The Beatles (76 page)

Sometime after ten o’clock Pete Shotton went in search of the bathroom while John plunged back into the crowd. John, who remembered being “
out of my mind with drink
,” elbowed past Bob Wooler, who was also “
sinking a fair bit of booze
.” For all his cozy rapport with the bands, Wooler could also be remarkably glib. Bill Harry says, “
Bob has a sarcastic note
in his voice that often rubs people the wrong way, and the way he talked to John that night set John off.”

There are various accounts of exactly what was said, but no one disagrees that Wooler made a snide reference to John’s vacation with Brian Epstein—something on the order of “Oh, John and Brian’s just come back from their honeymoon in Spain.”
^*
Impulsively, without warning, John leaped on Wooler, beating him viciously with “
tightly closed fists
.” When that didn’t do enough damage, he grabbed a garden shovel that was left in the yard and whacked Bob once or twice with the handle. According to one observer, “
Bob was holding his hands
to his face and John was kicking all the skin off his fingers.” In a more lucid moment, John recalled: “
I was beating the shit out of him
, hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, ‘I can kill this guy.’ ”

It took two big men—the Fourmost’s bass player, Billy Hatton, and Billy J. Kramer, who had just arrived late, on the heels of a gig—to haul John off Wooler and hold him down. “He was completely out of it,” Kramer recalls, “like someone who’d gone mad.” Pete Shotton returned in time to drag John away, into the garden, while others called an ambulance for the injured and badly shaken Wooler. (Wooler suffered a broken nose, a cracked collarbone, and three broken ribs.)

Before long, however, John went on another drunken rampage. While
Cynthia watched in horror, he accosted a girl and grabbed her by the breast, refusing to let go. Once again Billy J. stepped in, pulling them apart. According to Kramer: “He was flailing his arms, screaming, ‘You’re
nothing,
Kramer—you’re
fuck-all! We’re
the greatest band.’ And he was getting aggressive. So I showed him my fist and said, ‘I’ll fucking KO you if you don’t shut up.’ ”

Kramer, who was a much bigger man than John, hustled him out to the curb, where he endeavored to subdue John and calm down
Cynthia, who “was freaking out
,” until a taxi arrived to take them home.

Before the dust even settled, Bob Wooler made a beeline for Rex Makin’s office. “
He arrived with a black eye
and a swollen nose,” Makin recalls, “and instructed me to claim damages from Lennon.” Normally, a situation like this put a lawyer in an awkward position. As Brian’s—and thereby John’s—solicitor, it presented a clear conflict of interest. But the ever-resourceful Makin wasn’t troubled by such issues. “I merely rang Brian up and I acted for everybody,” he says smugly. “
For my trouble
,” says Wooler, “I got two hundred pounds and a rather halfhearted apology from John.”

A few days after the party, Tony Barrow received a call from Don Short, the pesky entertainment flack for the
Daily Mirror,
who was nosing around about a punch-up involving the Beatles. Barrow did everything he could to play it down, but when other papers also got wind of it, he was forced to make a statement. “
I first called John in Liverpool
to get his side of the story,” Barrow recalls, “but he was absolutely belligerent. His response was ‘So fucking what? That bastard called me a bloody queer. He got what he deserved.’ ” Barrow would learn to endure these passing storms, but at the time he sensed a professional disaster looming and moved to head it off. On his instructions, John was ordered away from the phone, while Barrow, fielding all calls, “put a mighty big spin” on the incident. The
Mirror
went to press on June 21 with an eye-catching headline splashed across the back page:
BEATLE IN BRAWL
—SORRY I SOCKED YOU:

Guitarist John Lennon, twenty-two-year-old leader of the Beatles pop group, said last night: “Why did I have to go and punch my best friend? I was so high I didn’t realize what I was doing.” Then he sent off a telegram apologizing to twenty-nine-year-old Liverpool rock show compère and disc jockey Bob Wooler… who said: “I don’t know why he did it. I have been a
friend of the Beatles for a long time. I have often compèred shows where they have appeared. I am terribly upset about this, physically as well as mentally.”

John Lennon said: “Bob is the last person in the world I would want to have a fight with. I can only hope he realizes that I was too far gone to know what I was doing.”

In fact, neither Wooler nor John ever spoke for the record. The quotes in the copy were the handiwork of Tony Barrow. For better or worse, the Beatles had finally bagged their first national press article.

Only hours after Paul’s birthday party, the Beatles returned to the road for the busy summer season ahead, “
racing up and down the country
,” playing a solid block of one-nighters. Delirious Beatles fans carried on with an intensity never before experienced. They wanted more than music. They wanted contact with the Beatles, wanted to get at them, touch them. Fans thrashed themselves into a frenzy, screamed and cried uncontrollably, leaped from balconies onto the stage, threw themselves in front of the group’s van—and worse. In the North, a reporter watched nervously as “
girls were plucked
from the front row in a state of collapse.” The next week a group of teenage boys suffered dehydration after hiding in a hotel room for seven hours just to shake their heroes’ hands.

Even the Beatles weren’t safe from the mayhem. Fans ripped at their clothes for souvenirs, stripped antennae and mirrors from their cars, hurled precious gifts at them. In Blackpool on July 21, prior to a Sunday afternoon concert at the Queen’s Theatre, police abandoned their efforts to disperse a mob of “
nearly five thousand fans
” thronging the stage door and wisely decided to detour the Beatles’ arrival.
The boys had to climb a scaffolding
in a nearby yard and cross the roofs of adjoining buildings until they could be lowered into a ceiling loft above the stage.

It was becoming evident to keen observers that these demonstrations of adulation transcended mere popularity and stardom. Roy Orbison was popular, Cliff Richard was a full-fledged star, but neither encountered the manic emotional display, the tearing passion, that surrounded the Beatles.
This was something more. It was hard for people to put a finger on it. The hysteria was primitive and overtly sexual. Certainly there had been some of the same response to Elvis, and before him, Johnnie Ray and Frank Sinatra, but nothing so aggressive, nothing that ranged to this extreme.
Publicly, the Beatles laughed it off
, but it was no joking matter. Their homes were invaded, their privacy shattered. Everywhere they went, either alone or with family and friends, fans accosted them “
like persistent termites
,” demanding autographs and pictures. “There was no longer any question of the Beatles appearing in a club or, indeed, anywhere in direct contact with their public,” writes George Melly in
Revolt Into Style.
“They had become a four-headed Orpheus. They would have been torn to pieces by the teenage Furies.”

While everyone debated the merits of the phenomenon, one aspect went unchallenged: the Beatles had set the stagnant British music scene on fire. Kids across the country were totally caught up in the excitement, gobbling up records and concert tickets at an unprecedented clip. Rock ’n roll—
British
rock ’n roll—became the major topic of conversation: who was coming out with a new record, what they sounded like, where they were playing, how hot they looked. Everyone wanted to be up-to-date, on top of the scene. Meanwhile, the American stars who had dominated for years began fading from the fore. Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, and Elvis continued to sell, but nowhere near as strongly as their British counterparts. “
Wave the Union Jack!
”
New Musical Express
advocated in a July issue, noting that “not a single American record has topped the Charts this… year—something which has never happened before in the 11 years since the top table was introduced!”

The record labels tore through the clubs in Liverpool, signing everyone in sight, and the subsequent proliferation of releases was dizzying indeed. In a span of two months, Decca announced singles by the Dennisons (“Come On Be My Girl”), Beryl Marsden (“I Know”), and Lee Curtis and the All Stars (“Let’s Stomp”), featuring Pete Best on drums; Pye issued Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four (“Lies”), the Searchers (“Sweets for My Sweet”), and the Undertakers (“Everybody Loves a Lover”); Fontana released Earl Preston and the TTs (“I Know Something”), Howie Casey and the Seniors (“The Boll Weevil Song”), and the Merseybeats (“It’s Love That Really Counts); HMV put out the first Swinging Blue Jeans record (“Too Late Now”); and Oriole released a single by Faron’s Flamingoes (“See If She Cares”), signed Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to a contract, and, in case anyone missed the point, prepared two compilation albums titled
This Is Merseybeat,
volumes one and two, featuring sixteen northern rock ’n roll bands.

In June Polydor began releasing sides from the 1961 sessions with Tony Sheridan in Hamburg—only this time crediting the band as the Beatles, as opposed to the original Beat Boys. It was inevitable that the session would come back to haunt them, but not even the Beatles expected it to crack the charts, which it did immediately following its debut. “
It’s terrible,” John complained
to a reporter for
Melody Maker,
objecting to the quality of the record and the circumstances of its release, but both refused to go away. EMI was particularly stung by the situation. After finally breaking the Beatles, it seemed unjust that a competing disc would surface to confuse record buyers.

To staunch a potential backlash, EMI countered by issuing an EP—or extended-play single—with “Twist and Shout,” “A Taste of Honey,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” and “There’s a Place.” No one had an inkling if such a concept would meet with enthusiasm, considering that all four songs were already on the
Please Please Me
album. But it hit the stores on July 15 and by the end of the weekend had
sold an astonishing 150,000 copies
, with back orders for 40,000 more. Come August, it became the
first EP ever to enter the Top Ten
.

Dozens of dates were booked in East Kent and Bournemouth through the summer, interspersed with tours of Jersey and Wales. Meanwhile, John and Paul were busy writing “
Bad to Me
” for Billy J. Kramer, as well as “Hello Little Girl” for the Fourmost, another NEMS act, which George Martin agreed to produce for Parlophone. Brian also signed a rambunctious teenager named Tommy Quigley who had been working an act locally with his twin sister, Pat. Following a welcome Parnesian name change to Quickly, a recording deal was arranged with a subsidiary of Pye on the basis of John and Paul’s anteing up an appropriate smash, and within a few weeks “
Tip of My Tongue
” was released as a single.

All the while, George Martin was pressing for another Beatles single to preserve the headlong run at the charts. A song begun in Newcastle in the afterglow of a late-June gig seemed as if it might fit the bill. Riding in the back of a poorly lit van, Paul had sketched out a lyric fragment that showed early promise. It was modeled on an “
answering song
,” according to Paul, who recalled hearing a Bobby Rydell record that put the form to clever use. A chorus of girls would sing, “Go, Bobby, go, everything’s cool,” while Rydell shot back, “We all go to a swingin’ school.” The way Paul envisioned it for the Beatles, he’d sing, “She loves you,” whereby the band
would respond,
“Yeah… yeah… yeah,”
offering a nonsensical but effective hook. He subsequently ran it by John, who decided that the answering business was
a “crummy idea
” but the lyric was worth exploring. They went back to their room at the Turk’s Hotel, whipped out their guitars, and in a few hours’ time had the bones of the song in place.

“She Loves You” was finished the next evening, during a rare day off in Liverpool. The boys worked intently in the tiny dining nook at Forthlin Road while Paul’s father sat not five feet away, chain-smoking and watching TV. His presence, the competing noise, didn’t matter—nothing could interrupt Paul and John’s concentration. They wrote with a sense of mission, replacing wobbly phrases, playing lines over and over, refining the way things scanned, until they’d gotten it right. And when they were done, they knew they had a hit on their hands. The song has a tremendous, explosive kind of energy that bursts from the opening notes and culminates in a beautiful split of harmony in the parcel of
yeah
s. George Martin listened to a rundown of it in the studio on July 1 and thought it was
“brilliant… one of the most vital [songs]
the Beatles had written so far.”

The band polished the song over the next few days, teaching George Harrison a third harmony to fatten the effect. Back in the studio, with Martin perched on a wooden stool in front of the piano, they belted it out, following an arrangement John and Paul had concocted on their guitars. Engineer Norman Smith, who was standing over the mixer, did a double-take as they turned up the juice. Earlier he had spotted the lyrics on the music stand and felt his heart sink. As he later relayed to Mark Lewisohn: “ ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I thought[,]
Oh my God, what a lyric!
This is going to be one that I
do not
like.”

In fact, there was something for everyone in the lyric, though nothing grabbed listeners as much as the performance. The Beatles sing “She Loves You” with such conviction and with such energy that for the brief time it lasts—considerably less than two and a half minutes—they create a groove that is not only completely irresistible but also quintessential. What the Beatles built into the song provided, for them, a perfect, lasting image: the
yeah-yeah-yeah
s and the falsetto
ooooo
s (when performing this, they shook their heads in unison, setting off rapturous shrieks from the fans) became iconic symbols. No matter how their music evolved, no matter how they experimented with complex musical textures and electronics, it is hard to think of the Beatles today without visualizing them as four grinning
mop tops positioned in that classic stage pose—the guitars riding high on their chests, drumsticks rhythmically pummeling the cymbals—singing, “And you know you should be glad:
oooooooo,
” with a decisive shake of their beautiful hair. Nothing identifies them more vividly.