the later, brief relationship that Joe, at least, had never forgotten. He had not seen Brian since their amicable breakup in 1957, and initially presumed him to be “downtown” seeking rough trade, as of yore. That definition certainly seemed to apply to at least one of the boys Brian had with him: the slant-eyed, abrasive one who instantly turned the name Joe Flannery into “Flo Jannery.”

As sympathetic a listener as ever, Flannery soon elicited the fact that Brian now managed a pop group and that all was going far from
smoothly. They adjourned for a private drink at the Beehive pub in Paradise Street, where Brian poured out the dual frustration of canvassing London record labels and trying to do business with small-time dance promoters on the Cheshire Wirral. “He told me he was really cheesed off with everything,” Joe says. “He was thinking of chucking it all in and going back to learning to act at RADA.”

Joe, as it happened, was managing his younger brother’s beat group, Lee Curtis and the All Stars. He offered to work unofficially for NEMS Enterprises, talking to promoters on the Beatles’ behalf and negotiating fees. He did it simply out of love for Brian. “I liked the way Brian spoke on the telephone. He never said ‘Hello’—just, ‘Joe…’ I always liked hearing that.”

The kindly, hospitable Flannery even let them use his pin-neat house as a base camp when gigs ended too late for them to return to their own homes. “I’d cook them beans on toast or cheese on toast, then they’d go to sleep all around my living room. Even then, I noticed there was a peck order. John always took the couch while Paul had the two armchairs pushed together. George didn’t seem to need as much sleep as the others, so I’d take him out in my car in the early hours of the morning and teach him to drive.”

On a side table in Flannery’s living room stood a hand-colored photograph of his mother, taken in the 1920s, her bobbed hair forming a glossy helmet with bangs above her eyes. Flannery remembers how fascinated John used to be by the photograph, and remains convinced that his mother, not Astrid or Jurgen Vollmer, was the genesis of the Beatle Cut.

With all these mundane management chores lifted from his shoulders, Brian was free to concentrate on matters he did understand. He understood, for example, how to design a poster, tastefully yet with an impact maximizing the Beatles’ meagre achievements. When they were booked to play at the Institute hall in Barnston, a small Cheshire village, Brian’s posters blazed the advent of
MERSEY BEAT POLL WINNERS! POLYDOR RECORDING ARTISTS! PRIOR TO EUROPEAN TOUR
!

On the Beatles themselves, Brian began to effect the same transformation—against much the same resistance—as on the display windows of the family’s Walton Road shop. He rearranged the four black-leather, draggle-headed, swearing, prancing Hamburg rockers to reflect his own idea of what a successful pop group ought to be.

To begin with, and most important of all, he told them, they must be punctual. They must not go onstage as a three-piece group, backing Gerry Marsden on an orange box. They must play to a program, not just as they pleased. They must not shout at their friends, and foes, in the audience. They must not eat or drink beer or wrestle and cuff each other onstage, or make V-signs or belch into the microphone. And if they must smoke, let it not be Woodbines, the workingman’s cigarette, but some sophisticated brand like Senior Service.