Shout! (31 page)

However exploitative—and frightening—Weissleder was a good employer, whose evident power in the Hamburg underworld protected his young British employees from the Reeperbahn’s darker perils. Each was issued with a small gilt Star-Club badge that acted as a potent shield in cases of difficulty or danger. “The usual thing was that you’d be walking along and someone would try to pull you into a doorway and rob you or rip you off,” Liverpool musician Kingsize Taylor remembers. “But as soon as they saw that badge, and realized you worked for Weissleder, they’d back off straight away.”

The bands were given accommodation in a block of flats above Maxim’s Club where Weissleder’s strippers and mud wrestlers also recuperated between shows. “We were all pretty rough and ready,” Kingsize says, “but the Beatles were the worst of all. Theirs was the only flat where, if the toilet was occupied, they’d go on the floor, then cover it up with newspaper. When they moved out, Weissleder had to have the whole place fumigated.”

The ringleaders in all the maddest and most pointlessly offensive escapades were John Lennon and Adrian Barber, the Big Three’s guitarist who later took a management job with Weissleder. It developed into a kind of contest to see who could be the most outrageous. Barber would walk along the Reeperbahn, dragging a hairbrush behind him on a dog lead. John would come onstage at the Star-Club, goose-stepping and
Sieg Heil
–ing, or naked, with a lavatory seat round his neck. Barber bought a pig at the fish market, brought it back to the flats, and threw it onto a bed where a fellow musician named Buddy Britten was sleeping. Kingsize Taylor remembers Britten’s terrified shrieks and the “shit coming out of the pig’s arse like a flamethrower.”

But even Barber could not match John in the acts of sacrilege that seemed to spring from some profound loathing of his own churchgoing past. On Sunday mornings, he would stand on the balcony of the Beatles’ flat shouting abuse at people walking to services at nearby St.
Joseph’s. In yet another misuse of his art school training, he carved a wooden effigy of Christ on the Cross and attached a water-filled condom to represent an erection. One Easter Sunday, he urinated from the balcony onto the heads of a party of nuns.

“That was the sort of crazy thing you did, full of drink and pills,” Johnny Hutch of the Big Three remembers. “Before we started playing at night, we’d shake Preludin down our throats by the tubeful. I’ve seen John Lennon foaming at the mouth, he’s got so many pills inside him.”

The Beatles were still in Hamburg when, toward the end of April, Brian set off from Liverpool for one last try with the London record companies. As his train rattled south he could not even be sure with whom that try should be made. Every label he could find in the NEMS stock catalog had by now turned the Beatles down. The only hope really did seem to be Embassy, the one everyone laughed at because it was stocked by Woolworth’s.

Someone had suggested that, instead of offering the Beatles on tape he should have a proper “demo” disk to play to the A&R men. That was what brought Brian, in his smart dark overcoat, to the teeming HMV record shop in Oxford Street. Above the shop was a small recording studio where, for a fee of one pound, a tape spool could be converted to an acetate demo.

Brian’s luck finally began to change when the studio engineer, a man named Jim Foye, looked up from processing the disk to remark that the music on it was “not at all bad.” The studio in fact belonged to a firm of music publishers named Ardmore and Beechwood who were in turn a subsidiary of EMI, the record giant from whom Brian and the Beatles had already suffered multiple rejections. So enthused was Foye that he took the demo up to Ardmore and Beechwood, one floor above the studio, and played it to the company’s boss, Syd Coleman. Coleman in turn saw “something” in the demo, asked to see Brian, and offered to publish two of the numbers on it, “Love of the Loved” and “Hello Little Girl.” He also asked whether the Beatles were signed with a record label, to which Brian’s diplomatic answer was “not yet.” In fact, he nurtured one final hope and had seriously been on the point of auditioning the Beatles with Embassy, the despised “Woolies” label.

Coleman’s deputy at Ardmore and Beechwood, a former singer named Kim Bennett, was so taken with their demo that he suggested
recording them as an independent production in the studio below. According to Bennett, Coleman put this idea to EMI’s recording head, Len Wood, but the company’s rigid internal protocol could not permit its publishing arm to start dabbling in recording. Instead, Coleman sent Brian to yet another EMI subsidiary, the Parlophone label, whose A&R head, George Martin, happened to be a personal friend. According to Kim Bennett, a “gentlemen’s agreement” was made between Coleman and Brian that if the Beatles proved successful, Ardmore and Beechwood would handle their song publishing.

At that time, the only George Martin known outside Tin Pan Alley was a cockney radio comedian specializing in domestic monologues. Nothing could have been more unlike the Parlophone label boss who shook Brian’s hand a few days after that chance visit to the HMV shop. This George Martin was tall and gauntly elegant, with a clipped BBC newsreader’s accent and the air, Brian himself later said, “of a stern but fair-minded schoolmaster.”

Martin listened politely to Brian’s claim that the Beatles would one day be “bigger than Elvis.” Like everyone else in the business he had heard that many times before. Playing the acetate, he could understand why a group partial to “Sheik of Araby” and “Your Feet’s Too Big” might not be considered an instantly commercial proposition. But, unlike everyone else, he found things to praise. He said he liked Paul’s voice and some of the guitar playing, and the jaunty harmony in “Hello Little Girl.” He was not excited, merely interested. “There was an unusual quality—a certain roughness. I thought to myself, ‘There might
just
be something there.’”

Martin agreed to give the Beatles a recording test in June, after their return from Hamburg. It would only be a test, a studio audition like the one they had failed at Decca, and for a label not much in prestige above Embassy. But Brian was never one to downplay things, least of all now. “Congratulations, boys,” ran the telegram he at once sent to Hamburg. “EMI request recording session. Please rehearse new material.”

NINE

“SOMEBODY HAD TO PAY FOR THOSE 10,000 RECORDS BRIAN BOUGHT”

W
hen George Martin joined EMI in 1950 people still played “gramophones” cranked up by handles, and records were heavy black objects one foot in diameter that broke if you dropped them. Record studios were drab institutional places supervised by men in white coats, and so rigidly formal that not even a jazz drummer could take his jacket off during the recording session.

Young George Martin had joined EMI’s Parlophone label as assistant to the head of A&R, Oscar Preuss. He was, even then, suave, elegant, and polite. His superiors, in the trade jargon, said he was “very twelve inch.” They little realized he came from a humble North London background and that his father had once sold newspapers on a street corner.

He taught himself to play piano by ear, and at school ran his own little dance band, George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers. In 1943, aged seventeen, he joined the Fleet Air Arm. It was his navy service that gave him a large social leg up and also allowed him later to attend the London Guildhall School of Music, to continue his piano studies and take up the oboe. His first job, before joining Parlophone, was with the BBC Music Library. A little of the BBC manner and accent stuck.

EMI in 1950 was a corporation not much different in size and spirit from the BBC. Founded in 1931 as The Gramophone Company, its name changed, as its field diversified, to Electrical and Mechanical Industries. EMI invented the first practicable British television system: It manufactured television sets, medical equipment, and weapons systems under contract to the then War Office.

It also made records on a series of labels ingested mostly during the prewar years. Its pride was HMV, the definitive label of wistful dog staring into a gramophone trumpet. An HMV dealership in the retail world was as prized as one in Rolls-Royce cars.

No one ever prized the dealership for Parlophone. EMI had bought it
in the 1930s as the German Lindstrom label—hence the L label logo that was one day to be mistaken for a £ sterling sign. Within EMI in the fifties it was known derisively as the “junk” label. To Oscar Preuss and his assistant George Martin were left the despised light music catalog—Sidney Torch and his Orchestra; Bob and Alf Pearson; Roberto Inglez, “the Latin American Scot.” A sale of only a few hundred copies made any artist viable; to sell a thousand was spectacular. It happened in 1954 when a crooner named Dick James went to number two in the Top Twenty with the theme song from the
Robin Hood
television show.

That year, as it happened, EMI was in deep trouble. Its chief product, the heavy wooden cabinet TV set, was fast growing obsolete against the new, light, plastic sets coming from Japan. Decca, EMI’s great rival, had just introduced the long-playing record, for which EMI’s technicians predicted no future other than passing novelty.

In 1954, the EMI chairmanship passed to Joseph Lockwood—not a showbiz man, like his predecessor, but a successful industrialist, big in engineering and flour milling. Lockwood was appalled by the decay of the organization he had inherited. He also quickly decided where the future lay. He ended the production of cabinet TV sets and ordered twenty of the new LP record presses. A year later, in what was considered a foolhardy enterprise, he paid 3 million pounds for an established American record company, Capitol.

It was in the flurry of Lockwood’s first year as chairman that Oscar Preuss, Parlophone’s head of A&R, retired. By oversight more than anything, George Martin became, at twenty-nine, the youngest boss of an EMI label, at a salary of £1,100 per year.

Parlophone, to EMI’s bureaucratic mind, remained the junk label. It was simply junk of a different, not unsuccessful kind. Martin, in the late fifties, went in heavily for comic dialogue records like Peter Ustinov’s
Mock Mozart
and Peter Sellers’s
Songs for Swinging Sellers
. One of his coups was to recognize what potential cult followings lay in the new generation of London comedy stage revues. He produced live album versions of Flanders and Swann’s
At the Drop of a Hat
, and of a four-man undergraduate show, destined to influence comedy throughout the next decade, called
Beyond the Fringe
.

When rock ’n’ roll arrived George Martin shared in the general detestation felt by all trained musicians. It was his duty, however, as an A&R man, to tour the Soho coffee bars for talent. He auditioned and turned
down Tommy Steele, preferring to sign up Steele’s backing skiffle group, the Vipers. Significantly, in six years up to 1962, Parlophone’s only Top Ten hit was a comedy number, “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” by the Temperance Seven.

On EMI’s Columbia label, the A&R head Norrie Paramour meanwhile enjoyed virtually unbroken success and gigantic sales with his discovery, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. George Martin did not particularly like the echoey guitar sound that the Shadows had made all the rage. But he did envy Paramour his golden, effortless protégés. Each comedy success for Parlophone was the result of an endless search for new original material. With a pop group the product was all the same, so Martin thought: You simply sat back and let it happen.

Such was Martin’s frame of mind that April day in 1962 when Brian Epstein walked in and played the Beatles’ demo. After all their efforts to be otherwise, they would have been enraged by Martin’s first idea. Perhaps, he thought, he had found his very own Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

On Wednesday, June 6, 1962, the Beatles arrived at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in the leafy north London suburb of St. John’s Wood. Today, the place still looks very much as it did back then: the very last imaginable location for an international record company’s creative nerve center. Within an expansive front drive stands a plain-fronted late Victorian town house, painted plain white, with a steep flight of stone steps ascending to its front door. The espionage world could hardly have created a more innocent front for the labyrinth of state-of-the art studios, technical departments, and offices that lay—and still lie—behind.

The Beatles followed their manager up the front steps in a state of high excitement largely induced by Brian’s failure to explain precisely what was to happen today. They believed—as did everyone in Liverpool—that the test was the merely routine preamble to recording for Parlophone on the basis of a contract already promised.
Mersey Beat
had said so, even giving July as the month of their first record release and inviting readers to suggest possible titles for issue. They were, in any case, still dazed after Hamburg, the Star-Club, and six virtually sleepless weeks.

At Abbey Road studios that day, something entirely unexpected happened. George Martin, that elegant BBC-accented A&R man and the
four scruffily shod Liverpool boys took a liking to one another. Early in their conversation George Martin happened to mention he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, the founding members of the radio
Goon Show
. “Goon” humor is dear to most Liverpudlians: In John Lennon’s eyes, especially, Martin was instantly raised to near divinity by his connection with the man who had sung the “Ying-Tong Song.” He was, besides, agreeably plainspoken, neither ingratiating nor condescending. John and Paul—and especially George—were soon plying him with questions about the studio and its equipment. Only Pete Best remained, as usual, silent. George Martin does not remember exchanging a word with him all afternoon.

Brian had already sent down a neatly typewritten list of songs that the Beatles could play if required. A large portion were standards, like “Besame Mucho,” since these, Brian thought—mistakenly—had impressed Martin most on the demo tape. There was also the batch of new songs they had written in Hamburg, mostly round the battered piano at Jim Hawke’s Seaman’s Mission on the docks.