The Beatles (69 page)

John tore open a wax carton and gargled noisily with milk. He’d played most of the day in a rumpled suit, but sometime after dinner the jacket was removed and two fingers yanked down the tie. Now, without a word, he stripped off his shirt. He draped it over a bench, then walked over to the mike and nodded to the others: good to go.

It is obvious from the very first notes that John was straining for control. “Shake it up bay-be-eee…” was more of a shriek than singing. There was nothing left of his voice. It was bone-dry, stripped bare, with all the resonance husked from the tone, and the sound it made was like an angry, hoarse-voiced fan screeching at a football match. Between clamped jaws, contorting his face, he croaked, “
Twist and shout.
” He had been struggling all day to reach notes, but this was different, this hurt. And it was painful to listen to. Still, John held nothing in reserve. Trancelike, as the band rocked harder, building excitement with their impetuous energy, the struggle grew more intense. “C’mon, and twist a little closer” broke up into an agonizing, demonic rasp, until on the last refrain the tortured throatiness strangled every word before Paul, in admiration, shouted, “
Hey,
” celebrating, as they miraculously crossed the finish line.

John was wasted, near collapse, but the others already knew what he was about to find out from a playback: that for all its hairiness, “Twist and Shout” is a masterpiece—imperfect but no less masterful, with all the rough edges exposed to underscore its power. It is raw, explosive. The sound of ravaged lassitude, of everything coming apart, only complements the spirit of a tumultuous live performance. In the booth, there was jubilation. George Martin and his crew knew they had “
got it in one
,” and as he and
the others later claimed, they reveled in it. The Beatles had their first album, and as John so eloquently put it, they were “
dead chuffed
.”

But there was no rest for the weary. For the next ten days the Beatles humped around the country playing one-nighters on a route that often seemed designed by Jackson Pollock. After tearing out of London, they drove straight to Yorkshire, then east to Hull, stopping in Liverpool on February 14 long enough to play a Valentine’s Day dance.

It was a riotous homecoming, with almost two thousand of the faithful jamming into the Locarno Ballroom, where an agitated disc jockey repeatedly admonished the crowd “
to give the boys some air
.” The Beatles were no longer the loutish, chain-smoking, largely unprofessional—shameless—band that had haunted local jive hives months before. They took the stage like stars and launched into a set that had been shaped and refined to make the most of their new success. Kinder, gentler, even their look had improved; it was more tailored, their Beatles haircuts stylishly groomed, and at key points during songs, when they sensed the audience was in their thrall, George, Paul, and John, on cue, would hit a falsetto
oooo-o-o
and shake their heads in unison, inciting an ecstatic response.
This was a trick they had practiced
on tour, and when it worked onstage they grinned broadly, beaming, as though delighted by the adulation. Screams ripped through the seams of each song: rapturous approval and vows of love mixed with general hysteria, amplified tenfold since their last appearance. For some friends, the scene held great significance. Colin Manley, the Remo Four’s guitarist, recalls how he had stopped by the Locarno to say hello to George and felt humbled by the Beatles’ aura. “
Just a few weeks before
they’d been nothing more than mates, one of us,” he recalls, “but it was clear that night they’d become stars.”

But becoming stars didn’t mean star treatment. A week later the Beatles played an uproarious show at the Cavern,
drawing the biggest queue
that anyone could remember since the place had opened. Their sets ran long, instigated by delirious pleas for encores. As a result, it wasn’t until after eleven o’clock that they could break free of the club. Immediately afterward, they piled into the van and headed south to London, Neil Aspinall pitching down road after narrow road, mile after mile, against
swirling winds and in almost total darkness, while the Beatles, slumped against one another in the back, stole whatever shut-eye the potholes permitted. Just before dawn, they crept into London, grabbed some breakfast, then wandered around the shops to kill a few hours, before turning up at the Playhouse Theatre for a BBC television taping. Afterward, they darted out the door and spun back on the same roads. All for a four-minute spot.

There were times during the zigzag around the nation that the Beatles grumbled—grumbled
mightily—
about the brutal grind. How much would this really boost record sales? Why couldn’t it have been scheduled more conveniently? Was Brian driving them too hard? In the space of ten days, they’d come off a difficult tour, cut an album, played ten shows, and pulled off a day trip to London, with a solid block of eight days still ahead of them. The great distances they covered on the lousy British roads wore them out. “There was only
a small piece of motorway
in those days, so we’d be on the A5 for hours,” Ringo recalled. The roads killed them; the roads—and the lousy British weather. “Some nights it was so foggy that we’d be doing one mile an hour, but we’d still keep going.”

Going—and grumbling. But after the grumbling came the work. Exhausted though the Beatles might have been, they never passed up an opportunity of any kind to promote themselves. A workingman’s club, a talent show, a dance, a radio plug—no appearance was too small for the Beatles. Drive all night to a gig, shake hands with a distributor, sign autographs at a record shop, they did everything—
everything
—necessary to get their name around, to win fans, to succeed. There was a feeling shared among the band that if they kept at it, the dream would come true. And every so often there was a payoff, an incentive that let them know they were on the right track, that it mattered, that it wasn’t for naught.

The record deal was just such a reward, and it had kept them going for quite a long time. But it was nothing compared with the news Brian delivered the following week, while the Beatles played a club date in Manchester. “Please Please Me” had not only hit the charts, it had shot straight to number one.

Number one! As much as the news thrilled them, they had to hear it for themselves.

The Beatles remained skeptical.
The
NME
Top Thirty
cast them in a tie for the top spot, sharing honors with Frank Ifield’s dirgelike cover of “The Wayward Wind,” an American hit. Paul took a lot of grief over this
distinction.
Since breaking up with Dot Rhone
, he’d been dating Iris Caldwell, Rory Storm’s ravishingly beautiful sister, who, as everyone in Liverpool knew, was two-timing him—with Frank Ifield. There was no denying that it irked Paul. He “
was berserk over [Iris]
,” says a friend who knew them, and her affair with Ifield really set Paul’s teeth on edge, especially after Iris reported playing “Please Please Me” for Ifield and “he just burst out laughing.” Another incident at a concert intensified the rivalry. Paul, for some twisted reason, insisted on taking Iris to see Ifield perform at the Liverpool Empire. It seemed harmless enough at the time. Iris “knew Frank was practically blind,” and with her trademark long hair twisted in a bun, it seemed unlikely he would ever spot her in a dark, crowded audience. From their seats in the second row, Iris and Paul held hands, enjoying their little shenanigans. But near the end of the show, Ifield strode downstage and put his boot up on the footlights. “I’d like to sing a song that’s a great favorite of mine,” he announced, then rather suddenly pointed directly at Paul. “It’s called ‘
He’ll
Have to Go.’ ” Now their paths had crossed again:
tied for Iris’s affections, tied for number one.
If that didn’t take the cake!
Disc,
on the other hand
, showed the Beatles holding down the number one position all by themselves.

There was only one clear way to sort out the accuracy.

On Sunday, February 23, the Beatles rejoined the Helen Shapiro tour, which was appearing at the Grenada, in Mansfield. The next day, before leaving for Coventry, Kenny Lynch invited Paul, George, and John to accompany him in a car he’d borrowed rather than take the bus. No one had to twist the boys’ arms.
The bus was “a drag
.” Besides, the scenes Lynch made were a hoot, usually culminating in some kinky backstage grope with a couple of birds.

The Beatles, sans Ringo, piled into Kenny’s car—John holding the seat for Paul and George, which signaled he’d be riding shotgun. “It was a beautiful afternoon,” Lynch recalls. “Clear but with a cold, blustery wind. We were all happy to see each other and exchange recording war stories.” For Kenny, the layoff marked a milestone of a different sort; while the Beatles were making their album, he had rushed off to record “Misery,” making him the first artist to cover one of their songs. It was a dubious distinction from the Beatles’ point of view, inasmuch as they loathed Kenny’s interpretation. But on this day their only concern was determining if “Please Please Me” was number one.

“We were following the coach,” Lynch remembers, “so we wouldn’t get lost.” But in Coventry, they pulled off the road, into a car park just behind
the Lucien Theatre, to listen to a Sunday-afternoon radio show that counted down the charts. Waiting on edge, shivering in the unheated car, everyone lit cigarettes against the uneasiness, hope, and excitement that had been building up over the past two days. “It was a pretty intense moment. They knew [the record] would be pretty high because it was selling like hotcakes.” Kenny noticed that John, Paul, and George were “stern-faced” as they stared at the radio in the dashboard, waiting for the news. Finally, at about 3:30, the BBC disc jockey announced: “This week, at number two, Frank Ifield and ‘The Wayward Wind’…”

Before the opening bars
even filtered over the airwaves, a cheer went up in the car. It was official. How the music magazines broke it down was beside the point. In England the BBC had the final word on the chart rankings, and by its count, Frank Ifield was number two.

“Where are we going, Johnny?” the Beatles had asked repeatedly throughout 1961 and 1962. “To the toppermost of the poppermost,” John had promised. Now, only a year later, they had reached the summit.

MANIA

Chapter 21
The Jungle Drums

F
or the Beatles, everything changed with their leap to the top of the charts. They were no longer just a local act, not even a northern act. Once their record hit number one, they were lofted into a larger orbit that identified them as “Parlophone Recording Stars” or, perhaps somewhat prematurely, “
Britain’s top vocal-instrumental group
.” “Please Please Me” had extended their popularity far beyond the Cavern walls and far beyond the Mersey banks, establishing them as something of a national phenomenon. By the second half of the Helen Shapiro tour, everywhere the Beatles played, ear-splitting screams broke out at the mere mention of their names. The minute the lights went down, the crowd went crazy. And after each act finished its set, the theaters shook with kids hollering,
“
We want the Beatles!
We want the Beatles!”