Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (21 page)

“Look now, you’re being very stubborn about this,” began Wood, “but I’m determined to keep you on.”

“Okay, what have you got to offer?” asked Martin.

“Well, you’re definitely going to get a commission on sales. What I propose is that you get three percent of our profits, minus your overheads.”

“Well, that’s a bit vague. Can you tell me what it amounts to?”

“Yes, yes, hold on … Let’s take last year, for example. If this had been operating last year, 1963, you’d have ended up with a bonus of £11,000. How does that sound to you?” Wood smiled confidently.

“It sounds very good,” replied Martin, “but how did you arrive at that?”

Adding up the label’s four salaries and the previous year’s musician fees and multiplying by two, Wood calculated that Parlophone’s overhead was about £55,000. Subtracting that figure from a 3 percent commission of £66,000, the EMI Records boss arrived at an £11,000 bonus.

Martin’s mind grappled with the numbers as a wave of anger surged through his veins. “Wait a minute,” he insisted. “That must be turnover you’re talking about, not profits. Because £66,000 is three percent of … £2.2 million!”

“That’s right.”

“But that must surely be turnover!” pressed Martin, now raising his voice.

“No, no, that’s the profit.”

The last sinew of trust Martin had for EMI snapped. The company was making millions out of Parlophone—not to mention the tens of millions Capitol was set to make in America.

“Thank you very much,” Martin announced. “I haven’t changed my mind at all. I’m leaving.”

Of course, with a mortgage and a family to support, George Martin didn’t have the means to just slam the door behind him. On £3,000, he would have to sit out his bitterness for another year. It was a tricky situation to be in while the Beatles were conquering the world, but financial struggle had always been present throughout his life. Walking out of that fateful meeting, George Martin started a quiet revolt inside EMI—unaware that the idea of independent production was spreading through London’s rapidly mutating music scene.

13. ACTS

Show biz characters around London were dreaming up their own fantasies. In the very eye of the storm, a tall strawberry blond by the name of Andrew Loog Oldham sensed the potential for an alternative to the Beatles.

If anyone knew such a thing was possible, it was him. Andrew Loog Oldham was a PR agent who had peddled the Beatles to London’s columnists throughout the spring of 1963. Although barely nineteen years of age, Oldham was a seasoned hustler—well connected, imaginative, irreverent, and driven by an anarchic desire to disturb Britain’s cozy record business, which he saw as a type of colonial civil service dominated by boring old men.

As the Beatles were swept away on a wave of adulation, he found himself standing at a perfect vantage point. With the onset of
Beatlemania
, appetites had just been whetted. Britain’s entire entertainment industry now had to feed a hungry beast.

Oldham was a game changer who operated on youthful instinct. When he wasn’t working his magic on the telephone, he was swanning around London in flashy chauffeur-driven cars, popping pills, and scheming his next moves. With his taste for the wild life, he seemed to personify the sixties before they really started to swing. Andrew Loog Oldham remains one of the great unsung pioneers of British pop music, from whom so many bands, managers, and indie labels are descended.

Although an enigma to his peers, Oldham was the sum of his various parts. Conceived in 1943, he was the love child of an American air force pilot named Andrew Loog and an English mother, Celia Oldham. When she was just three months pregnant, his father-to-be was killed over the English Channel on a bombing mission. As a fatherless child, Andrew Loog Oldham inherited an elusive connection to America. A student of Hollywood movies, he reasoned with, bullshitted, and motivated others with the self-confident swagger of a Manhattan entrepreneur. His peers were all products of England’s class culture, but Oldham’s dream world was a
can-do
meritocracy where the young, beautiful, and daring would be kings. Charlie Watts once joked that Oldham was the first American he’d ever met.

In 1960, aged just sixteen, he quit school and secured a job at one of his favorite stores on King’s Road, fashion designer Mary Quant’s Bazarr. Arriving for the opening of her second store, in Knightsbridge, he caught his first glimpse of press agents stirring up interest in the national newspapers. At the time, Quant was pioneering the daring new look of the sixties: knee-high boots, miniskirts, high-waisted tweed tunics, tweed knickerbockers, and bobbed hairstyles.

For Oldham, Mary Quant’s modernist wonderland “was akin to being in the right movie. They knew they had recognized the right moment and turned a London cult into a worldwide success, retaining control through independent production. I was getting an education and call to arms that would cause and effect my later work with the Stones and Immediate Records.” Rather than head home to suburbia after work, Oldham got a second job at Ronnie Scott’s, a legendary club where beboppers like Ahmad Jamal, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk performed. Working in the coat check from seven to midnight or 1:00
A.M.
, he also escorted customers to their seats and delivered meals from the Indian restaurant across the street.

It was during these hectic months working two (and sometimes three) jobs that Oldham started showing signs of irrational behavior. One night when he paid a visit to his girlfriend, Sheila Klein, her psychoanalyst father opened the door and announced she wasn’t allowed out until she washed the dishes. Furious, the sixteen-year-old Oldham pulled a starting pistol from his pocket and placed it against Dr. Klein’s head. “Analyze this!” he said before disappearing off to the south coast.

Although he didn’t understand the mechanics of his mood swings, Oldham suffered from manic depression. He was experiencing his first of many sudden encounters with a suicidal blankness. Instead of cracking up around those who knew him, he preferred to disappear to France, writing letters to Mary Quant and Ronnie Scott apologizing for his absence. In the Mediterranean towns of St. Tropez and Cannes, he began hustling rich English tourists for money. He spent nights in jails and hung out with Vince Taylor, the self-destructive performer who later became the inspiration for David Bowie’s
Ziggy Stardust
character.

Once the Mediterranean sunshine had chased away his inner darkness, Oldham returned to London, with his mind made up to break into the record business. In 1961, former Shadows drummer Tony Meehan, then working in Decca’s A&R department, introduced Oldham to R&B records and pointed him to a tiny network of independent producers such as Shel Talmy, who later produced the Who, the Kinks, David Bowie, and Manfred Mann. Joe Meek, another pioneer independent, produced perhaps the biggest hit of the period, “Telstar.” Oldham began freelancing for them and others, mostly doing PR tasks.

Oldham’s flair made him particularly well suited to escorting American artists around London. For example, in 1962, he was paid £5 to keep the press informed about Bob Dylan’s appearance in a London theater production called
Madhouse on Castle Street
. He also met Phil Spector during his first trip to England accompanying the Ronettes. Watching how Spector insulted hotel staff and pranced around London like a prince, Oldham’s inner devil was tickled. “Little men in red corduroy jackets and shades simply did not alight from large Rolls-Royces in Mayfair,” Oldham reminisced. “Phil set the example and I was infatuated with him. I’d spent my time till now being polite, and now I had the opportunity to model myself after a perfect little hooligan.”

Oldham happened to be in the TV studio when the Beatles performed “Please Please Me.” Observing their dapper, smiling manager in the shadows, Oldham reasoned that Epstein’s being “somewhat to the manor born gave him both a self assurance and an entrée with the stubbornly middle-class label managers he had to deal with. At
Thank Your Lucky Stars,
Brian merely stood watching his boys, yet his belief and their talent permeated the room and would soon, thanks to TV, permeate the isles, north to south.”

Wangling his way into a Beatles rehearsal, Oldham approached Brian Epstein. As the well-dressed youngster pitched his PR services, Epstein sized him up. Luckily, Epstein at the time was furious with EMI for not plugging the Beatles with more determination, and he sensed that yes, maybe they should have their own representative “in … LON-DON,” which Epstein pronounced “like a man getting rid of phlegm in his throat.” In those days, it would have been unthinkable that even the most motivated manager based in Liverpool would spend afternoons hounding newspapers and radio stations by long-distance telephone.

So Oldham found himself, just eighteen, presenting the Beatles to London’s media. Although there weren’t any screaming girls yet, there was a momentum building. Oldham rented his own small office for £4 a week in the premises of an agent by the name of Eric Easton and started wearing makeup, realizing that the more he camped up his persona, the more people seemed to take him seriously. When he got the Beatles into
Vogue,
Epstein was so delighted that he reengaged him to plug a fifty-two-date tour on which the Beatles were supporting a young star named Chris Montez. It was during this multiartist ballroom tour that the Beatles started to explode. By the time the tour got to Bedford, the screaming began.

As he stood backstage with Brian Epstein, everything seemed to change in the stillness of absolute noise. The girls were so hysterical they smashed every window into the backstage area. Oldham remembered, “The roar I heard was the roar of the whole world. You can hear something without seeing it, in the same way as you can have an experience that is beyond anything you’ve had before. You don’t have to be clever, you only have to be a member of the public. The noise that night hit me emotionally, like a blow to the chest. The audience that night expressed something beyond repressed adolescent sexuality. The noise they made was the sound of the future … When I looked at Brian, he had the same lump in his throat and tear in his eye as I.”

After the Bedford show, Oldham knew the Beatles were on a path to giant things. His mind was racing. He felt a calling, but, bizarrely enough, not to serve the Beatles—he had to get his own group. Phil Spector had given Oldham some useful advice that took months to compute: If you ever find a group to record, never let the group sign directly to a major, nor use the record company’s own studios. By using your own studios and licensing the masters to a record company, you’ll keep control and earn much more money. Oldham was too young to care about money, but he was attracted to the idea of control. Just as it was for Brian Epstein, the thrill was to hold a giant chick magnet on a leash.

At the time, a pub in Soho called De Hems was where all the music business characters hung out. Nursing an orange juice all afternoon, Oldham would watch the door and hustle for jobs. One afternoon, shortly after the Beatles tour, Peter Jones, editor of
Record Mirror,
tipped off Oldham about a fledgling R&B band called the Rollin’ Stones. Jones knew Oldham was looking for a band of his own and assured him that dirty, old-school R&B was going to be the next big thing. So, just weeks after his realization backstage at the Beatles show, in Bedford, Oldham took the subway to the Station Hotel in Richmond.

Walking toward the entrance, he saw a young couple having a violent argument by a wall outside the venue. Oldham passed by and exchanged a penetrating look with the angry young man, who later turned out to be the band’s singer, a seventeen-year-old Mick Jagger. “There are no accidents,” asserted Oldham, “and Peter Jones was the conduit to my destiny. I was probably forty-eight hours ahead of the rest of the business in getting there, but that’s the way God planned it. I met the Rollin’ Stones and said hello to the rest of my life.”

As the six young musicians performed, Oldham studied the faces. The drummer looked like a jazz beatnik. The dark-haired guitarist was a thick-mouthed hunchback. The bassist had a medieval-looking head. The strawberry blond guitarist had “a face that already looked as though it had a few unpaid bills with life. His head, having forgone a neck, slipped straight into a subliminally formed Greystoke body.” The singer, whom he’d already seen outside, “moved like a Tarzan, plucked from the jungle, not comfortable in his clothes.” There was just one problem—a sixth musician who looked all wrong, Ian Stewart, the piano player.

They were rough and loose, but they had a sound. Above all there was a feeling in the air. Too stunned to approach the Rollin’ Stones after the show, Oldham took the train home sensing this gang was his ticket to bigger things. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any money and was even too young to get an agent’s license. Having called Brian Epstein and some other potential investors, he realized his only viable option was to collaborate with the agent down the hall, Eric Easton. So, after a Stones gig at the Crawdaddy, Oldham and Easton approached Brian Jones, then the official leader of the band.

Although Eric Easton was old-school, he was shrewd. Accepting Oldham’s novel idea to cofound a production company, he discreetly registered the supposed joint venture 100 percent under his own name. The plot thickened when Brian Jones admitted the Stones had recorded a demo at no cost, in return for their management rights. The studio in question, IBC, had unsuccessfully shopped the demo around to the usual labels but legally still had a right to the Stones for another six months—an eternity in 1963. So Oldham and Easton convinced Jones to drop by the studio, pretend he was joining another band, and politely request a release. Whining about himself came natural to Brian Jones even when the details were all bogus. Better still, his parents had lent him £90, which he dangled as a courtesy gesture. The trick worked. IBC took the money, and because Jones was the sole signatory, the entire contract became worthless.