The Beatles (82 page)

Among the elements that lifted this album above its predecessor are the innovative double-tracking—a process that allowed the Beatles to layer vocals and rhythm tracks rather than recording everything live, in one take—and its unique cover, an ethereal, grim-faced, black-and-white portrait that conjures up a striking, if disturbing, image of the boys. Nervous that EMI might pressure them into using the same kind of uninspired group shot as on
Please Please Me,
they enlisted Robert Freeman to come up with
something “artistic
,” something bold. “We showed him the pictures Astrid and Jurgen [sic] had taken in Hamburg and said, ‘Can’t you do it like this?’ ” George recalled.
Freeman posed the Beatles
against the velvet curtains of a hotel dining room in Bournemouth, using mostly natural light
that seeped in through an enormous window along one side of the wall. It was a stunning departure from the usual upbeat, glossy sleeves on which labels exclusively relied. Given the circumstances, EMI’s reaction was inevitable. They hated the concept, calling it “
shockingly humorless
,” and threatened to pull the cover for something more “happy” and less “grim.” Brian, too, was less than enthusiastic. “He was convinced
it would damage their image
,” Tony Barrow recalls, “but the boys put their feet down.”

When the album finally appeared, it was clear that the cover was every bit as alluring as they had hoped. Stores were besieged with jacked-up Beatles fans throughout the afternoon of November 22. Peter Brown, who was managing the NEMS record department in Brian’s absence, recalls being unprepared for the runaway demand. “
I’d never seen anything like it
,” he says. “No record in my experience had ever caused this kind of frenzy. There were hundreds of kids trying to get into the store; a crowd had gathered on the street. Police showed up to keep things under control. Our cashiers were so overwhelmed that everyone, myself included, worked the counter until the store closed.”

This scene wasn’t restricted to Liverpool. All over Great Britain, teenagers mobbed the local record stores to get their hands on copies of
With the Beatles.
If a cult of personality had surrounded the group, there was now also a retail phenomenon to go with it.
On that first day alone
, an impressive 530,000 copies of the album were sold, along with another 200,000 more singles of “She Loves You,” which had pushed beyond the vaunted million mark. No album had ever aroused this much interest. It was generally acknowledged by record companies that teenagers bought singles and, occasionally, the rare album; right up to the release of
With the Beatles,
EMI was still unsure if a market for it would materialize. Now all that had changed.

EMI couldn’t afford to let a slipup burst the bubble, but neither did it want to interfere with the fantastic flow of sales.
Please Please Me
was still selling like hotcakes, too, and by the end of sales on November 22, it was keeping pace alongside
With the Beatles.
Two albums by the same artist on the British charts was rare indeed; the last time it had happened was in 1960, with Elvis Presley. But by that evening,
NME
decided that the sales situation was so unique that it launched the new album into the Top Thirty at the number fifteen position.
^*

These facts and figures dominated the conversation on a DC-3 overrun with Beatles fans as it took off from Speke Airport en route to Hamburg that same afternoon.
The Cavern sponsored the chartered excursion
to coincide with the release of the new Beatles album and about thirty teenagers signed on, along with Allan Williams, Bob Wooler, Bill Harry, and other supporting cast members associated with the Beatles’ rise in Liverpool. Everyone spent the flight time singing the songs on
With the Beatles
—songs they knew by heart from the gigs—and swooning over the dramatic events of the past few months. At the moment, everything else seemed unimportant. The boys had come not only so far but so fast: from the side streets of Liverpool to the royal roads of London, where the Queen herself had crossed their path. Only a year before, they had alternated between a basement club and the back of a creaky van, with nothing more than a substandard demo tape and the fierce, unquenchable dream to make records, to be rock ’n roll stars. Now they were poised again to build upon that dream, and the entire country’s attention had swung toward Liverpool. It was a fairy tale come true, and the fans aboard the flight—those who had been there all along, who
had known
from the beginning—were so giddy that at even 25,000 feet up in the air they seemed only a stone’s throw from the stars.

When the plane touched down in Hamburg, not only was there no carpet, there was no move initiated to help them disembark. “We stood on that tarmac for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for a coach to take us to the Star-Club,” Wooler remembers. The usual busyness that hastens an airport seemed eerily stalled; aside from a few planes landing in the distance, it was as quiet as a car parking lot outside church services. The passengers began to grow edgy, then irritable. Finally, an official pulled up in a car and bumbled around them in a fluster. “Oh, terrible,
terrible
news about JFK,” he said, all aquiver. The American president had been shot—he was dead; the world was in mourning. “You’ll find most of the Reeperbahn closed, as I’m sure you’ve closed your Cavern tonight.”

But from the Grosse Freiheit, the American tragedy and its reverberations seemed as far away as the banks of the Mersey. The seedier bars—those where even cataclysmic events took a backseat to debauchery—ran at full tilt, dispensing fantastic quantities of alcohol to the teenagers and chaperones alike, all of whom held on to the Beatles like a life raft against such terrible tides. For three days and nights, they drank themselves silly, putting the real world and its problems out of their mind. Although history may have turned a wicked corner, there were glimmers of “hope and
consolation” to be found in the Beatles’ music. Of course, it was only the beginning of a generation’s dependency on rock ’n roll as an escape from the harsh changes that rocked the world at large. For the next six years—and beyond—music and other intoxicants would be liberating forces, the kind of distractions that helped kids avoid the wicked corners. On the way back to Liverpool, Wooler says, “we were so diminished by our indulgences that when the pilot delivered the news about the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, many of us, sitting there like zombies, were unable to open our eyes.”

By the last week in November
, “She Loves You” returned to the top spot on the
Record Retailer
chart, along with word that the band’s next single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” had more than a million advance orders.
The next week “She Loves You
” held its position, while “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was number three, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas’ version of “I’ll Keep You Satisfied,” written by John and Paul, hovered at number six, and “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones entered at number thirty.
NME
’s album chart
was even more rewarding, listing
With the Beatles
and
Please Please Me
as vying for the very top, with three EPs—
Twist and Shout, The Beatles Hits,
and
Beatles No. 1
—
padding close behind. The dominance was unprecedented. In a single outburst, the Beatles had hijacked the charts.

Finally America took notice. In mid-November all three U.S. networks sent film crews to the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth in an attempt to report on the Beatles phenomenon. The clips they sent back received only scattered coverage, but one viewer’s impression touched off a storm of unexpected interest. A teenager named Marsha Albert was so intrigued by the music that she wrote a letter to her local deejay, at WWDC in Washington, D.C., asking to hear something by the Beatles. That station in particular was a curious place to handle such a request; it played “a real mixed bag” of pop standards, catering to a devoted Frank Sinatra–Nat King Cole audience, with only the occasional rock ’n roll song slipping onto the playlist. But the disc jockey, a genial straight arrow named Carroll James, hunted down an import copy of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and invited Marsha Albert to introduce it on the air.

On December 17, 1963, she read a few lines of copy that James had scrawled on the back of a traffic report, then launched the Beatles into the American airwaves for the first time ever. When it was over, James invited
the audience to pass on their opinion of the record. As he recalled it, “
the switchboard just went totally wild
.” Every line lit up. Completely unprepared for such a reaction, James “played it again in the next hour, which is something I’d never ever done before.” He continued programming “I Want to Hold Your Hand” every night that week, fading in the middle of the song and interjecting, “A WDDC exclusive!” in order to prevent WPGC, the area’s main teen station, from taping it.

The circumstances at WDDC sounded an alarm at Capitol Records, which was planning to release the single in late January. Eventually, after days of memos flying back and forth, Capitol decided to move up the American release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to December 27. It would not arrive in time for Christmas, but the Beatles didn’t care. It was the best gift they could have asked for that holiday season, and at long last it was under the tree.

After “I Want to Hold Your Hand” struck gold, Beatles Fan Club membership was no longer just an indulgence of former Cavern groupies. Applications poured in from all over the country, more than even a sophisticated mail-order company could handle. “
There came a time
when we had a backlog of many thousands of unopened mailbags, each one containing hundreds of applications, accompanied by money orders for membership,” recalls Barrow, who’d been awakened to the danger of their negligence. “Goodness knows how many mailbags were stolen from the rickety staircase leading to the office above the dirty bookstore.”

Complaints followed, and it wasn’t long before the media, especially the tabloids, picked up the story. What happened, reporters wondered, to all the money sent to the Beatles? How did they intend to placate thousands of unhappy teenagers?

Faced with a public relations catastrophe, Epstein directed Tony Barrow to run damage control and propose a solution. Barrow decided to get everyone immediately onto a mailing list and appease those who were slighted by giving them something special for Christmas. But what? All the standard options—key chains, bracelets, T-shirts—took too much of a bite out of the NEMS budget. It had to be something, Brian insisted, “that only cost a few pence to produce.” Finally, when it looked all but hopeless, Barrow struck gold. Paging through
Reader’s Digest,
he came across something called a flexi-disk—a plastic record the size of a seven-inch forty-five but played at the speed of a thirty-three. The magazine
used it quite cleverly, to preview selections from its record club. “My idea was to get out a humorous message from the Beatles to their fans, giving them something that was totally exclusive—and
free.
I ran it by the lads, who loved the idea and were eager to do their share.”

Portions of the record were leaked to the press, which called it “
the craziest Xmas greeting
of all [time].” Following a loosely scripted sketch that skipped around for roughly five minutes, it delivered more of the “likable, crazy” Scouse-inspired zaniness fans had come to expect from the Beatles. Each musician delivered a personal greeting (in which more than a few of the band’s devotees detected John’s handprint) loaded with puns and loony wordplay. There were parodies of Christmas carols. Everyone sang a few bars of his favorite, the most bizarre rendition, perhaps, being Ringo’s “Buddy Greco-style version” of “Good King Wenceslas,” after which George deadpans: “
Thank you, Ringo
—we’ll phone you.”

At times the band responded to fans directly. “
Somebody asked us
if we still like jelly babies,” Paul mentioned, referring to a comment John had made during an interview earlier that year in which he expressed fondness for the candies. Back then, John had joked that George had eaten his supply. “The next day,” John recalled, “
I started getting jelly babies
with a note saying, ‘Don’t give George any.’ And George got some saying, ‘Here’s some for you, George; you don’t need John’s.’ And then it went mad.” From that day on, whenever the Beatles took to the stage, a hailstorm of jelly babies pelted them from the seats—whole bags and occasionally even boxes were lobbed—with fans often winging them sidearm from overhanging balconies. Eventually it resembled a combat zone, with candy projectiles ricocheting off guitars and cymbals, once even cutting John above the eye. For the first time, Ringo said, “
it felt dangerous
” onstage. “Anyway, we’ve
gone
right off
jelly babies!
” Paul avowed on the flexi-disk, hoping that put an end to the gesture.