Dead Chuffed[I]
Only days after the release of their latest single, the Beatles viewed their Saturday, January 19, 1963, appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars as a major plug for “Please Please Me.” (At the afternoon rehearsal they learned that the spots were all “mimed” to records, which allowed them to more or less walk through the two-minute segment.) The audience was completely unprepared for what they saw. Gliding eerily across the screen were four extraordinary-looking boys, grinning at one another with goofy joy from beneath mops of unhumanly long hair and behaving like cuddly wind-up toys—heads bobbing on an invisible spring, shoulders seesawing to the beat, bodies jerking back and forth—in a manner reminiscent of a Carry On gang send-up. No one had ever seen hair that long—or that shape—before. Was it some kind of a joke? And their suits broke all the rules; they were smart and relaxed, with a nod to the tradition of good English tailoring, but also a wink in the way they were buttoned to the neck.
Once viewers got past the window dressing, the music knocked them out cold. Hearing “Please Please Me” had the same effect as being thrown into an icy shower. After sitting through thirty-eight minutes of warm, sudsy pop, this bracing rock ’n roll song cut right to the bone. The intro alone hit a nerve. The tone of it was powerful, unrelenting. Listen to this: “Last night I said these words to m-y-y-y-g-i-r-r-r-l…” Harmonies! Gorgeous three-part vocals, followed by a dramatic explosion of ascending guitar chords. “Please pleeeeeease me, wo-yeah, like I please…” And that finish—five sharp, emphatically executed chords wrapped up in a sustained burst of drumbeats—left the whole thing vibrating with uncommon energy.
A bomb had gone off. British rock ’n roll had arrived.
In the next three years, the Beatles would be joined by the Olympian forces of British rock: the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Hollies, Van Morrison, Manfred Mann, and Traffic, as well as virtually the entire Merseybeat roster—all of them swept in on the vast tide of musicians and personalities that transformed the popular culture. Plenty of others contributed to the exuberant groundswell, from artists (Hockney) to critics (Tynan) to photographers (Bailey) to designers (Quant) to writers (Fleming), but none of them caused such a stir as did the Beatles; none was as personable or as newsworthy; none was so innocent that every exploit, every record seemed genuinely fresh and unspoiled by creeping commercialism. “To those of us in England who lived for the next great American single,” says journalist Ray Connolly, “it seemed like the Beatles were the promise we’d been waiting for all our lives.”
Unlike “Love Me Do,” which had scrounged for random airplay, “Please Please Me” echoed everywhere. Radio Luxembourg had added it right out of the box, and not the occasional spotty play they begrudged to borderline new releases but the kind of all-out saturation that indicated a smash. The same happened at the BBC, where it immediately cracked the teenage playlists, then crept ever so gently into the “light programming” shows. Critics—including some who had found fault with “Love Me Do”—raved. By the end of the month, a year after being told the Beatles were inappropriate for radio, Brian was fielding offers from a variety of producers for appearances on such important shows as The Friday Spectacular, People and Places, Saturday Club, The Talent Spot, and Here We Go.
The mood in the overcrowded headquarters of NEMS was irrepressibly upbeat. Since the beginning of the year, the management end of the business had taken on a momentum of its own, sustained mostly by the Beatles but intensified by some fresh roster moves Brian had made, as well as others in the works. Plans were now under way for the release of Gerry and the Pacemakers’ first record—the resurrected “How Do You Do It,” produced by George Martin—which was scheduled for the end of January. And sensing some ground gained at EMI, Brian also signed the Big Three, in the hope of grooming them for a session with one of the company’s labels. “Things were going so well,” recalls Tony Bramwell, “that he started believing he had the magic touch.”
Indeed, Brian so enjoyed the deal-making aspect that he decided to develop another artist almost from scratch. Since the end of the previous year, he’d had his eye on a shy, plump-faced boy with unobvious good looks named Billy Ashton. Ashton’s voice was as thin as watered-down soup, he moved awkwardly onstage, and those loud, black-and-pink suits he favored didn’t fool anyone. But Brian, according to Alistair Taylor, “probably fancied the lad” and was full of his own “star-making” potential. “Brian knew Billy couldn’t sing,” says Taylor, but he wouldn’t allow a little thing like that to get in the way, “because [Billy] had the right image; he was a good-looking, clean-cut, impressionable young lad who could approximately sing, which would more than do.”
Decades later, Billy Kramer (Brian changed his name, thinking Ashton “too posh”) would be asked to account for Brian Epstein’s interest in his career. Shrugging, he says, “I was just a wild card,” meaning an inconsequential component. “It could have been anybody, when you think about it.”
[II]
Up until a year earlier, Brian Epstein’s only experience with rock ’n roll had been ordering records to stock the bins at his father’s store. Now he had to organize—relying mostly on his imagination—a full-blown management company substantial in size and complicated in detail. The duties were no longer limited to penciling in local club appearances but now involved recording dates, radio appearances, press interviews, label and contract negotiations, transportation, overnight accommodations, and fan mail. There were fees to be collected, weekly salaries paid (each of the Beatles received a paycheck of £50 every Friday), schedules coordinated, equipment purchased, wardrobe fitted. And Brian handled everything himself—every phone call, every booking, every piece of mail, every arrangement: every decision. There were assistants to do the legwork, but the responsibility was entirely his.
It was a demanding but manageable workload that Brian had undertaken. But with the success of “Please Please Me,” all hell broke loose. Sales were strong, stronger than anything EMI had expected, requiring repeated pressings to satisfy demand. And in Liverpool the impact was explosive. Now every time the band came in to see Brian, be it for routine business or to root through stacks of fan mail, extreme measures had to be taken to provide for their safety. “Whenever word spread that the boys were inside, kids started coming around the shop, blocking the doors so the ordinary customers couldn’t get in,” Frieda Kelly remembers. After so many years of complete informality, it seemed downright unfriendly, if not hostile, to suddenly throw up barriers. Eventually, Norris explains, the hard-core fans refused to leave NEMS until the Beatles came downstairs, so Brian would send the boys out the second-floor fire escape, onto the roof, where a cast-iron ladder lowered them to safety on busy Whitechapel.
Harry Epstein wasn’t pleased. His business—Liverpool’s foremost appliance store—had become a hangout for crowds of Beatles fans that often snowballed into thirty or forty kids. More and more, when Harry returned from lunch with Clive they had to fight their way inside. Brian did his best to propose remedies—“I’ll ask Bob Wooler to have a word with the kids,” he promised—but the inconvenience grew only worse. Harry put his foot down: Brian had to look for another place to conduct his new venture.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Beatles were set to embark on their first major tour—dead-last on a six-act bill headlined by Helen Shapiro, the teenage pop sensation who reigned as Britain’s Sweetheart. A poised, showbiz-style belter with a megawatt personality, often described by friends as “a pint-sized Ethel Merman” (although Teresa Brewer was probably more apropos), Shapiro had racked up several middle-of-the-road hits and a following that was rock-solid in the provinces. The Beatles were “elated” to appear on the bill. In their book, Helen Shapiro was a star, even though she sang what John openly referred to as “mush.”
“The Beatles made little or no impression on the first few nights of the tour,” singer Kenny Lynch, one of the other performers, recalled years later. “They played their hearts out, like everyone else, but it would have taken a blowtorch to get those audiences to warm to us.” The response in Bradford, and again in Doncaster, reflected the brutal chill gripping England, especially in the Northeast, where the flatlands, naked and defenseless, were hammered by howling North Sea winds. There was little cheer in the lonely towns around Yorkshire that winter. Blizzards—one right after another—had ripped across the country, isolating villages and their people from one another, and a fresh covering of snow, layered in strata on the pitted roads, swept down from Scotland, keeping many of the faithful fans away. The Beatles appear not to have minded the inconvenience. Even the shabby accommodations—fifteen-shilling guesthouses, some of which “looked like something out of Vincent Price’s cellar”—failed to dampen their spirits. As John noted, they were happy “just to get out of Liverpool and [to] break new ground.” Those dire jive-hall gigs, the endless lunchtime sessions, even Hamburg, where they were regarded as stars—all had run their course, and the Beatles, bored and restless, aspired to new challenges, no matter the Siberian conditions.
By the time they reached Carlisle, the ice had thawed. At the ABC Cinema, a grand, slightly tattered, old picture palace where they were booked to play two shows, the seats were packed with kids who had been shut inside all month. Besides the insurgent relief they felt, there was palpable anticipation in the room. “Please Please Me” was proving an efficient calling card. The record—along with fairly heavy buzz dispatched by favorable disc jockeys—had sparked serious interest in the Beatles, and fans scattered among the crowd began to react with tremendous enthusiasm. Gordon Sampson, covering the show for NME, found the behavior incredible. A buildup for the Beatles erupted from the moment the houselights went down, as “the audience repeatedly called for them while other artists were performing.” The response was unprecedented.
That night the Beatles were fourth on the bill, following three professionally tight but insipid acts. Kenny Lynch was on right before them. Before he left the stage, a murmur was rippling through the hall. “It was clear from the middle of my set,” Lynch recalls, “that [the] audience was waiting for them.” Lynch remained onstage while his backing band unplugged their instruments and fled, then looked into the wings for his cue. John and George, standing practically on top of each other, waggled the necks of their guitars. Lynch put the microphone to his lips and said, “And now…” But the rest of it was drowned out by an uproar as the Beatles bounded onto the stage.
Looking back over the Beatles’ set, the repertoire seems unexceptional. They opened with a jaunty cover version of “Chains,” then more covers—“Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” and “A Taste of Honey”—which provided a comfort zone for the audience who expected as much, no more and no less, from young British bands. But the Beatles’ showmanship, that mix of aggression coupled with those dazzling, seductive smiles they’d hit upon at the Cavern and perfected in Hamburg, scored instantly with the kids. And it was in sharp contrast to the canned arrangements pumped out by the previous bands. By the time they launched into “Please Please Me”—jacking up the excitement with that raucous harmonica-bass intro and shaking their heads in unison—the place just went wild.
“I think the Beatles shook those crowds up, even scared them a little,” says Kenny Lynch, who watched every set from the cinema wings. “They were so different, so tight, so confident, really playing their hearts out. It was like no experience those kids ever had before. Every girl thought they were singing straight to her, every boy saw himself standing in their place.
“It all changed from that night. We took a break a day or two later, before the next leg of the tour, but when we went back out on the road you could tell the whole balance had shifted, because all anyone wanted to hear was the Beatles.”
The next day, instead of accompanying the coach tour to Peterborough, the Beatles traveled by van to London, where, on Monday, February 11, they were expected at Abbey Road. Just before the tour began, George Martin had contacted Brian Epstein about plans to schedule another recording session, this time for an album to be released sometime that spring. Martin was determined to capitalize on the success of the first two singles. “Please Please Me” had shot to number five on the charts, and conventional wisdom dictated that an album sold best shortly after a single broke into the Top Twenty, which is when most kids would decide to buy it. That meant working fast to get an album into the stores before the record peaked.
It also left little time to come up with a concept. For a while, George Martin toyed with the idea of recording a live album. He’d been captivated by the raw energy of the Beatles’ Cavern performances and thought that if there was somehow a way to duplicate the magic of it—if he could sneak the outside world into the party for a night—then the songs would take care of themselves. That sounded good in theory, but it soon became evident to him that the logistics for such a session made the reality impossible. This wasn’t like recording the cast album for Beyond the Fringe, when his producer sat under a stage for three nights, operating a tape recorder. Acoustically, the Cavern was a nightmare, all cement-and-brick entrails, with nothing to absorb the reverberation. They’d never be able to control sound levels or get any kind of balance there. And how would they mix those gorgeous harmonies? Or cover up the inevitable clams? It was more practical, Martin decided, to work in a controlled environment.
Instead, Martin prepared a list of fourteen songs—highlights gleaned from the Cavern sessions—and suggested that the Beatles run down all of them when they got to the studio. To fill the album, they needed ten songs in addition to the two singles and their B-sides, and from their repertoire Martin had selected mostly covers—some pop hits, a few rock ’n roll gems, a schmaltzy ballad or two—along with a number of Lennon-McCartney songs to show off their originality. The entire album had to be cut in a daylong, ten-hour session.
To complicate matters, sessions ran “strictly to time” at Abbey Road, which meant working from ten o’clock in the morning until one; taking an hour off for lunch; returning to the studio from two until five (with a tea break at 3:45); followed by an evening session from seven until ten, when the studio closed.
It didn’t help matters that John had arrived sick. He had developed a cold during the Helen Shapiro tour that was festering in his chest by the time they arrived in London. “[His] voice was pretty shot,” recalled engineer Norman Smith, who glowered at the tin of Zubes throat lozenges and cartons of cigarettes the boys stockpiled on the piano. As it was, Smith had his hands full trying, as Martin requested, to capture “the sound of the Beatles singing and playing as [if] they’d [be] perform[ing] on stage.” Earlier in the week they’d decided to lay down the rhythm tracks first, before adding any vocals, in order to imitate the atmospherics of live sound, and as such, Smith allowed the brown coats extra time that morning to double-check the configuration of the patch bays on the recording console.
In the meantime, George Martin ran over the song list with the Beatles to make sure they were all on the same page. Paul seemed adamant about recording “Falling in Love Again,” the overstylized Marlene Dietrich torch song, and it took some time for Martin, who considered the number “corny,” to talk him out of it. The same for “Besame Mucho,” which the Beatles had performed regularly since 1960. As a ballad, it meant more to them, Paul argued, than “A Taste of Honey,” which Martin preferred, but the producer stood his ground, insisting that he knew what would sound best on tape and asking them to trust his judgment. Ordinarily, the Beatles might have resisted. If anything, they were confident about their choice of material and stood up for their choices when they believed they were right, but neither John nor Paul pressed the point.
All their attention was focused on the original songs, which Martin had shuffled evenly into the album sequence. The singles—“Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me,” along with their B-sides—were a lock, but since the last string of Cavern dates John and Paul had been writing steadily, just churning out songs, and some seemed to warrant strong consideration. Huddled in a corner of the big studio while technicians swarmed around, the boys picked up guitars and launched into three of them for Martin: “Misery,” “There’s a Place,” and “17,” the latter two which they had finished some time before.
When they were done, there was no doubt that all three should be recorded. These numbers were more fully developed than their predecessors, more well crafted and rhythmically textured, allowing for dramatic shifts in the melodies with transitions suited to all sorts of imaginative orchestration. Martin was duly impressed; the boys seemed to get better each time they walked through the door.
The first session started about twenty minutes late, with the Beatles getting right to work on the newest songs. They cut “There’s a Place” (the title pinched from West Side Story) first thing that morning, a stirring, melodic tune that showed off the lushness of their interlocking harmonies, singing it again and again—ten takes in all—until everyone was satisfied with the result. From the beginning, it was clear that John’s voice was ragged, tearing at the seams. As the opening word uncoils—“There-re-re-re’s”—he struggles to stay with Paul, almost growling the bottom part of the duet while the low, sepulchral phrase threads its uneasy approach. Once aloft, however, there is a sweet synthesis of their voices, as beautiful as they ever sound on record, climaxing with a powerful, dramatic finish riding over John’s haunting harmonica.
With enough time left before lunch, they recorded “17,” a number the Beatles had been performing to great acclaim since Hamburg. It was a breathless, all-out rocker whose opening lines—“She was just seventeen, and she’d never been a beauty queen”—Paul had written down in the van one night in 1962 on his way home from a gig. The melody and the first stanza came right away, but by the next afternoon, when he showed it to John, both boys agreed that the second line was “useless.” Sitting on the living-room floor at Paul’s house, with a Liverpool Institute notebook open at their feet, they ran through the alphabet looking for acceptable rhymes. It’s a tribute to their cleverness, and perhaps a prophetic gesture toward the blasé shorthand of disaffected youth, that they went for a complete throwaway: “You know what I mean.” What cheek! And yet, how effective. It said it all, without really saying a thing.
“She was just seventeen, you know what I mean” eventually became the cornerstone of this album, certainly the heart of the song, which they retitled “I Saw Her Standing There.” Nothing the Beatles had done so far packed more excitement into a number. From the opening bar, when Paul counts off the time, the song takes off, fairly well soars, with all the spark and spirit of a rave-up. Clearly, they put everything they had into it—raspy, suggestive vocals; twangy, rhythmic guitars; syncopated handclaps; falsetto oooohs; and a galloping bass line that Paul claimed to have lifted, almost note for note, from Chuck Berry’s album cut “I’m Talking About You.” For two minutes and fifty-five seconds, the Beatles find the groove and never let go.
When they were done, George Martin called for a lunch break, inviting the band to join him, Norman Smith, and the second engineer, Richard Langham, “for a pie and a pint” at the Heroes of Alma pub around the corner from the studio. The Beatles were visibly tired and in need of a break—besides touring, they’d traveled hours to get to the session and had worked under extreme pressure since their arrival—but they passed on the offer in order to continue rehearsing the material.
After lunch the producers returned to find the Beatles still at it. “We couldn’t believe it,” Richard Langham later told chronologist Mark Lewisohn. “We had never seen a group work right through their lunch break before.” Sometime during that stretch, they had traipsed down to the studio canteen and bought containers of milk on the premise that it would soothe their ragged voices. Milk was hardly an elixir—the relief it brought was temporary and produced a phlegmy wheeze—but as the afternoon session began, John swigged often from the wax containers stacked by the steps of the control room. His voice gained a brief reprieve while Paul sang lead on “A Taste of Honey,” followed by “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” a lilting, innocent confession of adolescent love that John had written, based on the tune of “I’m Wishing” from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as a vehicle to showcase George’s vocal debut.
No doubt George wasn’t the same intuitive stylist as his bandmates, nor in their rarefied category. But while his voice wasn’t yet cultivated or as confident as John’s or Paul’s, neither was it feeble or ineffective. His rendition of “Do You Want to Know a Secret” (which Paul considered a “hack song”) may not have been as exciting as some of the other tracks, but it was entirely capable, even charming. And there was nothing to disassociate it from the overall Beatles sound; it caused no disruption to the flow of the album that might prove jarring or out of place.
After the Beatles came back from a tea and dinner break, Paul stumbled through thirteen takes of “Hold Me Tight,” a song he’d written that they were still on the fence about. (It was eventually left off the album.) Five songs remained—a sizable workload by any reasonable standard, especially with three hours left on the studio clock. But these were songs the Beatles could—and occasionally did—play in their sleep: “Anna,” “Boys,” “Chains,” “Baby It’s You,” and one more to be chosen from their trusty playlist. Since the concept had been to simulate a Cavern gig, the boys determined to let it rip.
“They just put their heads down and played” was how Brian explained it to a friend. And when they did, as George Martin predicted, echoes of Garston, Litherland, Mathew Street, and Hamburg flooded the studio. The infectious excitement and the raw and ragged beat, all the ingredients vital to a live Beatles show, come right through. In the scheme of things, the covers are the least interesting aspect of the Beatles’ remarkable output. But they cook with the true spirit of the band, from the distinctive American influence to the energy and power of the beat.
The four songs required only four or five takes each, with the first take, in most cases, enough to do the trick. By ten o’clock, they had finished. Abbey Road was packing up for the night; technicians switched off the equipment and looped miles of extension cables over their arms, musicians said good night at the door, lights were dimmed. There was still a great deal that might be done with the evening, but the Beatles were spent, physically and emotionally. Over the years there were places they’d played longer and harder, but never with as much on the line. They’d put everything they had into the session. George Martin was understandably ecstatic, but wouldn’t it be perfect, he speculated, if they wrapped the whole project that night? The album was still one song short. The way they’d smoked through the others, it would take only another half an hour or so to cut a final track.
If he expected reluctance on the Beatles’ part, there was none forthcoming. At this point in the game, they were willing to do whatever Martin asked, so they followed him downstairs to the canteen, where, over coffee, they sorted through songs, looking for a killer finale. The way Norman Smith recalled it, “someone suggested they do ‘Twist and Shout,’ ” a staple of their shows throughout the past year. It was a kick-ass song, an early teen anthem, usually wound out into an extended jam, that never failed to jack up an audience. But it required a tremendous vocal performance, pushing every line to the limit of the register. “A real larynx-tearer,” as George Martin would later refer to it. And it was John’s song to carry. Was he up to it? No one, including John, was sure. If his voice was shot that morning, it was certainly worse for all the wear now. He’d been burdening it all day, straining and draining it like a car running on fumes. There was enough left, he insisted, though admittedly his voice felt “like sandpaper” when he swallowed.
Everyone knew they’d have to get it on the first take—the band, the engineer, everyone had to do his job, without a missed note or a glitch. There would be nothing left of John’s voice after that.
The band returned to the studio and tuned up while Brian and the production staff climbed the stairs to the control booth. It was cold and stale-smelling in the room: lived in. The air inside seemed thicker, sad, vaguely intimate. In the vast paneled space, ceilinged with fluorescent lamps, the light cast a calm and creamy umbrella over the boys, who went about their work like seasoned professionals. It took some concentration to pull the guitars together, which the Beatles wrote off to fatigue. Their fingers grew impatient. Coaxing, dwoing-ing the strings, the instruments eventually complied under protest. Not more than ten minutes passed until Martin, invisible behind the glass booth, signaled that they were ready.
John tore open a wax carton and gargled noisily with milk. He’d played most of the day in a rumpled suit, but sometime after dinner the jacket was removed and two fingers yanked down the tie. Now, without a word, he stripped off his shirt. He draped it over a bench, then walked over to the mike and nodded to the others: good to go.
It is obvious from the very first notes that John was straining for control. “Shake it up bay-be-eee…” was more of a shriek than singing. There was nothing left of his voice. It was bone-dry, stripped bare, with all the resonance husked from the tone, and the sound it made was like an angry, hoarse-voiced fan screeching at a football match. Between clamped jaws, contorting his face, he croaked, “Twist and shout.” He had been struggling all day to reach notes, but this was different, this hurt. And it was painful to listen to. Still, John held nothing in reserve. Trancelike, as the band rocked harder, building excitement with their impetuous energy, the struggle grew more intense. “C’mon, and twist a little closer” broke up into an agonizing, demonic rasp, until on the last refrain the tortured throatiness strangled every word before Paul, in admiration, shouted, “Hey,” celebrating, as they miraculously crossed the finish line.
John was wasted, near collapse, but the others already knew what he was about to find out from a playback: that for all its hairiness, “Twist and Shout” is a masterpiece—imperfect but no less masterful, with all the rough edges exposed to underscore its power. It is raw, explosive. The sound of ravaged lassitude, of everything coming apart, only complements the spirit of a tumultuous live performance. In the booth, there was jubilation. George Martin and his crew knew they had “got it in one,” and as he and the others later claimed, they reveled in it. The Beatles had their first album, and as John so eloquently put it, they were “dead chuffed.”
[III]
But there was no rest for the weary. For the next ten days the Beatles humped around the country playing one-nighters on a route that often seemed designed by Jackson Pollock. After tearing out of London, they drove straight to Yorkshire, then east to Hull, stopping in Liverpool on February 14 long enough to play a Valentine’s Day dance.
It was a riotous homecoming, with almost two thousand of the faithful jamming into the Locarno Ballroom, where an agitated disc jockey repeatedly admonished the crowd “to give the boys some air.” The Beatles were no longer the loutish, chain-smoking, largely unprofessional—shameless—band that had haunted local jive hives months before. They took the stage like stars and launched into a set that had been shaped and refined to make the most of their new success. Kinder, gentler, even their look had improved; it was more tailored, their Beatles haircuts stylishly groomed, and at key points during songs, when they sensed the audience was in their thrall, George, Paul, and John, on cue, would hit a falsetto oooo-o-o and shake their heads in unison, inciting an ecstatic response. This was a trick they had practiced on tour, and when it worked onstage they grinned broadly, beaming, as though delighted by the adulation. Screams ripped through the seams of each song: rapturous approval and vows of love mixed with general hysteria, amplified tenfold since their last appearance. For some friends, the scene held great significance. Colin Manley, the Remo Four’s guitarist, recalls how he had stopped by the Locarno to say hello to George and felt humbled by the Beatles’ aura. “Just a few weeks before they’d been nothing more than mates, one of us,” he recalls, “but it was clear that night they’d become stars.”
But becoming stars didn’t mean star treatment. A week later the Beatles played an uproarious show at the Cavern, drawing the biggest queue that anyone could remember since the place had opened. Their sets ran long, instigated by delirious pleas for encores. As a result, it wasn’t until after eleven o’clock that they could break free of the club. Immediately afterward, they piled into the van and headed south to London, Neil Aspinall pitching down road after narrow road, mile after mile, against swirling winds and in almost total darkness, while the Beatles, slumped against one another in the back, stole whatever shut-eye the potholes permitted. Just before dawn, they crept into London, grabbed some breakfast, then wandered around the shops to kill a few hours, before turning up at the Playhouse Theatre for a BBC television taping. Afterward, they darted out the door and spun back on the same roads. All for a four-minute spot.
There were times during the zigzag around the nation that the Beatles grumbled—grumbled mightily—about the brutal grind. How much would this really boost record sales? Why couldn’t it have been scheduled more conveniently? Was Brian driving them too hard? In the space of ten days, they’d come off a difficult tour, cut an album, played ten shows, and pulled off a day trip to London, with a solid block of eight days still ahead of them. The great distances they covered on the lousy British roads wore them out. “There was only a small piece of motorway in those days, so we’d be on the A5 for hours,” Ringo recalled. The roads killed them; the roads—and the lousy British weather. “Some nights it was so foggy that we’d be doing one mile an hour, but we’d still keep going.”
Going—and grumbling. But after the grumbling came the work. Exhausted though the Beatles might have been, they never passed up an opportunity of any kind to promote themselves. A workingman’s club, a talent show, a dance, a radio plug—no appearance was too small for the Beatles. Drive all night to a gig, shake hands with a distributor, sign autographs at a record shop, they did everything—everything—necessary to get their name around, to win fans, to succeed. There was a feeling shared among the band that if they kept at it, the dream would come true. And every so often there was a payoff, an incentive that let them know they were on the right track, that it mattered, that it wasn’t for naught.
The record deal was just such a reward, and it had kept them going for quite a long time. But it was nothing compared with the news Brian delivered the following week, while the Beatles played a club date in Manchester. “Please Please Me” had not only hit the charts, it had shot straight to number one.
Number one! As much as the news thrilled them, they had to hear it for themselves.
The Beatles remained skeptical. The NME Top Thirty cast them in a tie for the top spot, sharing honors with Frank Ifield’s dirgelike cover of “The Wayward Wind,” an American hit. Paul took a lot of grief over this distinction. Since breaking up with Dot Rhone, he’d been dating Iris Caldwell, Rory Storm’s ravishingly beautiful sister, who, as everyone in Liverpool knew, was two-timing him—with Frank Ifield. There was no denying that it irked Paul. He “was berserk over [Iris],” says a friend who knew them, and her affair with Ifield really set Paul’s teeth on edge, especially after Iris reported playing “Please Please Me” for Ifield and “he just burst out laughing.” Another incident at a concert intensified the rivalry. Paul, for some twisted reason, insisted on taking Iris to see Ifield perform at the Liverpool Empire. It seemed harmless enough at the time. Iris “knew Frank was practically blind,” and with her trademark long hair twisted in a bun, it seemed unlikely he would ever spot her in a dark, crowded audience. From their seats in the second row, Iris and Paul held hands, enjoying their little shenanigans. But near the end of the show, Ifield strode downstage and put his boot up on the footlights. “I’d like to sing a song that’s a great favorite of mine,” he announced, then rather suddenly pointed directly at Paul. “It’s called ‘He’ll Have to Go.’ ” Now their paths had crossed again: tied for Iris’s affections, tied for number one. If that didn’t take the cake! Disc, on the other hand, showed the Beatles holding down the number one position all by themselves.
There was only one clear way to sort out the accuracy.
On Sunday, February 23, the Beatles rejoined the Helen Shapiro tour, which was appearing at the Grenada, in Mansfield. The next day, before leaving for Coventry, Kenny Lynch invited Paul, George, and John to accompany him in a car he’d borrowed rather than take the bus. No one had to twist the boys’ arms. The bus was “a drag.” Besides, the scenes Lynch made were a hoot, usually culminating in some kinky backstage grope with a couple of birds.
The Beatles, sans Ringo, piled into Kenny’s car—John holding the seat for Paul and George, which signaled he’d be riding shotgun. “It was a beautiful afternoon,” Lynch recalls. “Clear but with a cold, blustery wind. We were all happy to see each other and exchange recording war stories.” For Kenny, the layoff marked a milestone of a different sort; while the Beatles were making their album, he had rushed off to record “Misery,” making him the first artist to cover one of their songs. It was a dubious distinction from the Beatles’ point of view, inasmuch as they loathed Kenny’s interpretation. But on this day their only concern was determining if “Please Please Me” was number one.
“We were following the coach,” Lynch remembers, “so we wouldn’t get lost.” But in Coventry, they pulled off the road, into a car park just behind the Lucien Theatre, to listen to a Sunday-afternoon radio show that counted down the charts. Waiting on edge, shivering in the unheated car, everyone lit cigarettes against the uneasiness, hope, and excitement that had been building up over the past two days. “It was a pretty intense moment. They knew [the record] would be pretty high because it was selling like hotcakes.” Kenny noticed that John, Paul, and George were “stern-faced” as they stared at the radio in the dashboard, waiting for the news. Finally, at about 3:30, the BBC disc jockey announced: “This week, at number two, Frank Ifield and ‘The Wayward Wind’…”
Before the opening bars even filtered over the airwaves, a cheer went up in the car. It was official. How the music magazines broke it down was beside the point. In England the BBC had the final word on the chart rankings, and by its count, Frank Ifield was number two.
“Where are we going, Johnny?” the Beatles had asked repeatedly throughout 1961 and 1962. “To the toppermost of the poppermost,” John had promised. Now, only a year later, they had reached the summit.