Shout! (35 page)

On December 18, with the worst possible grace, they set off for Hamburg and what would be their farewell performance at the Star-Club. “Please Please Me” was just beginning to show in the Top Twenty; rather than vanishing abroad they felt they should be on home territory, taking every possible opportunity to promote the single. It was not much consolation that sharing the Star-Club’s Christmas bill would be Carl Perkins, one of their earliest rock ’n’ roll idols, whose easygoing numbers, like “Honey Don’t” and “Matchbox,” had proved ideal for giving Ringo a stab at singing lead.

By now the Beatles’ place as darlings of the Reeperbahn had been somewhat usurped by Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the highoctane R&B band who had taught them so much at Merseyside gigs like Lathom Hall. Kingsize Taylor, the towering, throaty-voiced butcher’s apprentice, was an uncomplaining workhorse for Weissleder and other German promoters, sometimes playing sets of up to twelve hours’ duration with just fifteen minutes’ break each hour. However, after several incidents with tear-gas guns in the flats above Maxim’s Club, Weissleder had felt it safer to move all his British bands into a small hotel, the Pacific. There Kingsize and the Beatles celebrated their reunion by pelting one another with grapes.

The Star-Club’s barnlike acoustics made it impossible for the bands
to hear themselves while they played. To help him and his colleagues check their sound balance, Kingsize Taylor left a tape recorder running throughout much of that 1962 Christmas show. So was accidentally preserved for posterity the fullest and most vivid record of the Beatles’ soon-to-disappear stage act. Audibly drunk, fluffing words and notes, shouting back to hecklers in pidgin German, they lurch through some twenty songs in their old, undisciplined mixture of rock ’n’ roll classics, country songs, middle-of-the-road ballads, and show tunes—“Your Feet’s Too Big,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Besame Mucho,” even Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again.” Kingsize and the Dominoes had been featuring a new soul number, the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” which—keeping up Lathom Hall tradition—the Beatles had instantly pirated, reproducing even the Dominoes’ added guitar break.

On Ray Charles’s “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” the lead vocal is warbled by an unfamiliar voice that makes Ringo Starr sound Caruso-like by comparison. It is Horst Fascher, the Star-Club’s lethal bouncer. They let Horst (and also his brother Freddy) have a go onstage in return for getting the beer in.

TEN

“FOUR FRENZIED LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROYS EARNING 5,000 POUNDS A WEEK”

T
he winter of 1962–63 was Britain’s worst for almost a hundred years. From December to mid-March the entire country disappeared and a snow-leveled tundra took its place, stretching from north to south, silent and motionless but for snowplows trying to locate the buried highways. With the blizzards came Siberian cold that froze the English Channel, annihilated old people and the Essex oyster beds, wiped out the zebra at Whipsnade Zoo, turned milk into creamflavored sorbet, and caused beer to explode spontaneously in its bottles. Southwest England was completely cut off; indeed, there seemed at one point a sporting chance that Wales would never be seen again. As usual in Britain winter was the last thing anyone had expected and, as usual, the British responded to chaos with cheerfulness. A year of unprecedented uproar, of unparalleled outrage, thus began with a feeling that everything in Britain was much the way it had always been. Everyone talked, and talked, about the weather.

On January 12, the nation, still snowed into its homes, provided a bumper audience for ABC-TV’s Saturday night pop show
Thank Your Lucky Stars
. The show was popular for two reasons: its teenage record critic Janice, and the imaginative studio sets that were built around singers and groups as they mimed, not always accurately, their latest Top Twenty disk. Janice’s peculiar magic was a thick Birmingham accent in which, awarding some new release maximum points, she would invariably say: “Oi’ll give it foive.”

A certain act on
Lucky Stars
that night had caused some perplexity to the show’s producer, Philip Jones, and his set designer. Jones had kept his promise to his friend Dick James to book the Beatles in the same week that “Please Please Me” was released. Jones had not met them until
the afternoon they arrived at ATV’s Birmingham studios, after driving straight down from a tour of Scottish ballrooms. “We’d no idea how to present them,” Jones says. “In the end, we just gave up. We decided to put each one of them inside a big metal heart. It was obvious that the song, not our set, would be the thing that sold them.”

The four metal hearts framed a pop group such as no British teenager south of Lancashire had ever seen before. Their hair was not blow-dried into a cockade; it fringed their eyes like the high fur hats of Grenadier guardsmen. Their suits buttoned up to the neck, completely concealing their ties. The front three figures did not, as was usual, step to and fro: They bounced and jigged with their guitar necks out of time. One, unprecedentedly, played a Spanish guitar; another held a bass guitar like a stretched-out violin, its skinny neck pointing leftward rather than rightward, in completely the wrong direction. All four compounded their eccentricity by refusing to look stern and moody, as pop stars should, but by grinning broadly at the cameras and each other. The song they performed was largely inaudible, owing to the screams of the studio audience—all but for the moment where, with one extra zesty “Whoa yeah,” their voices toppled into falsetto. Then, six million snowbound British teenagers heard what George Martin, on his musician’s stool, had heard; what Dick James in his Tin Pan Alley garret had heard; what Philip Jones had heard even over the telephone. It was the indefinable yet unmistakable sound of a number one.

The same week brought enthusiastic reviews of “Please Please Me” in the music trade press. Keith Fordyce, a leading Radio Luxembourg disk jockey, said in
New Musical Express
that “Please Please Me” was “a really enjoyable platter, full of vigour and vitality.” The
World’s Fair
thought the Beatles had “every chance of becoming the big star attraction of 1963.” Brian Matthew, emcee of
Thank Your Lucky Stars
and BBC radio’s
Saturday Club
, and the country’s most influential commentator on pop music, delivered the ultimate accolade, calling them “musically and visually the most accomplished group to emerge since the Shadows.”

The national press, however, still maintained an attitude of scornful indifference to teenagers and their music. One exception was the London
Evening Standard
, which on Saturdays published a full page by its young pop columnist, Maureen Cleave. A friend of Cleave’s, the Liverpool-based journalist Gillian Reynolds, had been urging her for
months to come up and write something about the Beatles and the Cavern Club. Late in January, just as “Please Please Me” was about to enter the Top Ten, Maureen Cleave traveled to Liverpool to interview them for her
Evening Standard
page. On the train she met Vincent Mulchrone, the
Daily Mail
’s chief feature writer, bound on the same assignment.

The Beatles were in Liverpool to play a one-nighter at the Grafton Ballroom before leaving on the Helen Shapiro package tour. Mulchrone and Cleave were taken by Brian to see the queues that, as usual, had formed outside the Grafton two hours in advance of opening time. Some of the girls told Cleave they hadn’t bought “Love Me Do” when it first appeared for fear the Beatles would become famous, leave Liverpool, and never return.

The interview that followed was like none Maureen Cleave had ever done with a pop group. “The Beatles made me laugh immoderately, the way I used to laugh as a child at the Just William books. Their wit was just so keen and sharp—John Lennon’s especially. They all had this wonderful quality—it wasn’t innocence, but everything was new to them. They were like William, finding out about the world and trying to make sense of it.”

“John Lennon,” Cleave wrote, “has an upper lip which is brutal in a devastating way. George Harrison is handsome, whimsical and untidy. Paul McCartney has a round baby face while Ringo Starr is ugly but cute. Their physical appearance inspires frenzy. They look beat-up and depraved in the nicest possible way.”

The piece caught the knockabout flavor of their conversation—John’s threat, for instance, to lie down on the stage like Al Jolson during the Helen Shapiro tour, and Paul’s rejoinder that he was too blind to see the audience anyway. In John, Cleave found a fellow devotee of the William stories. “After the piece came out, John said to me, ‘You write like that woman who did the William books.’ For me, it was like being told one wrote like Shakespeare.”

They had been hired to tour with Helen Shapiro by Arthur Howes, the promoter who saw them die the death at Peterborough but who had, even so, kept an option with Brian to rebook them. This Howes now did, for a bottom-of-the-bill fee of eighty pounds per week. The tour was to last throughout February, visiting theaters as far south as Taunton, Shrewsbury, and, once again, Peterborough.

It was by no means one of Arthur Howes’ major package tours. Helen Shapiro, who had enjoyed spectacular success as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, was now considered, at sixteen, to be somewhat past her best. The Beatles, at any rate, found her awesomely starlike with her chauffeur-driven car, her dressing-room TV set, and constant, ferocious chaperonage.

She was, as it happened, a friendly girl who preferred to dodge her chauffeur and chaperone and travel with the Beatles and other small fry on the bus. Her chief memory is of snow, and of John Lennon, next to her, pulling his cripple face at passersby through a clear patch in the frosted window. “He would never sit still—none of them could. They’d always be writing songs or fooling about or practicing their autographs. Paul, I remember, used to practice his a lot. They didn’t have any giveaway photographs of themselves, so they used to practice signing across pictures of me.

“Paul was the PR. He was the one who came up to me on the tour and said, very nervous, ‘Er—we’ve written this song, we wonder if you’d like to do it.’ It was ‘Misery.’”

In Carlisle, after they had returned to their hotel, someone came up to Helen and invited her to a Young Conservatives dance in progress in the hotel ballroom. Feeling cold and bored she decided to accept. The Beatles also decided to accept. The Young Conservatives door steward saw them all coming down the corridor, taking long steps and snapping their fingers in chorus like a
West Side Story
“Jets” routine. They got past the door steward but were then, stiffly, asked to leave. The Beatles’ leather jackets had caused offense and outrage.

Next morning, the
Daily Express
reported that the famous schoolgirl pop star Helen Shapiro had been ejected from a dance in Carlisle. Sympathy was entirely with the hotel, the Young Conservatives, and with the schoolgirl star herself, since the incident had obviously not been her fault. It was the leather jackets worn by her companions that gave the story the whiff of sordidness that was Fleet Street’s only interest in printing stories about pop musicians.

On February 16, while they were still iced into the tour bus with Helen Shapiro,
Melody Maker
’s Top Twenty showed those reprehensible leather jacket wearers’ record “Please Please Me” at number two. That meant another journey south through the snow, to appear a second time on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
, on BBC radio’s
Saturday Club
, and on
EMI’s own
Radio Luxembourg Show
. On March 2, the snows were beginning to melt.
Melody Maker
’s chart showed “Please Please Me” at number one. Brian spread the paper out on his desk in Liverpool, and Olive and Freda and everyone crowded round to look. It was true.

Liverpool could not believe it. Letters poured into the NEMS office, written on complete toilet rolls, on cardboard hearts four feet high, on cylinders of wallpaper. There were also celebratory offerings of life-size cuddly toys, “Good Luck” cakes from Sayer’s, sacks of charm bracelets, brooches, eternity rings, jelly babies, even—from one fan with dockyard connections—a live tarantula in a specially ventilated box. “Luckily, I never opened it,” Freda Kelly says. “I took one look inside the box and ran. Brian sent me out to find a home for it at the School of Tropical Medicine.”

In his third-floor front office Brian sat, amid ringing telephones, with a pretense at coolness that, for once, deceived no one. “I’d never seen him so excited,” Freda says. “It was the first thing he said to anyone who rang up. ‘Have you heard about the boys?’ If anyone came to see him it was the first thing out of his mouth: ‘Have you heard about the boys?’”

George Martin heard the news with elation, but also deep thought. The Beatles were doing this week what the Kalin Twins had done in 1957, what the Allisons had done in 1960, and what the Brook Brothers had in 1961. Any A&R man could reel off a list of such one-hit wonders, raised to freakish fame on a single song, then instantly forgotten. Martin’s concern was to capitalize on a success that, according to the statistics of the business, had only the smallest outside chance of happening twice.

The way you capitalized on a number-one single in 1962 was to rush-release an LP record of the same name. It was a simple, shameless catchpenny device to persuade the teenage public to buy the same song again, but at £1.50 instead of 62p. For few, if any, listened to the supporting tracks, knowing all too well what they would be. They would be standards, hastily recorded in an insincere attempt to pass off some perishable, new, blow-dried zombie as an “all-round entertainer.’”

Martin’s instinct was that he could do something better with the Beatles’ first LP. He was, after all, distinguished as a producer of live stage recordings. He considered, but abandoned, the idea of taping them live at the Cavern. His gamble was that they would be able to pour out the
excitement anywhere. “What you’re going to do,” he told them on February 11 at Abbey Road studios, “is play me this selection of things I’ve chosen from what you do at the Cavern.”