Tune In Read online

  ALSO BY MARK LEWISOHN

  The Beatles Live! (1986)

  The Beatles: 25 Years in the Life (1987) [USA: Day By Day, 1990]

  The [Complete] Beatles Recording Sessions (1988)

  The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992)

  Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy (1998)

  Funny, Peculiar: The True Story of Benny Hill (2002)

  Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy (2nd edition, 2003)

  AS COAUTHOR

  In My Life: John Lennon Remembered (1990)

  The Beatles’ London (1994)

  The Beatles’ London (2nd edition, 2008)

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Lewisohn

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Little Brown UK.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lewisohn, Mark.

  The Beatles : all these years / Mark Lewisohn. — First edition.

  volumes cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Beatles. 2. Rock musicians—England—Biography. I. Title.

  ML421.B4.L47 2013

  782.42166092’2—dc23

  [B}

  2013031654

  ISBN 978-1-4000-8305-3

  eBook 978-0-8041-3934-2

  Jacket design by M-80 Design

  Jacket photographs by: (left to right) Beatles at Liverpool Airport: © The Epstein Family; Beatles at Indra: Courtesy Aarkive Features; Ringo with Ty, Johnny and Rory: Courtesy Iris Caldwell; John, Paul and George at Hulme Hall: © Graham Smith

  v3.1

  For Richard, who gets it,

  and Neil, who got it but went too soon,

  and Liverpudlians everywhere, whose heritage this is

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  The Pre-1971 British Monetary System Explained

  THE PROLOGUE: Another Lennon-McCartney Original (January 1958)

  OLD BEFORE OUR BIRTH

  1 In My Liverpool Home (1845–1945)

  2 Boys (1945–54)

  3 “Who You Lookin’ At?” (1954–5)

  4 Scufflers to Skifflers (1956)

  5 Guaranteed Not to Split (January–June 1957)

  6 Come Go with Me (July 6, 1957)

  7 “He’ll Get You into Trouble, Son” (July–December 1957)

  YEAR 1, 1958: THINKING OF LINKING

  8 “Where We Going, Johnny?” (January–May 1958)

  9 “This Is My Life” (June–December 1958)

  YEAR 2, 1959: THREE COOL CATS

  10 “A Sort of Violent Teddy Boy” (January–July 1959)

  Photo Insert 1

  11 “Come Viz Me to Ze Casbah” (July–December 1959)

  YEAR 3, 1960: COMPETENCE, CONFIDENCE & CONTINUITY

  12 The Swish of the Curtain

  13 “Hi-yo, hi-yo, Silver—Away!” (January–May 1960)

  14 “Where’s the Bloody Money?” (May 18–30, 1960)

  15 Drive and Bash (May 31–August 15, 1960)

  16 “Mach Schau!” (August 15–September 30, 1960)

  17 A Cellarful of Oiks (October 1–December 31, 1960)

  YEAR 4, 1961: THE ROCK AGE

  18 The Big Beat Boppin’ Beatles (January–March 1961)

  19 Piedels on Prellies (April–June 1961)

  Photo Insert 2

  20 Soup and Sweat and Rock ’n’ Roll (July–September 1961)

  21 Les Nerk Twins à Paris (October 1–14, 1961)

  22 “Right Then, Brian – Manage Us” (October 15–December 3, 1961)

  23 The Boys (December 1961)

  YEAR 5, 1962: ALWAYS BE TRUE

  24 Choices (January 1–February 5, 1962)

  25 “A Tendency to Play Music” (February 6–March 8, 1962)

  26 “Us Against Them” (March 9–April 10, 1962)

  27 “He Could Easily Have Been the Beatle” (April 10–13, 1962)

  28 You Better Move On (April 13–June 2, 1962)

  29 Under Marching Orders (June 2–6, 1962)

  30 The Undesirable Member (June 7–August 18, 1962)

  31 Some Other Guy (August 19–October 4, 1962)

  Photo Insert 3

  32 Friday, October 5, 1962—The Sixties Start Here

  33 “We’ve Got It, and Here We Are with It” (October 6–31, 1962)

  34 “Show Me I’m Wrong” (November 1–15, 1962)

  35 New Look, New Sound (November 16–December 17, 1962)

  36 And Who Knows! (December 18–31, 1962)

  NOTES

  APPEAL

  CREDITS

  PICTURE CREDITS

  INTRODUCTION

  Every once in a while, life conjures up a genuine ultimate.

  It can be said without fear of hyperbole: this is what the Beatles were and are, and fifty-plus years after they leapt into view—fifty—there’s little hint it’s going to change. So many would-be successors have come and gone, there’s now an acceptance that no one can be bigger or better. John Winston Lennon, James Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey hold on strong, universally acknowledged as a cultural force, still somehow current and woven into the fabric of modern lives. John, Paul, George and Ringo, the four Liverpool lads who pumped the heart of the decade that also won’t shut up, the 1960s.

  If it was necessary to “sell” the Beatles you could point to many achievements, but their music underpins everything: one game-changing album after another and one game-changing single after another, 214 tracks recorded in seven crowded years in a kaleidoscope of styles. This music is known, loved, respected, discussed, imitated, cherished and studied; it continues to inspire new artists and be reshaped impressively in every genre; its song titles and words are adapted for headlines in twenty-first-century media, quoted and folded into everyday vocabulary, chanted in football stadiums. Infused with the Beatles’ energy and personalities, this music still lifts the spirit and is passed joyfully from generation to generation.

  Clearly, something special happened here—but what? How?

  Consider too …

  • how the Beatles repeatedly married cutting-edge originality with immense mainstream popularity, when for almost anyone else these are mutually exclusive, and how (and why) they ditched their winning ideas every time the world raced to copy them;

  • how they did everything with down-to-earth humor, honesty, optimism, style, charisma, irreverence, intelligence and a particularly spiky disdain for falseness; how they were articulate, bold, curious, direct, instinctive, challenging, blunt, sharp, polite, rude, prickers of pomposity, rule-breakers never cowed by convention;

  • how they created a profound and sustained connection to their public, and how they resisted branding, commercial sponsorship and corporate affiliation and hype: the Beatles were free of artifice and weren’t the product of market research or focus groups or TV talent shows, they were original and developed organically when everyone was looking the other way.

  I’ve been waiting for the book this sweeping story demands, one that stares unflinchingly at how it happened and what it was all about—a book to shoot adrenaline back into extraordinary events crushed under the weight of fifty years’ telling (and not always very good telling at that). I’ve wanted a history of deep-level inquiry where the information is tested accurate, and free of airbrushing, embellishment and guesswork, written with an open mind and even ha
nds, one that unfolds lives and events in context and without hindsight, the way they occurred, and sets the Beatles fully among their contemporaries—they never existed in isolation and were always part of musical scenes with friends and rivals, young turks together in clubs and nightclubs.

  I’ve also wanted a book that explains how the society that shaped the Beatles first received them and was then shaped by them, that looks at how John, Paul, George and Ringo dealt with each other as friends and bandmates, and how they so deftly handled the media and such phenomenal celebrity. I’ve wanted it shown how they transformed the worldwide music industry, and shook global youth culture awake, and induced a revolution in how people listened to and played music. The Beatles didn’t invent the electric guitar and weren’t the first “guitar group,” but every rock band since 1963 is fulfilling their legacy, especially if they write their own songs.

  In 2003, I decided to have a go. As a professional historian-researcher who had worked around (and sometimes for) the Beatles for thirty years, I could draw on long periods of access to the right people and resources. Beyond that, I was aware that mountains of unfound knowledge—vibrant color, vital details—were out there if you knew where to look.

  But, one book? Way too much of relevance and interest happened in and around the Beatles to fit into one book. This is a richly epic tale; cramming it into a single volume would mean cutting reams of material essential to the understanding. This book, Tune In, is the first in a trilogy titled All These Years that I hope will do the subject justice. (It is, at any rate, my best shot.) It’s an objective and independent three-volume series that begins at the beginning and will go on until it reaches the end. Primary sources are central: an array of research discoveries, and every conceivable form of archive document found in private and public hands—letters, contracts, photos, recordings and so much more, and this story has a fantastically rich paper trail—augmented entirely by direct quotes. I’m tracking whatever was said by the Beatles (and those close to them) to anyone at any time—and there are hundreds of frank and revealing interviews unused since they were carried out. I’ve also traced and talked to hundreds of authentic witnesses, many of them overlooked until now. George Harrison’s cautionary words are a constant companion—“In their bid to tell what they know, sometimes people tell more than what they know”*—but fictions fall quicker through the sieve.

  It’s been a continually surprising experience. I’ve likened the challenge (which is ongoing) to assembling a multimillion-piece jigsaw puzzle of lives and moments: the more pieces you have and can place right where they belong, where they really fit, the clearer the picture becomes both in vivid close-up and broadly detailed context.

  Tune In takes the Beatles from before their childhoods right up to the final night of 1962 when, after packing several years into the previous three, they know success is theirs to grasp but have no clue they’re on the cusp of a whole new kind of fame, a white-hot and ever-royal celebrity. These, then, are the formative years, the less visible years, the premadness years—and in many respects the most absorbing and entertaining period of them all. (This can also be claimed for the others, of course.)

  What the research yells loudly is that the Beatles didn’t begin to be remarkable when they upped and took over Britain or (all the more amazingly) America and the rest of the world, and that they didn’t suddenly become funny when they filmed A Hard Day’s Night, or beguiling when recording Rubber Soul. It shouts that their compelling urge to move on fast, to innovate and progress, didn’t start with Revolver or Sgt. Pepper—or even when, in the last chapters of this book, their first record came out. Everything was already revved up and running in the halls, houses and streets of an exceptional city, the only place these people could have come from, the only place these events could have happened: Liverpool, that great matrix of Anglo-Celtic alchemy. From her Second World War bombsites rose a thriving live music scene the like of which existed nowhere else, a scene in which the Beatles were sharper-smarter-faster-funnier than their many rivals—and where they also polished, well before they had hits, that tightly engaged relationship with their public. In other words, those later world-changing Beatles are these Beatles, just lesser-known, local not global. They’re the same blokes with the same instinctive, intuitive originality and humor, the same bluntness and abhorrence of sham, living the present to the full … and sowing seeds that would flower later.

  Again, though, how? I’ve tried to thread together the lives and relationships of John, Paul, George, Richy, Stuart, Pete, Brian Epstein, George Martin and other crucial players. Everyone is in their context and worlds run on parallel and occasionally interweaving tracks before properly connecting—characters creating the circumstances to dictate an outcome. The Lennon and McCartney partnership is one among many deep explorations, told thoroughly in their words and deeds. George and Ringo were essential to the Beatles but John and Paul drove the bus and wrote the catalog, and theirs is an especially fascinating tale—two needle-sharp grammar-school boys and then young men steeped in postwar British culture but with a passion for America and its great music, close friends with a deep admiration for each other’s talent and understanding of each other’s moods and personalities. Their determination, their egos and their creative rivalry made them the greatest songwriters of the age, and I’ve tried to show how it began.

  The Beatles manifestly rejected labels and categories in all they did, so it doesn’t matter if you call them the ultimate rock band or the ultimate pop group or whatever else. They just were, and theirs is the best story. Every performer, band, producer, impresario has one, and many of them are great and worthy of fine biographies, but there’s nothing like the Beatles story to legitimately go everywhere and strongly connect everything to everyone. It’s a blockbuster history with surprises at every turn, many heroes and a few villains, unparalleled triumphs, great joys and genuine tragedies, the ebbs and flows of human lives—plus an avalanche of fortuitous chances and coincidences that defy the laws of probability.

  From the project’s conception I’ve seen it as the Beatles in their times—them in their world and the world right about them. And now it’s all this …

  Mark Lewisohn

  England, 2013

  * * *

  * Said during evidence given at the Royal Courts of Justice, London, May 6, 1998.

  THE PRE-1971 BRITISH

  MONETARY SYSTEM EXPLAINED

  Britain’s long history gave it a monetary system archaic in comparison to the latterly introduced decimal method. Until switching in 1971, the currency was pounds, shillings and pence, often abbreviated in print as L.S.D. or l.s.d.—from the Latin librae, solidi, denarii. (The £ sign derives from Libra, the basic Roman unit of weight.)

  A pound—£1—was broken down into twenty shillings, and each shilling had twelve pence, so instead of today’s decimal 100 pence to the pound there were 240. An old shilling is equivalent to five decimal pence (5p); ten shillings is 50p, and so on.

  Amounts with both shillings and pence would be spoken as, for example, eight and six—eight shillings and sixpence [8s 6d; 42½p]. The perennially popular retail price that is one penny short of a pound was 19s 11d, said as nineteen and eleven. Some items (in business transactions especially) were priced in the old form of “guineas.” A guinea was £1 1s [£1.05]. The £5 and £10 notes were known as “a fiver” and “a tenner.”

  Just as the pound had nicknames—e.g., a quid—so a shilling was a bob. A record might cost six bob [30p]. Ten shillings [50p] was ten bob. £1 10s [£1.50] could be written as 30s and said as thirty bob. Coins took on these and other nicknames: the 3d was a threppence or thruppence, the 6d (sixpence) was a tanner, two shillings two bob, and the large silver coin worth two and six (2s 6d) was half a crown or a half-crown. Two pence (2d) was known as tuppence, and fractions of a penny were known as the ha’penny (half-penny) and farthing (quarter of a penny, phased out in 1960). Something costing just pennies—e.g., 4d—would be known as
four penn’orth, short for “four pennies worth.”

  There were several ways of writing shillings and pence, so eight and six could be 8s 6d or 8/6 or even 8/6d. Unless quoting original documents that had it differently, this book adopts one style—8s 6d.

  The Pre-1971 British Monetar y System Explained

  The value of £1 in these years, comparable to 2013

  1850 £72.10

  1860 £64.71

  1870 £63.08

  1880 £66.40

  1890 £78.86

  1900 £81.40

  1910 £74.21

  1920 £27.58

  1930 £43.46

  1940 £37.35

  1941 £34.52

  1942 £34.31

  1943 £34.50

  1944 £34.19

  1945 £33.75

  1946 £33.70

  1947 £33.49

  1948 £31.37

  1949 £30.51

  1950 £29.63

  1951 £27.15

  1952 £24.85

  1953 £24.11

  1954 £23.67

  1955 £22.66

  1956 £21.58

  1957 £20.82

  1958 £20.21

  1959 £20.09

  1960 £19.89

  1961 £19.23

  1962 £18.45

  Source: Bank of England/International Monetary Fund

  The value of £1 in US $

  1915 4.70

  1925 4.87

  1932 3.69

  1934 5.00

  1940 4.03

  1949 3.72

  1950–62 2.80

  THE PROLOGUE

  JANUARY 1958

  ANOTHER LENNON-MCCARTNEY ORIGINAL

  Jim McCartney would no more let Paul skip school than allow that boy in the house, so subterfuge was vital. Afternoon sessions, two till five, ended with a hurried wafting around of smoke and washing of dirty dishes … though by then they’d often written another song.

  “He’ll get you into trouble, son,” Jim warned Paul. Parents had been saying that about John Lennon since he was five—and rightly so, because he did. But this hadn’t stopped a solid gang of pals—intelligent grammar-school boys, as Paul McCartney was—idolizing him as their leader. And what high and hysterical times he gave them in return.