The Beatles (70 page)

The Beatles got a charge out of it, playing off the energy with increasing confidence, but it wreaked havoc with the tour. The show had been constructed so that each act was assured of its own twenty-minute set, giving Helen half an hour to close the performance. That had worked for a while, but as each day passed, as audiences grew more familiar with “Please Please Me,” as word of the Beatles spread from town to town, “
all the people coming to the show
were just waiting for the Beatles” and it often took several minutes to restore order between sets.

During those first few months in the spotlight, the Beatles regarded the mayhem as a novelty—and a boost to their spirits. Most of the days were interminably long and insufferably boring, with hours spent cooped up on the bus followed by ridiculous hours of downtime. In the northern towns, they’d “
have a walk through the streets
and visit a greasy spoon for some lunch.” Afterward, if there was time, they would go shopping. Then,
about four o’clock, before the first show, says Kenny Lynch, “we’d have a bacon sarnie and a mug of tea in the closest café to the theater.”

The tea came in handy. John, for one, couldn’t function without it. His voice had never fully recovered from the bashing he’d given it recording “Twist and Shout,” and as a result, the live shows did a number on his vocal chords. On long bus trips, he’d sweet-talk the driver into stopping whenever possible so he could tank up on something warm. And “
in the dressing-rooms
,” observed Ray Coleman, who covered the Beatles for
Melody Maker, “
Lennon was addicted to tea.” His hand was constantly wrapped around a steam-capped paper cup, convenient to sip from or to warm his fingers. The conditions in most theaters were impoverished, the backstage comforts less than meager, the heat often nonexistent. If the Beatles had envisioned a world of glamour and luxury as rock ’n roll stars, this tour brought them back to earth with a thud.

As dreary as the theaters were, their accommodations were often worse—
the guesthouses
they stayed in run-down, staffed with local help who regarded them as nothing more than riffraff. All-night service stations were the restaurant of choice for most package-tour units, with a heaping portion of starchy beans on toast and chips a safe enough bet to see them through until the next opportunity arose to eat something.

Touring was hard work—and worse. “
It was always a bore
,” Ringo recalled. At least when they were on the bus, there were plenty of diversions. A card game was usually in progress among facing rows of seats. There were invariably conversations about the previous night’s show and its aftermath, with bloated conquests bandied about like fish stories. Each day, the boys plowed through newspapers, searching for their names. Once, in a Yorkshire town, they found an article hailing them as “a band in the American Negro blues tradition,” in which they reveled and quoted from ad nauseam. For a change of scenery, John read avant-garde poetry, along with a volume of Spike Milligan’s verse to lighten the mood. Everyone wrote home, with dreamy postcards sent to their girls.

In the highs and lows of those journeys, however, John and Paul always made time to work on some music. “They wrote every day on the coach, like clockwork,” says Kenny Lynch. At some point John or Paul would catch the other’s eye, then they would get up nonchalantly, work their way to the back of the bus, take out their guitars, and get down to business. “It was always the same routine: one would play, and the other would be writing down lyrics and chord changes.” They were in their own private world back there, absorbed by the instant gratification of the work
and adept at blocking out distractions. Every so often Kenny would lean over the seat in front of them and attempt to offer a line or critique the work. “Fuck off! Turn around!” they replied—and they meant it.

On the bus, they began to explore new ground. The steadying success of the collaboration encouraged them to experiment with different chord combinations, concentrating more on the choruses—or what they called “the middle eight”—to give the songs a fuller, more accomplished sound.

The effects of this creative experimentation began to show up immediately. A real breakthrough came on February 28, as the bus rolled south along roads from York to Shrewsbury.
To fulfill an urgent request
from George Martin for a follow-up single to “Please Please Me,” John and Paul spread out across the backseat and worked on several ideas. One, finished a few days earlier, was “
Thank You Little Girl
.”
^*
The song still needed tinkering, but as they played around with it, other themes emerged and they went off on a tangent, leaving the song behind. In an interview with columnist Alan Smith, John recalled how after a while they were
just “fooling around” on the guitar
. “Then we began to get a good melody line, and we really started to work on it.”

The new tune came quickly
. Working in the key of C, they sketched out a verse using a standard four-chord progression. But when it came time to construct the middle eight, Paul accidentally hit a G-minor and felt something shift. “
It went to a surprising place
,” he explained.

Once they had the melody, the words just tumbled out. It was John who came up with the basic premise. As he recalled it: “
Paul and I had been talking
about one of the letters in [
NME’
s] ‘From You to Us’ column.” Up to that point, all their songs exploited pronouns in the title as a way of making them “
very direct and personal
.” That way, Paul thought, “
people can identify… with it
.” This time around, they’d finally hit the mother lode: me and you, together, in the same phrase.

“
From Me to You” was finished
before they even crossed the Shrewsbury town line. As soon as the ink was dry on the last “to you,” the Beatles knew they had another smash.

The Beatles cut their new single five days later, sandwiched between a show in St. Helens and a radio appearance in Manchester. The session, which ran from 2:30 until 10:00
P.M.
at Abbey Road, went as smoothly as
the last. As uncertain as he still was about rock ’n roll, George Martin was amazed by the quality of the song—and that John and Paul kept writing obvious winners. He’d never experienced anything like it before, and the prospect that they were
real,
as opposed to one-shot wonders, gave him chills.

They rehearsed the number once or twice while Norman Smith worked in the booth to get a balance on the mikes. George’s guitar intro’ed the song with a lick that mimicked the opening line. But something about it didn’t work for the producer. Martin pulled up a stool and listened to them play it again. There, right at the top: it was unexciting, slack.
Why not sing the intro
? he suggested. Just as George played it: “Da da da da da dum dum da…”

Sing it? What an odd approach. No rock ’n roll artist in their memory had ever sung an opening lick, but it never occurred to the Beatles—nor would they have
dared
—to argue with Martin. Martin was known for creating an atmosphere in which recording artists felt comfortable to express their feelings. But there was a clear, almost palpable distinction between them, based largely on roles of authority. To working-class Liverpool lads, inadequate by nature in London, in the Smoke, Martin’s refined social graces and perfect diction drew a line. It put him in a position of command, of authority, and while their relationship was harmonious, it was an uneasy alliance. If he wanted them to sing it, they’d give it a try. Besides, after an initial pass at it, they heard the difference: it was dynamic, it drove them into the song. “In a way, this made them aware of George’s enormous musical sense,” says Ron Richards, who listened to the result sometime later that week and “wasn’t at all surprised” by how well it turned out. “The Beatles had marvelous ears when it came to writing and arranging their material, but George had real taste—and an innate sense of what worked.”

From the moment they were signed, the Beatles regarded the States as the Promised Land. That isn’t to say they weren’t pleased with recent developments. In fact, they were thrilled by the opportunity to make the kind of records they were making and tickled by the possibility of getting airplay in London. But it was America—home of Chuck, Buddy, Elvis, Gene, Richard, and Phil and Don—on which they ultimately set their sights. America had the aura; it would legitimize them in a way that no one from England had yet experienced.

Brian shared their dream
and persisted in his belief that an American tour should happen without delay. He had first brought it to EMI’s attention after “Love Me Do” cracked the charts, but the brass couldn’t promise anything other than that they would try to find a suitable outlet. Now, with “Please Please Me” at number one and the third single in the can, he stepped up his efforts, pestering George Martin to get something done.

The stumbling block seemed to be Capitol
Records, which, according to its president, Alan Livingston, had the right of first refusal on EMI products in the States. EMI had bought Capitol in the late 1950s, cashing in almost immediately in Europe with Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mercer, and Nat King Cole. “
The idea was that [Capitol]
would also be useful for launching EMI’s roster in the USA,” says Roland Rennie, who had come up through the ranks of the British organization and functioned as its chief traffic coordinator, fighting to get product released overseas, and vice versa. “But the Capitol Tower in Hollywood was very much its own master. They called all the shots—and they frankly refused to put out any of our records.” Every two weeks EMI sent packages to Capitol, stuffed with their latest releases, and within days always got back the same terse response: Not suitable for the U.S. market. “They turned everything down.”

Most parent companies would simply demand that their subsidiaries follow orders, but EMI took a very hands-off position with Capitol. Its lawyers had warned that such interference might summon up antitrust litigation, which, Rennie says, “put the fear of God in the British.” EMI never said so much as peep to Capitol about its A&R responsibilities. “Think of that,” he muses, “not a word—they only
owned
it.”

In America, Alan Livingston claims he “
didn’t even hear the first Beatles record
”—it was just one more bloodless import that Capitol chucked on the overflowing slush pile. Earlier, he had appointed a producer named David Dexter to screen every EMI artist that was sent to Capitol for consideration. And according to Dexter,
the Beatles were “nothing
.” According to his Capitol colleagues, Dexter was “
a jazz man
… who couldn’t see [sic] pop records.” Out of “courtesy,” Alan Livingston says, they would occasionally put out an English artist to satisfy the parent company, but it was merely a gesture, never bearing any fruit.

That left matters in the hands of Leonard G. Wood, known to everyone as L.G., who was EMI’s managing director and “very sympathetic” toward the company’s growing “American problem.” Rennie had first brought the Beatles to Wood’s attention in late 1962, after George Martin had turned up the heat. “He was polite but noncommittal, warning
me again about this antitrust business,” Rennie remembers. But there was another course of action that Wood recommended he explore. A year earlier, frustrated by Capitol’s rigid resistance toward EMI releases, he commandeered a Capitol employee named Joe Zerger and set up a company in America—the absurdly important-sounding Transglobal Music—which was to lease EMI’s repertoire throughout the States once Capitol had turned it down.

Zerger, whose heart wasn’t in it, “didn’t do anything much,” says Rennie. But his partner was a young man named Paul Marshall, a dapper, dynamic, raspy-voiced lawyer with a passion for music and a finely tuned ear for quality. Behind a perfectly coiffed head of cotton-white hair and a blinding smile lurked an impetuous deal maker. Marshall had placed dozens of foreign masters with independent labels and undertook EMI’s offer as a personal challenge.

Having listened to a few dozen EMI releases, Marshall was determined to push the record business in a radically new direction. He chose a handful of those records he considered American in spirit, and in early January 1963, with Roland Rennie replacing Joe Zerger, Marshall set out to find British artists a home for their music in the New World. Coincidentally, the first record he put his hands on was by a group called the Beatles.