The Beatles (67 page)

Chapter 20
Dead Chuffed

O
nly days after the release of their latest single, the Beatles viewed their Saturday, January 19, 1963, appearance on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
as a major plug for “Please Please Me.” (At the afternoon rehearsal they learned that
the spots were all “mimed
” to records, which allowed them to more or less walk through the two-minute segment.) The audience was completely unprepared for what they saw. Gliding eerily across the screen were four extraordinary-looking boys, grinning at one another with goofy joy from beneath mops of unhumanly long hair and behaving like cuddly wind-up toys—heads bobbing on an invisible spring, shoulders seesawing to the beat, bodies jerking back and forth—in a manner reminiscent of a
Carry On
gang send-up. No one had ever seen hair that long—or that shape—before. Was it some kind of a joke? And their suits broke all the rules; they were smart and relaxed, with a nod to the tradition of good English tailoring, but also a wink in the way they were buttoned to the neck.

Once viewers got past the window dressing, the music knocked them out cold. Hearing “Please Please Me” had the same effect as being thrown into an icy shower. After sitting through thirty-eight minutes of warm, sudsy pop, this bracing rock ’n roll song cut right to the bone. The intro alone hit a nerve. The tone of it was powerful, unrelenting.
Listen to this:
“Last night I said these words to m-y-y-y-g-i-r-r-r-l…”
Harmonies!
Gorgeous three-part vocals, followed by a dramatic explosion of ascending guitar chords. “Please
pleeeeeease
me, wo-yeah, like I please…” And that finish—five sharp, emphatically executed chords wrapped up in a sustained burst of drumbeats—left the whole thing vibrating with uncommon energy.

A bomb had gone off. British rock ’n roll had arrived.

In the next three years, the Beatles would be joined by the Olympian forces of British rock: the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Hollies, Van Morrison, Manfred Mann, and Traffic, as well as virtually the entire Merseybeat roster—all of them swept in on the vast tide of musicians and personalities that transformed the popular culture. Plenty of others contributed to the exuberant groundswell, from artists (Hockney) to critics (Tynan) to photographers (Bailey) to designers (Quant) to writers (Fleming), but none of them caused such a stir as did the Beatles; none was as personable or as newsworthy; none was so innocent that every exploit, every record seemed genuinely fresh and unspoiled by creeping commercialism. “
To those of us in England
who lived for the next great American single,” says journalist Ray Connolly, “it seemed like the Beatles were the promise we’d been waiting for all our lives.”

Unlike “Love Me Do,” which had scrounged for random airplay, “Please Please Me” echoed everywhere.
Radio Luxembourg had added it
right out of the box, and not the occasional spotty play they begrudged to borderline new releases but the kind of all-out saturation that indicated a smash. The same happened at the BBC, where it immediately cracked the teenage playlists, then crept ever so gently into the “light programming” shows. Critics—including some who had found fault with “Love Me Do”—raved. By the end of the month, a year after being told the Beatles were inappropriate for radio, Brian was fielding offers from a variety of producers for appearances on such important shows as
The Friday Spectacular, People and Places, Saturday Club, The Talent Spot,
and
Here We Go.

The mood in the overcrowded headquarters of NEMS was irrepressibly upbeat. Since the beginning of the year, the management end of the business had taken on a momentum of its own, sustained mostly by the Beatles but intensified by some fresh roster moves Brian had made, as well as others in the works. Plans were now under way for the release of Gerry and the Pacemakers’ first record—the resurrected “How Do You Do It,” produced by George Martin—which was scheduled for the end of January.
And sensing some ground gained
at EMI, Brian also signed the Big Three, in the hope of grooming them for a session with one of the company’s labels. “
Things were going so well
,” recalls Tony Bramwell, “that he started believing he had the magic touch.”

Indeed, Brian so enjoyed the deal-making aspect that he decided to develop another artist almost from scratch. Since the end of the previous year, he’d had his eye on a shy, plump-faced boy with unobvious good looks named Billy Ashton. Ashton’s voice was as thin as watered-down soup, he moved awkwardly onstage, and those loud, black-and-pink suits he favored didn’t fool anyone. But Brian, according to Alistair Taylor, “
probably fancied the lad
” and was full of his own “star-making” potential. “Brian knew Billy couldn’t sing,” says Taylor, but he wouldn’t allow a little thing like that to get in the way, “because [Billy] had the right image; he was a good-looking, clean-cut, impressionable young lad who could
approximately
sing, which would more than do.”

Decades later, Billy Kramer (Brian changed his name, thinking Ashton “too posh”) would be asked to account for Brian Epstein’s interest in his career. Shrugging, he says, “
I was just a wild card
,” meaning an inconsequential component. “It could have been anybody, when you think about it.”

Up until a year earlier, Brian Epstein’s only experience with rock ’n roll had been ordering records to stock the bins at his father’s store. Now he had to organize—relying mostly on his imagination—a full-blown management company substantial in size and complicated in detail. The duties were no longer limited to penciling in local club appearances but now involved recording dates, radio appearances, press interviews, label and contract negotiations, transportation, overnight accommodations, and fan mail. There were fees to be collected, weekly salaries paid (each of the Beatles received a paycheck of £50 every Friday), schedules coordinated, equipment purchased, wardrobe fitted. And Brian handled everything himself—every phone call, every booking, every piece of mail, every arrangement: every decision. There were assistants to do the legwork, but the responsibility was entirely his.

It was a demanding but manageable workload that Brian had undertaken. But with the success of “Please Please Me,” all hell broke loose. Sales were strong, stronger than anything EMI had expected, requiring repeated pressings to satisfy demand. And in Liverpool the impact was explosive. Now every time the band came in to see Brian, be it for routine business or to root through stacks of fan mail, extreme measures had to be
taken to provide for their safety. “
Whenever word spread
that the boys were inside, kids started coming around the shop, blocking the doors so the ordinary customers couldn’t get in,” Frieda Kelly remembers. After so many years of complete informality, it seemed downright unfriendly, if not hostile, to suddenly throw up barriers. Eventually, Norris explains, the hard-core fans refused to leave NEMS until the Beatles came downstairs, so Brian would send the boys out the second-floor fire escape, onto the roof, where a cast-iron ladder lowered them to safety on busy Whitechapel.

Harry Epstein wasn’t pleased
. His business—Liverpool’s foremost appliance store—had become a hangout for crowds of Beatles fans that often snowballed into thirty or forty kids. More and more, when Harry returned from lunch with Clive they had to fight their way inside. Brian did his best to propose remedies—“
I’ll ask Bob Wooler
to have a word with the kids,” he promised—but the inconvenience grew only worse. Harry put his foot down: Brian had to look for another place to conduct his new venture.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Beatles were set to embark on their first major tour—dead-last on a six-act bill headlined by Helen Shapiro, the teenage pop sensation who reigned as Britain’s Sweetheart. A poised, showbiz-style belter with a megawatt personality, often described by friends as “a pint-sized Ethel Merman” (although Teresa Brewer was probably more apropos), Shapiro had racked up several middle-of-the-road hits and a following that was rock-solid in the provinces. The Beatles were “elated” to appear on the bill. In their book, Helen Shapiro was a star, even though she sang what John openly referred to as “mush.”

“
The Beatles made little or no impression
on the first few nights of the tour,” singer Kenny Lynch, one of the other performers, recalled years later. “They played their hearts out, like everyone else, but it would have taken a blowtorch to get those audiences to warm to us.” The response in Bradford, and again in Doncaster, reflected the brutal chill gripping England, especially in the Northeast, where the flatlands, naked and defenseless, were hammered by howling North Sea winds. There was little cheer in the lonely towns around Yorkshire that winter. Blizzards—one right after another—had ripped across the country, isolating villages and their people from one another, and a fresh covering of snow, layered in strata on the pitted roads, swept down from Scotland, keeping many of the faithful fans away. The Beatles appear not to have minded the inconvenience. Even the shabby accommodations—fifteen-shilling guesthouses, some of which “looked like something out of Vincent Price’s cellar”—failed to dampen
their spirits. As John noted, they were
happy “just to get out of Liverpool
and [to] break new ground.” Those dire jive-hall gigs, the endless lunchtime sessions, even Hamburg, where they were regarded as stars—all had run their course, and the Beatles, bored and restless, aspired to new challenges, no matter the Siberian conditions.

By the time they reached Carlisle, the ice had thawed. At the ABC Cinema, a grand, slightly tattered, old picture palace where they were booked to play two shows, the seats were packed with kids who had been shut inside all month. Besides the insurgent relief they felt, there was palpable anticipation in the room. “Please Please Me” was proving an efficient calling card. The record—along with fairly heavy buzz dispatched by favorable disc jockeys—had sparked serious interest in the Beatles, and fans scattered among the crowd began to react with tremendous enthusiasm. Gordon Sampson, covering the show for
NME,
found the behavior incredible. A buildup for the Beatles erupted from the moment the houselights went down, as “
the audience repeatedly called for them
while other artists were performing.” The response was unprecedented.

That night the Beatles were fourth on the bill, following three professionally tight but insipid acts. Kenny Lynch was on right before them. Before he left the stage, a murmur was rippling through the hall. “It was clear from the middle of my set,” Lynch recalls, “that [the] audience was waiting for them.” Lynch remained onstage while his backing band unplugged their instruments and fled, then looked into the wings for his cue. John and George, standing practically on top of each other, waggled the necks of their guitars. Lynch put the microphone to his lips and said, “And now…” But the rest of it was drowned out by an uproar as the Beatles bounded onto the stage.

Looking back over the Beatles’ set, the repertoire seems unexceptional. They opened with a jaunty cover version of “Chains,” then more covers—“Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” and “A Taste of Honey”—which provided a comfort zone for the audience who expected as much, no more and no less, from young British bands. But the Beatles’ showmanship, that mix of aggression coupled with those dazzling, seductive smiles they’d hit upon at the Cavern and perfected in Hamburg, scored instantly with the kids. And it was in sharp contrast to the canned arrangements pumped out by the previous bands. By the time they launched into “Please Please Me”—jacking up the excitement with that raucous harmonica-bass intro and shaking their heads in unison—the place just went wild.

“I think the Beatles shook those crowds up, even scared them a little,” says Kenny Lynch, who watched every set from the cinema wings. “They were so different, so tight, so confident, really playing their hearts out. It was like no experience those kids ever had before. Every girl thought they were singing straight to her, every boy saw himself standing in their place.