Shout! (34 page)

After the show, he was just as seraphically amiable, telling local journalists how much he loved England and Liverpool, posing for pictures with John, Paul, George, and Ringo in a tickled-pink group around him. He even gave Paul instruction in the trademark scream he called his “little holler.” For the rest of his erratic career he would always maintain, “The Beatles was my group. I taught ’em everything they knew.”

So powerful was Brian’s influence over Little Richard that he was able to bring him back to Liverpool for a second concert, at the Empire theater on October 28, to head the existing bill of Craig Douglas, Jet Harris and the Jetblacks, and the Beatles. Brian planned the entire event as a means of giving them their first professional booking at the Empire.

Because it was Sunday none of the groups were allowed to appear in costume, so they all took off their jackets. The Beatles played in pink, round-collared shirts. For a fan like Freda Kelly it was no less a miracle that they had crossed the gulf from underground clubs to this softly lit, luxurious realm of concert and Christmas pantomime. “I remember when the spotlight went on Paul in his pink shirt, and he started to sing “Besame Mucho.” I thought, “This is
it
. Now they’ve
really
made it.”

“Love Me Do” was released on October 4, 1962, in a week when America’s grip on the British Top Twenty had seldom been stronger. Carole King, Tommy Roe, Bobby Vee, Little Eva, Ray Charles, and Del Shannon all had new songs making, or about to make, their inevitable ascent. The
sensation of the moment was “Let’s Dance” by Chris Montez, prolonging the Twist dance craze that French students had imported into Britain during the summer. Among British artists, the continuing success of Helen Shapiro, Jimmy Justice, Kathy Kirby, and Shane Fenton seemed to bear out the Decca prophecy that solo singers were what the teenagers wanted, that guitar groups were “on the way out.”

EMI themselves seemed to think so. After “Love Me Do” was released virtually no effort was made to plug the disk to the trade press or BBC radio, or even to EMI’s own sponsored Radio Luxembourg show. Newspaper publicity was confined to a single printed handout, copied from the “Life Lines” that Freda Kelly had drawn up in Liverpool, vouchsafing to indifferent Fleet Street record columnists that Paul McCartney’s favorite clothes were leather and suede, that Ringo Starr’s favorite dish was steak and chips, that George Harrison’s greatest musical influence was Carl Perkins, and that John Lennon’s “type of car” was “bus.”

After his experience with Decca Brian was taking no chances. He himself had ordered ten thousand copies of “Love Me Do” from Parlophone. He had been told that that was the quantity you had to sell to have a Top Twenty hit.

Though the Liverpool fans loyally bought “Love Me Do,” and though
Mersey Beat
’s chart made it instantaneously number one, most of the ten thousand copies remained in unopened cartons in a back room of the Whitechapel NEMS shop. “Brian took me and showed me them,” Joe Flannery says. “He even made up a little song about all the copies he hadn’t been able to sell. ‘Here we go gathering dust in May,’ he’d sing.” A few days later, in London, Flannery bumped into Paul McCartney. “Paul said he was hungry; he’d only had a cake to eat all day. I was amazed. I said, ‘Paul—how?’ Paul said, ‘Someone had to pay for those ten thousand records Brian bought.’”

The first radio play was on Luxembourg, after hundreds of requests from Liverpool. George Harrison sat waiting for it next to the radio all evening with his mother, Louise. She had given up and was in bed when George ran upstairs, shouting, “We’re on! We’re on!” Mr. Harrison was angry at being disturbed; he had to be up early the next morning to drive his bus.

A few scattered plays followed on the BBC Light Program, where pop was beginning to creep into “general” music shows like the early evening
Roundabout
. The best exposure was secured by Kim Bennett of Ardmore
and Beechwood, the publishers who had first steered Brian back to EMI and George Martin. By dint of repeatedly nagging a radio producer friend, Bennett got “Love Me Do” onto the playlist of
Two-Way Family Favourites
, a hugely popular Sunday-morning show playing record requests for British forces overseas. After two appearances there on consecutive Sundays, “Love Me Do” was shown at number forty-nine in
Record Mirror
’s top 100. The
New Musical Express
, shortly afterward, showed it at number twenty-seven. Finally, on December 13, it reached number seventeen.

For a first record, especially on Parlophone, that was not at all a bad performance. If “Love Me Do” had not taken the country by storm, it had confirmed George Martin’s instinct that the Beatles could be successful singing the right song. He reached that conclusion even before “Love Me Do” made its brief Top Twenty showing. The second single under their first year’s contract was due to be recorded on November 26.

Though bound to EMI on record for five years, Brian had only a gentlemen’s agreement with Syd Coleman of Ardmore and Beechwood that A&B would continue publishing John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s song output. He felt disappointed with Ardmore and Beech-wood’s performance in publicizing “Love Me Do”—though, to be fair, the failure was all on EMI’s side—and now confided to George Martin that he’d be seeking new publishers for the Beatles’ follow-up single. His initial idea was to go to an American firm, Hill and Range, that held British rights on the Elvis Presley catalog. Martin’s advice was to pick a small firm with a drive to succeed that would match Brian’s own: “In other words, what I told Brian he needed was a hungry music publisher.”

The hungriest music publisher George Martin knew was Dick James, a tubby, amiable, bald-headed man whose office was one first-floor room at the corner of Denmark and Old Compton Streets. Born Isaac Vapnik, James had begun his career as a crooner in the 1930s, as featured vocalist with Primo Scala’s Accordion Band. He had sung with leading orchestras, including Henry Hall’s and Cyril Stapleton’s, and made several records, of which the most famous was the theme song for
Robin Hood
, a children’s series on early commercial television. On losing his moderate female fan base along with his hair he had turned first to song plugging, then to publishing. In November 1962, he had been in
business on his own for one year exactly. Everyone knew Dick James, everyone liked him, but no one yet mistook him for Tin Pan Alley’s next millionaire.

In the early 1950s, as a newcomer to Parlophone, George Martin had produced Dick James on several minor hit records, including “Tenderly” and “Robin Hood.” It was natural, therefore, that when EMI’s own publishing company proved deficient, he should approach Dick James informally, both as a possible publisher for the Beatles and also in James’s old capacity as a plugger of likely recording material. The first approach, when Martin mentioned “this Liverpool group,” was not encouraging. James laughed his cuddly laugh and echoed, “Liverpool? So what’s from Liverpool?”

The answer, by then, was a disk with at least a toe-hold in the
New Musical Express
Top 100. James heard “Love Me Do,” liked the overall sound but agreed with Martin that the song was “just a riff.” He promised to use his Tin Pan Alley contacts to find them a good “professional” song for their follow-up record. This he produced within days, on a demo disk that he played to Martin. The song was “How Do You Do It?” by a young composer named Mitch Murray. “As soon as Dick played it to me,” Martin says, “I started jumping up and down. ‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is the song that’s going to make the Beatles a household name.’”

He said the same to the Beatles themselves when Brian brought them back to Abbey Road studios on November 26. He played them the demo of “How Do You Do It?” accompanied by his own carefully thought-out ideas on how the song could be adapted to suit them. He was surprised, and not a little irritated, when John and Paul said flatly that they didn’t like it, and wanted to do another of their own songs. This apparent willfulness in the face of an almost certain hit brought a stern lecture from Martin. “‘When you can write material as good as this I’ll record it,’ I said. ‘But right now, we’re going to record
this
.’”

His words sent them, chastened, into the studio, to produce a version of “How Do You Do It?” in which every note and nuance of John Lennon’s lead voice made plain their lugubrious distaste. George Harrison, halfway through, produced a guitar solo not far removed in scale and ambition from the twanging of a rubber band. Even so, they could not stop a little charm and originality from creeping in.

The song they wanted to record was one of John and Paul’s called
“Please Please Me,” one fairly slow version of which had already been tried on Martin. Since then, they had worked on it, tidying up the lyric and making it faster. The revised version was now played by Paul and John on their acoustic Gibson guitars while Martin, perched on a musician’s high stool, listened critically. Then, as their voices broke together on the “Whoa yeah” Martin recognized something. His objection was that the song as it stood lasted barely more than a minute. They could lengthen it with an intro on John’s harmonica, and by repeating the first chorus at the end.

The first take of “Please Please Me” was so belligerently alive that George Martin decided to use it, even though Paul had forgotten the words in the first chorus and John, more obviously, had forgotten them in the finale. “The whole session was a joy,” Martin says. “At the end, I pressed the intercom button and said, ‘Gentlemen, you have just made your first number one.’”

He now had to break it to Dick James that the Mitch Murray song would not, after all, be out soon on Parlophone. “George rang me up,” James says. “His words were, ‘You know that song the Beatles
were
going to record…’” James held his head in Tin Pan Alley mock anguish, but agreed to meet Brian Epstein the next day with a view to publishing—and plugging—“Please Please Me.” It was arranged that Brian would bring an early pressing of the single for James to hear at his Denmark Street office at 11:00
A.M
.

Brian arrived, instead, at 10:20. He had had an earlier appointment with another music publisher, but the man he was supposed to meet had not bothered to keep the appointment. Instead, it was suggested that he play his demo disk to the office boy. He had walked out in fury and come straight on to Dick James Music. James, to his lasting benefit, was at work already, and able to greet the angrily blushing young man in person.

A single hearing of “Please Please Me” was enough for James. He loved the song, he told Brian; could he publish it? Brian, a little nonplussed by the shabby office, asked what James thought he could do for the Beatles that EMI’s publicity department had not already done. James’s answer was to pick up the telephone and call a friend of his named Philip Jones, the producer of the Saturday night television pop show
Thank Your Lucky Stars
. He told Jones to listen, then put “Please Please Me” onto his record player and held the telephone receiver near
to it. Jones agreed that it was very good. He also agreed, at James’s skillful prompting, to put the Beatles into
Thank Your Lucky Stars
. In five minutes, Dick James had guaranteed them exposure on what was—after BBC TV’s
Juke Box Jury
—the show with the greatest influence over the record-buying public. “Now,” he asked ingenuously, “can I publish the song?”

Another reason why George Martin had sent Brian to James was that he knew James to be very straight in financial matters. As a singer, he had himself frequently been done out of large earnings in the days when English artists received no royalty on American sales of their records. Twice in the early 1950s he had topped the American charts and yet received only seven pounds each time—the then standard studio fee. The deal he now offered Brian, while not actuated by pure benevolence, was both fair and imaginative.

Under the usual predatory publisher’s contract James would have taken 10 percent of the
retail
price of sheet music, plus up to half of the royalties from radio play and cover versions. Instead, he proposed that a special company be formed within his own organization but exclusively publishing Lennon-McCartney songs. The company would be called Northern Songs and its proceeds split 50-50: half to Dick James, 20 percent each to John and Paul, and 10 percent to Brian. It sounded handsome, and it was, notwithstanding the clause that James’s own company would take a percentage of Northern Songs’ earnings “off the top.” “Brian said to me, ‘Why are you doing this for us?’” James recalled. “What I said to him then was the truth. I was doing it because I had such faith in the songs.”

“Please Please Me” was not scheduled for release until January 1963. In the meantime, the Beatles were committed to return to Hamburg for a two-week engagement at Manfred Weissleder’s Star-Club. The booking had been made back in the summer, before George Martin’s advent, at rates of pay that no longer seemed attractive. All four, besides, felt they had had their fill of the Reeperbahn. Also, for the first time, they would be away from home during both Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The clincher was an offer from Manfred Weissleder to Brian of one thousand deutschmarks in “brown bag money” that wouldn’t have to be declared for income tax.

On December 2, a severe jolt was sustained by the Beatles’ collective ego. Brian, through sheer effrontery, had managed to get them into
what was then known as a package show of pop acts currently enjoying Top Twenty success. He had discovered the private telephone number of Arthur Howes, the country’s biggest tour promoter, and had rung up Howes one Saturday afternoon at home in Peterborough. Arthur Howes, a veteran at the agency game, smiled a bit when he heard the name of the group on offer, but was fair-minded enough not to refuse them without a trial. He offered to put them on for one night only at the Embassy cinema, Peterborough, in a show headed by Frank Ifield, the Australian yodeler.

The appearance was an unmitigated flop. The staid East Anglian audience had come to see Frank Ifield, not four unknowns from the north; they had come to worship suntan and upswept hair, not eccentric bangs, and to hear sentimental ballads, not Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins music. Total silence followed every perversely loud number. But something about them appealed to Arthur Howes; he told Brian that the disaster was not all their fault, and even made a small offer for the option of using them in future package shows.