When They Were Boys (51 page)

At this he laughed out loud heartily, and with that lovely and engaging smile, the same smile that engrossed passengers on the ferry across the Mersey where he worked as a bartender, the smile that energized Rory and his Hurricanes night after night, and the fearless laugh that he displayed at the Montreal Forum in 1964 when he shrugged off a telephoned death threat from Quebec separatists, and played on with his fellow Beatles, telling me on the airplane a few hours later, “There was so much noise that if there were a real threat, I would, you know, never heard it.”

In many accounts of his early life, Ringo has been described as a sad-eyed little boy. I asked Ringo repeatedly about that “sad” label. He said, quite pointedly, in a Chicago dressing room, “It's just the face. I'm quite happy inside.”

Yet, many writers and musical pundits still insist he was the “sad Beatle.”

Perhaps it was his sickly nature, or the loneliness of having no siblings. But as life endured, he became a man of many emotions, some of them expressed with a daring bluntness, others with that unforgettable face of joy, which in public almost always lit up the back of the Beatles stage.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TRIUMPH AT PARLOPHONE

“There was this huge north–south divide, which still exists in the UK, and you've probably heard George quoted occasionally as having been told by people, ‘Oh, you guys from Liverpool, you're wasting your time down here in London.' It was wonderful that a group from Liverpool went down to London and knocked them sideways. And not only knocked London sideways but knocked the whole world sideways. What this did for the psychology of northern England was just immense.”

—Rod Davis

“Although I told Paul it wasn't good, I am happy that I was wrong. I hope he didn't hold it against me.”

—Horst Fascher, on his critique of the song that made history

M
ASTER PROMOTER
T
ONY
B
RAMWELL ADMITS PROUDLY THAT HE WAS CONNIVING AND DESPERATE FOR NEWS EVEN AS A TEENAGER
.
Bramwell would hang around the NEMS record store to try to get a bead on what was going on. What he found was that Brian Epstein and Epstein's just-signed boys, whom he was friendly with, were down after the Decca disaster.

“I wasn't that close to Brian at that time,” Bramwell says, “but he liked to use me as a sounding board for new music and all that stuff. By early spring, in late March, the boys were not aware that they had been rejected, but finally Brian pulled out the letter from Decca and nervously told them about the failure at Decca.”

John, ever the optimist, seemed helpless. But Bramwell, as a future promotion man, was “impressed” when Brian put out a smart press release.

“It was a good ‘cover,'” Bramwell explains. “It announced a European tour, but it was really a month-and-a-half gig at the Star Club in Hamburg. They would arrive with tragedy facing them, in Stuart's death. What they didn't know, as I learned much later, that Brian, still relentless, was running out of options. Facing loss, and back in the grasp of Hamburg, they needed
good news. As a fan and friend, I also felt helpless.”

Once again, the “what-ifs” of life enter the picture. At play here was Epstein's steely determination, plus a sense by the manager that Tony Barrow from Decca was a good man to stay in touch with. Barrow, for his part, liked the boys and thought Epstein was first-rate. In truth, while working for Decca, Barrow had been quietly doing freelance jobs to promote the Beatles. Coupled with Bill Harry's efforts, Bob Wooler's singular promotion in person and in print, and Barrow's planting of timely reminders of the group's Merseyside achievements, the fires were still lit in the north of England.

London was a different story, until a chance visit.

The fact is that, near the end of spring 1962, despite his happy face and optimism toward the boys, Epstein was running out of options when he arrived in London at the Oxford Street offices of Ardmore and Beechwood, a publishing arm of the big EMI record conglomerate. Epstein was not selling the Beatles that day. He was simply looking for an engineer to make vinyl copies of the Decca recordings. The engineer made the duplicates, and in doing so seemed remarkably impressed by the songs. He urged Epstein to go to another floor of the building and meet one of the company's executives. The man's name was Syd Coleman. One thing led to another. Coleman listened to the recordings, offered to publish them as sheet music, and surprised Epstein with another offer.

“Now this was a dramatic turning point,” Tony Barrow remembers. “This chance meeting changed everything.”

Coleman referred Epstein to a young producer at Parlophone, an unusual label, not confined just to music, but owned by EMI. The man's name was George Martin. Epstein, all excited, phoned his expert pressman Tony Barrow that very day.

He was thrilled, so thrilled, but thought, “Parlophone?” That was an odd choice, but the door was at least opened.

At the time, Martin's stable included men of comedy and satire, with the biggest star being Peter Sellers.

Liking some of their tunes and finding a good chemistry with the young musicians, he set a test recording for June 6. The place was studio #3
at Abbey Road Studios. In several later interviews, Martin called it “love at first sight.”

But there was work to be done. Martin, who impressed the boys with his regal bearing, was not speedy, but methodical.

“One of the untold stories of George Martin was how really detailed he was,” says Tony Bramwell, “all the time he spent getting to know John, Paul, George and Pete. I watched in many later sessions and the man was classy and deep.”

In 1962, before the Parlophone connection, the Beatles owned only one contract, with Polydor, for backing up Tony Sheridan's “My Bonnie” in Hamburg in 1961, thanks to the strong support of German songwriter Bert Kaempfert, a huge success in his own right.

Beatles business and contract expert Bruce Spizer thinks that Epstein made an initial mistake with the Sheridan record.

“He passed it off to everyone at EMI in the early months of 1962. But it was a backup performance and did not show their songwriting ability.”

It turns out that the songwriting talent, which in the early days separated John and Paul, and to some extent George, from the other Merseyside groups, was hardly noticed, until George Martin showed up.

“Ironically,” Bramwell muses, “if Dick Rowe of Decca was making the decisions, the Beatles might never have been the Beatles, so Brian's search for a recording studio and the link to Parlophone and Martin was extraordinary.

“In a way, he was going behind the same EMI people who rejected them in early 1962, since EMI owned Parlophone. People talk about missed opportunities all their lives, but Epstein's chance meeting with Syd Coleman, as he looked for a studio to simply make copies [of the demo], was the most powerful turning point. With all their talent, they still could have been ignored, or bureaucrats could have buried them in the waste bin.”

George Martin was no bureaucrat. He was forward-looking and willing to take risks. After Epstein signed a basic artist's agreement with Parlophone, the boys performed an artist's test. It was in that session that Martin and another producer, Ron Richards, decided they needed a session drummer, a decision that had continuity when Pete Best left and Ringo came aboard. As
the summer months arrived, there was also disagreement, a friendly dispute, between the boys and Martin over what single they should record. The Beatles wanted “Love Me Do”; Martin wanted “How Do You Do It.”

Martin demurred. “Love Me Do” was recorded. Ringo played the tambourine while session drummer Andy White played drums, although Ringo later played drums on the album version of the song. Abbey Road was busy for the Beatles, George Martin, and Ron Richards, another significant producer. Both men insisted on recordings and re-recordings. They were regular drill sergeants on demanding the best the boys could offer.

It was a long road for “Love Me Do,” and its history will show just how good timing and patience paid off. “Love Me Do” had been in the boys' bag of goodies for four years before it surfaced as a hit, thanks to the chance meeting with Syd Coleman; and thanks to Syd Coleman's referral to George Martin, who technically worked for EMI, which had rejected the Beatles in the first place; and thanks to the carefully crafted words of Tony Barrow, Bob Wooler, Derek Taylor, and the venerable Bill Harry. The truth is that Paul McCartney wrote most of it, back in 1958 and 1959, and John wrote the so-called middle eight, or bridge.

So, it took four years, constant revision, help from friends and writers, and two masterful producers, plus the addition of John Lennon's mouth organ (harmonica) to make it work.

There are many myths and disagreements about the Beatles' first single, notably that Epstein bought up thousands of copies to help the record make the charts. That has never been verified, but the following stats have.

“Love Me Do,” the very first Beatles single, with “PS—I Love You” on the flip side, hit the market on October 5, 1962. Its highest ranking in the United Kingdom was seventeen, in the fall and winter of 1962. Total sales were 17,000. In fourteen months, it would be number one in America. In 1982, twenty years later, after an official reissue, it hit number four on the UK charts, with sales totaling 150,000. While not totally accepted in the beginning, the song was the linchpin of the Beatles' roar to greatness, and the biggest hit as the Beatles began their iconic era following John Lennon's death.

“Love Me Do”? Remember the early test when Paul played the song for
boxer–bouncer–star maker Horst Fascher in Hamburg? “Love Me Do” survived Fascher's review of it.

The rollout for the song was classic Epstein. Location was very important to him. He arranged for the Beatles to play supporting act for Little Richard at the Tower Ballroom. In fact, a full-page NEMS ad purchased for
Mersey Beat
emphasizes Little Richard, with the Beatles as first supporting act, but never mentions “Love Me Do.”

For press genius Tony Barrow, one of the invigorating pen pals, the Beatles' status as supporting act was inappropriate. For Epstein, location, in the beginning, was everything. For Barrow, space was the key.

In his column for the
Liverpool Echo
newspaper, he decided to give the boys extra space. After all, they were the breakthrough group from Liverpool.

The headline read: “Big Date for Beatles.”

Barrow's review was even more emphatic than the headline, and more powerful. He called the song “an infectious medium-paced ballad with an exceptionally haunting harmonica accompaniment that smacks home the simple tune and gives the whole deck that extra slab of impact and atmosphere so essential to the construction of a Top Twenty smasher.”

Was Tony Barrow good? In the words of John Lennon, over and over again in taped interviews on different topics, “You betcha, Larry!”

Tony Barrow's words were smooth as silk. And Bill Harry was doing his thing. In the Liverpool area, “Love Me Do” was ranked number one in
Mersey Beat
, the only publication to give it top ranking.

The most important thing was that the Beatles had a nationwide hit—and number seventeen was not so bad. Young fan Tony Bramwell heard the song for the first time a few months after joining Epstein as a weekend warrior of sorts. After checking out Epstein, Bramwell's mother gave him the green light to work for Epstein and the boys, but only on weekends when school was not in session. Bramwell was impressed with “Love Me Do,” even though it was not the element of hard rock he loved so much.

“The kids loved it. The girls swooned over it. My romantic life, if you could call it that at that age, was looking better. ‘Love Me Do' was a breakout song for Merseyside.”

Lennon House curator Colin Hall, also a budding teenager at the time, remembers the tone and rhythm of the ballad. “Prior to this, I could only think of the Beatles in terms of raw, rough, leather, and wild. This song made the girls and boys dream of love.”

One special feature of “Love Me Do” was the soft sound of the mouth organ, with Lennon's lips squeezing out the music. Was it the same harmonica that John Lennon stole from a store on Allan Williams's rocky van journey to Hamburg? Whether the harmonica was purloined or purchased, John's mouth action was a big hit, along with the romantic voice of Paul McCartney.

So, again, a chance walk-in by the unrelenting Brian Epstein ended in a score of untold proportions. George Martin was encountered, quite accidentally. That would be a marriage made in heaven, as they say.

“Love Me Do” would thrill young lovers in Britain and much later in America. Over in Hamburg, the song's first critic was surprised, but pleased.

Forty-nine years later, sipping strong coffee on a cold day in Hamburg, Horst Fascher looks at me with a grin and says, “Although I told Paul it wasn't good, I am happy that I was wrong. I hope he didn't hold it against me.”

The breakout song wasn't the Beatles' best, but it was the result of their extraordinary talent being actually recognized. The honest truth? No one gets to their goals alone, which brings us to the story of an unusual ensemble of friends and supporters who changed the boys' lives, and at the same time, changed their own in wonderful ways—in one case with an unhappy ending.