The Beatles (64 page)

Many wonderful performing groups promptly fell apart in the studio. Making a record was an exacting process, not at all the loose, spontaneous joyride that galvanized a band onstage. The atmosphere, as a rule, was predominantly tense. Artists were contractually required to record three songs in as many hours. There was no audience to play off of, no outside energy or stimulus; it all took place in a vacuum, under the hard gaze of a demanding producer—
Bruce Welch of the Shadows
likened the role to that of God—which many artists found too “
intimidating
.” As a creative experience, recording was plodding and intricate, especially at Abbey Road, where much of the process was reduced to a technical exercise. There was a “
very strong engineering discipline
” observed at the studio, prescribed times for recording, even a strict dress code among the ranks of personnel. “We all wore white lab coats when we worked,” recalls longtime Abbey Road technician Alan Brown—“we,” in this case, being anyone relegated to the control booths. Apprentices wore brown coats, the cleaning staff blue; only balance engineers were permitted to remove their jackets, and then only while setting up equipment. It was a finely drawn tradition; every aspect was scrutinized from above. According to Geoff Emerick, who engineered many of the Beatles’ sessions, “
You had to polish your shoes
, [be]cause if management saw you with dirty shoes, you were in trouble.” Most work was conducted in a rather austere bubble of silence. There was “
a right time to speak to artists
, and a right time
not
to.” Above all else, as every British subject was aware, you “
had to know your place
.”

Fortunately, the Beatles let it all roll off their backs. They took naturally to the studio environment, oblivious to most of the guidelines that kept the staff on edge. Of course, this wasn’t their first session; nevertheless, its significance was deeply felt, so they showed up on time for their 2:30
P.M.
rehearsal. They even wore the suits they had broken out for John’s wedding.

“They didn’t seem at all nervous,” says Ron Richards, who conducted the three-hour rehearsal on September 4, in Studio Three. “They already knew their way around and had done enough work on their own so that we didn’t have to sit and arrange every note for them.” Richards, who shunned that kind of hand-holding, was a good match for the Beatles. He worked very fast and knew his way around pop music to such an extent that he covered for his “
blissfully unaware
” boss. Later, Richards would strike gold on his own, producing the Hollies, so it is no surprise that with the Beatles he focused on their vocal blend and harmonies. “It was obvious,
right away, that they had their own
sound.
At that time, few groups came in with anything unique or identifiable, but the way they sang and played set them immediately apart.” Norman Smith, who engineered the session, heard it, too, and decided to capture as much of it as he could by opening the microphones and letting the sound bleed so that it took on more of a live—that is, less slickly produced—quality. It was a risky move coming out of such a steady, well-grounded program, but ultimately it showed off the Beatles in a way that best suited them.

That afternoon
the Beatles rehearsed six songs
, from which they selected two to record later that evening—“Love Me Do” and the catchy but lightweight “How Do You Do It,” a song Martin had selected for them, certain it would be a hit. “Love Me Do” was a concession to the band, who practically begged Martin to consider their own material. Up until then, most British pop groups recorded what was put in front of them by their producers—songs written by polished professionals that reflected an overall image the label had in mind for them. Parlophone’s view of the Beatles was as performers, not songwriters. Besides, George Martin so far hadn’t heard “
any evidence of what was to come
in the way of songwriting.” Of their demos, the only songs that stood out were “P.S. I Love You”
^*
and possibly “Love Me Do.” “I thought
it might have made a good ‘B’ side
,” Martin recalled, referring to “Love Me Do,” but he wasn’t giving them any more than that.

Martin was determined that the Beatles’ first single would be “How Do You Do It.” It had formula written all over it and was, indeed, the kind of song that might have passed muster with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who remained the industry standard. But the Beatles had shied away from the Shadows’ image since they first formed the band. Yes, they’d modeled themselves on more refined vocalists like the Everly Brothers, Bobby Vee, and Roy Orbison, but other influences, as well as their own developing sound, had sharpened their edge—and their perspective. Recording a song like “How Do You Do It” ran contrary to everything they stood for. The song embarrassed them. Demoralized, they complained to Brian Epstein and asked him to intercede with Martin on their behalf. But Brian didn’t want to make waves. “
Do it!
” he insisted. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. Do it!”

Martin recorded the song with them later that evening, along with “Love Me Do,” which required fifteen takes and was pressed onto an acetate for the producer’s review. Much to his credit—and displaying a quality that marked his entire relationship with the Beatles—Martin kept an open mind. The Beatles were dead set against releasing “How Do You Do It.” They argued: “
We just don’t want this kind of song
. It’s a different thing we’re going for… something new.” Their vehemence forced Martin to reconsider “Love Me Do,” and after listening to it again, he agreed to see it their way—for now.

As it turned out, Ringo was the problem. The next day Martin and Ron Richards listened repeatedly to the acetate and determined from the playback that it lacked drive. Paul has since observed that “
Ringo at that point
was not
that
steady on time,” and to Norman Smith’s ear, “
he didn’t have quite enough push
.” The drums were too muddy, not as precise as the situation demanded. “
Ringo had a lot more zest
to his drumming than Pete,” Richards recalls, “and I knew he’d be able to handle recording—in time. But we had a record to make and I needed someone who could deliver exactly what the song required on every take.”

That afternoon Martin and Richards walked down Oxford Street, discussing how to handle it. Richards had already put in a call to Kenny Clair, “
probably the top session drummer
at the time… who was a brilliant player and could do anything.” His background was big band, as opposed to rock ’n roll, but as far as recording went, he would solve their immediate problem. Martin, however, was already thinking ahead. The Beatles had put a bug into his ear about image, and he was concerned that the first record should lay it all on the line. “He knew how important it was to establish their identity,” Richards says, “so we kept walking and talked about what to call them—Paul McCartney and the Beatles, or John Lennon and the Beatles.” Martin felt they needed a leader out front, like Cliff and the Shadows. Paul could handle that; he was “the pretty boy” and more outgoing, whereas “John was the down-to-earth type” and the sharp wit. That could also work to the band’s advantage, they decided. It was a tough choice. Paul… John? John… Paul? “It went on like that, back and forth, as we continued along Oxford Street,” Richards says. Nothing emerged from their various proposed scenarios to sway things one way or the other. Each boy had enough star power to carry the group. And yet, a move like that might serve to fracture the beautiful balance they seemed to have found. The band’s personality was pretty much intact—and a very important part of their appeal. There were no apparent power struggles. Besides, Martin mused, maybe the Beatles were right. Maybe this was something
new and different that didn’t fall into the same tired mold. “And when we got to the end, we knew it was perfect the way it was.”

A week later, on September 11, the Beatles returned to Abbey Road and recorded another version of “Love Me Do.”
Ringo was stunned
and “devastated” upon learning that a session drummer had been brought in to replace him. Kenny Clair was unavailable, but Ron Richards had booked another big band veteran, thirty-two-year-old Andy White, who performed with Vic Lewis’s orchestra and had worked on numerous Parlophone sessions. “
I knew he could play the beat
I was looking for,” says Richards, who invited Ringo to join him upstairs in the sound booth during the session.

Ringo was not pacified. When Richards asked him to play tambourine and maracas on the track, he complied “
but he was not pleased
.” The song was hardly what anyone would consider difficult. There was no tricky time signature, no intricate pattern. “
It didn’t call for any drumnastics
,” as Bob Wooler assessed it, nothing Ringo couldn’t handle in his sleep. Still, he stepped aside, silently seething, and let the trained ears prevail.

The result was a success. The Beatles cut “Love Me Do,” featuring a nifty harmonica riff by John, and its flip side, “P.S. I Love You,” in a little under two hours, with Ron Richards at the helm. George Martin, who had been preoccupied with his secretary, returned at the end of the session while the band was lumbering through a version of “Please Please Me.” From what he could hear, it still lacked conviction. The song was slow—
Martin called it “much too dreary
”—patterned, as it was, on Roy Orbison’s haunting delivery of “Only the Lonely.” John tinkered with the vocal, roughing it up a bit, making it more bluesy and aggressive, but no matter what they tried, it never got off the ground. Most producers would have ditched the song at that point and instructed the band to move on. And perhaps if Richards had continued as point man, that might have been its fate. But Martin heard whatever it was that inspired the Beatles to pursue the song in the first place. In fact, it was “obvious” to him how to rescue “Please Please Me.” Rather than cast it aside, he suggested they pick up the tempo and “
work out some tight harmonies
.” They could “have another go at it” the next time they were in the studio.

September was particularly hot that year. Thanks to the North Atlantic Drift and its entourage of warm winds, the normally pleasant nights remained uncomfortably sticky throughout the month. Clumps of soggy
Irish moss, garbage, and dead fish collected in oily pools around the docks, cooking during the day and unleashing a black, marshy stench that by nightfall closed around one’s mouth and tasted of the ripe sea. Few places in Liverpool enjoyed the luxury of air-conditioning. The Cavern, especially, was a sweatbox, and by eight o’clock, with two hundred teenagers whipping themselves into a frenzy in the smoke-filled, airless cellar, body heat vaporized on the ceiling and streamed down the walls until the floors were puddled in slime. Every so often a wilted dancer would keel over, sometimes unnoticed until the music stopped, and have to be carried up the stairs, to recover in the street. Or tempers would overheat, with the inevitable punch-up that would follow. How the club avoided an outbreak of malaria is anyone’s guess.

Somehow, the Beatles never complained. Not even when Brian demanded they wear the new mohair suits he’d picked out to spruce up their “
undesirable” image
. All his energies went into grooming the Beatles for stardom, and now with a record coming out and the need to “
open doors
” in places that frowned on black leather, he decided they should dress for success, even at the Cavern, where the attire that September was decidedly receding. Later, John would mark the suits as a turning point in the band’s eventual climb, noting that from the moment they put them on, they’d more or less sold out to the showbiz establishment.
He’d blame the outfits on Paul
, who, he said, caved in all too willingly to that kind of pretense, but at the time, all of the Beatles complied—and
quite “gladly
,” as George noted—believing in the long run that it would broaden their appeal.

To the Beatles’ fans, suits were a very big deal—leather jackets, black T-shirts, and dark jeans had been their trademark. Brian had tipped off Bob Wooler about the new outfits, and the exuberant disc jockey played it for all it was worth. “
Hey, listen, Cavernites
,” he teased a lunchtime crowd on the day of their forthcoming show, “the next time the Beatles appear on this stage they’ll be wearing their
brand-new suits.
Now, this is going to be a
revelation!
We’ve never seen them in suits before, so be sure to be here for the unveiling.” Even Wooler admits that “there was a touch of the Barnum and Bailey in this,” but it was too good to resist. Even Ray McFall, the Cavern’s huffy owner, caught the fever and ordered the ceiling covered in a new coat of white emulsion paint to celebrate the momentous event.

That night happened to be a scorcher. It had rained earlier in the day, and moisture hung in the thick air like clotted cream, none of which deterred an overly large crowd from descending into the Cavern right on schedule. It seemed like “
an extra two hundred kids
turned out” to check
out the young emperors’ new clothes—and they weren’t disappointed. The Beatles looked resplendent and, in their manager’s eyes, finally like proper entertainers. They “actually glowed” as they took the stage, slightly embarrassed in front of the hometown crowd, but not enough to diminish their obvious pride. Unfortunately, that mood didn’t last very long. No one had taken into account what heat did to new paint, and as the temperature climbed, water condensed on the ceiling and ultimately the emulsion dripped, splattering their new clothes.