Paul McCartney (21 page)

Young also worked for Weissleder, in a managerial capacity, booking American acts like Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles, for which he was rewarded with a luxurious apartment and a swish Ford Taunus convertible. ‘The Beatles were always asking me to take them for a drive to the seaside. When I did, they all started jumping around in the sea in their clothes and calling to me to do the same. I knew that if I didn’t, I’d be thrown in. Then I turned around and saw John driving my brand-new Taunus down the beach towards the water… On the way back to Hamburg, I made them all sit forwards like little kids, so they wouldn’t make the upholstery too wet.’

In the aftermath of Stu Sutcliffe’s death, and without Brian around to restrain him, John’s behaviour, both on and offstage, was more manic than even St Pauli had seen before. ‘He’d take so many pills that he literally wouldn’t be able to shut his eyes to go to sleep,’ Roy Young says. ‘Paul, on the other hand, would always want to be up early, to write songs or rehearse. And he used to worry that they weren’t saving any of the money they earned–that they’d end up with nothing to show for all the struggle they’d had to get this far, and have to take ordinary everyday jobs that they hated.

‘One night when the Beatles were due onstage, John wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Eventually, Horst Fascher found him in a toilet near the stage, having sex with a girl inside one of the cubicles. Horst got a bucket of water and emptied it over the top of the door onto the two of them. In retaliation John wrenched off the toilet-seat, hung it around his neck and went onstage wearing it. Horst started screaming that the Beatles were fired and they’d better pack their bags and be on the next plane home.

‘When I looked into their dressing-room, I found Paul in a corner–in tears. He said he’d borrowed some money from his father to buy a car and if they were fired from the Star-Club, he wouldn’t be able to pay it back.’

But the Reeperbahn forgave them yet again. And a few days later came the momentous (if not wholly truthful) telegram from Brian:

CONGRATULATIONS BOYS. EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION. PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL

The Beatles weren’t only the greatest pop band in history; they were also arguably the luckiest. Their first massive stroke of good fortune was acquiring Brian Epstein as their manager; their second came when Brian stumbled on Parlophone Records and George Martin.

In 1962, there wasn’t another label boss in London with Martin’s special combination of qualities. He was a trained classical musician who had studied piano and oboe at the prestigious Guildhall School and was a talented composer, arranger and conductor. Yet he also had a love of comedy in its more outrageous forms and felt something of a mission to capture it on record. Parlophone at that time was best-known for albums by the Goons–whose radio show had entranced John and Paul long before there was an Elvis–and live recordings of West End comedy hits like Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and the groundbreaking satirical revue Beyond the Fringe.

Parlophone was the least significant in the constellation of labels belonging to the giant EMI organisation and Brian had already pitched the Beatles to the others without success. It was during what he’d decided would be his final foray to London on their behalf that everything changed. A chance tip-off led him to Martin, a tall, elegant man of 36 with a cultured accent and the aura (so he later recalled) of ‘a stern but fair-minded schoolmaster’.

At Brian’s assertion that the Beatles could be ‘bigger than Elvis’, Martin’s eyes glazed over–for he knew nothing could ever be bigger than that. But he heard something in their demo that no one else had, and agreed to audition them on tape at EMI’s Abbey Road studios on 6 June after their return from Hamburg. That was the real meaning of ‘EMI request recording session’.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, Abbey Road studios are on a leafy boulevard through north London’s wealthiest quarter, St John’s Wood. Their frontage is an unassuming white townhouse with a spacious drive and steep front steps, behind which a maze of technical departments and offices occupies perhaps three times the area. In 1962, the place looked much as today except that its low white street-wall had yet to be covered with adoring graffiti and the nearby zebra pedestrian crossing was considered no different from any other.

The Beatles’ audition there could not have been more unlike their Decca one six months earlier. Although George Martin spoke like a BBC announcer, he came from quite humble north London roots and, while crisp and authoritative, was genial and welcoming. He impressed the band by not treating them like hicks while they instantly won him over with their Scouser charm and cheek.

In Abbey Road’s orchestra-sized Studio Two, they demoed three Lennon–McCartney compositions, ‘Love Me Do’, ‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Ask Me Why’, plus various cover versions including Paul’s semi-comic version of ‘Besame Mucho’, a Mexican bolero dating from 1940 that was part of his musical legacy from his father.

Ironically, George Martin at this point was not seeking anything particularly original. The comedy albums in which Parlophone specialised–and which Martin usually produced personally–were hugely effortful to put together, yet only rarely achieved major sales or listing in the record charts. Meanwhile, over at EMI’s prestigious Columbia label, Cliff Richard’s producer, Norrie Paramor, turned out a golden stream of pop hits to a virtually identical formula. Martin’s initial hope was that the Beatles might be his very own Cliff and the Shadows.

So the unsuspecting John, Paul and George were each tested singing solo, to see which of them might be moulded into a Cliff-style front man. ‘I thought of making Paul the leader,’ Martin later recalled. ‘Just because he was the prettiest.’ Then–going against all pop fashion, and possibly his own interests, too–he decided to leave the pattern of their voices as was.

He also made a decision one cannot imagine from any other British record producer at the time. If and when the Beatles recorded on Parlophone, it must be Lennon–McCartney material they performed. Indeed, Paul and John were a bit surprised by Martin’s preference for ‘Ask Me Why’ and ‘Love Me Do’ over ‘Besame Mucho’ or ‘The Sheik of Araby’. Paul remembers how he and John still regarded their own songs as ‘a bit wet’ compared to those of Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and the other giants they covered.

There was a further caveat, for Brian’s ears only. Martin had decided Pete Best wasn’t a good enough drummer to record; if he did sign them to Parlophone, he’d want to use a session-player of his own. It was not a demand that Pete be dropped from the line-up only that he shouldn’t play on the records. But it brought to the boil John, Paul and George’s long-simmering ambition to sack Pete and replace him with Ringo Starr.

The main reason is said to have been Paul’s insecurity about Pete’s good looks and the numbers of female fans he attracted. It’s certainly true that at more than one Liverpool gig his drums were placed at the front of the band rather than the back, and that screams of ‘Pete!’ could sometimes drown out those of ‘Paul!’ Such, anyway, would be Pete’s solace in later life, when he possessed one of the world’s most tragic pairs of eyes. Asked why he’d been dropped on the very eve of Beatlemania, he’d simply answer, ‘Jealousy.’

But the truth was that Pete had never really fitted into the band: he was too quiet and self-contained and lacking in John’s and Paul’s verbal and intellectual sparkle. He had seemed even more of an outsider since the other three had started combing their hair forward over their eyes while his remained in a neat, no-nonsense cockade. In fact, he now says he would have been perfectly willing to copy the others but was never asked to because Astrid thought his hair too curly.

Ringo, by contrast, fitted the line-up like a comfortable old carpet slipper even before he joined it: he was friendly, easy-going and apparently devoid of self-importance or temperament–qualities that would prove more valuable than he knew. Although raised in Liverpool’s tough Dingle area and robbed of education by childhood illness, he had a droll, dry wit and love of wordplay that chimed perfectly with John’s and Paul’s. They’d become friends in Hamburg when Ringo was there as one of Rory Storm’s Hurricanes and, later, playing in Tony Sheridan’s band; John, Paul and George had once even cut a demo record with Ringo drumming and the Hurricanes’ Lu Walters on vocals (billed as ‘the Beatles mit Wally’).

But firing Pete and hiring Ringo had ramifications far beyond the inevitable outcry from Pete’s Liverpool fans. After his stint in Hamburg with Tony Sheridan, Ringo had rejoined Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and was about to depart with them for a summer season at Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness, Lincolnshire. Poaching Rory’s drummer, and perhaps jeopardising the Skegness gig, would be a tricky matter, the more so with Paul still dating Rory’s sister, Iris.

Almost as big a problem was that Pete’s best friend was Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ invaluable driver/roadie. What if Neil were to quit out of loyalty to Pete and the Best family, in whose home he lodged? In a further twist, worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan, Neil had been having a Mrs Robinson-style affair with Pete’s mother, Mona, whose Casbah club had given the Beatles their first real break and who’d been their de facto manager before Brian Epstein came along. To cap the Gilbertian plot, Mrs Best was on the point of giving birth to Neil’s child.

In fact, Pete’s firing and Ringo’s poaching were mainly orchestrated by George. Although Paul had long been unhappy with Pete’s drumming–shown up in all its heavy-handedness on the first ‘Love Me Do’ demo–he was too civilised not to feel twinges of conscience, especially since Pete had no idea of what was in the wind. One evening, when the Beatles had met up at the Bests’ house, he was talking excitedly about a new car he intended to buy. Paul looked uncomfortable and mumbled, ‘You’d be better saving your money.’

George Martin had by now decided to offer the band a recording contract–a fact carefully concealed from Pete. It was to last for seven years and pay a royalty of one old penny per double-sided record, 1.25 per cent of the retail price, rising by yearly increments of a farthing, or a quarter of a penny. Later, it would be held up as one of the stingiest contracts ever, but at that time, when even major artistes considered making records an honour rather than an earner, it was standard.

In the end, John, Paul and George couldn’t face telling Pete he was out, but deputed Brian to do it. The task was doubly awkward for Brian, who’d relied on Pete as a kind of sub-manager to the band as well as once proposing they should sleep together. During their painful conversation in Brian’s office, the telephone rang: it was Paul, asking whether the deed had been done yet. For Pete, that would always be final proof of Paul’s culpability.

Thereafter, everything was sorted out with the ease of a less mercenary age. Rory Storm released Ringo from the Hurricanes with no ill will towards the Beatles, least of all his sister Iris’s boyfriend. The Bests made no attempt to extract financial compensation from Brian, contenting themselves with his promise to put Pete into another band (the All Stars, fronted by the brother of his friend Joe Flannery). At Pete’s unselfish urging, Neil Aspinall elected to remain the Beatles’ roadie, while the baby boy Neil had fathered with Mona Best was christened Roag and brought up as a member of the Best family.

For some time after Pete’s firing, the Beatles guiltily stayed away from the Bests’ house. Then one evening, Paul–viewed by the whole family as the arch-villain of the affair–knocked on the front door and asked if he could park his car in their driveway. Mrs Best, as she later recalled, managed to hold her peace but Pete’s girlfriend, Kathy, ‘gave him a damned good talking-to’.

It was a different story with Pete’s fans when Mersey Beat broke the news on 23 August. There were riots outside the Cavern and, unprecedentedly, heckling of the Beatles inside; as George Harrison made his way to the stage, someone ‘nutted’ him and gave him a black eye. Brian was the target of so many threats and recriminations that he hired a bodyguard.

The only film footage of the Beatles at the Cavern dates from this turbulent week, shot in grainy black and white by Manchester’s Granada Television. Ringo, with his new Beatle cut, sits at his drums, clearly disconcerted by the audible shrieks of ‘We want Pete!’ To try to drown the protests, Paul and John do a good old R&B standard–the unwittingly appropriate ‘Some Other Guy’.

Concurrent with the Pete Best problem was one which seemed to threaten the Beatles’ career just as it was about to take flight. John had found himself in the same fix Paul had been in two years earlier, without the same providential get-out. He’d made his girlfriend, Cynthia, pregnant and saw no alternative but to marry her.

Back then, it was considered risky enough for a pop artiste to have a steady girlfriend, as Iris Caldwell was Paul’s. Being married was thought to destroy any appeal for young women, whose fantasies depended on their idols being–at least theoretically–available and within reach. Such had been the fate of Marty Wilde, once kingpin of the Larry Parnes stable; Brian Epstein was determined it shouldn’t happen to his lead Beatle at this pivotal moment in the band’s career.

After John and Cynthia’s lower-than-low-key civil marriage, therefore, the new Mrs Lennon spent her first months of pregnancy secreted in a flat in Falkner Street belonging to Brian (where in fact he’d once hoped for a first romantic tryst with John). To keep an eye on Cynthia, her friend Dot Rhone–Paul’s former fiancée and so nearly the mother of his first child–agreed to move into the flat below, even though it would inevitably mean frequent painful encounters with Paul. He would later describe his first wife, Linda, as the kindest person he ever knew, but Dot certainly ran her close.

Everything had thus been beautifully tidied up by early September, when the Beatles returned to Abbey Road studios to record their first single. There was some initial awkwardness when they filed into Studio Two to find a strange drum-kit already set up there. George Martin had not been told of Ringo’s accession and–as he’d stipulated–had hired a session-drummer, Andy White, to take Pete Best’s place. With the unchallengeable authority of all producers, he refused to change this arrangement. Ringo was therefore relegated to bashing a tambourine and glumly thinking they’d ‘done a Pete Best’ on him.