Podcast appearances and mentions of Allan Williams

SUMMARY Unseen Paul builds on our earlier episodes by sharing even more quotes, stories, and insights about young Paul McCartney, who deserves a nuanced and dynamic portrait in any Beatles biography. We explore some of his more overlooked character traits: his quirks and gifts; his stressors and anxieties; his unusual interests and values. These features reveal him as a fascinatingly dualistic artist and person. SOURCES Paul McCartney: the Definitive Biography by Chris Salewicz (1986) The Beatles by Bob Spitz (2005) “Portrait of Paul” Women Magazine by Mike McCartney (1965) Magical Mystery Tours: My Time with the Beatles by Tony Bramwell (2006) Many Years From Now by Barry Miles (1997) Thank U Very Much by Mike McCartney Paul McCartney on Howard Stern (2021) “A Political Paul” Interview w/ Jonathan Powers for Prospect Magazine (Jan 17, 2009) Paul McCartney interview w/ Hot Press magazine (2002) Maureen Cleave “Intelligent Beatle” “Mockers” Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9e6zHA6eOY&t=116s The Beatles Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies (1968) The Beatles diary: Volume 1 by Barry Miles (2001) BBC Interview “dyslexia”  (October 4, 1997) https://www.effinghamradio.com/2023/06/15/happy-birthday-paul-mccartney-2 Angie McCartney Interview w/ Geoffrey Guiliano (1984) https://www.tumblr.com/pleasantlyinsincere/697307027602571264/angie-and-ruth-mccartney-on-saying-i-love-you-in?source=share Mike McCartney; Beatles Book Monthly Magazine (1992) Paul McCartney for New York Times Magazine (2020) THE LYRICS by Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon (2021) Icke, Evelyn Hamann und die Beatles: Eine Art Biografie by Hans “Icke” Braun (2019) A Cellar Full of Noise by Brian Epstein (1964) Allan Williams quote from Music Legends The Beatles Special Edition by The Rock Review Music Legends Library (Sept 2, 2019) https://issuu.com/codarecordsltd/docs/music_legends_beatles_special_edition Interview w/ Horst Fascher for Deutschlandfunk Kultur (2006) Astrid Kirchherr Interviewed by Colin Hall for Get Rhythm (August 2001) PLAYLIST Stairway to Paradise SARAH VAUGHAN 4 Pointers 1 TREVOR DUNCAN Fine and Mellow ETTA JONES Welcome to My World JIM REEVES El Paso MARTY ROBBINS You Go To My Head BILLIE HOLIDAY Nature Boy NAT KING COLE Black and White EARL ROBINSON My Bucket's Got a Hole in it HANK WILLIAMS Spoonful HOWLIN WOLF Since I Don't Have You THE SKYLINERS Perhaps DORIS DAY Lonesome Town RICKY NELSON Love to Love NINA SIMONE

brad allan williams is not only a great guitar player but also a serious recording engineer, and someone who understands both the technical and emotional sides to record making. Known for his work with Jose James, Nate Smith and Brittany Howard, he released his album œconomy on Pete Min's Colorfield label earlier this year.  Like all Colorfield releases, œconomy was born from an improvisatory spirit that reflects the label's mission. Artists show up to the recording sessions with nothing written. They create spontaneously in the studio and then edit, arrange, and develop those improvisations into their record. In the case of brad's œconomy album, he added string arrangements to his free form compositions and a few virtuosic cameos by drummer Mark Guiliana. This conversation is not only an exploration of that process but also a master class in Memphis music history, a meditation on the merits of music with “layered emotions”, a conversation about relationship between suffering and art, connecting the threads of noise rock and bebop, specialization vs broad knowledge, the value of vulnerability in music, why he doesn't capitalize his name, and the journey that led him from Memphis to Los Angeles by way of Southern Mississippi, North Texas, New Jersey, New York, and the moon. www.third-story.com www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast

Peter Armitage, CEO of Anchor Capital looks at the movement of the dollar and explains what it means for emerging markets like South Africa.   In the Money Show Explainer, Steven Ambrose, MD at Atvance Intellect looked at how and why public service bargaining councils were hacked.    Then for Friday File, we looked at cheese, with Allan Williams, co-founder of The Smoking Gourmet.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

NBL Today | Your daily dose of everything NBL finals Shocking image of Harry Froling released yesterday, wish him all the best in recovery SEM re-sign Allan Williams for 2 more years Expansion debate continues, 3rd Melbourne team flagged as possibility Can TAS cover Magette loss? Awards discussion ahead of tonight

The Sports for Social Change Network Africa (SSCNA) has officially launched the inaugural SSCN Africa Awards set to be held this Wednesday, 23rd November, here at the SABC in Johannesburg. The awards are aimed at celebrating the achievements of individuals and organisations who have made strides toward positive social impact throughout Africa. Under the theme 'Leading like Mandela', the awards ceremony will honour the achievements of various social role players across the continent through sports. We spoke to Allan Williams, Network Director at the Sports for Social Change Network Africa.

**DJ Ricky K Show Replay From New Zealand on traxfm.org. Ricky Featured New Zealand/Australia's Most Happening Future House/Nu Disco & Dance Tracks From James Hype Feat Miggy, Luude & Mattafix, Allan Williams, Jolyon Petch & Starley, Funkagenda & Mark Knight, FISHER, Kygo & Whitney Houston, TSHA & Clementine Douglas, Mark Night & Armand Van Helden, David Guetta, Lizzo, David Guetta & Bebe Rexha, Miss Palmer & Steve Aoki Feat Afrojack, Leftwing & Kody & More. Catch Ricky K Live Every Sunday From 11AM UK Time/12AM NZ time #traxfm #dance #bigroomdance #edm #inthemix #club #nudisco #futurehouse Listen Live Here Via The Trax FM Player: chat.traxfm.org/player/index.html Mixcloud LIVE : sbee.link/9yjqfaw3bn Free Trax FM Android App: play.google.com/store/apps/det...mradio.ba.a6bcb The Trax FM Facebook Page : facebook.com/original103.3 Trax FM Live On Hear This: hearthis.at/k8bdngt4/live Tunerr: tunerr.co/radio/Trax-FM Tune In Radio : tunein.com/radio/Trax-FM-s225176 OnLine Radio Box: onlineradiobox.com/uk/trax/?cs...cs=uk.traxRadio Radio Deck: radiodeck.com/radio/5a09e2de87...7e3370db06d44dc Radio.Net: traxfmlondon.radio.net Stream Radio : streema.com/radios/Trax_FM..The_Originals Live Online Radio: liveonlineradio.net/english/tr...ax-fm-103-3.htm**

In which we paddle our conversational canoe through the rock and roll backwaters, stopping off this week at … … the closure of Word magazine ten years ago and what we miss – and don't miss - about it. … who in their right mind in this day and age would possibly want to be famous? … Bruce Findlay, the country's only famous record store owner. … the energetic sexual activities of Dave Davies in his new memoir and the uniquely mid-‘60s British concept of ‘kinkiness'. … Dave Grohl reaches ‘the Meldrew Point' – as old as Richard Wilson when he first played Victor Meldrew (who was a year older than Wilfred Brambell when he played Paul's grandad). .. the documentary someone should make about the Rubettes. … Manny Charlton of Nazareth RIP and the bizarre pop fact that one of their biggest hits was a Joni Mitchell cover. … handcuffed men in court for stealing rare Eagles artefacts. … whether the legendarily awful Be Here Now album deserves a gentler appraisal 25 years later. Don't forget it starts with “a minute of helicopter noise and morse code”. … and birthday patron Allan Williams' collection of Hipgnosis album sleeves – paging Picnic, Helloe'en and Music From Free Creek! You can buy Dave Davies' memoir Living On A Thin Line here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Thin-Line-Dave-Davies/dp/1472289773Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world... and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In which we paddle our conversational canoe through the rock and roll backwaters, stopping off this week at … … the closure of Word magazine ten years ago and what we miss – and don't miss - about it. … who in their right mind in this day and age would possibly want to be famous? … Bruce Findlay, the country's only famous record store owner. … the energetic sexual activities of Dave Davies in his new memoir and the uniquely mid-‘60s British concept of ‘kinkiness'. … Dave Grohl reaches ‘the Meldrew Point' – as old as Richard Wilson when he first played Victor Meldrew (who was a year older than Wilfred Brambell when he played Paul's grandad). .. the documentary someone should make about the Rubettes. … Manny Charlton of Nazareth RIP and the bizarre pop fact that one of their biggest hits was a Joni Mitchell cover. … handcuffed men in court for stealing rare Eagles artefacts. … whether the legendarily awful Be Here Now album deserves a gentler appraisal 25 years later. Don't forget it starts with “a minute of helicopter noise and morse code”. … and birthday patron Allan Williams' collection of Hipgnosis album sleeves – paging Picnic, Helloe'en and Music From Free Creek! You can buy Dave Davies' memoir Living On A Thin Line here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Thin-Line-Dave-Davies/dp/1472289773Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world... and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In which we paddle our conversational canoe through the rock and roll backwaters, stopping off this week at … … the closure of Word magazine ten years ago and what we miss – and don't miss - about it. … who in their right mind in this day and age would possibly want to be famous? … Bruce Findlay, the country's only famous record store owner. … the energetic sexual activities of Dave Davies in his new memoir and the uniquely mid-‘60s British concept of ‘kinkiness'. … Dave Grohl reaches ‘the Meldrew Point' – as old as Richard Wilson when he first played Victor Meldrew (who was a year older than Wilfred Brambell when he played Paul's grandad). .. the documentary someone should make about the Rubettes. … Manny Charlton of Nazareth RIP and the bizarre pop fact that one of their biggest hits was a Joni Mitchell cover. … handcuffed men in court for stealing rare Eagles artefacts. … whether the legendarily awful Be Here Now album deserves a gentler appraisal 25 years later. Don't forget it starts with “a minute of helicopter noise and morse code”. … and birthday patron Allan Williams' collection of Hipgnosis album sleeves – paging Picnic, Helloe'en and Music From Free Creek! You can buy Dave Davies' memoir Living On A Thin Line here …https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Thin-Line-Dave-Davies/dp/1472289773Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world... and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hear the story of Elias Kibreab and how, along with his crew chief Allan Williams, he conquered the Bruce Trail in 8d 16h 55m 0s. Along the way to the men's supported Fastest Known Time on Canada's oldest long-distance hiking trail, he encountered heat and flat tires, the goodness of friends and strangers and insight into why he runs. Importantly, consider helping him continue to raise money for the Dekemhare Orphanage Boarding school in Dekemhare, Eritrea: https://www.gofundme.com/f/dekemhare-orphanage-school

In March of 1957, John Winston Lennon formed a "skiffle" group called The Quarrymen. What is "skiffle," you may be asking? It's a kind of folk music with a blues or jazz flavor that was popular in the 1950s, played by a small group and often incorporating improvised instruments such as washboards. On July 6, '57, Lennon met a guy named James. James Paul McCartney, while playing at the Woolton Parish church fete. In Britain, fêtes are traditional public festivals held outdoors and organized to raise funds for a charity. On February 6, 1958, the young up-and-coming guitarist George Harrison was invited to watch the group perform at Wilson Hall, Garston, Liverpool. He was soon brought in as a regular player. During this period, members continually joined and left the lineup. Finally, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Stuart Sutcliffe (a classmate of Lennon at Liverpool Art College) emerged as the only constant members. One day, the members showed up to a gig wearing different colored shirts, so they decided to call themselves 'The Rainbows.' In a talent show they did in 1959, they called themselves 'Johnny and the Moondogs.' Once again, changing their name to "The Silver Beatles," they eventually decided, on August 17, 1960, on the moniker "The Beatles." Why did they choose the Beatles, Logan? They were huge fans of Buddy Holly and The Crickets – as a way of emulating their heroes, they called themselves after an insect. Right?   Well, According to John Lennon, "It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, 'from this day forward you are the Beatles with an 'A'! Thank you, mister man, they said, thanking him," he said.   Most of the accounts claim that Lennon's love of wordplay led them to adopt the 'a' eventually. Lennon would explain in a 1964 interview: "It was beat and beetles, and when you said it, people thought of crawly things, and when you read it, it was beat music."   After Lennon died in 1980, George Harrison claimed that the name came about differently in the Beatles' Anthology documentary (as is usually the case).   Harrison claimed that the name, 'The Beatles', came from the 1953 Marlon Brando film, The Wild One. In the film, Brando played a character called 'Johnny' and was in a gang called 'The Beetles.'   This answer would add up considering that the group also flirted with the name of 'Johnny and the Beetles', as well as 'Long John and the Silver Beetles.' Their unofficial manager, Allan Williams, arranged for them to perform in clubs on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany. On August 16, 1960, McCartney invited a guy named Pete Best to become the group's permanent drummer after watching Best playing with The Blackjacks in the Casbah Club. The Casbah Club was a cellar club operated by Best's mother Mona in West Derby, Liverpool, where The Beatles had played and often visited. They started in Hamburg by playing in the Indra and Kaiserkeller bars and the Top Ten club. George, who was only seventeen years old, had lied about his age, and when this little fact was discovered, he was deported by the German authorities. Paul and Pete thought it was good to start a small fire by lighting an unused condom in their living quarters while leaving it for more luxurious rooms. Arrested and charged for arson, they too were both deported. Lennon and Sutcliffe followed suit and returned to Liverpool in December. While in Germany, they stayed in a small room with bunkbeds. George Harrison admitted in The Beatles Anthology that this made things especially awkward when he crawled under the sheets with a woman for the first time — Lennon, McCartney, and then-drummer Pete Best actually applauded for him after the deed was done. Harrison joked, "At least they kept quiet while I was doing it."   They went back a second time and played the Top Ten Club for three months (April-June 1961). Stuart Sutcliffe decided to remain in Germany to concentrate on painting and left the group during this time. Sutcliffe's departure led McCartney to switch from playing rhythm guitar to bass guitar. While they were playing at the Top Ten, they were recruited by singer Tony Sheridan to act as his "backing band" on a series of recordings for the German Polydor Records label, produced by famed bandleader Bert Kaempfert ("Strangers in the Night", "Danke Schoen"). Kaempfert signed the group to its own Polydor contract at the first session on June 22, 1961. On October 31, Polydor released the recording, My Bonnie (Mein Herz ist bei dir nur), which made it into the German charts under Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers. Around 1962, My Bonnie was mentioned in Cashbox as the debut of a "new rock and roll team, Tony Sheridan and the Beatles," and a few copies were also pressed for U.S. disc jockeys. Cashbox, also known as Cash Box, was a music industry trade magazine published initially weekly from July 1942 to November 1996. Ten years after its dissolution, it was revived and continues as Cashbox Magazine, an online magazine with weekly charts and occasional special print issues. The band's third stay in Hamburg was from April 13–May 31, 1962, when they opened The Star Club. However, that stay was dampened when Astrid Kirchherr informed them upon their arrival of Sutcliffe's death from a brain hemorrhage. Astrid, a German photographer, and friend of the Beatles, revealed that her fiancé (and former Beatles bass player) Stuart Sutcliffe had died. No one was more shocked than John Lennon, who reportedly broke out in a fit of hysterical laughter at the idea of losing his art school buddy.   Upon their return from Hamburg, the group was enthusiastically promoted by local promoter Sam Leach, who presented them for the next year and a half on various stages in Liverpool forty-nine times. Brian Epstein (no relation to a particular disgusting human being), took over as the group's manager in 1962 and led The Beatles' quest for a British recording contract. In one now-famous exchange, a senior Decca Records A&R executive named Dick Rowe turned Epstein down flat and informed him that "The Decca audition for guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein." Remember Decca? They were Buddy Holly's first record label that thought "rock n roll was a fad." Strike two, Decca. Strike two. Epstein eventually met with producer George Martin of EMI's Parlophone label. Martin expressed an interest in hearing the band in the studio. So he invited the band to London's Abbey Road studios to audition on June 6. Martin wasn't particularly impressed by the band's demo recordings but instantly liked them when they met. He concluded that they had raw musical talent but said (in later interviews) that what made the difference for him that fateful day was their wit and humor in the studio.   Martin privately suggested to Brian Epstein that the band use another drummer in the studio. Yikes. Pete Best had some popularity and was considered attractive by many fans. Still, the three founding members had become increasingly unhappy with his popularity and personality, and Epstein had become exasperated with his refusal to adopt the distinctive hairstyle as part of their unified look. So Epstein sacked Best on August 16, 1962. Lennon and McCartney immediately asked their friend Richard Starkey, the drummer for one of the top Merseybeat groups, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, to join the band. Unfortunately, Rory Storm didn't want to release Starkey but let Starkey out of his contract. Oh... Richard Starkey would eventually be known as "Ringo Starr." He chose Ringo because of the rings he wore, and it also had a cowboy feel to it. His drum solos were referred to as Starr Time.   The Beatles' first EMI session on June 6 did not yield any releasable recordings, but the September sessions produced the minor U.K. hit, "Love Me Do," which peaked on the charts at number 17. The single reached the top of the United States singles chart more than 18 months later in May 1964. This single was swiftly followed by their second single, "Please Please Me." They recorded their first album (also titled Please Please Me) three months later. George Martin capitalized on the wild, live energy the boys perfected in Hamburg and recorded the entire Please Please Me LP in less than 13 hours — saving "Twist and Shout" for last so the taxing vocals wouldn't ruin Lennon's voice before the other songs were done. That's fourteen songs. Luckily, the longest song on the album was only 2 minutes and 54 seconds long. The shortest was a minute and 47 seconds.   The band's first televised performance was on a program called People and Places, transmitted live from Manchester by Granada Television on October 17, 1962. The band experienced massive popularity on the record charts in the U.K. from early 1963. However, Parlophone's American counterpart, Capitol Records (owned by EMI), refused to issue their singles "Love Me Do," "Please Please Me," and "From Me to You" in the United States. Mainly because no British act had ever had a sustained commercial impact on American audiences.   Vee-Jay Records, a small Chicago label, is said by some to have been pressured into issuing these initial singles. Allegedly it was part of a deal for the rights to another performer's masters. Art Roberts, music director of Chicago powerhouse radio station WLS, placed "Please Please Me" into radio rotation in late February 1963, making it possibly the first time the American people heard a Beatles record on American radio. In August 1963, the Philadelphia-based Swan Records tried again with The Beatles' "She Loves You," which failed to receive airplay.   After The Beatles' massive success in 1964, Vee-Jay Records and Swan Records took advantage of their previously secured rights to The Beatles' early recordings and reissued the songs they had rights to, which all reached the top ten of the charts the second time around. Then, in a shifty move, Vee-Jay Records issued some weird L.P. repackaging of the Beatles' material they had and released "Introducing… The Beatles," which was basically The Beatles' debut British album with some minor alterations. Andi Lothian, a former Scottish music promoter, laid claim to the term in that he coined 'Beatlemania" while speaking to a reporter on October 7, 1963 at the Caird Hall in Dundee at a Beatles concert that took place during The Beatles' 1963 Mini-Tour of Scotland. Beatlemania was taking over the world.   In early November 1963, Brian Epstein persuaded Ed Sullivan to commit to presenting The Beatles on three editions of his show in February. He turned this guaranteed exposure into a record deal with Capitol Records. Capitol agreed to a mid-January 1964 release for "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Still, unexpected circumstances triggered premature airplay of an imported copy of the single on a Washington D.C. radio station in mid-December. Capitol brought forward the release of the record on December 26, 1963.   Bob Dylan introduced The Beatles to the cannabis drug in 1964 in a New York hotel room. He offered the "Fab Four" marijuana as a consequence of his misconception that the lyrics in their hit song "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from Meet the Beatles! were "I get high" instead of "I can't hide." This initial partaking in drugs grew into heavier experimentation with LSD and other substances whose psychedelic effects were commonly thought to have manifested themselves in the band's music. The Beatles, in turn, would influence Dylan's move into an electrified rock sound in his music.   Several New York City radio stations—first WMCA, then WINS, and finally, WABC began playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on its release day. The Beatlemania that had started in Washington was duplicated in New York and quickly spread to other markets. The record sold one million copies in just ten days. By January 16, Cashbox Magazine had certified The Beatle's record as number one in the edition published with the cover-date January 23, 1964.   This widespread phenomenon contributed to the near-hysterical fan reaction on February 7, 1964 at John F. Kennedy International Airport (which had been renamed in December 1963 from Idlewild Airport). A record-breaking seventy-three million viewers, approximately 40 percent of the U.S. population at the time, tuned in to the first Ed Sullivan Show appearance two days later on February 9. During the week of April 4, The Beatles held the top five places on the Billboard Hot 100, a feat that has never been repeated. They had an additional seven songs at lower positions. That's twelve songs on the Billboard charts at once. Of all the music acts on the charts, 12 percent of the entries consisted of Beatles songs. They were so unaware of their popularity in America that, on their arrival, they initially thought the crowds were there to greet someone else.   Oh, and their Concerts Often Smelled Like Urine Apparently, the masses of young girls who turned up for their concerts, movie premieres, or to wave hello as the Beatles walked off the plane in a new city were apparently too distracted by their love for the band to care about whether or not their bladders were full. DSo, they'd pee themselves.  In 1964, the band undertook their first appearances outside of Europe and North America, touring Australia and New Zealand, notably without Ringo Starr, who was ill and was temporarily replaced by session drummer Jimmy Nicol. When they arrived in Adelaide, The Beatles were greeted by what is reputed to be the largest crowd of their touring career, when over 300,000 people turned out to see them at the Adelaide Town Hall. Yeah, Adelaide's population was only right around 200,000. In September of that year, baseball owner Charles O. Finley paid the band the unheard-of sum of $150,000 to play in Kansas City, Missouri. That's $1,398,914.52 today and utterly unheard of at that time.   In 1965, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom bestowed the band the Member of the Order of the British Empire or MBE, a civil honor nominated by Prime Minister Harold Wilson.   On August 15, that year, The Beatles performed in the first stadium rock concert in the history of Rock n roll, playing at Shea Stadium in New York to a crowd of 55,600. The stadium's capacity is 57,333. The band later admitted that they had mainly been unable to hear themselves play or sing due to the volume of screaming and cheering. This concert is generally considered when they started disliking playing live shows.   In 1965, recently interested in Indian music, George Harrison purchased a sitar. He played it in the song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), the first instance of such an instrument being used on a rock record. He later took sitar lessons from maestro Ravi Shankar, and implemented additional elements of Eastern music and spirituality into his songs, notably Love You To and Within You Without You. These musical decisions significantly increased the influence of Indian music on popular culture in the late 1960s.   In July 1966, when The Beatles toured the Philippines, they unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace. Manager Brian Epstein was forced to give back all the money that the band had earned while there before being allowed to leave the country.   Upon returning from the Philippines, an earlier comment by John Lennon back in March of that year launched a backlash against The Beatles. In an interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave, Lennon had offered his opinion that Christianity was dying and that The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now." Oops!   There was an immediate response, starting with an announcement by two radio stations in Alabama and Texas that they had banned Beatles' music from their playlists. WAQY DJ, Tommy Charles said: "We just felt it was so absurd and sacrilegious that something ought to be done to show them that they can't get away with this sort of thing." Around two dozen other stations followed suit with similar announcements. Some stations in the South (shocker) went further, organizing demonstrations with bonfires, drawing hordes of teenagers to burn their Beatles' records and other memorabilia publicly. Many people affiliated with churches in the American South took the suggestion seriously.   The Memphis, TN city council, aware that a Beatles' concert was scheduled at the Mid-South Coliseum during the group's upcoming U.S. tour, voted to cancel it. Rather than have "municipal facilities be used as a forum to ridicule anyone's religion" and said, "The Beatles are not welcome in Memphis." On August 13, The Ku Klux Klan nailed a Beatles' album to a wooden cross and subsequently burned it, vowing "vengeance," with conservative groups staging further public burnings of Beatles' records.   Young people across the United States and South Africa burned Beatles records in protest. Then, under tremendous pressure from the American media, John Lennon apologized for his remarks at a press conference in Chicago on August 11, the eve of the first performance of what turned out to be their final tour.   The Beatles performed their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966. From that point forward, they focused on recording music. They ended up pioneering more advanced, multi-layered arrangements in popular and pop music. After three months away from each other, they returned to Abbey Road Studios on November 24, 1966, to begin a 129-day recording period in making their eighth album: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released on June 1, 1967.   Along with studio tricks such as sound effects, unconventional microphone placements, automatic double-tracking, and vari-speed recording, The Beatles began to augment their recordings with unconventional instruments for rock music at the time. These instruments included string and brass ensembles, Indian instruments such as the sitar and the "swarmandel," tape loops, and early electronic devices, including the "Mellotron," which was used with flute voices on the intro to "Strawberry Fields Forever." McCartney once asked Martin what a guitar would sound like if played underwater and was serious about trying it. Lennon also wondered what his vocals would sound like if he was hanging upside down from the ceiling. Unfortunately, their ideas were ahead of the available technology at the time.   Beginning with the use of a string quartet (arranged by George Martin) on Yesterday in 1965, The Beatles pioneered a modern form of art-rock and art song, exemplified by the double-quartet string arrangement on "Eleanor Rigby" (1966), "Here, There and Everywhere" (1966), and "She's Leaving Home" (1967). In addition, Lennon and McCartney's interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach led them to use a piccolo trumpet on the arrangement of "Penny Lane" and a Mellotron at the start of "Strawberry Fields Forever."   On June 25, 1967, the Beatles became the first band globally transmitted on television, in front of an estimated 400 million people worldwide, in a segment within the first-ever worldwide T.V. satellite hook-up, a show entitled Our World. The Beatles were transmitted live from Abbey Road Studios, and their new song "All You Need Is Love" was recorded live during the show.   Following the triumphs of the Sgt. Pepper album and the global broadcast, The Beatles' situation seemingly got worse. First, their manager Brian Epstein died of an overdose of sleeping pills on August 27, 1967, at 32, and the band's business affairs began to unravel. Next, at the end of 1967, they received their first major negative press criticism in the U.K., with disparaging reviews of their surrealistic T.V. film Magical Mystery Tour. The public wasn't a fan, either.   The group spent the early part of 1968 in Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh, India, studying transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Upon their return, Lennon and McCartney formed Apple Corps, initially a philanthropic business venture they described as an attempt at "western communism." The middle part of 1968 saw the guys busy recording the double album, The Beatles, popularly known as "The White Album" due to its stark white cover. These sessions saw deep divisions beginning within the band, including John Lennon's new girlfriend, Yoko Ono, being at his side through much of the sessions and the feeling that Paul McCartney was becoming too dominating. Paul McCartney gradually took more control of the group. Internal divisions within the band had been a small but growing problem during their earlier career. Most notably, this was reflected in the difficulty that George Harrison experienced in getting his songs onto Beatles' albums, and in the growing artistic and personal differences between John and Paul.   On the business side, Paul wanted Lee Eastman, the father of his wife, Linda Eastman, to manage The Beatles, but the other guys wanted New York manager Allen Klein to represent them. All of the band's decisions in the past were unanimous, but this time the four could not agree on a manager. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr felt the Eastmans would look after McCartney's well-being before the group's. Paul was quoted years later during the Anthology interviews, saying, "Looking back, I can understand why they would feel that was biased against them." Afterward, the band kicked themselves in the ass for the Klein decision, as Klein embezzled millions from their earnings.   Their final live performance was on the rooftop of the Apple building in Savile Row, London, on January 30, 1969, the next-to-last day of the problematic Get Back sessions. Mainly due to Paul McCartney's efforts, they recorded their final album, Abbey Road, in the summer of 1969.   John Lennon announced his departure to the rest of the group on September 20, 1969. The rest of the band talked him out of saying anything publicly. In March 1970, the band gave the "Get Back" session tapes to American producer Phil Spector, whose "Wall of Sound" production was in direct opposition to the record's original intent to appear as a stripped-down live studio performance. McCartney announced the breakup on April 10, 1970, a week before releasing his first solo album, McCartney. On May 8, 1970, the Spector-produced version of Get Back was released as the album Let It Be, followed by the documentary film of the same name. The Beatles' partnership was legally dissolved after McCartney filed a lawsuit on December 31, 1970. Following the group's dissolution, the BBC marketed an extensive collection of Beatles recordings, mainly of original studio sessions from 1963 to 1968. Much of this material formed the basis for a 1988 radio documentary series, The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes. Later, in 1994, the best of these sessions were given an official EMI, released on Live at the BBC.   On the evening of December 8 1980, John Lennon was shot and fatally wounded in the archway of the Dakota, his home in New York City. His killer was Mark David Chapman, an American Beatles fan incensed by Lennon's lavish lifestyle and his 1966 comment that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." Chapman said he was inspired by the fictional character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, a "phony-killer" who despised hypocrisy. Chapman planned the killing over several months and waited for John at the Dakota on the morning of December 8. Early in the evening, Chapman met Lennon, who signed his copy of the album Double Fantasy and subsequently left for a recording session. Later that night, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, returned to the Dakota. As Lennon and Ono approached the building's entrance, Chapman fired five hollow-point bullets from a .38 special revolver, four of which hit John in the back. Chapman remained at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye until the police arrested him. John Lennon was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in a police car, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at around 11:15 p.m.   In February 1994, the then-three surviving Beatles reunited to produce and record additional music for a few of John Lennon's old unfinished demos, almost as if reuniting the Beatles. "Free As A Bird" premiered as part of The Beatles Anthology, a series of television documentaries, and was released as a single in December 1995, with "Real Love" following in March 1996. These songs were also included in the three Anthology collections of C.D.s released in 1995 and 1996, each consisting of two C.D.s of never-before-released Beatles material.   On November 29 2001, George Harrison died at a property belonging to Paul McCartney, on Heather Road in Beverly Hills, California. He was 58 years old. As relayed in a statement by his wife Olivia and son Dhani, his final message to the world was: "Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another." The Beatles were the best-selling popular musical act of the twentieth century. EMI estimated that by 1985, the band had sold over one billion discs or tapes worldwide. In addition, the Recording Industry Association of America has certified The Beatles as the top-selling artists of all time in the United States based on U.S. sales of singles and albums.   The Beatles have spent 132 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart – by far the most of any artist. Garth Brooks occupied the top spot for 52 weeks, the second most.   The Beatles are one of only two musical acts to have eight consecutive albums on the Billboard 200 all hit No. 1.  – the other being Eminem –   Anthology 1 sold 450,000 copies on its first day of release, reaching the highest volume of single-day sales ever for an album. In 2000, a compilation album named one was released, containing almost every number-one single released by the band from 1962 to 1970. The collection sold 3.6 million copies in its first week and more than 12 million in three weeks worldwide, becoming the fastest-selling album of all time and the biggest-selling album of 2000. The collection also reached number one in the United States and 33 other countries. In 1988, every Beatles member (including Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe) was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. www.iconsandoutlaws.com www.accidentaldads.com  

Enjoy this episode of The Learn Squared Podcast with Concept Designer Allan Williams and how he combines his design skills with that which he loves fused together with a healthy dose of nostalgia. FOLLOW ALLAN https://www.artstation.com/allanvekta https://www.instagram.com/vektasigma/ https://www.behance.net/allanwilliams FOLLOW LEARN SQUARED ( ALL First Lessons are FREE!) https://www.learnsquared.com https://www.instagram.com/learnsquared https://www.twitter.com/learnsquared https://www.linkedin.com/school/learnsquared   YOUR HOST https://www.artstation.com/dhanda https://www.instagram.com/dhandatron/ https://www.twitter.com/dhandatron

Welcome to the SGF podcast! Our mission is to help create a healthy planet and people through profitable grass-based livestock production. This episode comes from The Grass & Genetics School. In this first part of three, Allan Williams discusses “The Basis of Sound Genetics”. Want to try the first lesson from SGF's Grass & Genetics with Allen Williams for FREE? https://www.stockmangrassfarmer.digital/gg-sample Or read his writings? Are You An Accomplished Grazer? Allen asks this question in one of our articles. https://www.stockmangrassfarmer.digital/blog/are-you-an-accomplished-grazer-by-allen-r-williams-ph-d To download this section of The Grass & Genetics School for free, to check out other links, and to see special offers, visit us at https://www.stockmangrassfarmer.digital/profile Grassfarming is a 24-7 job and you can't always get away. So we've put together this podcast, so that you can listen while you work (or whatever you're doing) but always on your schedule. Whenever and where ever you want.

By the time The Beatles were writing songs for their first film A Hard Day's Night, John was absolutely on fire. "Tell Me Why," a song he went on to consider as nothing more than a throwaway, was a song he seemed to be able to just toss off with no problem at this point in time, absolutely on top of his game. But what comes off as a perfect slice of early Beatle songcraft may actually have way more meaning than what it seems on the surface, and this meaning may be one that appears way more regularly throughout his writing than we realize. Also, I may have completely blown it on this particular ranking. Joining us this week is author and historian Jude Southerland Kessler. Jude has been spending decades researching the life of John Lennon for her on-going The John Lennon Series, a 9 volume collection detailing the life of Lennon with more detail and fact based information than any other book. The most recent book, volume 5, "Shades of Life," is now available at johnlennonseries.com or anywhere you buy your Beatles books! We chat with Jude (and avoid saying "hey" as much as possible) about her 30 years of researching John, how a north Louisiana woman got enraptured in his story, songs like "Tell Me Why" being the crux of Lennon's story, adventures with Allan Williams, and so much more! What do you think? Too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know in the comments on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/rankingthebeatles, Instagram @rankingthebeatles, or Twitter @rankingbeatles! Be sure to check out RTB's new official website, www.rankingthebeatles.com! Enjoying the show, and wanna show your support? Buy Us A Coffee! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/support

Author : Leanna Renee Hieber Narrator : Joe Williams Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Marty Perrett Discuss on Forums “Charged” was first published in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells (Tor Books, 2011) The reader,  Joe Williams, would like to dedicate the reading to his Father who recently passed away: “Allan Williams was Joe’s […]

  Good Morning it's Thursday December 24th, and this is The Wenatchee World's podcast, Slices of Wenatchee. We're excited to bring you a closer look at one of our top stories and other announcements every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Today, we're focused on what's in store for the The Apple Blossom Festival in 2021.   Today's episode is brought to you by Equilus Group Incorporated. Equilus Group, Inc is a Registered Investment Advisory Firm in the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Equilus Group, Inc- Building Your Financial Success. Learn more at Equilusfinancial.com. Member SIPC and FINRA.   -   Before we begin, did you know that more than three-dozen festive displays have been added to our holiday lights map this year? See the map at wenatcheeworld.com/holidaylights and enjoy a safe drive around the valley. Happy holidays from all of us at The Wenatchee World.   -   Now our feature story…   The Apple Blossom Festival is starting to see some changes for the 2021 season. Everything from a cancelled auction to virtual Apple Blossom pageants.   Darci Christoferson, Apple Blossom Festival administrator said that the festival is ready to adapt to whatever circumstances arise. They're planning to be in full swing starting in late April.    The Apple Blossom royalty selection process has already started earlier this month with the announcement of the top 38 girls from Wenatchee and Eastmont high schools.   The royalty selection will be a virtual experience this year. Ten of the 38 girls competing will be selected at the end of January to advance to the Royalty Selection Pageant. But the selection process for the Top 10 girls has changed because of COVID-19, according to the news release. It will not include a vote from the student body of each high school, instead relying entirely on the votes of five out-of-town judges. Finally, a queen and two princesses for the year are selected. The Apple Blossom Queen will win a prize of $10,000 in scholarship funding and two princesses will win $5,000 each. You can watch on the NCW Life Channel, they'll be streaming all of the events on their Facebook Live page. NCW Life will also live stream the Royalty Selection Pageant which takes place on February 27th. In addition to these changes in how the pageant will be run, the Apple Blossom Festival has canceled its in person auction this year. Instead the festival will do a virtual auction during the Royalty Selection Pageant. This year It will be somewhat difficult for the festival considering they won't receive any revenue from selling tickets to the pageant. The festival's budget has been somewhat helped by the fact that they haven't had to spend money on events due to the pandemic, but they do employ two full-time staff members and one part-time bookkeeper. For now, Christoferson says they're doing fine, they're keeping our lights on. But as it gets closer to the festival - that is when we're going to need income coming in. - Now, we'd like to take a moment to talk about how local wineries are adapting to covid rules. Wineries and tasting rooms were set for a booming summer before the coronavirus led to far more restrictive plans for social gatherings. The region's growing number of wineries have been reined in by often-changing regulations that have kept them from fully opening. In response, owners and managers of North Central Washington wineries have come up with creative ways to sell and distribute their spirits. They've also found ways to offer safe social gatherings - something customers are craving more than ever.  Cave B Estate Vineyards in Quincy, among others, offers outdoor tastings by reservation. Customers are encouraged to bring a picnic and enjoy their drinks on the lawn. Allan Williams, the marketing director for Jones of Washington, said that their winery is fortunate that it also sells wine wholesale to distributors - those sales started off the year way above years past.  This year, people are buying more wine than ever, but the competition is fierce.    -   Finally, some local history, Wenatchee Valley History is brought to you by NABUR – your trusted neighborhood community. NABUR is a free online forum you can trust to connect with your community, focus on facts & make a difference. Join the conversation! Visit wenatcheeworld.com/nabur   The White Heron Cellars winery has also been located above nearby Trinidad since 1989. Trinidad was originally a railroad stop, named because of its similarity to Trinidad, Colorado. And now, Trinidad is becoming busier - as houses are built to take advantage of the views of the Columbia River.   -   Thanks for listening. Today's episode is brought to you by Equilus Group, Inc- Building Your Financial Success. Learn more at Equilusfinancial.com. The Wenatchee World has been engaging, informing and inspiring North Central Washington Communities since 1905. We encourage you to subscribe today to keep your heart and mind connected to what matters most in North Central Washington. Thank you for starting your morning with us and don't forget to tune in again on Saturday! Support the show: https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/site/forms/subscription_services/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week there are two episodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of “Love Me Do”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of "Love Me Do". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. While there are many books on the Beatles, and I have read dozens of them, only one needs to be mentioned as a reference for this episode (others will be used for others). All These Years Vol 1: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn is simply the *only* book worth reading on the Beatles' career up to the end of 1962. It is the most detailed, most accurate, biography imaginable, and the gold standard by which all other biographies of musicians should be measured. I only wish volumes two and three were available already so I could not expect my future episodes on the Beatles to be obsolete when they do come out. There are two versions of the book -- a nine-hundred page mass-market version and a 1700-page expanded edition. I recommend the latter. The information in this podcast is almost all from Lewisohn's book, but I must emphasise that the opinions are mine, and so are any errors -- Lewisohn's book only has one error that I'm aware of (a joke attributed to the comedian Jasper Carrott in a footnote that has since been traced to an earlier radio show). I am only mortal, and so have doubtless misunderstood or oversimplified things and introduced errors where he had none.   The single version of "Love Me Do" can be found on Past Masters, a 2-CD compilation of the Beatles' non-album tracks that includes the majority of their singles and B-sides. The version with Andy White playing on can be found on Please Please Me. The version with Pete Best, and many of the other early tracks used here, is on Anthology 1.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I pronounce the name of Lewisohn's book as "All Those Years" instead of "All These Years". I say " The Jets hadn't liked playing at Williams' club" at one point. I meant "at Koschmider's club"   Transcript   The Beatles came closer than most people realise to never making a record. Until the publication of Mark Lewisohn's seminal biography All These Years vol 1: Tune In, in 2013 everyone thought they knew the true story -- John met Paul at Woolton Village Fete in 1957, and Paul joined the Quarrymen, who later became the Beatles. They played Hamburg and made a demo, and after the Beatles' demo was turned down by Decca, their manager Brian Epstein shopped it around every record label without success, until finally George Martin heard the potential in it and signed them to Parlophone, a label which was otherwise known for comedy records. Martin was, luckily, the one producer in the whole of the UK who could appreciate the Beatles' music, and he signed them up, and the rest was history. The problem is, as Lewisohn showed, that's not what happened. Today I'm going to tell, as best I can the story of how the Beatles actually became the band that they became, and how they got signed to EMI records. I'm going to tell you the story of "Love Me Do": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love Me Do (single version)"] As I mentioned at the beginning, this episode owes a *huge* debt to Mark Lewisohn's book. I like to acknowledge my sources, anyway, but I've actually had difficulty with this episode because Lewisohn's book is *so* detailed, *so* full, and written *so* well that much of the effort in writing this episode came from paring down the information, rather than finding more, and from reworking things so I was not just paraphrasing bits of his writing. Normally I rely on many sources, and integrate the material myself, but Lewisohn has done all that work far better than any other biographer of any other musician. Were the Beatles not such an important part of music history, I would just skip this episode because there is nothing for me to add. As it is, I *obviously* have to cover this, but I almost feel like I'm cheating in doing so. If you find this episode interesting at all, please do yourself a favour and buy that book.  This episode is going to be a long one -- much longer than normal. I won't know the precise length until after I've recorded and edited it, of course, but I'm guessing it's going to be about ninety minutes. This is the hundredth episode, the end of the second year of the podcast, the end of the second book based on the podcast, and the introduction of the single most important band in the whole story, so I'm going to stretch out a bit. I should also mention that there are a couple of discussions of sudden, traumatic, deaths in this episode. With all that said, settle in, this is going to take a while. Every British act we've looked at so far -- and many of those we're going to look at in the next year or two -- was based in London. Either they grew up there, or they moved there before their musical career really took off. The Beatles, during the time we're covering in this episode, were based in Liverpool. While they did eventually move to London, it wasn't until after they'd started having hits. And what listeners from outside the UK might not realise is what that means in terms of attitudes and perceptions. Liverpool is a large city -- it currently has a population of around half a million, and the wider Liverpool metropolitan area is closer to two million -- but like all British cities other than London, it was regarded largely as a joke in the British media, and so in return the people of Liverpool had a healthy contempt for London. To give Americans some idea of how London dominates in Britain, and thus how it's thought of outside London, imagine that New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles were all the same city -- that the financial, media, and political centres of the country were all the same place. Now further imagine that Silicon Valley and all the Ivy League universities were half an hour's drive from that city. Now, imagine how much worse the attitudes that that city would have about so-called "flyover states" would be, and imagine in return how people in large Midwestern cities like Detroit or Chicago would think about that big city.  In this analogy, Liverpool is Detroit, and like Detroit, it was very poor and had produced a few famous musicians, most notably Billy Fury, who was from an impoverished area of Liverpool called the Dingle: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, "Halfway to Paradise"] But Fury had, of course, moved to London to have his career. That's what you did. But in general, Liverpool, if people in London thought of it at all, was thought of as a provincial backwater full of poor people, many of them Irish, and all of them talking with a ridiculous accent. Liverpool was ignored by London, and that meant that things could develop there out of sight. The story of the Beatles starts in the 1950s, with two young men in their mid-teens. John Winston Lennon was born in 1940, and had had a rather troubled childhood. His father had been a merchant seaman who had been away in the war, and his parents' relationship had deteriorated for that and other reasons. As a result, Lennon had barely known his father, and when his mother met another man, Lennon's aunt, Mary Smith, who he always called Mimi, had taken him in, believing that his mother "living in sin" would be a bad influence on the young boy. The Smith family were the kind of lower middle class family that seemed extremely rich to the impoverished families in Liverpool, but were not well off by any absolute standard. Mimi, in particular, was torn between two very different urges. On one hand, she had strongly bohemian, artistic, urges -- as did all of her sisters. She was a voracious reader, and a lover of art history, and encouraged these tendencies in John. But at the same time, she was of that class which has a little status, but not much security, and so she was extremely wary of the need to appear respectable. This tension between respectability and rebellion was something that would appear in many of the people who Lennon later worked with, such as Brian Epstein and George Martin, and it was something that Lennon would always respond to -- those people would be the only ones who Lennon would ever view as authority figures he could respect, though he would also resent them at times. And it might be that combination of rebellion and respectability that Lennon saw in Paul McCartney. McCartney was from a family who, in the Byzantine world of the British class system of the time, were a notch or so lower than the Smith family who raised Lennon, but he was academically bright, and his family had big plans for him -- they thought that it might even be possible that he might become a teacher if he worked very hard at school. McCartney was a far less openly rebellious person than Lennon was, but he was still just as caught up in the music and fashions of the mid-fifties that his father associated with street gangs and hooliganism. Lennon, like many teenagers in Britain at the time, had had his life changed when he first heard Elvis Presley, and he had soon become a rock and roll obsessive -- Elvis was always his absolute favourite, but he also loved Little Richard, who he thought was almost as good, and he admired Buddy Holly, who had a special place in Lennon's heart as Holly wore glasses on stage, something that Lennon, who was extremely short-sighted, could never bring himself to do, but which at least showed him that it was a possibility. Lennon was, by his mid-teens, recreating a relationship with his mother, and one of the things they bonded over was music -- she taught him how to play the banjo, and together they worked out the chords to "That'll Be the Day", and Lennon later switched to the guitar, playing banjo chords on five of the six strings.  Like many, many, teenagers of the time, Lennon also formed a skiffle group, which he called the Quarrymen, after a line in his school song. The group tended to have a rotating lineup, but Lennon was the unquestioned leader. The group had a repertoire consisting of the same Lonnie Donegan songs that every other skiffle group was playing, plus any Elvis and Buddy Holly songs that could sound reasonable with a lineup of guitars, teachest bass, and washboard. The moment that changed the history of the music, though, came on July the sixth, 1957, when Ivan Vaughan, a friend of Lennon's, invited his friend Paul McCartney to go and see the Quarry Men perform at Woolton Village Fete. That day has gone down in history as "the day John met Paul", although Mark Lewisohn has since discovered that Lennon and McCartney had briefly met once before. It is, though, the day on which Lennon and McCartney first impressed each other musically. McCartney talks about being particularly impressed that the Quarry Men's lead singer was changing the lyrics to the songs he was performing, making up new words when he forgot the originals -- he says in particular that he remembers Lennon singing "Come Go With Me" by the Del-Vikings: [Excerpt: The Del-Vikings, "Come Go With Me"] McCartney remembers Lennon as changing the lyrics to "come go with me, right down to the penitentiary", and thinking that was clever. Astonishingly, some audio recording actually exists of the Quarry Men's second performance that day -- they did two sets, and this second one comes just after Lennon met McCartney rather than just before. The recording only seems to exist in a very fragmentary form, which has snatches of Lennon singing "Baby Let's Play House" and Lonnie Donegan's hit "Puttin' on the Style", which was number one on the charts at the time, but that even those fragments have survived, given how historic a day this was, is almost miraculous: [Excerpt: The Quarrymen, "Puttin' on the Style"] After the first set, Lennon met McCartney, who was nearly two years younger, but a more accomplished musician -- for a start, he knew how to tune the guitar with all six strings, and to proper guitar tuning, rather than tuning five strings like a banjo. Lennon and his friends were a little nonplussed by McCartney holding his guitar upside-down at first -- McCartney is left-handed -- but despite having an upside-down guitar with the wrong tuning, McCartney managed to bash out a version of Eddie Cochran's "Twenty-Flight Rock", a song he would often perform in later decades when reminding people of this story: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Twenty-Flight Rock"] This was impressive to Lennon for three reasons. The first was that McCartney was already a strong, confident performer -- he perhaps seemed a little more confident than he really was, showing off in front of the bigger boys like this. The second was that "Twenty-Flight Rock" was a moderately obscure song -- it hadn't charted, but it *had* appeared in The Girl Can't Help It, a film which every rock and roll lover in Britain had watched at the cinema over and over. Choosing that song rather than, say, "Be-Bop-A-Lula", was a way of announcing a kind of group affiliation -- "I am one of you, I am a real rock and roll fan, not just a casual listener to what's in the charts". I stress that second point because it's something that's very important in the history of the Beatles generally -- they were *music fans*, and often fans of relatively obscure records. That's something that bound Lennon and McCartney, and later the other members, together from the start, and something they always noted about other musicians. They weren't the kind of systematic scholars who track down rare pressings and memorise every session musician's name, but they were constantly drawn to find the best new music, and to seek it out wherever they could. But the most impressive thing for Lennon -- and one that seems a little calculated on McCartney's part, though he's never said that he thought about this that I'm aware of -- was that this was an extremely wordy song, and McCartney *knew all the words*. Remember that McCartney had noticed Lennon forgetting the words to a song with lyrics as simple as "come, come, come, come, come into my heart/Tell me darling we will never part", and here's McCartney singing this fast-paced, almost patter song, and getting the words right.  From the beginning, McCartney was showing how he could complement Lennon -- if Lennon could impress McCartney by improvising new lyrics when he forgot the old ones, then McCartney could impress Lennon by remembering the lyrics that Lennon couldn't -- and by writing them down for Lennon, sharing his knowledge freely. McCartney went on to show off more, and in particular impressed Lennon by going to a piano and showing off his Little Richard imitation. Little Richard was the only serious rival to Elvis in Lennon's affections, and McCartney could do a very decent imitation of him. This was someone special, clearly. But this put Lennon in a quandary. McCartney was clearly far, far, better than any of the Quarry Men -- at least Lennon's equal, and light years ahead of the rest of them. Lennon had a choice -- invite this young freak of nature into his band, and improve the band dramatically, but no longer be the unquestioned centre of the group, or remain in absolute control but not have someone in the group who *knew the words* and *knew how to tune a guitar*, and other such magical abilities that no mere mortals had. Those who only know of Lennon from his later reputation as a massive egoist would be surprised, but he decided fairly quickly that he had to make the group better at his own expense. He invited McCartney to join the group, and McCartney said yes. Over the next few months the membership of the Quarry Men changed. They'd been formed while they were all at Quarry Bank Grammar School, but that summer Lennon moved on to art school. I'm going to have to talk about the art school system, and the British education system of the fifties and early sixties a lot over the next few months, but here's an extremely abbreviated and inaccurate version that's good enough for now. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen, people in Britain -- at least those without extremely rich parents, who had a different system -- went to two kinds of school depending on the result of an exam they took aged eleven, which was based on some since-discredited eugenic research about children's potential. If you passed the exam, you were considered academically apt, and went to a grammar school, which was designed to filter you through to university and the professions. If you failed the exam, you went to a secondary modern, which was designed to give you the skills to get a trade and make a living working with your hands. And for the most part, people followed the pipeline that was set up for them. You go to grammar school, go to university, become a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher. You go to secondary modern, leave school at fourteen, become a plumber or a builder or a factory worker. But there are always those people who don't properly fit into the neat categories that the world tries to put them in. And for people in their late teens and early twenties, people who'd been through the school system but not been shaped properly by it, there was another option at this time. If you were bright and creative, but weren't suited for university because you'd failed your exams, you could go to art school. The supposed purpose of the art schools was to teach people to do commercial art, and they would learn skills like lettering and basic draughtsmanship. But what the art schools really did was give creative people space to explore ideas, to find out about areas of art and culture that would otherwise have been closed to them. Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Ian Dury, Ray Davies, Bryan Ferry, Syd Barrett, and many more people we'll be seeing over the course of this story went to art school, and as David Bowie would put it later, the joke at the time was that you went to art school to learn to play blues guitar. With Lennon and his friends all moving on from the school that had drawn them together, the group stabilised for a time on a lineup of Lennon, McCartney, Colin Hanton, Len Garry, and Eric Griffiths. But the first time this version of the group played live, while McCartney sang well, he totally fluffed his lead guitar lines on stage. While there were three guitarists in the band at this point, they needed someone who could play lead fluently and confidently on stage. Enter George Harrison, who had suddenly become a close friend of McCartney. Harrison went to the same school as McCartney -- a grammar school called the Liverpool Institute, but was in the year below McCartney, and so the two had always been a bit distant. However, at the same time as Lennon was moving on to art school after failing his exams, McCartney was being kept back a year for failing Latin -- which his father always thought was deliberate, so he wouldn't have to go to university. Now he was in the same year at school as Harrison, and they started hanging out together. The two bonded strongly over music, and would do things like take a bus journey to another part of town, where someone lived who they heard owned a copy of "Searchin'" by the Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Searchin'"] The two knocked on this stranger's door, asked if he'd play them this prized record, and he agreed -- and then they stole it from him as they left his house. Another time they took the bus to another part of town again, because they'd heard that someone in that part of town knew how to play a B7 chord on his guitar, and sat there as he showed them. So now the Quarrymen needed a lead guitarist, McCartney volunteered his young mate. There are a couple of stories about how Harrison came to join the band -- apparently he auditioned for Lennon at least twice, because Lennon was very unsure about having such a young kid in his band -- but the story I like best is that Harrison took his guitar to a Quarry Men gig at Wilson Hall -- he'd apparently often take his guitar to gigs and just see if he could sit in with the bands. On the bill with the Quarry Men was another group, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, who were generally regarded as the best skiffle band in Liverpool. Lennon told Harrison that he could join the band if he could play as well as Clayton, and Harrison took out his guitar and played "Raunchy": [Excerpt: Bill Justis, "Raunchy"] I like this story rather than the other story that the members would tell later -- that Harrison played "Raunchy" on a bus for Lennon -- for one reason. The drummer in the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group was one Richy Starkey, and if it happened that way, the day that George joined the Quarry Men was also the day that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were all in the same place for the first time. George looked up to John and essentially idolised him, though Lennon thought of him as a little annoying at times -- he'd follow John everywhere, and not take a hint when he wasn't wanted sometimes, just eager to be with his big cool new mate. But despite this tiny bit of tension, John, Paul, and George quickly became a solid unit -- helped by the fact that the school that Paul and George went to was part of the same complex of buildings as Lennon's art college, so they'd all get the bus there and back together.  George was not only younger, he was a notch or two further down the social class ladder than John or Paul, and he spoke more slowly, which made him seem less intelligent. He came from Speke, which was a rougher area, and he would dress even more like a juvenile delinquent than the others. Meanwhile, Len Garry and Eric Griffiths left the group -- Len Garry because he became ill and had to spend time in hospital, and anyway they didn't really need a teachest bass. What they did need was an electric bass, and since they had four guitars now they tried to persuade Eric to get one, but he didn't want to pay that much money, and he was always a little on the outside of the main three members, as he didn't share their sense of humour. So the group got Nigel Walley, who was acting as the group's manager, to fire him. The group was now John, Paul, and George all on guitars, and Colin Hanton on drums. Sometimes, if they played a venue that had a piano, they'd also bring along a schoolfriend of Paul's, John "Duff" Lowe, to play piano. Meanwhile, the group were growing in other ways. Both John and Paul had started writing songs, together and apart. McCartney seems to have been the first, writing a song called "I Lost My Little Girl" which he would eventually record more than thirty years later: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "I Lost My Little Girl"] Lennon's first song likewise sang about a little girl, this time being "Hello, Little Girl". By the middle of 1958, this five-piece group was ready to cut their first record -- at a local studio that would cut a single copy of a disc for you. They went into this studio at some time around July 1958, and recorded two songs. The first was their version of "That'll Be the Day": [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, "That'll be the Day"] The B-side was a song that McCartney had written, with a guitar solo that George had come up with, so the label credit read "McCartney/Harrison". "In Spite of All the Danger" seems to have been inspired by Elvis' "Trying to Get to You": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Trying to Get to You"] It's a rough song, but a good attempt for a teenager who had only just started writing songs: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, "In Spite of All the Danger"] Apparently Lowe and Hanton hadn't heard the song before they started playing, but they make a decent enough fist of it in the circumstances. Lennon took the lead even though it was McCartney's song -- he said later "I was such a bully in those days I didn’t even let Paul sing his own song." That was about the last time that this lineup of Quarry Men played together. In July, the month that seems likely for the recording, Lowe finished at the Liverpool Institute, and so he drifted away from McCartney and Harrison. Meanwhile Hanton had a huge row with the others after a show, and they fell out and never spoke again. The Quarry Men were reduced to a trio of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. But -- possibly the very day after that recording if an unreliable plaque at the studio where they recorded it is to be believed -- something happened which was to have far more impact on the group than the drummer leaving. John Lennon's mother, with whom he'd slowly been repairing his relationship, had called round to visit Mimi. She left the house, and bumped into Nigel Walley, who was calling round to see John. She told him he wasn't there, and that he could walk with her to the bus stop. They walked a little while, then went off in different directions. Walley heard a thump and turned round -- Julia Lennon had been hit by a car and killed instantly. As you can imagine, John's mother dying caused him a huge amount of distress, but it also gave him a bond with McCartney, whose own mother had died of cancer shortly before they met. Neither really spoke about it to each other, and to the extent they did it was with ultra-cynical humour -- but the two now shared something deeper than just the music, even though the music itself was deep enough. Lennon became a much harder, nastier, person after this, at least for a time, his natural wit taking on a dark edge, and he would often drink too much and get aggressive. But life still went on, and John, Paul, and George kept trying to perform -- though the gigs dried up, and they didn't have a drummer any more. They'd just say "the rhythm's in the guitars" when asked why they didn't have one. They were also no longer the Quarry Men -- they didn't have a name. At one point late in the year, they also only had two guitars between the three of them -- Lennon seems to have smashed his in a fit of fury after his mother's death. But he stole one backstage at a talent contest, and soon they were back to having three. That talent show was one run by Carroll Levis, who we talked about before in the episode on "Shakin' All Over". The three boys went on Levis' show, this time performing as Johnny & The Moondogs --  in Manchester, at the Hippodrome in Ancoats, singing Buddy Holly's "Think it Over": [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Think it Over"] Lennon sang lead with his arms draped over the shoulders of Paul and George, who sang backing vocals and played guitar. They apparently did quite well, but had to leave before the show finished to get the last train back to Liverpool, and so never found out whether the audience would have made them the winner, with the possibility of a TV appearance. They did well enough, though, to impress a couple of other young lads on the bill, two Manchester singers named Allan Clarke and Graham Nash. But in general, the Japage Three, a portmanteau of their names that they settled on as their most usual group name at this point, played very little in 1959 -- indeed, George spent much of the early part of the year moonlighting in the Les Stewart Quartet, another group, though he still thought of Lennon and McCartney as his musical soulmates; the Les Stewart Quartet were just a gig.  The three of them would spend much of their time at the Jacaranda, a coffee bar opened by a Liverpool entrepreneur, Allan Williams, in imitation of the 2is, which was owned by a friend of his. Lennon was also spending a lot of time with an older student at his art school, Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the few people in the world that Lennon himself looked up to. The Les Stewart Quartet would end up indirectly being key to the Beatles' development, because after one of their shows at a local youth club they were approached by a woman named Mona Best. Mona's son Pete liked to go to the youth club, but she was fairly protective of him, and also wanted him to have more friends -- he was a quiet boy who didn't make friends easily. So she'd hit upon a plan -- she'd open her own club in her cellar, since the Best family were rich enough to have a big house. If there was a club *in Pete's house* he'd definitely make lots of friends. They needed a band, and she asked the Les Stewart Quartet if they'd like to be the resident band at this new club, the Casbah, and also if they'd like to help decorate it.  They said yes, but then Paul and George went on a hitch-hiking holiday around Wales for a few days, and George didn't get back in time to play a gig the quartet had booked. Ken Brown, the other guitarist, didn't turn up either, and Les Stewart got into a rage and split the group. Suddenly, the Casbah had no group -- George and Ken were willing to play, but neither was a lead singer -- and no decorators either. So George roped in John and Paul, who helped decorate the place, and with the addition of Ken Brown, the group returned to the Quarry Men name for their regular Saturday night gig at the Casbah. The group had no bass player or drummer, and they all kept pestering everyone they knew to get a bass or a drum kit, but nobody would bite. But then Stuart Sutcliffe got half a painting in an exhibition put on by John Moores, the millionaire owner of Littlewoods, who was a big patron of the arts in Liverpool. I say he got half a painting in the exhibition, because the painting was done on two large boards -- Stuart and his friends took the first half of the painting down to the gallery, went back to get the other half, and got distracted by the pub and never brought it. But Moores was impressed enough with the abstract painting that he bought it at the end of the exhibition's run, for ninety pounds -- about two thousand pounds in today's money. And so Stuart's friends gave him a choice -- he could either buy a bass or a drum kit, either would be fine. He chose the bass. But the same week that Stuart joined, Ken Brown was out, and they lost their gig at the Casbah. John, Paul, George and Ken had turned up one Saturday, and Ken hadn't felt well, so instead of performing he just worked on the door. At the end of the show, Mona Best insisted on giving Ken an equal share of the money, as agreed. John, Paul, and George wouldn't stand for that, and so Ken was out of the group, and they were no longer playing for Mona Best. Stuart joining the group caused tensions -- George was fine with him, thinking that a bass player who didn't yet know how to play was better than no bass player at all, but Paul was much less keen. Partly this was because he thought the group needed to get better, which would be hard with someone who couldn't play, but also he was getting jealous of Sutcliffe's closeness to Lennon, especially when the two became flatmates. But John wanted him in the group, and what John wanted, he got. There are recordings of the group around this time that circulate -- only one has been released officially, a McCartney instrumental called "Cayenne", but the others are out there if you look: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, "Cayenne"] The gigs had dried up again, but they did have one new advantage -- they now had a name they actually liked. John and Stuart had come up with it, inspired by Buddy Holly's Crickets. They were going to be Beatles, with an a. Shortly after the Beatles' first appearance under that name, at the art school student union, came the Liverpool gig which was to have had Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent headlining, before Cochran died. A lot of Liverpool groups were booked to play on the bill there, but not the Beatles -- though Richy Starkey was going to play the gig, with his latest group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Allan Williams, the local promoter, added extra groups to fill out the bill, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, and suddenly everyone who loved rock and roll in Liverpool realised that there were others out there like them. Overnight, a scene had been born. And where there's a scene, there's money to be made. Larry Parnes, who had been the national promoter of the tour, was at the show and realised that there were a lot of quite proficient musicians in Liverpool. And it so happened that he needed backing bands for three of his artists who were going on tour, separately -- two minor stars, Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle, and one big star, Billy Fury. And both Gentle and Fury were from Liverpool themselves. So Parnes asked Allan Williams to set up auditions with some of the local groups. Williams invited several groups, and one he asked along was the Beatles, largely because Lennon and Sutcliffe begged him. He also found them a drummer, Tommy Moore, who was a decade older than the rest of them -- though Moore didn't turn up to the audition because he had to work, and so Johnny "Hutch" Hutchinson of Cass and the Cassanovas sat in with them, much to Hutch's disgust -- he hated the Beatles, and especially Lennon.  Cass of the Cassanovas also insisted that "the Beatles" was a stupid name, and that the group needed to be Something and the Somethings, and he suggested Long John and the Silver Beatles, and that stuck for a couple of shows before they reverted to their proper name. The Beatles weren't chosen for any of the main tours that were being booked, but then Parnes phoned Williams up -- there were some extra dates on the Johnny Gentle tour that he hadn't yet booked a group for. Could Williams find him a band who could be in Scotland that Friday night for a nine-day tour? Williams tried Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, but none of them could go on tour at such short notice. They all had gigs booked, or day jobs they had to book time off with. The Beatles had no gigs booked, and only George had a day job, and he didn't mind just quitting that. They were off to Scotland. They were so inspired by being on tour with a Larry Parnes artist that most of them took on new names just like those big stars -- George became Carl Harrison, after Carl Perkins, Stuart became Stuart de Staël, after his favourite painter, and Paul became Paul Ramon, which he thought sounded mysterious and French. There's some question about whether John took on a new name -- some sources have him becoming "Long John", while others say he was "Johnny" Lennon rather than John. Tommy Moore, meanwhile, was just Thomas Moore. It was on this tour, of course, that Lennon helped Johnny Gentle write "I've Just Fallen For Someone", which we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Darren Young, "I've Just Fallen For Someone"] The tour was apparently fairly miserable, with horrible accommodation, poor musicianship from the group, and everyone getting on everyone's nerves -- George and Stuart got into fistfights, John bullied Stuart a bit because of his poor playing, and John particularly didn't get on well with Moore -- a man who was a decade older, didn't share their taste in music, and worked in a factory rather than having the intellectual aspirations of the group. The two hated each other by the end of the tour. But the tour did also give the group the experience of signing autographs, and of feeling like stars in at least a minor way. When they got back to Liverpool, George moved in with John and Stuart, to get away from his mum telling him to get a proper job, and they got a few more bookings thanks to Williams, but they soon became drummerless -- they turned up to a gig one time to find that Tommy Moore wasn't there. They went round to his house, and his wife shouted from an upstairs window, "Yez can piss off, he's had enough of yez and gone back to work at the bottle factory". The now four-piece group carried on, however, and recordings exist of them in this period, sounding much more professional than only a few months before, including performances of some of their own songs. The most entertaining of these is probably "You'll Be Mine", an Ink Spots parody with some absurd wordplay from Lennon: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You'll Be Mine"] Soon enough the group found another drummer, Norm Chapman, and carried on as before, getting regular bookings thanks to Williams. There was soon a temporary guest at the flat John, Stuart, and George shared with several other people -- Royston Ellis, the Beat poet and friend of the Shadows, had turned up in Liverpool and latched on to the group, partly because he fancied George. He performed with them a couple of times, crashed at the flat, and provided them with two formative experiences -- he gave them their first national press, talking in Record and Show Mirror about how he wanted them to be his full-time group, and he gave them their first drug experience, showing them how to get amphetamines out of inhalers. While the group's first national press was positive, there was soon some very negative press indeed associated with them. A tabloid newspaper wanted to do a smear story about the dangerous Beatnik menace. The article talked about how "they revel in filth", and how beatniks were "a dangerous menace to our young people… a corrupting influence of drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies". And for some reason -- it's never been made clear exactly how -- the beatnik "pad" they chose to photograph for this story was the one that John, Stuart, and George lived in, though they weren't there at the time -- several of their friends and associates are in the pictures though. They were all kicked out of their flat, and moved back in with their families, and around this time they lost Chapman from the group too -- he was called up to do his National Service, one of the last people to be conscripted before conscription ended for good. They were back to a four-piece again, and for a while Paul was drumming. But then, as seems to have happened so often with this group, a bizarre coincidence happened. A while earlier, Allan Williams had travelled to Hamburg, with the idea of trying to get Liverpool groups booked there. He'd met up with Bruno Koschmider, the owner of a club called the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider had liked the idea, but nothing had come of it, partly because neither could speak the other's language well. A little while later, Koschmider had remembered the idea and come over to the UK to find musicians. He didn't remember where Williams was from, so of course he went to London, to the 2is, and there he found a group of musicians including Tony Sheridan, who we talked about back in the episode on "Brand New Cadillac", the man who'd been Vince Taylor's lead guitarist and had a minor solo career: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, "Why?"] Sheridan was one of the most impressive musicians in Britain, but he also wanted to skip the country -- he'd just bought a guitar on credit in someone else's name, and he also had a wife and six-month-old baby he wanted rid of. He eagerly went off with Koschmider, and a scratch group called the Jets soon took up residence at the Kaiserkeller. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Derry and the Seniors were annoyed. Larry Parnes had booked them for a tour, but then he'd got annoyed at the unprofessionalism of the Liverpool bands he was booking and cancelled the booking, severing his relationship with Williams. The Seniors wanted to know what Williams was going to do about it.  There was no way to get them enough gigs in Liverpool, so Williams, being a thoroughly decent man who had a sense of obligation, offered to drive the group down to London to see if they could get work there. He took them to the 2is, and they were allowed to get up and play there, since Williams was a friend of the owner. And Bruno Koschmider was there. The Jets hadn't liked playing at Williams' club, and they'd scarpered to another one with better working conditions, which they helped get off the ground and renamed the Top Ten, after Vince Taylor's club in London. So Bruno had come back to find another group, and there in the same club at the same time was the man who'd given him the idea in the first place, with a group. Koschmider immediately signed up Derry and the Seniors to play at the Kaiserkeller.  Meanwhile, the best gig the Beatles could get, also through Williams, was backing a stripper, where they played whatever instrumentals they knew, no matter how inappropriate, things like the theme from The Third Man: [Excerpt: Anton Karas, "Theme from The Third Man"] A tune guaranteed to get the audience into a sexy mood, I'm sure you'll agree. But then Allan Williams got a call from Koschmider. Derry and the Seniors were doing great business, and he'd decided to convert another of his clubs to be a rock and roll club. Could Williams have a group for him by next Friday? Oh, and it needed to be five people. Williams tried Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They were busy. He tried Cass and the Cassanovas. They were busy. He tried Gerry and the Pacemakers. They were busy. Finally, he tried the Beatles. They weren't busy, and said yes they could go to Hamburg that week. There were a few minor issues, like there not being five of them, none of them having passports, and them not having a drummer. The passports could be sorted quickly -- there's a passport office in Liverpool -- but the lack of a fifth Beatle was more of a problem. In desperation, they turned eventually to Pete Best, Mrs. Best's son, because they knew he had a drum kit. He agreed.  Allan Williams drove the group to Hamburg, and they started playing six-hour sets every night at the Indra, not finishing til three in the morning, at which point they'd make their way to their lodgings -- the back of a filthy cinema.  By this time, the Beatles had already got good -- Howie Casey, of Derry and the Seniors, who'd remembered the Beatles as being awful at the Johnny Gentle audition, came over to see them and make fun of them, but found that they were far better than they had been. But playing six hours a night got them *very* good *very* quickly -- especially as they decided that they weren't going to play the same song twice in a night, meaning they soon built up a vast repertoire. But right from the start, there was a disconnect between Pete Best and the other four -- they socialised together, and he went off on his own. He was also a weak player -- he was only just starting to learn -- and so the rest of the group would stamp their feet to keep him in time. That, though, also gave them a bit more of a stage act than they might otherwise have had. There are lots of legendary stories about the group's time in Hamburg, and it's impossible to sort fact from fiction, and the bits we can sort out would get this podcast categorised as adult content, but they were teenagers, away from home for a long period for the first time, living in a squalid back room in the red light district of a city with a reputation for vice. I'm sure whatever you imagine is probably about right. After a relatively short time, they were moved from the Indra, which had to stop putting on rock and roll shows, to the Kaiserkeller, where they shared the bill with Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, up to that point considered Liverpool's best band. There's a live recording of the Hurricanes from 1960, which shows that they were certainly powerful: [Excerpt: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, "Brand New Cadillac"] That recording doesn't have the Hurricanes' normal drummer on, who was sick for that show. But compared to what the Beatles had become -- a stomping powerhouse with John Lennon, whose sense of humour was both cruel and pointed, doing everything he could to get a rise out of the audience -- they were left in the dust. A letter home that George Harrison wrote sums it up -- "Rory Storm & the Hurricanes came out here the other week, and they are crumby. He does a bit of dancing around but it still doesn’t make up for his phoney group. The only person who is any good in the group is the drummer." That drummer was Richy Starkey from the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, now performing as Ringo Starr. They struck up a friendship, and even performed together at least once -- John, Paul, George, and Ringo acting as the backing group for Lu Walters of the Hurricanes on a demo, which is frustratingly missing and hasn't been heard since. They were making other friends, too. There was Tony Sheridan, who they'd seen on TV, but who would now sometimes jam with them as equals. And there was a trio of arty bohemian types who had stumbled across the club, where they were very out of place -- Astrid Kirscherr, Klaus Voormann, and Jurgen Vollmer. They all latched on to the Beatles, and especially to Stuart, who soon started dating Astrid, despite her speaking no English and him speaking no German. But relations between Koschmider and the Beatles had worsened, and he reported to the police that George, at only seventeen, was under-age. George got deported. The rest of the group decided to move over to the Top Ten Club, and as a parting gift, Paul and Pete nailed some condoms to their bedroom wall and set fire to them. Koschmider decided to report this to the police as attempted arson, and those two were deported as well. John followed a week later, while Stuart stayed in Hamburg for a while, to spend more time with Astrid, who he planned to marry. The other four regrouped, getting in a friend, Chas Newby, as a temporary bass player while Stuart was away. And on the twenty-seventh of December, 1960, when they played Litherland Town Hall, they changed the Liverpool music scene. They were like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the audience didn't dance -- they just rushed to the stage, to be as close to the performance as possible. The Beatles had become the best band in Liverpool. Mark Lewisohn goes further, and suggests that the three months of long nights playing different songs in Hamburg had turned them into the single most experienced rock band *in the world* -- which seems vanishingly unlikely to me, but Lewisohn is not a man given to exaggeration. By this time, Mona Best had largely taken over the group's bookings, and there were a lot of them, as well as a regular spot at the Casbah. Neil Aspinall, a friend of Pete's, started driving them to gigs, while they also had a regular MC, Bob Wooler, who ran many local gigs, and who gave the Beatles their own theme music -- he'd introduce them with the fanfare from Rossini's William Tell Overture: [Excerpt: Rossini, "William Tell Overture"] Stuart came over from Hamburg in early January, and once again the Beatles were a five-piece -- and by now, he could play quite well, well enough, at any rate, that it didn't destroy the momentum the group had gathered. The group were getting more and more bookings, including the venue that would become synonymous with them, the Cavern, a tiny little warehouse cellar that had started as a jazz club, and that the Quarry Men had played once a couple of years earlier, but had been banned from for playing too much rock and roll. Now, the Beatles were getting bookings at the Cavern's lunchtime sessions, and that meant more than it seemed. Most of the gigs they played otherwise were on the outskirts of the city, but the Cavern was in the city centre. And that meant that for the lunchtime sessions, commuters from outside the city were coming to see them -- which meant that the group got fans from anywhere within commuting distance, fans who wanted them to play in their towns. Meanwhile, the group were branching out musically -- they were particularly becoming fascinated by the new R&B, soul, and girl-group records that were coming out in the US. After already having loved "Money" by Barrett Strong, John was also obsessed with the Miracles, and would soon become a fervent fan of anything Motown, and the group were all big fans of the Shirelles. As they weren't playing original material live, and as every group would soon learn every other group's best songs, there was an arms race on to find the most exciting songs to cover. As well as Elvis and Buddy and Eddie, they were now covering the Shirelles and Ray Charles and Gary US Bonds. The group returned to Hamburg in April, Paul and Pete's immigration status having been resolved and George now having turned eighteen, and started playing at the Top Ten club, where they played even longer sets, and more of them, than they had at the Kaiserkeller and the Indra. Tony Sheridan started regularly joining them on stage at this time, and Paul switched to piano while Sheridan added the third guitar. This was also when they started using Preludin, a stimulant related to amphetamines which was prescribed as a diet drug -- Paul would take one pill a night, George a couple, and John would gobble them down. But Pete didn't take them -- one more way in which he was different from the others -- and he started having occasional micro-sleeps in the middle of songs as the long nights got to him, much to the annoyance of the rest of the group. But despite Pete's less than stellar playing they were good enough that Sheridan -- the single most experienced musician in the British rock and roll scene -- described them as the best R&B band he'd ever heard. Once they were there, they severed their relationship with Allan Williams, refusing to pay him his share of the money, and just cutting him out of their careers.  Meanwhile, Stuart was starting to get ill. He was having headaches all the time, and had to miss shows on occasion. He was also the only Beatle with a passion for anything else, and he managed to get a scholarship to study art with the famous sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who was now working in Hamburg. Paul subbed for Stuart on bass, and eventually Stuart left the group, though on good terms with everyone other than Paul. So it was John, Paul, George and Pete who ended up making the Beatles' first records. Bert Kaempfert, the most important man in the German music industry, had been to see them all at the Top Ten and liked what he saw. Outside Germany, Kaempfert was probably best known for co-writing Elvis' "Wooden Heart", which the Beatles had in their sets at this time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Wooden Heart"] Kaempfert had signed Tony Sheridan to a contract, and he wanted the Beatles to back him in the studio -- and he was also interested in recording a couple of tracks with them on their own. The group eagerly agreed, and their first session started at eight in the morning on the twenty-second of June 1961, after they had finished playing all night at the club, and all of them but Pete were on Preludin for the session. Stuart came along for moral support, but didn't play. Pete was a problem, though. He wasn't keeping time properly, and Kaempfert eventually insisted on removing his bass drum and toms, leaving only a snare, hi-hat, and ride cymbal for Pete to play. They recorded seven songs at that session in total. Two of them were just by the Beatles. One was a version of "Ain't She Sweet", an old standard which Gene Vincent had recorded fairly recently, but the other was the only track ever credited to Lennon and Harrison as cowriters. On their first trip to Hamburg, they'd wanted to learn "Man of Mystery" by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] But there was a slight problem in that they didn't have a copy of the record, and had never heard it -- it came out in the UK while they were in Germany. So they asked Rory Storm to hum it for them. He hummed a few notes, and Lennon and Harrison wrote a parody of what Storm had sung, which they named "Beatle Bop" but by this point they'd renamed "Cry For a Shadow": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Cry For a Shadow"] The other five songs at the session were given over to Tony Sheridan, with the Beatles backing him, and the song that Kaempfert was most interested in recording was one the group had been performing on stage -- a rocked-up version of the old folk song "My Bonnie": [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, "My Bonnie"] That was the record chosen as the single, but it was released not as by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, but by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers -- "Beatles", to German ears, sounded a little like "piedels", a childish slang term for penises. The Beatles had made their first record, but it wasn't one they thought much of. They knew they could do better. The next week, the now four-piece Beatles returned to Liverpool, with much crying at Stuart staying behind -- even Paul, now Stuart was no longer a threat for John's attention, was contrite and tried to make amends to him.  On their return to Liverpool, they picked up where they had left off, playing almost every night, and spending the days trying to find new records -- often listening to the latest releases at NEMS, a department store with an extensive record selection. Brian Epstein, the shop's manager, prided himself on being able to get any record a customer wanted, and whenever anyone requested anything he'd buy a second copy for the shelves. As a result, you could find records there that you wouldn't get anywhere else in Liverpool, and the Beatles were soon adding more songs by the Shirelles and Gary US Bonds to their sets, as well as more songs by the Coasters and Ben E. King's "Stand By Me". They were playing gigs further afield, and Neil Aspinall was now driving them everywhere. Aspinall was Pete Best's closest friend -- and was having an affair with Pete's mother -- but unlike Pete himself he also became close to the other Beatles, and would remain so for the rest of his life.  By this point, the group were so obviously the best band on the Liverpool scene that they were starting to get bored -- there was no competition. And by this point it really was a proper scene -- John's old art school friend Bill Harry had started up a magazine, Mersey Beat, which may be the first magazine anywhere in the world to focus on one area's local music scene. Brian Epstein from NEMS had a column, as did Bob Wooler, and often John's humorous writing would appear as well. The Beatles were featured in most issues -- although Paul McCartney's name was misspelled almost every time it appeared -- and not just because Lennon and Harry were friends. By this point there were the Beatles, and there were all the other groups in the area. For several months this continued -- they learned new songs, they played almost every day, and they continued to be the best. They started to find it boring. The one big change that came at this point was when John and Paul went on holiday to Paris, saw Vince Taylor, bumped into their friend Jurgen from Hamburg, and got Jurgen to do their hair like his -- the story we told in the episode on "Brand New Cadillac". They now had the Beatles haircut, though they were still wearing leather. When they got back, George copied their new style straight away, but Pete decided to leave his hair in a quiff. There was nowhere else to go without a manager to look after them. They needed management -- and they found it because of "My Bonnie": [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, "My Bonnie"] "My Bonnie" was far from a great record, but it was what led to everything that followed. The Beatles had mentioned from the stage at the Cavern that they had a record out, and a young man named Raymond Jones walked into NEMS and asked for a copy of it. Brian Epstein couldn't find it in the record company catalogues, and asked Jones for more information -- Jones explained that they were a Liverpool group, but the record had come out in Germany. A couple of days later, two young girls came into the shop asking for the same record, and now Epstein was properly intrigued -- in his view, if *two* people asked for a record, that probably meant a lot more than just two people wanted it. He decided to check these Beatles out for himself. Epstein was instantly struck by the group, and this has led to a lot of speculation over the years, because his tastes ran more to Sibelius than to Little Richard. As Epstein was also gay, many people have assumed that the attraction was purely physical. And it might well have been, at least in part, but the suggestion that everything that followed was just because of that seems unlikely -- Epstein was also someone who had a long interest in the arts, and had trained as an actor at RADA, the most prestigious actors' college in the UK, before taking up his job at the family store. Given that the Beatles were soon to become the most popular musicians in the history of the world, and were already the most popular musicians in the Liverpool area, the most reasonable assumption must be that Epstein was impressed by the same things that impressed roughly a billion other people over the next sixty years. Epstein started going to the Cavern regularly, to watch the Beatles and to make plans -- the immaculately dressed, public-school-educated, older rich man stood out among the crowd, and the Beatles already knew his face from his record shop, and so they knew something was going on. By late November, Brian had managed to obtain a box of twenty-five copies of "My Bonnie", and they'd sold out within hours. He set up a meeting with the Beatles, and even before he got them signed to a management contract he was using his contacts with the record industry in London to push the Beatles at record companies. Those companies listened to Brian, because NEMS was one of their biggest customers. December 1961, the month they signed with Brian Epstein, was also the month that they finally started including Lennon/McCartney songs in their sets.  And within a couple of weeks of becoming their manager, even before he'd signed them to a contract, Brian had managed to persuade Mike Smith, an A&R man from Decca, to come to the Cavern to see the group in person. He was impressed, and booked them in for a studio session. December 61 was also the first time that John, Paul, George, and Ringo played together in that lineup, without any other musicians, when on the twenty-seventh of December Pete called in sick for a show, and the others got in their friend to cover for him. It wouldn't be the last time they would play together. On New Year's Day 1962, the Beatles made the trek down to London to record fifteen songs at the Decca studios. The session was intended for two purposes -- to see if they sounded as good on tape as they did in the Cavern, and if they did to produce their first single. Those recordings included the core of their Cavern repertoire, songs like "Money": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Money (Decca version)"] They also recorded three Lennon/McCartney songs, two by Paul -- "Love of the Loved" and "Like Dreamers Do": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Like Dreamers Do"] And one by Lennon -- "Hello Little Girl": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Little Girl"] And they were Lennon/McCartney songs, even though they were written separately -- the two agreed that they were going to split the credit on anything either of them wrote. The session didn't go well -- the group's equipment wasn't up to standard and they had to use studio amps, and they're all audibly nervous -- but Mike Smith was still fairly confident that they'd be releasing something through Decca -- he just had to work out the details with his boss, Dick Rowe. Meanwhile, the group were making other changes. Brian suggested that they could get more money if they wore suits, and so they agreed -- though they didn't want just any suits, they wanted stylish mohair suits, like the black American groups they loved so much.  The Beatles were now a proper professional group -- but unfortunately, Decca turned them down. Dick Rowe, Mike Smith's boss, didn't think that electric guitars were going to become a big thing -- he was very tuned in to the American trends, and nothing with guitars was charting at the time. Smith was considering two groups -- the Beatles, and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and wanted to sign both. Rowe told him that he could sign one, but only one, of them. The Tremeloes had been better in the studio, and they lived round the corner from Smith and were friendly with him. There was no contest -- much as Smith wanted to sign both groups, the Tremeloes were the better prospect. Rowe did make an offer to Epstein: if Epstein would pay a hundred pounds (a *lot* of money in those days), Tony Meehan, formerly of the Shadows, would produce the group in another session, and Decca would release that. Brian wasn't interested -- if the Beatles were going to make a record, they were going to make it with people who they weren't having to pay for the privilege. John, Paul, and George were devastated, but for their own reasons they didn't bother to tell Pete they'd been turned down. But they did have a tape of themselves, at least -- a professional-quality recording that they could use to attract other labels. And their career was going forward in other ways. The same day Brian had his second meeting with Decca, they had an audition with the BBC in Manchester, where they were accepted to perform on Teenager's Turn, a radio programme hosted by the Northern Dance Orchestra. A few weeks later, on the seventh of March, they went to Manchester to record four songs in front of an audience, of which three would be broadcast: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Please Mr. Postman (Teenager's Turn)"] That recording of John singing "Please Mr. Postman" is historic for another reason, which shows just how on the cutting edge of musical taste the Beatles actually were -- it was the first time ever that a Motown song was played on the BBC. Now we get to the part of the story that, before Mark Lewisohn's work in his book a few years back, had always been shrouded in mystery. What Lewisohn shows is that George Martin was in fact forced to sign the Beatles, against his will, and that this may have been as a punishment. The Beatles had already been turned down by Parlophone once, based on "My Bonnie", when Brian Epstein walked into the HMV store on Oxford Street in London in mid-February. HMV is now mostly known as a retail chain, Britain's biggest chain of physical media stores, but at the time it was owned by EMI, and was associated with their label of the same name -- HMV stood for "His Master's Voice", and its logo was the same one as America's RCA, with whom it had a mutual distribution deal for many years. As a record retailer, Epstein naturally had a professional interest in other record shops, and he had a friend at HMV, who suggested to him that they could use a disc-cutting machine that the shop had to turn his copy of the Decca tapes into acetate discs, which would be much more convenient for taking round and playing to record labels. That disc-cutter was actually in a studio that musicians used for making records for themselves, much as the Quarry Men had years earlier -- it was in fact the studio where Cliff Richard had cut *his* first private demo, the one he'd used to get signed to EMI.  Jim Foy, the man who worked the lathe cutter, liked what he heard, and he talked with Brian about the group. Brian mentioned that some of the songs were originals, and Foy told him that EMI also owned a publishing company, Ardmore & Beechwood, and the office was upstairs -- would Brian like to meet with them to discuss publishing? Brian said he would like that. Ardmore & Beechwood wanted the original songs on the demo. They were convinced that Lennon and McCartney had potential as songwriters, and that songs like "Like Dreamers Do" could become hits in the right hands. And Brian Epstein agreed with them -- but he also knew that the Beatles had no interest in becoming professional songwriters. They wanted to make records, not write songs for other people to record.  Brian took his new discs round to George Martin at EMI -- who wasn't very impressed, and basically said "Don't call us, we'll call you". Brian went back to Liverpool, and got on with the rest of the group's career, including setting up another Hamburg residency for them, this time at a new club called the Star Club. That Star Club residency, in April, would be devastating for the group -- on Tuesday the tenth of April, the same day John, Paul, and Pete got to Hamburg (George was ill and flew over the next day), Stuart Sutcliffe, who'd been having headaches and feeling ill for months, collapsed and died, aged only twenty-one. The group found out the next day -- they got to the airport to meet George, and bumped into Klaus and Astrid, who were there to meet Stuart's mother from the same flight. They asked where Stuart was, and heard the news from Astrid.  John basically went

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode one hundred, is the hundredth-episode special and is an hour and a half long. It looks at the early career of the Beatles, and at the three recordings of “Love Me Do”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources No Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. While there are many books on the Beatles, and I have read dozens of them, only one needs to be mentioned as a reference for this episode (others will be used for others). All These Years Vol 1: Tune In by Mark Lewisohn is simply the *only* book worth reading on the Beatles’ career up to the end of 1962. It is the most detailed, most accurate, biography imaginable, and the gold standard by which all other biographies of musicians should be measured. I only wish volumes two and three were available already so I could not expect my future episodes on the Beatles to be obsolete when they do come out. There are two versions of the book — a nine-hundred page mass-market version and a 1700-page expanded edition. I recommend the latter. The information in this podcast is almost all from Lewisohn’s book, but I must emphasise that the opinions are mine, and so are any errors — Lewisohn’s book only has one error that I’m aware of (a joke attributed to the comedian Jasper Carrott in a footnote that has since been traced to an earlier radio show). I am only mortal, and so have doubtless misunderstood or oversimplified things and introduced errors where he had none.   The single version of “Love Me Do” can be found on Past Masters, a 2-CD compilation of the Beatles’ non-album tracks that includes the majority of their singles and B-sides. The version with Andy White playing on can be found on Please Please Me. The version with Pete Best, and many of the other early tracks used here, is on Anthology 1.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I pronounce the name of Lewisohn’s book as “All Those Years” instead of “All These Years”. I say ” The Jets hadn’t liked playing at Williams’ club” at one point. I meant “at Koschmider’s club”   Transcript   The Beatles came closer than most people realise to never making a record. Until the publication of Mark Lewisohn’s seminal biography All These Years vol 1: Tune In, in 2013 everyone thought they knew the true story — John met Paul at Woolton Village Fete in 1957, and Paul joined the Quarrymen, who later became the Beatles. They played Hamburg and made a demo, and after the Beatles’ demo was turned down by Decca, their manager Brian Epstein shopped it around every record label without success, until finally George Martin heard the potential in it and signed them to Parlophone, a label which was otherwise known for comedy records. Martin was, luckily, the one producer in the whole of the UK who could appreciate the Beatles’ music, and he signed them up, and the rest was history. The problem is, as Lewisohn showed, that’s not what happened. Today I’m going to tell, as best I can the story of how the Beatles actually became the band that they became, and how they got signed to EMI records. I’m going to tell you the story of “Love Me Do”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Love Me Do (single version)”] As I mentioned at the beginning, this episode owes a *huge* debt to Mark Lewisohn’s book. I like to acknowledge my sources, anyway, but I’ve actually had difficulty with this episode because Lewisohn’s book is *so* detailed, *so* full, and written *so* well that much of the effort in writing this episode came from paring down the information, rather than finding more, and from reworking things so I was not just paraphrasing bits of his writing. Normally I rely on many sources, and integrate the material myself, but Lewisohn has done all that work far better than any other biographer of any other musician. Were the Beatles not such an important part of music history, I would just skip this episode because there is nothing for me to add. As it is, I *obviously* have to cover this, but I almost feel like I’m cheating in doing so. If you find this episode interesting at all, please do yourself a favour and buy that book.  This episode is going to be a long one — much longer than normal. I won’t know the precise length until after I’ve recorded and edited it, of course, but I’m guessing it’s going to be about ninety minutes. This is the hundredth episode, the end of the second year of the podcast, the end of the second book based on the podcast, and the introduction of the single most important band in the whole story, so I’m going to stretch out a bit. I should also mention that there are a couple of discussions of sudden, traumatic, deaths in this episode. With all that said, settle in, this is going to take a while. Every British act we’ve looked at so far — and many of those we’re going to look at in the next year or two — was based in London. Either they grew up there, or they moved there before their musical career really took off. The Beatles, during the time we’re covering in this episode, were based in Liverpool. While they did eventually move to London, it wasn’t until after they’d started having hits. And what listeners from outside the UK might not realise is what that means in terms of attitudes and perceptions. Liverpool is a large city — it currently has a population of around half a million, and the wider Liverpool metropolitan area is closer to two million — but like all British cities other than London, it was regarded largely as a joke in the British media, and so in return the people of Liverpool had a healthy contempt for London. To give Americans some idea of how London dominates in Britain, and thus how it’s thought of outside London, imagine that New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles were all the same city — that the financial, media, and political centres of the country were all the same place. Now further imagine that Silicon Valley and all the Ivy League universities were half an hour’s drive from that city. Now, imagine how much worse the attitudes that that city would have about so-called “flyover states” would be, and imagine in return how people in large Midwestern cities like Detroit or Chicago would think about that big city.  In this analogy, Liverpool is Detroit, and like Detroit, it was very poor and had produced a few famous musicians, most notably Billy Fury, who was from an impoverished area of Liverpool called the Dingle: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, “Halfway to Paradise”] But Fury had, of course, moved to London to have his career. That’s what you did. But in general, Liverpool, if people in London thought of it at all, was thought of as a provincial backwater full of poor people, many of them Irish, and all of them talking with a ridiculous accent. Liverpool was ignored by London, and that meant that things could develop there out of sight. The story of the Beatles starts in the 1950s, with two young men in their mid-teens. John Winston Lennon was born in 1940, and had had a rather troubled childhood. His father had been a merchant seaman who had been away in the war, and his parents’ relationship had deteriorated for that and other reasons. As a result, Lennon had barely known his father, and when his mother met another man, Lennon’s aunt, Mary Smith, who he always called Mimi, had taken him in, believing that his mother “living in sin” would be a bad influence on the young boy. The Smith family were the kind of lower middle class family that seemed extremely rich to the impoverished families in Liverpool, but were not well off by any absolute standard. Mimi, in particular, was torn between two very different urges. On one hand, she had strongly bohemian, artistic, urges — as did all of her sisters. She was a voracious reader, and a lover of art history, and encouraged these tendencies in John. But at the same time, she was of that class which has a little status, but not much security, and so she was extremely wary of the need to appear respectable. This tension between respectability and rebellion was something that would appear in many of the people who Lennon later worked with, such as Brian Epstein and George Martin, and it was something that Lennon would always respond to — those people would be the only ones who Lennon would ever view as authority figures he could respect, though he would also resent them at times. And it might be that combination of rebellion and respectability that Lennon saw in Paul McCartney. McCartney was from a family who, in the Byzantine world of the British class system of the time, were a notch or so lower than the Smith family who raised Lennon, but he was academically bright, and his family had big plans for him — they thought that it might even be possible that he might become a teacher if he worked very hard at school. McCartney was a far less openly rebellious person than Lennon was, but he was still just as caught up in the music and fashions of the mid-fifties that his father associated with street gangs and hooliganism. Lennon, like many teenagers in Britain at the time, had had his life changed when he first heard Elvis Presley, and he had soon become a rock and roll obsessive — Elvis was always his absolute favourite, but he also loved Little Richard, who he thought was almost as good, and he admired Buddy Holly, who had a special place in Lennon’s heart as Holly wore glasses on stage, something that Lennon, who was extremely short-sighted, could never bring himself to do, but which at least showed him that it was a possibility. Lennon was, by his mid-teens, recreating a relationship with his mother, and one of the things they bonded over was music — she taught him how to play the banjo, and together they worked out the chords to “That’ll Be the Day”, and Lennon later switched to the guitar, playing banjo chords on five of the six strings.  Like many, many, teenagers of the time, Lennon also formed a skiffle group, which he called the Quarrymen, after a line in his school song. The group tended to have a rotating lineup, but Lennon was the unquestioned leader. The group had a repertoire consisting of the same Lonnie Donegan songs that every other skiffle group was playing, plus any Elvis and Buddy Holly songs that could sound reasonable with a lineup of guitars, teachest bass, and washboard. The moment that changed the history of the music, though, came on July the sixth, 1957, when Ivan Vaughan, a friend of Lennon’s, invited his friend Paul McCartney to go and see the Quarry Men perform at Woolton Village Fete. That day has gone down in history as “the day John met Paul”, although Mark Lewisohn has since discovered that Lennon and McCartney had briefly met once before. It is, though, the day on which Lennon and McCartney first impressed each other musically. McCartney talks about being particularly impressed that the Quarry Men’s lead singer was changing the lyrics to the songs he was performing, making up new words when he forgot the originals — he says in particular that he remembers Lennon singing “Come Go With Me” by the Del-Vikings: [Excerpt: The Del-Vikings, “Come Go With Me”] McCartney remembers Lennon as changing the lyrics to “come go with me, right down to the penitentiary”, and thinking that was clever. Astonishingly, some audio recording actually exists of the Quarry Men’s second performance that day — they did two sets, and this second one comes just after Lennon met McCartney rather than just before. The recording only seems to exist in a very fragmentary form, which has snatches of Lennon singing “Baby Let’s Play House” and Lonnie Donegan’s hit “Puttin’ on the Style”, which was number one on the charts at the time, but that even those fragments have survived, given how historic a day this was, is almost miraculous: [Excerpt: The Quarrymen, “Puttin’ on the Style”] After the first set, Lennon met McCartney, who was nearly two years younger, but a more accomplished musician — for a start, he knew how to tune the guitar with all six strings, and to proper guitar tuning, rather than tuning five strings like a banjo. Lennon and his friends were a little nonplussed by McCartney holding his guitar upside-down at first — McCartney is left-handed — but despite having an upside-down guitar with the wrong tuning, McCartney managed to bash out a version of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty-Flight Rock”, a song he would often perform in later decades when reminding people of this story: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty-Flight Rock”] This was impressive to Lennon for three reasons. The first was that McCartney was already a strong, confident performer — he perhaps seemed a little more confident than he really was, showing off in front of the bigger boys like this. The second was that “Twenty-Flight Rock” was a moderately obscure song — it hadn’t charted, but it *had* appeared in The Girl Can’t Help It, a film which every rock and roll lover in Britain had watched at the cinema over and over. Choosing that song rather than, say, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, was a way of announcing a kind of group affiliation — “I am one of you, I am a real rock and roll fan, not just a casual listener to what’s in the charts”. I stress that second point because it’s something that’s very important in the history of the Beatles generally — they were *music fans*, and often fans of relatively obscure records. That’s something that bound Lennon and McCartney, and later the other members, together from the start, and something they always noted about other musicians. They weren’t the kind of systematic scholars who track down rare pressings and memorise every session musician’s name, but they were constantly drawn to find the best new music, and to seek it out wherever they could. But the most impressive thing for Lennon — and one that seems a little calculated on McCartney’s part, though he’s never said that he thought about this that I’m aware of — was that this was an extremely wordy song, and McCartney *knew all the words*. Remember that McCartney had noticed Lennon forgetting the words to a song with lyrics as simple as “come, come, come, come, come into my heart/Tell me darling we will never part”, and here’s McCartney singing this fast-paced, almost patter song, and getting the words right.  From the beginning, McCartney was showing how he could complement Lennon — if Lennon could impress McCartney by improvising new lyrics when he forgot the old ones, then McCartney could impress Lennon by remembering the lyrics that Lennon couldn’t — and by writing them down for Lennon, sharing his knowledge freely. McCartney went on to show off more, and in particular impressed Lennon by going to a piano and showing off his Little Richard imitation. Little Richard was the only serious rival to Elvis in Lennon’s affections, and McCartney could do a very decent imitation of him. This was someone special, clearly. But this put Lennon in a quandary. McCartney was clearly far, far, better than any of the Quarry Men — at least Lennon’s equal, and light years ahead of the rest of them. Lennon had a choice — invite this young freak of nature into his band, and improve the band dramatically, but no longer be the unquestioned centre of the group, or remain in absolute control but not have someone in the group who *knew the words* and *knew how to tune a guitar*, and other such magical abilities that no mere mortals had. Those who only know of Lennon from his later reputation as a massive egoist would be surprised, but he decided fairly quickly that he had to make the group better at his own expense. He invited McCartney to join the group, and McCartney said yes. Over the next few months the membership of the Quarry Men changed. They’d been formed while they were all at Quarry Bank Grammar School, but that summer Lennon moved on to art school. I’m going to have to talk about the art school system, and the British education system of the fifties and early sixties a lot over the next few months, but here’s an extremely abbreviated and inaccurate version that’s good enough for now. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen, people in Britain — at least those without extremely rich parents, who had a different system — went to two kinds of school depending on the result of an exam they took aged eleven, which was based on some since-discredited eugenic research about children’s potential. If you passed the exam, you were considered academically apt, and went to a grammar school, which was designed to filter you through to university and the professions. If you failed the exam, you went to a secondary modern, which was designed to give you the skills to get a trade and make a living working with your hands. And for the most part, people followed the pipeline that was set up for them. You go to grammar school, go to university, become a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher. You go to secondary modern, leave school at fourteen, become a plumber or a builder or a factory worker. But there are always those people who don’t properly fit into the neat categories that the world tries to put them in. And for people in their late teens and early twenties, people who’d been through the school system but not been shaped properly by it, there was another option at this time. If you were bright and creative, but weren’t suited for university because you’d failed your exams, you could go to art school. The supposed purpose of the art schools was to teach people to do commercial art, and they would learn skills like lettering and basic draughtsmanship. But what the art schools really did was give creative people space to explore ideas, to find out about areas of art and culture that would otherwise have been closed to them. Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Ian Dury, Ray Davies, Bryan Ferry, Syd Barrett, and many more people we’ll be seeing over the course of this story went to art school, and as David Bowie would put it later, the joke at the time was that you went to art school to learn to play blues guitar. With Lennon and his friends all moving on from the school that had drawn them together, the group stabilised for a time on a lineup of Lennon, McCartney, Colin Hanton, Len Garry, and Eric Griffiths. But the first time this version of the group played live, while McCartney sang well, he totally fluffed his lead guitar lines on stage. While there were three guitarists in the band at this point, they needed someone who could play lead fluently and confidently on stage. Enter George Harrison, who had suddenly become a close friend of McCartney. Harrison went to the same school as McCartney — a grammar school called the Liverpool Institute, but was in the year below McCartney, and so the two had always been a bit distant. However, at the same time as Lennon was moving on to art school after failing his exams, McCartney was being kept back a year for failing Latin — which his father always thought was deliberate, so he wouldn’t have to go to university. Now he was in the same year at school as Harrison, and they started hanging out together. The two bonded strongly over music, and would do things like take a bus journey to another part of town, where someone lived who they heard owned a copy of “Searchin'” by the Coasters: [Excerpt: The Coasters, “Searchin'”] The two knocked on this stranger’s door, asked if he’d play them this prized record, and he agreed — and then they stole it from him as they left his house. Another time they took the bus to another part of town again, because they’d heard that someone in that part of town knew how to play a B7 chord on his guitar, and sat there as he showed them. So now the Quarrymen needed a lead guitarist, McCartney volunteered his young mate. There are a couple of stories about how Harrison came to join the band — apparently he auditioned for Lennon at least twice, because Lennon was very unsure about having such a young kid in his band — but the story I like best is that Harrison took his guitar to a Quarry Men gig at Wilson Hall — he’d apparently often take his guitar to gigs and just see if he could sit in with the bands. On the bill with the Quarry Men was another group, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, who were generally regarded as the best skiffle band in Liverpool. Lennon told Harrison that he could join the band if he could play as well as Clayton, and Harrison took out his guitar and played “Raunchy”: [Excerpt: Bill Justis, “Raunchy”] I like this story rather than the other story that the members would tell later — that Harrison played “Raunchy” on a bus for Lennon — for one reason. The drummer in the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group was one Richy Starkey, and if it happened that way, the day that George joined the Quarry Men was also the day that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were all in the same place for the first time. George looked up to John and essentially idolised him, though Lennon thought of him as a little annoying at times — he’d follow John everywhere, and not take a hint when he wasn’t wanted sometimes, just eager to be with his big cool new mate. But despite this tiny bit of tension, John, Paul, and George quickly became a solid unit — helped by the fact that the school that Paul and George went to was part of the same complex of buildings as Lennon’s art college, so they’d all get the bus there and back together.  George was not only younger, he was a notch or two further down the social class ladder than John or Paul, and he spoke more slowly, which made him seem less intelligent. He came from Speke, which was a rougher area, and he would dress even more like a juvenile delinquent than the others. Meanwhile, Len Garry and Eric Griffiths left the group — Len Garry because he became ill and had to spend time in hospital, and anyway they didn’t really need a teachest bass. What they did need was an electric bass, and since they had four guitars now they tried to persuade Eric to get one, but he didn’t want to pay that much money, and he was always a little on the outside of the main three members, as he didn’t share their sense of humour. So the group got Nigel Walley, who was acting as the group’s manager, to fire him. The group was now John, Paul, and George all on guitars, and Colin Hanton on drums. Sometimes, if they played a venue that had a piano, they’d also bring along a schoolfriend of Paul’s, John “Duff” Lowe, to play piano. Meanwhile, the group were growing in other ways. Both John and Paul had started writing songs, together and apart. McCartney seems to have been the first, writing a song called “I Lost My Little Girl” which he would eventually record more than thirty years later: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “I Lost My Little Girl”] Lennon’s first song likewise sang about a little girl, this time being “Hello, Little Girl”. By the middle of 1958, this five-piece group was ready to cut their first record — at a local studio that would cut a single copy of a disc for you. They went into this studio at some time around July 1958, and recorded two songs. The first was their version of “That’ll Be the Day”: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, “That’ll be the Day”] The B-side was a song that McCartney had written, with a guitar solo that George had come up with, so the label credit read “McCartney/Harrison”. “In Spite of All the Danger” seems to have been inspired by Elvis’ “Trying to Get to You”: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Trying to Get to You”] It’s a rough song, but a good attempt for a teenager who had only just started writing songs: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, “In Spite of All the Danger”] Apparently Lowe and Hanton hadn’t heard the song before they started playing, but they make a decent enough fist of it in the circumstances. Lennon took the lead even though it was McCartney’s song — he said later “I was such a bully in those days I didn’t even let Paul sing his own song.” That was about the last time that this lineup of Quarry Men played together. In July, the month that seems likely for the recording, Lowe finished at the Liverpool Institute, and so he drifted away from McCartney and Harrison. Meanwhile Hanton had a huge row with the others after a show, and they fell out and never spoke again. The Quarry Men were reduced to a trio of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. But — possibly the very day after that recording if an unreliable plaque at the studio where they recorded it is to be believed — something happened which was to have far more impact on the group than the drummer leaving. John Lennon’s mother, with whom he’d slowly been repairing his relationship, had called round to visit Mimi. She left the house, and bumped into Nigel Walley, who was calling round to see John. She told him he wasn’t there, and that he could walk with her to the bus stop. They walked a little while, then went off in different directions. Walley heard a thump and turned round — Julia Lennon had been hit by a car and killed instantly. As you can imagine, John’s mother dying caused him a huge amount of distress, but it also gave him a bond with McCartney, whose own mother had died of cancer shortly before they met. Neither really spoke about it to each other, and to the extent they did it was with ultra-cynical humour — but the two now shared something deeper than just the music, even though the music itself was deep enough. Lennon became a much harder, nastier, person after this, at least for a time, his natural wit taking on a dark edge, and he would often drink too much and get aggressive. But life still went on, and John, Paul, and George kept trying to perform — though the gigs dried up, and they didn’t have a drummer any more. They’d just say “the rhythm’s in the guitars” when asked why they didn’t have one. They were also no longer the Quarry Men — they didn’t have a name. At one point late in the year, they also only had two guitars between the three of them — Lennon seems to have smashed his in a fit of fury after his mother’s death. But he stole one backstage at a talent contest, and soon they were back to having three. That talent show was one run by Carroll Levis, who we talked about before in the episode on “Shakin’ All Over”. The three boys went on Levis’ show, this time performing as Johnny & The Moondogs —  in Manchester, at the Hippodrome in Ancoats, singing Buddy Holly’s “Think it Over”: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “Think it Over”] Lennon sang lead with his arms draped over the shoulders of Paul and George, who sang backing vocals and played guitar. They apparently did quite well, but had to leave before the show finished to get the last train back to Liverpool, and so never found out whether the audience would have made them the winner, with the possibility of a TV appearance. They did well enough, though, to impress a couple of other young lads on the bill, two Manchester singers named Allan Clarke and Graham Nash. But in general, the Japage Three, a portmanteau of their names that they settled on as their most usual group name at this point, played very little in 1959 — indeed, George spent much of the early part of the year moonlighting in the Les Stewart Quartet, another group, though he still thought of Lennon and McCartney as his musical soulmates; the Les Stewart Quartet were just a gig.  The three of them would spend much of their time at the Jacaranda, a coffee bar opened by a Liverpool entrepreneur, Allan Williams, in imitation of the 2is, which was owned by a friend of his. Lennon was also spending a lot of time with an older student at his art school, Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the few people in the world that Lennon himself looked up to. The Les Stewart Quartet would end up indirectly being key to the Beatles’ development, because after one of their shows at a local youth club they were approached by a woman named Mona Best. Mona’s son Pete liked to go to the youth club, but she was fairly protective of him, and also wanted him to have more friends — he was a quiet boy who didn’t make friends easily. So she’d hit upon a plan — she’d open her own club in her cellar, since the Best family were rich enough to have a big house. If there was a club *in Pete’s house* he’d definitely make lots of friends. They needed a band, and she asked the Les Stewart Quartet if they’d like to be the resident band at this new club, the Casbah, and also if they’d like to help decorate it.  They said yes, but then Paul and George went on a hitch-hiking holiday around Wales for a few days, and George didn’t get back in time to play a gig the quartet had booked. Ken Brown, the other guitarist, didn’t turn up either, and Les Stewart got into a rage and split the group. Suddenly, the Casbah had no group — George and Ken were willing to play, but neither was a lead singer — and no decorators either. So George roped in John and Paul, who helped decorate the place, and with the addition of Ken Brown, the group returned to the Quarry Men name for their regular Saturday night gig at the Casbah. The group had no bass player or drummer, and they all kept pestering everyone they knew to get a bass or a drum kit, but nobody would bite. But then Stuart Sutcliffe got half a painting in an exhibition put on by John Moores, the millionaire owner of Littlewoods, who was a big patron of the arts in Liverpool. I say he got half a painting in the exhibition, because the painting was done on two large boards — Stuart and his friends took the first half of the painting down to the gallery, went back to get the other half, and got distracted by the pub and never brought it. But Moores was impressed enough with the abstract painting that he bought it at the end of the exhibition’s run, for ninety pounds — about two thousand pounds in today’s money. And so Stuart’s friends gave him a choice — he could either buy a bass or a drum kit, either would be fine. He chose the bass. But the same week that Stuart joined, Ken Brown was out, and they lost their gig at the Casbah. John, Paul, George and Ken had turned up one Saturday, and Ken hadn’t felt well, so instead of performing he just worked on the door. At the end of the show, Mona Best insisted on giving Ken an equal share of the money, as agreed. John, Paul, and George wouldn’t stand for that, and so Ken was out of the group, and they were no longer playing for Mona Best. Stuart joining the group caused tensions — George was fine with him, thinking that a bass player who didn’t yet know how to play was better than no bass player at all, but Paul was much less keen. Partly this was because he thought the group needed to get better, which would be hard with someone who couldn’t play, but also he was getting jealous of Sutcliffe’s closeness to Lennon, especially when the two became flatmates. But John wanted him in the group, and what John wanted, he got. There are recordings of the group around this time that circulate — only one has been released officially, a McCartney instrumental called “Cayenne”, but the others are out there if you look: [Excerpt: The Quarry Men, “Cayenne”] The gigs had dried up again, but they did have one new advantage — they now had a name they actually liked. John and Stuart had come up with it, inspired by Buddy Holly’s Crickets. They were going to be Beatles, with an a. Shortly after the Beatles’ first appearance under that name, at the art school student union, came the Liverpool gig which was to have had Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent headlining, before Cochran died. A lot of Liverpool groups were booked to play on the bill there, but not the Beatles — though Richy Starkey was going to play the gig, with his latest group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Allan Williams, the local promoter, added extra groups to fill out the bill, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, and suddenly everyone who loved rock and roll in Liverpool realised that there were others out there like them. Overnight, a scene had been born. And where there’s a scene, there’s money to be made. Larry Parnes, who had been the national promoter of the tour, was at the show and realised that there were a lot of quite proficient musicians in Liverpool. And it so happened that he needed backing bands for three of his artists who were going on tour, separately — two minor stars, Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle, and one big star, Billy Fury. And both Gentle and Fury were from Liverpool themselves. So Parnes asked Allan Williams to set up auditions with some of the local groups. Williams invited several groups, and one he asked along was the Beatles, largely because Lennon and Sutcliffe begged him. He also found them a drummer, Tommy Moore, who was a decade older than the rest of them — though Moore didn’t turn up to the audition because he had to work, and so Johnny “Hutch” Hutchinson of Cass and the Cassanovas sat in with them, much to Hutch’s disgust — he hated the Beatles, and especially Lennon.  Cass of the Cassanovas also insisted that “the Beatles” was a stupid name, and that the group needed to be Something and the Somethings, and he suggested Long John and the Silver Beatles, and that stuck for a couple of shows before they reverted to their proper name. The Beatles weren’t chosen for any of the main tours that were being booked, but then Parnes phoned Williams up — there were some extra dates on the Johnny Gentle tour that he hadn’t yet booked a group for. Could Williams find him a band who could be in Scotland that Friday night for a nine-day tour? Williams tried Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, but none of them could go on tour at such short notice. They all had gigs booked, or day jobs they had to book time off with. The Beatles had no gigs booked, and only George had a day job, and he didn’t mind just quitting that. They were off to Scotland. They were so inspired by being on tour with a Larry Parnes artist that most of them took on new names just like those big stars — George became Carl Harrison, after Carl Perkins, Stuart became Stuart de Staël, after his favourite painter, and Paul became Paul Ramon, which he thought sounded mysterious and French. There’s some question about whether John took on a new name — some sources have him becoming “Long John”, while others say he was “Johnny” Lennon rather than John. Tommy Moore, meanwhile, was just Thomas Moore. It was on this tour, of course, that Lennon helped Johnny Gentle write “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”, which we talked about last week: [Excerpt: Darren Young, “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”] The tour was apparently fairly miserable, with horrible accommodation, poor musicianship from the group, and everyone getting on everyone’s nerves — George and Stuart got into fistfights, John bullied Stuart a bit because of his poor playing, and John particularly didn’t get on well with Moore — a man who was a decade older, didn’t share their taste in music, and worked in a factory rather than having the intellectual aspirations of the group. The two hated each other by the end of the tour. But the tour did also give the group the experience of signing autographs, and of feeling like stars in at least a minor way. When they got back to Liverpool, George moved in with John and Stuart, to get away from his mum telling him to get a proper job, and they got a few more bookings thanks to Williams, but they soon became drummerless — they turned up to a gig one time to find that Tommy Moore wasn’t there. They went round to his house, and his wife shouted from an upstairs window, “Yez can piss off, he’s had enough of yez and gone back to work at the bottle factory”. The now four-piece group carried on, however, and recordings exist of them in this period, sounding much more professional than only a few months before, including performances of some of their own songs. The most entertaining of these is probably “You’ll Be Mine”, an Ink Spots parody with some absurd wordplay from Lennon: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “You’ll Be Mine”] Soon enough the group found another drummer, Norm Chapman, and carried on as before, getting regular bookings thanks to Williams. There was soon a temporary guest at the flat John, Stuart, and George shared with several other people — Royston Ellis, the Beat poet and friend of the Shadows, had turned up in Liverpool and latched on to the group, partly because he fancied George. He performed with them a couple of times, crashed at the flat, and provided them with two formative experiences — he gave them their first national press, talking in Record and Show Mirror about how he wanted them to be his full-time group, and he gave them their first drug experience, showing them how to get amphetamines out of inhalers. While the group’s first national press was positive, there was soon some very negative press indeed associated with them. A tabloid newspaper wanted to do a smear story about the dangerous Beatnik menace. The article talked about how “they revel in filth”, and how beatniks were “a dangerous menace to our young people… a corrupting influence of drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies”. And for some reason — it’s never been made clear exactly how — the beatnik “pad” they chose to photograph for this story was the one that John, Stuart, and George lived in, though they weren’t there at the time — several of their friends and associates are in the pictures though. They were all kicked out of their flat, and moved back in with their families, and around this time they lost Chapman from the group too — he was called up to do his National Service, one of the last people to be conscripted before conscription ended for good. They were back to a four-piece again, and for a while Paul was drumming. But then, as seems to have happened so often with this group, a bizarre coincidence happened. A while earlier, Allan Williams had travelled to Hamburg, with the idea of trying to get Liverpool groups booked there. He’d met up with Bruno Koschmider, the owner of a club called the Kaiserkeller. Koschmider had liked the idea, but nothing had come of it, partly because neither could speak the other’s language well. A little while later, Koschmider had remembered the idea and come over to the UK to find musicians. He didn’t remember where Williams was from, so of course he went to London, to the 2is, and there he found a group of musicians including Tony Sheridan, who we talked about back in the episode on “Brand New Cadillac”, the man who’d been Vince Taylor’s lead guitarist and had a minor solo career: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan, “Why?”] Sheridan was one of the most impressive musicians in Britain, but he also wanted to skip the country — he’d just bought a guitar on credit in someone else’s name, and he also had a wife and six-month-old baby he wanted rid of. He eagerly went off with Koschmider, and a scratch group called the Jets soon took up residence at the Kaiserkeller. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Derry and the Seniors were annoyed. Larry Parnes had booked them for a tour, but then he’d got annoyed at the unprofessionalism of the Liverpool bands he was booking and cancelled the booking, severing his relationship with Williams. The Seniors wanted to know what Williams was going to do about it.  There was no way to get them enough gigs in Liverpool, so Williams, being a thoroughly decent man who had a sense of obligation, offered to drive the group down to London to see if they could get work there. He took them to the 2is, and they were allowed to get up and play there, since Williams was a friend of the owner. And Bruno Koschmider was there. The Jets hadn’t liked playing at Williams’ club, and they’d scarpered to another one with better working conditions, which they helped get off the ground and renamed the Top Ten, after Vince Taylor’s club in London. So Bruno had come back to find another group, and there in the same club at the same time was the man who’d given him the idea in the first place, with a group. Koschmider immediately signed up Derry and the Seniors to play at the Kaiserkeller.  Meanwhile, the best gig the Beatles could get, also through Williams, was backing a stripper, where they played whatever instrumentals they knew, no matter how inappropriate, things like the theme from The Third Man: [Excerpt: Anton Karas, “Theme from The Third Man”] A tune guaranteed to get the audience into a sexy mood, I’m sure you’ll agree. But then Allan Williams got a call from Koschmider. Derry and the Seniors were doing great business, and he’d decided to convert another of his clubs to be a rock and roll club. Could Williams have a group for him by next Friday? Oh, and it needed to be five people. Williams tried Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They were busy. He tried Cass and the Cassanovas. They were busy. He tried Gerry and the Pacemakers. They were busy. Finally, he tried the Beatles. They weren’t busy, and said yes they could go to Hamburg that week. There were a few minor issues, like there not being five of them, none of them having passports, and them not having a drummer. The passports could be sorted quickly — there’s a passport office in Liverpool — but the lack of a fifth Beatle was more of a problem. In desperation, they turned eventually to Pete Best, Mrs. Best’s son, because they knew he had a drum kit. He agreed.  Allan Williams drove the group to Hamburg, and they started playing six-hour sets every night at the Indra, not finishing til three in the morning, at which point they’d make their way to their lodgings — the back of a filthy cinema.  By this time, the Beatles had already got good — Howie Casey, of Derry and the Seniors, who’d remembered the Beatles as being awful at the Johnny Gentle audition, came over to see them and make fun of them, but found that they were far better than they had been. But playing six hours a night got them *very* good *very* quickly — especially as they decided that they weren’t going to play the same song twice in a night, meaning they soon built up a vast repertoire. But right from the start, there was a disconnect between Pete Best and the other four — they socialised together, and he went off on his own. He was also a weak player — he was only just starting to learn — and so the rest of the group would stamp their feet to keep him in time. That, though, also gave them a bit more of a stage act than they might otherwise have had. There are lots of legendary stories about the group’s time in Hamburg, and it’s impossible to sort fact from fiction, and the bits we can sort out would get this podcast categorised as adult content, but they were teenagers, away from home for a long period for the first time, living in a squalid back room in the red light district of a city with a reputation for vice. I’m sure whatever you imagine is probably about right. After a relatively short time, they were moved from the Indra, which had to stop putting on rock and roll shows, to the Kaiserkeller, where they shared the bill with Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, up to that point considered Liverpool’s best band. There’s a live recording of the Hurricanes from 1960, which shows that they were certainly powerful: [Excerpt: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, “Brand New Cadillac”] That recording doesn’t have the Hurricanes’ normal drummer on, who was sick for that show. But compared to what the Beatles had become — a stomping powerhouse with John Lennon, whose sense of humour was both cruel and pointed, doing everything he could to get a rise out of the audience — they were left in the dust. A letter home that George Harrison wrote sums it up — “Rory Storm & the Hurricanes came out here the other week, and they are crumby. He does a bit of dancing around but it still doesn’t make up for his phoney group. The only person who is any good in the group is the drummer.” That drummer was Richy Starkey from the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, now performing as Ringo Starr. They struck up a friendship, and even performed together at least once — John, Paul, George, and Ringo acting as the backing group for Lu Walters of the Hurricanes on a demo, which is frustratingly missing and hasn’t been heard since. They were making other friends, too. There was Tony Sheridan, who they’d seen on TV, but who would now sometimes jam with them as equals. And there was a trio of arty bohemian types who had stumbled across the club, where they were very out of place — Astrid Kirscherr, Klaus Voormann, and Jurgen Vollmer. They all latched on to the Beatles, and especially to Stuart, who soon started dating Astrid, despite her speaking no English and him speaking no German. But relations between Koschmider and the Beatles had worsened, and he reported to the police that George, at only seventeen, was under-age. George got deported. The rest of the group decided to move over to the Top Ten Club, and as a parting gift, Paul and Pete nailed some condoms to their bedroom wall and set fire to them. Koschmider decided to report this to the police as attempted arson, and those two were deported as well. John followed a week later, while Stuart stayed in Hamburg for a while, to spend more time with Astrid, who he planned to marry. The other four regrouped, getting in a friend, Chas Newby, as a temporary bass player while Stuart was away. And on the twenty-seventh of December, 1960, when they played Litherland Town Hall, they changed the Liverpool music scene. They were like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the audience didn’t dance — they just rushed to the stage, to be as close to the performance as possible. The Beatles had become the best band in Liverpool. Mark Lewisohn goes further, and suggests that the three months of long nights playing different songs in Hamburg had turned them into the single most experienced rock band *in the world* — which seems vanishingly unlikely to me, but Lewisohn is not a man given to exaggeration. By this time, Mona Best had largely taken over the group’s bookings, and there were a lot of them, as well as a regular spot at the Casbah. Neil Aspinall, a friend of Pete’s, started driving them to gigs, while they also had a regular MC, Bob Wooler, who ran many local gigs, and who gave the Beatles their own theme music — he’d introduce them with the fanfare from Rossini’s William Tell Overture: [Excerpt: Rossini, “William Tell Overture”] Stuart came over from Hamburg in early January, and once again the Beatles were a five-piece — and by now, he could play quite well, well enough, at any rate, that it didn’t destroy the momentum the group had gathered. The group were getting more and more bookings, including the venue that would become synonymous with them, the Cavern, a tiny little warehouse cellar that had started as a jazz club, and that the Quarry Men had played once a couple of years earlier, but had been banned from for playing too much rock and roll. Now, the Beatles were getting bookings at the Cavern’s lunchtime sessions, and that meant more than it seemed. Most of the gigs they played otherwise were on the outskirts of the city, but the Cavern was in the city centre. And that meant that for the lunchtime sessions, commuters from outside the city were coming to see them — which meant that the group got fans from anywhere within commuting distance, fans who wanted them to play in their towns. Meanwhile, the group were branching out musically — they were particularly becoming fascinated by the new R&B, soul, and girl-group records that were coming out in the US. After already having loved “Money” by Barrett Strong, John was also obsessed with the Miracles, and would soon become a fervent fan of anything Motown, and the group were all big fans of the Shirelles. As they weren’t playing original material live, and as every group would soon learn every other group’s best songs, there was an arms race on to find the most exciting songs to cover. As well as Elvis and Buddy and Eddie, they were now covering the Shirelles and Ray Charles and Gary US Bonds. The group returned to Hamburg in April, Paul and Pete’s immigration status having been resolved and George now having turned eighteen, and started playing at the Top Ten club, where they played even longer sets, and more of them, than they had at the Kaiserkeller and the Indra. Tony Sheridan started regularly joining them on stage at this time, and Paul switched to piano while Sheridan added the third guitar. This was also when they started using Preludin, a stimulant related to amphetamines which was prescribed as a diet drug — Paul would take one pill a night, George a couple, and John would gobble them down. But Pete didn’t take them — one more way in which he was different from the others — and he started having occasional micro-sleeps in the middle of songs as the long nights got to him, much to the annoyance of the rest of the group. But despite Pete’s less than stellar playing they were good enough that Sheridan — the single most experienced musician in the British rock and roll scene — described them as the best R&B band he’d ever heard. Once they were there, they severed their relationship with Allan Williams, refusing to pay him his share of the money, and just cutting him out of their careers.  Meanwhile, Stuart was starting to get ill. He was having headaches all the time, and had to miss shows on occasion. He was also the only Beatle with a passion for anything else, and he managed to get a scholarship to study art with the famous sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who was now working in Hamburg. Paul subbed for Stuart on bass, and eventually Stuart left the group, though on good terms with everyone other than Paul. So it was John, Paul, George and Pete who ended up making the Beatles’ first records. Bert Kaempfert, the most important man in the German music industry, had been to see them all at the Top Ten and liked what he saw. Outside Germany, Kaempfert was probably best known for co-writing Elvis’ “Wooden Heart”, which the Beatles had in their sets at this time: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart”] Kaempfert had signed Tony Sheridan to a contract, and he wanted the Beatles to back him in the studio — and he was also interested in recording a couple of tracks with them on their own. The group eagerly agreed, and their first session started at eight in the morning on the twenty-second of June 1961, after they had finished playing all night at the club, and all of them but Pete were on Preludin for the session. Stuart came along for moral support, but didn’t play. Pete was a problem, though. He wasn’t keeping time properly, and Kaempfert eventually insisted on removing his bass drum and toms, leaving only a snare, hi-hat, and ride cymbal for Pete to play. They recorded seven songs at that session in total. Two of them were just by the Beatles. One was a version of “Ain’t She Sweet”, an old standard which Gene Vincent had recorded fairly recently, but the other was the only track ever credited to Lennon and Harrison as cowriters. On their first trip to Hamburg, they’d wanted to learn “Man of Mystery” by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Shadows, “Man of Mystery”] But there was a slight problem in that they didn’t have a copy of the record, and had never heard it — it came out in the UK while they were in Germany. So they asked Rory Storm to hum it for them. He hummed a few notes, and Lennon and Harrison wrote a parody of what Storm had sung, which they named “Beatle Bop” but by this point they’d renamed “Cry For a Shadow”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Cry For a Shadow”] The other five songs at the session were given over to Tony Sheridan, with the Beatles backing him, and the song that Kaempfert was most interested in recording was one the group had been performing on stage — a rocked-up version of the old folk song “My Bonnie”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, “My Bonnie”] That was the record chosen as the single, but it was released not as by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, but by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers — “Beatles”, to German ears, sounded a little like “piedels”, a childish slang term for penises. The Beatles had made their first record, but it wasn’t one they thought much of. They knew they could do better. The next week, the now four-piece Beatles returned to Liverpool, with much crying at Stuart staying behind — even Paul, now Stuart was no longer a threat for John’s attention, was contrite and tried to make amends to him.  On their return to Liverpool, they picked up where they had left off, playing almost every night, and spending the days trying to find new records — often listening to the latest releases at NEMS, a department store with an extensive record selection. Brian Epstein, the shop’s manager, prided himself on being able to get any record a customer wanted, and whenever anyone requested anything he’d buy a second copy for the shelves. As a result, you could find records there that you wouldn’t get anywhere else in Liverpool, and the Beatles were soon adding more songs by the Shirelles and Gary US Bonds to their sets, as well as more songs by the Coasters and Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me”. They were playing gigs further afield, and Neil Aspinall was now driving them everywhere. Aspinall was Pete Best’s closest friend — and was having an affair with Pete’s mother — but unlike Pete himself he also became close to the other Beatles, and would remain so for the rest of his life.  By this point, the group were so obviously the best band on the Liverpool scene that they were starting to get bored — there was no competition. And by this point it really was a proper scene — John’s old art school friend Bill Harry had started up a magazine, Mersey Beat, which may be the first magazine anywhere in the world to focus on one area’s local music scene. Brian Epstein from NEMS had a column, as did Bob Wooler, and often John’s humorous writing would appear as well. The Beatles were featured in most issues — although Paul McCartney’s name was misspelled almost every time it appeared — and not just because Lennon and Harry were friends. By this point there were the Beatles, and there were all the other groups in the area. For several months this continued — they learned new songs, they played almost every day, and they continued to be the best. They started to find it boring. The one big change that came at this point was when John and Paul went on holiday to Paris, saw Vince Taylor, bumped into their friend Jurgen from Hamburg, and got Jurgen to do their hair like his — the story we told in the episode on “Brand New Cadillac”. They now had the Beatles haircut, though they were still wearing leather. When they got back, George copied their new style straight away, but Pete decided to leave his hair in a quiff. There was nowhere else to go without a manager to look after them. They needed management — and they found it because of “My Bonnie”: [Excerpt: Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, “My Bonnie”] “My Bonnie” was far from a great record, but it was what led to everything that followed. The Beatles had mentioned from the stage at the Cavern that they had a record out, and a young man named Raymond Jones walked into NEMS and asked for a copy of it. Brian Epstein couldn’t find it in the record company catalogues, and asked Jones for more information — Jones explained that they were a Liverpool group, but the record had come out in Germany. A couple of days later, two young girls came into the shop asking for the same record, and now Epstein was properly intrigued — in his view, if *two* people asked for a record, that probably meant a lot more than just two people wanted it. He decided to check these Beatles out for himself. Epstein was instantly struck by the group, and this has led to a lot of speculation over the years, because his tastes ran more to Sibelius than to Little Richard. As Epstein was also gay, many people have assumed that the attraction was purely physical. And it might well have been, at least in part, but the suggestion that everything that followed was just because of that seems unlikely — Epstein was also someone who had a long interest in the arts, and had trained as an actor at RADA, the most prestigious actors’ college in the UK, before taking up his job at the family store. Given that the Beatles were soon to become the most popular musicians in the history of the world, and were already the most popular musicians in the Liverpool area, the most reasonable assumption must be that Epstein was impressed by the same things that impressed roughly a billion other people over the next sixty years. Epstein started going to the Cavern regularly, to watch the Beatles and to make plans — the immaculately dressed, public-school-educated, older rich man stood out among the crowd, and the Beatles already knew his face from his record shop, and so they knew something was going on. By late November, Brian had managed to obtain a box of twenty-five copies of “My Bonnie”, and they’d sold out within hours. He set up a meeting with the Beatles, and even before he got them signed to a management contract he was using his contacts with the record industry in London to push the Beatles at record companies. Those companies listened to Brian, because NEMS was one of their biggest customers. December 1961, the month they signed with Brian Epstein, was also the month that they finally started including Lennon/McCartney songs in their sets.  And within a couple of weeks of becoming their manager, even before he’d signed them to a contract, Brian had managed to persuade Mike Smith, an A&R man from Decca, to come to the Cavern to see the group in person. He was impressed, and booked them in for a studio session. December 61 was also the first time that John, Paul, George, and Ringo played together in that lineup, without any other musicians, when on the twenty-seventh of December Pete called in sick for a show, and the others got in their friend to cover for him. It wouldn’t be the last time they would play together. On New Year’s Day 1962, the Beatles made the trek down to London to record fifteen songs at the Decca studios. The session was intended for two purposes — to see if they sounded as good on tape as they did in the Cavern, and if they did to produce their first single. Those recordings included the core of their Cavern repertoire, songs like “Money”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Money (Decca version)”] They also recorded three Lennon/McCartney songs, two by Paul — “Love of the Loved” and “Like Dreamers Do”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Like Dreamers Do”] And one by Lennon — “Hello Little Girl”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Hello Little Girl”] And they were Lennon/McCartney songs, even though they were written separately — the two agreed that they were going to split the credit on anything either of them wrote. The session didn’t go well — the group’s equipment wasn’t up to standard and they had to use studio amps, and they’re all audibly nervous — but Mike Smith was still fairly confident that they’d be releasing something through Decca — he just had to work out the details with his boss, Dick Rowe. Meanwhile, the group were making other changes. Brian suggested that they could get more money if they wore suits, and so they agreed — though they didn’t want just any suits, they wanted stylish mohair suits, like the black American groups they loved so much.  The Beatles were now a proper professional group — but unfortunately, Decca turned them down. Dick Rowe, Mike Smith’s boss, didn’t think that electric guitars were going to become a big thing — he was very tuned in to the American trends, and nothing with guitars was charting at the time. Smith was considering two groups — the Beatles, and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and wanted to sign both. Rowe told him that he could sign one, but only one, of them. The Tremeloes had been better in the studio, and they lived round the corner from Smith and were friendly with him. There was no contest — much as Smith wanted to sign both groups, the Tremeloes were the better prospect. Rowe did make an offer to Epstein: if Epstein would pay a hundred pounds (a *lot* of money in those days), Tony Meehan, formerly of the Shadows, would produce the group in another session, and Decca would release that. Brian wasn’t interested — if the Beatles were going to make a record, they were going to make it with people who they weren’t having to pay for the privilege. John, Paul, and George were devastated, but for their own reasons they didn’t bother to tell Pete they’d been turned down. But they did have a tape of themselves, at least — a professional-quality recording that they could use to attract other labels. And their career was going forward in other ways. The same day Brian had his second meeting with Decca, they had an audition with the BBC in Manchester, where they were accepted to perform on Teenager’s Turn, a radio programme hosted by the Northern Dance Orchestra. A few weeks later, on the seventh of March, they went to Manchester to record four songs in front of an audience, of which three would be broadcast: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Please Mr. Postman (Teenager’s Turn)”] That recording of John singing “Please Mr. Postman” is historic for another reason, which shows just how on the cutting edge of musical taste the Beatles actually were — it was the first time ever that a Motown song was played on the BBC. Now we get to the part of the story that, before Mark Lewisohn’s work in his book a few years back, had always been shrouded in mystery. What Lewisohn shows is that George Ma

When, on Monday, 15th August, 1960, The Beatles left Liverpool en route to their first stint in Hamburg, West Germany, the five of them—John, Paul, George, Stu and the newly recruited Pete—were joined by five others: their manager/agent Allan Williams, Trinidadian calypsonian Harold Philips (a.k.a. Lord Woodbine), Austrian translator Herr Steiner, Allan’s wife Beryl… and her 19-year-old brother Barry Chang. 60 years later, Barry shares his memories of that fateful trip: in a van, on a boat and inside the Indra Club during The Beatles’ inaugural week there. It was Barry who snapped the now-iconic photo of the travellers, mid-journey, posing at Holland’s Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery, in front of a memorial bearing the legend Their Names Liveth For Evermore. Half of them have now passed on; he’s here to recount how his routine vacation became the stuff of legend. The Music I’ll Follow the Sun The One After 909 I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You) Roll Over Beethoven Youngblood Ain’t She Sweet That’s All Right (Mama) Nothin’ Shakin’ (but the Leaves on the Trees) Catswalk

RHYS GWYNFOR Y canwr Rhys Gwynfor oedd yn cadw cwmni i Shelley a Rhydian ar y Sioe Sadwrn. Cawn glywed ychydig o hanes teulu Rhys i ddechrau cyn iddo fe rannu’r gyfrinach am sut i ennill cystadleuaeth Cân i Gymru, fel gwnaeth e gyda’r band Jessop a’r Sgweiri.... Cyfrinach Secret Cystadleuaeth Competition Cynllun Plan Pentre genedigol Native village Del Pert Mwy neu lai More or less Namyn With the exception of Ar lwyfan On stage Twyllo To cheat HENO AUR AC ANGHARAD MAIR Mae cyfres newydd yn edrych yn ôl ar raglen Heno yn y 90au wedi dechrau ar S4C – Heno Aur. Angharad Mair fuodd yn sôn am y gwaith o gasglu clipiau o’r archif ar gyfer y gyfres gyda Lisa Gwilym fore Sul. Cyfres Series Casglu Gathering Digideiddo Digitising Ymwybodol Aware Gwerth chweil Worthwhile Gwahanol agweddau Different aspects Amlwg Obvious Cyfweliadau Interviews Dadansoddi breuddwydion Analysing Diniwed Innocent PENBWLYDD HAPUS CARYL LEWIS Yr awdures Caryl Lewis oedd gwestai penblwydd Dewi Llwyd yr wythnos yma, ac dyma hi’n sôn sut mae ei phlant yn ei helpu hi i ysgrifennu nofelau…. I’r perwyl hwnnw For that purpose Annibynnol Independent Cyn i chi gyhoeddi Before you publish Eu barn nhw Their opinion Tu hwnt Extremely Beirniadol Critical Llym Harsh Doniol Funny Addasu To adapt Eu hawydd nhw Their appetite Ysbrydoliaeth Inspiration HEDDLU GOGLEDD CYMRU Mae yna gyfres newydd ar Radio Cymru sy'n dilyn rhai o blismyn y gogledd wrth eu gwaith bob dydd. Dyma flas ar Heddlu Gogledd Cymru gyda hanes un o’r plismyn yn delio gyda pherchennog ci oedd wedi lladd dafad. Digwyddiad Incident Dianc To escape Tennyn A lead Bellach By now Ymgartrefu To settle Hyderus Confident Y pellter The distance Wal gerrig Stone wall Dinistro To destroy Bwriadu To intend BRECWAST LISA ANGHARAD Mae Llio Angharad yn blogio am fwyd a hi oedd yn cadw cwmni i Lisa Angharad ar y Sioe Frecwast fore Sadwrn. Ac wrth gwrs – roedd y ddwy eisiau siarad am frecwast! Dyfeisgar Innovative Creadigol Creative Anhygoel Incredible Ansicr Uncertain Cefnogi To support Sicrhau To ensure ALLAN WILLIAMS A GERAINT LLOYD Nos Fawrth buodd Geraint Lloyd yn sgwrsio gyda Allan Williams o Flaencwrt yng Ngheredigion sydd yn dathlu hanner can mlynedd fel barbwr eleni. Buon nhw’n sôn am sut mae byd y barbwr wedi newid dros y blynyddoedd a daeth Geraint o hyd i gysylltiad teuluol gyda’r barbwr yn ystod y sgwrs. Cysylltiad teuluol Family connection Amrywio Varying Pryd hynny At that time Trwm ei glyw Hard of hearing Cerwch! Get away! ( meaning you don’t say) Y Parchedig The Reverand

Episode eighty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Three Steps to Heaven" by Eddie Cochran, and at the British tour which changed music and ended his life. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Quarter to Three" by Gary US Bonds. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  ----more---- Resources   As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Much of the information here comes from Spencer Leigh's book Things Do Go Wrong, which looks specifically at the 1960 tour. I also used Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis.  While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran's music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. This CD contains the Saturday Club recordings by Vincent and Cochran, which are well worth listening to.   Pete Frame's The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though -- his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's been a sad running theme in the episodes in recent months of rock stars dying in accidents. Sadly, in the 1950s and sixties, travelling long distances was even more dangerous than it is today, and rock musicians, who had to travel a lot more than most people, and did much of that travelling at night, were more likely to be in accidents than most. Today, we're going to look at yet another of these tragic deaths, of someone who is thought of in the US as being something of a one-hit wonder, but who had a much bigger effect on British music. We're going to look at what would be Eddie Cochran's final tour, and at his UK number one single "Three Steps to Heaven": [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] When we left Eddie Cochran, he had just appeared in the film "The Girl Can't Help It", singing "Twenty Flight Rock", and he had also had a hit with "Sittin' in the Balcony". But he hadn't yet managed to establish himself as the star he knew he could be -- he was the whole package, singer, songwriter, and especially guitarist, and he hadn't yet made a record that showed him to his best advantage as an artist. "Twenty Flight Rock" had come close, but it wasn't a song he'd written himself, and the record hadn't yet been released in the US. Meanwhile, Liberty Records seemed to not understand what they had in him -- they were trying to push him to be another Pat Boone, and become a bland pop singer with no rock and roll in his sound. His first album, Singin' to My Baby, had little to do with the music that he was interested in playing. So Cochran needed to find something that would really put him on the map -- a song that would mean he wasn't just one of dozens of Fabians and Frankie Avalons and interchangeable Bobbies who were starting to take over shows like American Bandstand. "Twenty Flight Rock" hadn't ended up being a hit at all, despite its placement in a popular film -- they'd left it too long between the film coming out and releasing the record, and he'd lost that momentum. At the end of 1957 he'd gone on the Australian tour with Little Richard and Gene Vincent which had led to Richard retiring from rock and roll, and he'd become much closer with Vincent, with whom he'd already struck up a friendship when making The Girl Can't Help It. The two men bonded, particularly, over their love of guns, although they expressed that love in very different ways. Cochran had grown up in rural Minnesota, and had the same love of hunting and fishing that most men of his background did at that time (and that many still do). He was, by all accounts, an affable person, and basically well adjusted. Vincent, on the other hand, was a polite and friendly person when not drinking. Unfortunately, he was in constant pain from his leg wounds, and that meant he was drinking a lot, and when he was drunk he was an incredibly unpleasant, aggressive, person. His love of guns was mostly for threatening people with, and he seems to have latched on to Cochran as someone who could look after him when he got himself into awkward situations -- Cochran was so personally charming that he could defuse the situation when Vincent had behaved appallingly towards someone. At the time, Vincent seemed like a has-been and Cochran a never-would-be. This was late 1957, and it seemed like rock and roll records with guitars on were a fad that had already passed their sell-by date. The only white guitarist/vocalist other than Elvis who'd been having hits on a regular basis was Buddy Holly, and his records were doing worse and worse with each release. Vincent hadn't had a real hit since his first single, "Be Bop A Lula", while Cochran had made the top twenty with "Sittin' in the Balcony", but the highest he'd got after that was number eighty-two. He'd recently recorded a song co-written by George Mottola, who'd written "Goodnight My Love", but "Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie" stalled at number ninety-four when it was released in early 1958: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie"] So neither man was in a good place at the start of 1958, but they had very different attitudes -- Vincent was depressed and angry, but Cochran knew that something would come along. He was only nineteen, he was astonishingly good looking, he was a great guitarist -- if rock and roll didn't work out, something would. In early 1958, Cochran was still hunting for that elusive big hit, as he joined the Blue Caps in the studio, to provide bass, arrangements, and backing vocals on several tracks for Vincent's latest album. It's Cochran singing the bass vocals at the start of "Git It", one of Vincent's greatest tracks: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, "Git It"] But shortly after that recording, a major turn in Cochran's fortunes came from an unexpected place. Liberty Records had been in financial difficulties, and part of the reason that Cochran's records were unsuccessful was that they just didn't have the money to promote them as much as they'd like. But then at the beginning of April a man called Ross Bagdasarian, under the name David Seville, released a novelty song called "The Witch Doctor", featuring some mildly racist comedy and a sped-up voice. That record became a massive hit, selling over a million copies, going to number one, and becoming the fourth most successful record of 1958. Suddenly, Liberty Records was saved from bankruptcy. That made all the difference to the success of a track that Cochran had recorded on March the 28th, the same week he recorded those Gene Vincent sessions, and which came out at the tail-end of summer. Cochran had come up with a guitar riff that he liked, but he didn't have any lyrics for it, and his friend and co-writer Jerry Capehart said "there's never been a blues about the summer". The two of them came up with some comedy lyrics in the style of the Coasters, who had just started to have big hits, and the result became Cochran's only top ten hit in the US, reaching number eight, and becoming one of the best-remembered tracks of the fifties: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Summertime Blues"] That track was recorded with a minimal number of musicians -- Cochran played all the guitars and sang both vocal parts, his bass player Guybo Smith played the bass part, and the great session drummer Earl Palmer played drums. There was also a fourth person on the record -- Sharon Sheeley, who added handclaps, and who had written the B-side. Sheeley was a talented songwriter who also had a propensity for dating musicians. She'd dated one of the Everly Brothers for a while -- different reports name different brothers, but the consensus seems to be that it was Don -- and then when they'd split up, she'd written a song called "Poor Little Fool". She'd then faked having her car break down outside Ricky Nelson's house, and collared him when he came out to help. That sort of thing seemed to happen to Nelson a lot with songwriters -- Johnny and Dorsey Burnette had sold Nelson songs by sitting on his doorstep and refusing to move until he listened to them -- but it seemed to work out very well for him. The Burnettes wrote several hits for him, while Sheeley's "Poor Little Fool" became Nelson's first number one, as well as being the first number one ever on Billboard's newly-renamed Hot One Hundred, and the first number one single on any chart to be written by a woman without a male cowriter: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Poor Little Fool"] Sheeley gets unfairly pigeonholed as a groupie (not that there's anything wrong with being a groupie) because she had relationships with musicians, and at this point she was starting a relationship with Cochran. But it's important to remember that when they got together, even though he was eighteen months older than her, she was the one who had written a number one single, and he was the one whose last record had gone to number ninety-four -- and that after her relationship with Cochran, she went on to form a writing partnership with Jackie DeShannon that produced a long string of hits for people like Brenda Lee and the Fleetwoods, as well as songs that weren't hits but probably deserved to be, like Ral Donner's "Don't Put Your Heart in His Hands": [Excerpt: Ral Donner, "Don't Put Your Heart in His Hands"] Sheeley was more invested in her relationship with Cochran than he was, but this has led rock writers to completely dismiss her as "just Eddie Cochran's girlfriend", when in terms of their relative statuses in the music industry, it would be more fair to define Cochran as "just Sharon Sheeley's boyfriend". I have to emphasise this point, because in the limited number of books about Cochran, you will see a lot of descriptions of her as "a groupie", "a fantasist", and worse, and very few mentions of the fact that she had a life outside her partner. "Summertime Blues" looked like it was going to be the start of Eddie Cochran's career as a rock and roll star, but in fact it was the peak of it, at least in the US. While the song was a big hit, the follow-up, "C'mon Everybody", which was written by Cochran and Capehart to much the same formula, but without the humour that characterised "Summertime Blues", didn't do so well: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "C'mon Everybody"] That made only number thirty-five on the US charts, and would be Cochran's last top forty record there -- but in the UK, it was a bigger hit than "Summertime Blues", reaching number six. "C'mon Everybody" was, though, big enough for Cochran to make some TV appearances. He'd agreed to go on tour with his friends Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens on a tour called the Winter Dance Party tour, but had bowed out when he got some offers of TV work. He definitely appeared on a show called Town Hall Party broadcast from California on February the second 1959, and according to Sheeley he was booked to appear in New York on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was the reason he'd decided not to do the tour, a few days later. As it turned out, Cochran never made that Ed Sullivan Show appearance, as in the early hours of February the third, his friends died in a plane crash. He refused to get on the plane to New York for the show, and instead drove out to the desert in his station wagon to grieve, and from that point on he developed a fear of flying. The follow-up to "C'mon Everybody", "Teenage Heaven", only went to number ninety-nine on the charts, and his next two singles didn't do much better. "Somethin' Else", a song that Sheeley had written for him, made number fifty-eight, while his cover version of Ray Charles' "Hallelujah I Love Her So" didn't chart at all. 1959 was a depressing year for Cochran personally and professionally. But while "Somethin' Else" and "Hallelujah I Love Her So" were flops in the US, they both made the top thirty in the UK. In the US, guitar-based white rock and roll was now firmly out of fashion, with the audience split between black vocal groups singing R&B and white male solo singers called Bobby singing mid-tempo pop. But in the UK, the image of rock and roll in people's minds was still that of the rockabillies from a couple of years earlier -- while British musical trends would start to move faster than the US by the sixties, in the fifties they lagged a long way behind. And in particular, Cochran's friend Gene Vincent was doing much better in Britain than in the US. Very few US performers had toured the UK, and with the exception of Buddy Holly, most of those who had were not particularly impressive. Because of an agreement between the two countries' musicians' unions, it was difficult for musicians to perform in one country if they were from the other. It wasn't quite so difficult for solo performers, who could be backed by local musicians and were covered under a different agreement, but Lew and Leslie Grade, who had a virtual monopoly on the UK entertainment business, had had a very bad experience with Jerry Lee Lewis when his marriage to his teenage cousin had caused his UK tour to be cancelled, and anyway, Britain was an unimportant market a long way away from America, so why would Americans come all that way? For most of 1959, the closest thing to American rock and roll stars touring the UK were Connie Francis and Paul Anka, neither of whom screamed rock and roll rebellion. American rockers just didn't come to the UK. Unless they had nowhere else to go, that is -- and Gene Vincent had nowhere else to go. In the US, he was a washed-up has been who'd burned every single bridge, but in the UK he was an American Rock Star. In late 1959 he released a not-great single, "Wildcat": [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Wildcat"] That single wasn't doing particularly well, but then Larry Parnes and Jack Good hatched a plan. Good had a new TV show, "Boy Meets Girls", based around one of Parnes' artists, Marty Wilde, and also had a column in Disc magazine. They'd get an American rock star over to the UK, Parnes would stick him on a bill with a bunch of Parnes' acts, Good would put him on the TV show and promote him in Disc magazine, and the tour and TV show would split the costs. Wilde was, at the time, about to go into a career slump. He'd just got married, and he and his wife were trying for their first kid -- they'd decided that if it was a girl, they were going to call her Kim. It seemed likely they were going to lose his audience of teenage girls, as he was no longer available, and so Larry Parnes was trying to move him from rock and roll into musical styles that would be more suitable for adults, so his latest single was a ballad, "Bad Boy": [Excerpt: Marty Wilde, "Bad Boy"] That meant that Wilde's band, the Wildcats, made up at this point of Tony Belcher, Big Jim Sullivan, Licorice Locking and Brian Bennett, were no longer going to be suitable to back Wilde, as they were all rock and rollers, so they'd be fine for whichever rock star they could persuade over to the UK. Vincent was the only rock star available, and his latest single was even called "Wildcat". That made him perfect for Parnes' purposes, though Vincent was slightly nervous about using British musicians -- he simply didn't think that British musicians would be any good. As it turned out, Vincent had nothing to worry about on that score at least. When he got to the studios in Didsbury, in Manchester, where Boy Meets Girls was filmed, he met some of the best session musicians Britain had to offer. The house band for the show, the Flying Squad, was a smaller version of the bands that had appeared on Good's earlier shows, a nine-piece group that included organist Cherry Wainer and session drummer Andy White, and was led by Joe Brown. Brown was a Larry Parnes artist, who at this point had released one rather uninspired single, the country-flavoured "People Gotta Talk": [Excerpt: Joe Brown, "People Gotta Talk"] But Brown had an independent streak, which could be seen just from his name -- Larry Parnes had tried to change it, as he did with all his acts, but Brown had flat-out refused to be called Elmer Twitch, the name Parnes had chosen for him. He insisted on keeping his own name, and it was under that name that he became one of Britain's most respected guitarists. Vincent, amazingly, found these British musicians to be every bit as good as any musicians he'd worked with in the USA. But that was about all that he liked about the UK -- you couldn't get a hamburger or a pizza anywhere in the whole country, and the TV was only in black and white, and it finished at 11PM. For someone like Vincent, who liked to stay up all night watching old monster movies on TV, that was completely unacceptable. Luckily for him, at least he had his gun and knife to keep him occupied -- he'd strapped them both to the leg iron he used for his damaged leg, so they wouldn't set off the metal detectors coming into the country. But whatever his thoughts about the country as a whole, he couldn't help loving the audience reaction. Jack Good knew how to present a rock and roll star to an audience, and he'd moved Vincent out of the slacks and sweater vests and blue caps into the kind of leather that he'd already had Vince Taylor wear. He got Vincent to emphasise his limp, and to look pained at all times. He was imagining Vincent as something along the lines of Richard III, and wanted him to appear as dangerous as possible. He used all the tricks of stagecraft that he'd used on Taylor, but with the added advantage that Vincent had a remarkable voice, unlike Taylor. Sadly, as is the case with almost all of the British TV of the period, the videotapes of the performances have long since been wiped, but we have poor-quality audio that demonstrates both how good Vincent was sounding and how well the British musicians were able to adapt to backing him: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "Summertime", live on Boy Meets Girls] After making three appearances on Boy Meets Girls, Vincent was put on tour backed by the Wildcats, on a bill with acts like Wee Willie Harris and the Bachelors (the ones who recorded for Parlophone, not the later act of the same name), and "Wildcat" started going up the charts. Even though Gene Vincent hadn't had a hit in three years, he was a massive success with the British audiences, and as a result Parnes and Good decided that it might be an idea if they got another American star over here, and the obvious choice was Eddie Cochran. Cochran had the same agent as Vincent, and so there was a working relationship there; they both knew each other and so Vincent could help persuade Cochran over; and Cochran had had a string of top thirty hits in the UK, but was commercially dead in the US. It was tempting for Cochran, too -- as well as the obvious advantage of playing to people who were actually buying his record, the geography of Britain appealed. He'd been terrified of flying since Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens had died, but the British tour would only involve the transatlantic flight -- all the travel once he was in the UK would be by road or rail. Before he came over, he had to record his next single, to be released while he was over in the UK. So on January the 8th, 1960, Eddie Cochran went into Gold Star Studios with his normal bass player, Guybo, and with his friends Sonny Curtis and Jerry Allison, the guitarist and drummer of the Crickets, and they cut what turned out to be his last single, "Three Steps to Heaven": [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] Two days later, he was in Britain, for the start of what was the biggest rock and roll tour in British history to that point -- a hundred and eight live appearances, plus several TV and radio appearances, in a little over three months, playing two shows a night most nights. Parnes felt he had to work them hard to justify their fees -- Vincent was getting $2500 a week, and Cochran $1000, while for example Billy Fury, at that point the biggest of Parnes' acts, was on a salary of twenty pounds a week. While Vincent had made a great impression largely despite himself, Cochran was a different matter. Everyone seemed to love him. Unlike Vincent, he was a musician's musician, and he formed close friendships with the players on the tour. Joe Brown, for example, remembers Cochran explaining to him that if you swap the G string on your guitar for a second B string, tuned down to G, you could bend a note a full tone -- Brown used that trick to make himself one of the most sought-after session players in the UK before his own pop career started to take off. It was also apparent that while Jack Good had had to create a stage act for Gene Vincent, he didn't have to do anything to make Cochran look good in front of the cameras. Marty Wilde said of him "The first thing I noticed about Eddie was his complexion. We British lads had acne and all the usual problems, and Eddie walked in with the most beautiful hair and the most beautiful skin - his skin was a light brown, beautiful colour, all that California sunshine, and I thought 'you lucky devil'. We had Manchester white all over us. And he had the most beautiful face -- the photographs never did the guy justice". From the moment Cochran started his set in Ipswich, by saying "It's great to be here in Hipswich" and wiggling his hips, he was utterly in command of the British audiences. Thankfully, because they did so many TV and radio sessions while they were over here, we have some idea of what these shows sounded like -- and from the recordings, even when they were in the antiseptic environment of a BBC recording studio, without an audience, they still sounded fantastic. On some shows, Cochran would start with his back to the audience, the band would start playing "Somethin' Else", the song that Sharon Sheeley had written for him that had been a minor hit, and he'd whirl round and face the audience on the opening line, "Well look-a there!" [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, "Somethin' Else [Eddie Cochran vocals]", Saturday Club version] The shows all had a number of acts on, all of them other than the stars Larry Parnes acts, and because there were so many shows, acts would get rotated in and out as the tour went on. But some of those who played on many dates were Vince Eager, who had named himself after Gene Vincent but quickly grew more attached to Eddie Cochran, who he started to regard as his best friend as the tour went on, Tony Sheridan, who was building a solo career after leaving the Oh Boy! band, Georgie Fame, who was already more interested in being a jazz and R&B pianist in the mould of Mose Allison than he was in being a pop star, Johnny Gentle, a Liverpudlian performer who never rose to massive success, and Billy Fury, by far the most talented of Parnes' acts. Fury was another Liverpudlian, who looked enough like Cochran that they could be brothers, and who had a top ten hit at the time with "Collette", one of many hits he wrote for himself: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, "Collette"]  Fury was something of a sex symbol, aided by the fact that he would stuff his pants with the cardboard tube from a toilet roll before going on stage. This would lead the girls to scream at him -- but would also lead their violent boyfriends to try to bottle him off stage, which meant he had more reason than most to have stagefright. Cochran would joke with Fury, and try to put him at ease -- one story has him telling a nervous Fury, about to go on stage, to just say to himself "I am the greatest performer in the world". Fury repeated back "I am the greatest performer in the world", and Cochran replied, "No you're not -- I am!" This kind of joking led to Cochran becoming immensely popular among all the musicians on the tour, and to him once again falling into his old role of protecting Gene Vincent from the consequences of his own actions, when Vincent would do things like cut up a suit belonging to one of the road managers, while the road manager was inside it. While Vincent was the headliner, Cochran was clearly the one who impressed the British audiences the most. We have some stories from people who saw the tour, and they all focus on Eddie. Particularly notable is the tour's residency in Liverpool, during which time Cochran was opening his set with his version of "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, "What'd I Say [Eddie Cochran vocals]", Saturday Club version] We have this report of Cochran's performance in Liverpool: "Eddie blew me away. He had his unwound 3rd string, looked good and sang good and he was really getting to be a good guitarist… One moment will always represent Eddie to me. He finished a tune, the crowd stopped screaming and clapping, and he stepped up to the mike and before he said something he put both his hands back, pushed his hair back, and some girl, a single voice in the audience, she went ‘Eddie!’ and he said ‘Hi honey!’… I thought, ‘Yes! That’s it – rock ’n’ roll!’" That's a quote from George Harrison in the early 1990s. He'd gone to see the show with a friend, John Lennon -- it was Lennon's first ever rock and roll gig as an audience member, and one of a very small number he ever attended. Lennon never particularly enjoyed seeing live shows -- he preferred records -- but even he couldn't resist seeing Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent on the same bill. The Liverpool shows were massive successes, despite both American rockers being increasingly bored and turning more and more to drink as a result. Apparently the two would drink a bottle of bourbon between them before going on stage, and at one Liverpool show Cochran had to hold on to a mic stand to keep himself upright for the first two songs, before he sobered up enough to let go. The shows were successful enough that a local promoter, Allan Williams, asked if he could book Cochran and Vincent for another show, and Larry Parnes said yes -- after Liverpool, they had to play Newcastle, Manchester, London, and Bristol, taking up another month, and then Eddie Cochran was going to be going back to the US for a couple of weeks, but he could pencil them in for six weeks' time, when Cochran was going to come back. It's quite surprising that Cochran agreed to come back, because he was getting thoroughly sick of the UK. He'd asked Sharon Sheeley to fly over and join him, but other than her and Vincent he had nothing of home with him, and he liked sunshine, fast food, cold beer, and all-night TV, and hated everything about the British winter, which was far darker and wetter than anything he'd experienced. But on the other hand, he was enjoying making music with these British people. There's a great recording of Cochran, Vincent, Billy Fury, and Joe Brown jamming on the Willie Dixon blues song "My Babe" on "Boy Meets Girls": [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Billy Fury, Joe Brown, “My Babe”] But by the time the tour ended in Bristol, Eddie was very keen to get back. He was going to be bringing Vince Eager over to America to record, and arranged to meet him in London in the early hours of Easter Sunday. They were going to be taking the lunchtime plane from what was then London Airport but is now Heathrow. But there was a problem with getting there on time. There were very few trains between Bristol and London, and they'd have to get a car from the train station to the airport. But that Easter Sunday was the day of the annual Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons. These were massive marches which were big enough that they spawned compilation albums of songs to sing on the march, like Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's "Brother Won't You Join the Line": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, "Brother Won't You Join the Line?"] But the main effect the march was having on Cochran and Vincent was that it meant that to be sure of catching their plane, they would have to travel overnight by car. At first, they asked one of the other artists on the tour, Johnny Gentle, if they could go in his car, but he already had a carful, so they ended up getting a local driver, named George Martin (not the one at Parlophone Records) to drive them overnight. They got into the back seat of the car -- Cochran sitting between Vincent and Sheeley, as Sheeley couldn't stand Vincent. Vincent took a sleeping pill and went to sleep almost immediately, but Sheeley and Cochran were in a good mood, singing "California Here We Come" together, when Martin took a turn too fast and hit a lamppost. Vincent and Sheeley suffered major injuries and had to spend time in hospital. Cochran died. A short while later, Johnny Gentle's car made its way onward towards London, and ran out of fuel. As all-night garages weren't a thing in Britain then, they flagged down a policeman who told them there'd been a crash, and they could see if the breakdown vehicle would let them siphon petrol from the wrecked car. They did, and it was only the next day they realised which car it was they'd taken the fuel from. One of the police at the scene – maybe even that one – was a cadet who would later change his name to Dave Dee, and become the lead singer in Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. As soon as the news got out about Cochran's death, "Three Steps to Heaven", which had come out in the US, but not yet in the UK, was rush-released: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] It went to number one, and became Cochran's biggest hit. Larry Parnes didn't see why Cochran's death should put a crimp in his plans, and so he immediately started promoting the shows for which Vincent and Cochran had been booked, calling them Eddie Cochran Tribute Shows, and talking to the press about how ironic it was that Cochran's last song was "Three Steps to Heaven". Vince Eager was so disgusted with Parnes that he never worked with him again. But those shows turned out to have a much bigger impact than anyone could have imagined. Allan Williams was worried that without Cochran, the show he'd got booked in Liverpool wouldn't get enough of a crowd, so he booked in a number of local bands -- Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, Nero and the Gladiators, and Gerry and the Pacemakers -- to fill out the bill. This led to all the bands and musicians in Liverpool realising, for the first time, how much talent there was in the city and how many bands there were. That one show changed Liverpool from a town where there were a few bands to a town with a music scene, and May the third 1960 can be pointed to as the day that Merseybeat started. Parnes was impressed enough by the local groups that he decided that Liverpool might be a good place to look for musicians to back his singers on the road. And we'll pick up on what happened then in a few months. Sharon Sheeley, once she'd recovered from her injuries, went on to write hits for Brenda Lee, Jackie DeShannon, the Fleetwoods, and Irma Thomas, and when Jack Good moved back to the US, she renewed her acquaintance with him, and together with Sheeley's husband they created Shindig, the most important American music show of the sixties. But by the time she died in 2002, all her obituaries talked about was that she'd been Eddie Cochran's girlfriend. And as for Gene Vincent, he was already in chronic pain, suffering mood swings, and drinking too much before the accident hospitalised him. After that, all those things intensified. He became increasingly unreliable, and the hits dried up even in Britain by mid-1961. He made some good music in the sixties, but almost nobody was listening any more, and an attempted comeback was cut short when he died, aged thirty-six, in 1971, from illnesses caused by his alcoholism. Despite their tragic deaths, Vincent and Cochran, on that 1960 UK tour, almost accidentally catalysed a revolution in British music, and the changes from that will reverberate throughout the rest of this story.

Episode eighty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Three Steps to Heaven” by Eddie Cochran, and at the British tour which changed music and ended his life. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Quarter to Three” by Gary US Bonds. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources   As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. Much of the information here comes from Spencer Leigh’s book Things Do Go Wrong, which looks specifically at the 1960 tour. I also used Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis.  While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran’s music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. This CD contains the Saturday Club recordings by Vincent and Cochran, which are well worth listening to.   Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation is the best book available looking at British 50s rock and roll from a historical perspective. Be warned, though — his jokey and irreverent style can, when dealing with people like Larry Parnes (who was gay and Jewish) very occasionally tip over into reinforcing homophobic and anti-semitic stereotypes for an easy laugh. And a fair chunk of the background information here also comes from the extended edition of Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Beatles, British post-war culture, and British post-war music.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There’s been a sad running theme in the episodes in recent months of rock stars dying in accidents. Sadly, in the 1950s and sixties, travelling long distances was even more dangerous than it is today, and rock musicians, who had to travel a lot more than most people, and did much of that travelling at night, were more likely to be in accidents than most. Today, we’re going to look at yet another of these tragic deaths, of someone who is thought of in the US as being something of a one-hit wonder, but who had a much bigger effect on British music. We’re going to look at what would be Eddie Cochran’s final tour, and at his UK number one single “Three Steps to Heaven”: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Three Steps to Heaven”] When we left Eddie Cochran, he had just appeared in the film “The Girl Can’t Help It”, singing “Twenty Flight Rock”, and he had also had a hit with “Sittin’ in the Balcony”. But he hadn’t yet managed to establish himself as the star he knew he could be — he was the whole package, singer, songwriter, and especially guitarist, and he hadn’t yet made a record that showed him to his best advantage as an artist. “Twenty Flight Rock” had come close, but it wasn’t a song he’d written himself, and the record hadn’t yet been released in the US. Meanwhile, Liberty Records seemed to not understand what they had in him — they were trying to push him to be another Pat Boone, and become a bland pop singer with no rock and roll in his sound. His first album, Singin’ to My Baby, had little to do with the music that he was interested in playing. So Cochran needed to find something that would really put him on the map — a song that would mean he wasn’t just one of dozens of Fabians and Frankie Avalons and interchangeable Bobbies who were starting to take over shows like American Bandstand. “Twenty Flight Rock” hadn’t ended up being a hit at all, despite its placement in a popular film — they’d left it too long between the film coming out and releasing the record, and he’d lost that momentum. At the end of 1957 he’d gone on the Australian tour with Little Richard and Gene Vincent which had led to Richard retiring from rock and roll, and he’d become much closer with Vincent, with whom he’d already struck up a friendship when making The Girl Can’t Help It. The two men bonded, particularly, over their love of guns, although they expressed that love in very different ways. Cochran had grown up in rural Minnesota, and had the same love of hunting and fishing that most men of his background did at that time (and that many still do). He was, by all accounts, an affable person, and basically well adjusted. Vincent, on the other hand, was a polite and friendly person when not drinking. Unfortunately, he was in constant pain from his leg wounds, and that meant he was drinking a lot, and when he was drunk he was an incredibly unpleasant, aggressive, person. His love of guns was mostly for threatening people with, and he seems to have latched on to Cochran as someone who could look after him when he got himself into awkward situations — Cochran was so personally charming that he could defuse the situation when Vincent had behaved appallingly towards someone. At the time, Vincent seemed like a has-been and Cochran a never-would-be. This was late 1957, and it seemed like rock and roll records with guitars on were a fad that had already passed their sell-by date. The only white guitarist/vocalist other than Elvis who’d been having hits on a regular basis was Buddy Holly, and his records were doing worse and worse with each release. Vincent hadn’t had a real hit since his first single, “Be Bop A Lula”, while Cochran had made the top twenty with “Sittin’ in the Balcony”, but the highest he’d got after that was number eighty-two. He’d recently recorded a song co-written by George Mottola, who’d written “Goodnight My Love”, but “Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie” stalled at number ninety-four when it was released in early 1958: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie”] So neither man was in a good place at the start of 1958, but they had very different attitudes — Vincent was depressed and angry, but Cochran knew that something would come along. He was only nineteen, he was astonishingly good looking, he was a great guitarist — if rock and roll didn’t work out, something would. In early 1958, Cochran was still hunting for that elusive big hit, as he joined the Blue Caps in the studio, to provide bass, arrangements, and backing vocals on several tracks for Vincent’s latest album. It’s Cochran singing the bass vocals at the start of “Git It”, one of Vincent’s greatest tracks: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, “Git It”] But shortly after that recording, a major turn in Cochran’s fortunes came from an unexpected place. Liberty Records had been in financial difficulties, and part of the reason that Cochran’s records were unsuccessful was that they just didn’t have the money to promote them as much as they’d like. But then at the beginning of April a man called Ross Bagdasarian, under the name David Seville, released a novelty song called “The Witch Doctor”, featuring some mildly racist comedy and a sped-up voice. That record became a massive hit, selling over a million copies, going to number one, and becoming the fourth most successful record of 1958. Suddenly, Liberty Records was saved from bankruptcy. That made all the difference to the success of a track that Cochran had recorded on March the 28th, the same week he recorded those Gene Vincent sessions, and which came out at the tail-end of summer. Cochran had come up with a guitar riff that he liked, but he didn’t have any lyrics for it, and his friend and co-writer Jerry Capehart said “there’s never been a blues about the summer”. The two of them came up with some comedy lyrics in the style of the Coasters, who had just started to have big hits, and the result became Cochran’s only top ten hit in the US, reaching number eight, and becoming one of the best-remembered tracks of the fifties: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Summertime Blues”] That track was recorded with a minimal number of musicians — Cochran played all the guitars and sang both vocal parts, his bass player Guybo Smith played the bass part, and the great session drummer Earl Palmer played drums. There was also a fourth person on the record — Sharon Sheeley, who added handclaps, and who had written the B-side. Sheeley was a talented songwriter who also had a propensity for dating musicians. She’d dated one of the Everly Brothers for a while — different reports name different brothers, but the consensus seems to be that it was Don — and then when they’d split up, she’d written a song called “Poor Little Fool”. She’d then faked having her car break down outside Ricky Nelson’s house, and collared him when he came out to help. That sort of thing seemed to happen to Nelson a lot with songwriters — Johnny and Dorsey Burnette had sold Nelson songs by sitting on his doorstep and refusing to move until he listened to them — but it seemed to work out very well for him. The Burnettes wrote several hits for him, while Sheeley’s “Poor Little Fool” became Nelson’s first number one, as well as being the first number one ever on Billboard’s newly-renamed Hot One Hundred, and the first number one single on any chart to be written by a woman without a male cowriter: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Poor Little Fool”] Sheeley gets unfairly pigeonholed as a groupie (not that there’s anything wrong with being a groupie) because she had relationships with musicians, and at this point she was starting a relationship with Cochran. But it’s important to remember that when they got together, even though he was eighteen months older than her, she was the one who had written a number one single, and he was the one whose last record had gone to number ninety-four — and that after her relationship with Cochran, she went on to form a writing partnership with Jackie DeShannon that produced a long string of hits for people like Brenda Lee and the Fleetwoods, as well as songs that weren’t hits but probably deserved to be, like Ral Donner’s “Don’t Put Your Heart in His Hands”: [Excerpt: Ral Donner, “Don’t Put Your Heart in His Hands”] Sheeley was more invested in her relationship with Cochran than he was, but this has led rock writers to completely dismiss her as “just Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend”, when in terms of their relative statuses in the music industry, it would be more fair to define Cochran as “just Sharon Sheeley’s boyfriend”. I have to emphasise this point, because in the limited number of books about Cochran, you will see a lot of descriptions of her as “a groupie”, “a fantasist”, and worse, and very few mentions of the fact that she had a life outside her partner. “Summertime Blues” looked like it was going to be the start of Eddie Cochran’s career as a rock and roll star, but in fact it was the peak of it, at least in the US. While the song was a big hit, the follow-up, “C’mon Everybody”, which was written by Cochran and Capehart to much the same formula, but without the humour that characterised “Summertime Blues”, didn’t do so well: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “C’mon Everybody”] That made only number thirty-five on the US charts, and would be Cochran’s last top forty record there — but in the UK, it was a bigger hit than “Summertime Blues”, reaching number six. “C’mon Everybody” was, though, big enough for Cochran to make some TV appearances. He’d agreed to go on tour with his friends Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens on a tour called the Winter Dance Party tour, but had bowed out when he got some offers of TV work. He definitely appeared on a show called Town Hall Party broadcast from California on February the second 1959, and according to Sheeley he was booked to appear in New York on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was the reason he’d decided not to do the tour, a few days later. As it turned out, Cochran never made that Ed Sullivan Show appearance, as in the early hours of February the third, his friends died in a plane crash. He refused to get on the plane to New York for the show, and instead drove out to the desert in his station wagon to grieve, and from that point on he developed a fear of flying. The follow-up to “C’mon Everybody”, “Teenage Heaven”, only went to number ninety-nine on the charts, and his next two singles didn’t do much better. “Somethin’ Else”, a song that Sheeley had written for him, made number fifty-eight, while his cover version of Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah I Love Her So” didn’t chart at all. 1959 was a depressing year for Cochran personally and professionally. But while “Somethin’ Else” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So” were flops in the US, they both made the top thirty in the UK. In the US, guitar-based white rock and roll was now firmly out of fashion, with the audience split between black vocal groups singing R&B and white male solo singers called Bobby singing mid-tempo pop. But in the UK, the image of rock and roll in people’s minds was still that of the rockabillies from a couple of years earlier — while British musical trends would start to move faster than the US by the sixties, in the fifties they lagged a long way behind. And in particular, Cochran’s friend Gene Vincent was doing much better in Britain than in the US. Very few US performers had toured the UK, and with the exception of Buddy Holly, most of those who had were not particularly impressive. Because of an agreement between the two countries’ musicians’ unions, it was difficult for musicians to perform in one country if they were from the other. It wasn’t quite so difficult for solo performers, who could be backed by local musicians and were covered under a different agreement, but Lew and Leslie Grade, who had a virtual monopoly on the UK entertainment business, had had a very bad experience with Jerry Lee Lewis when his marriage to his teenage cousin had caused his UK tour to be cancelled, and anyway, Britain was an unimportant market a long way away from America, so why would Americans come all that way? For most of 1959, the closest thing to American rock and roll stars touring the UK were Connie Francis and Paul Anka, neither of whom screamed rock and roll rebellion. American rockers just didn’t come to the UK. Unless they had nowhere else to go, that is — and Gene Vincent had nowhere else to go. In the US, he was a washed-up has been who’d burned every single bridge, but in the UK he was an American Rock Star. In late 1959 he released a not-great single, “Wildcat”: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Wildcat”] That single wasn’t doing particularly well, but then Larry Parnes and Jack Good hatched a plan. Good had a new TV show, “Boy Meets Girls”, based around one of Parnes’ artists, Marty Wilde, and also had a column in Disc magazine. They’d get an American rock star over to the UK, Parnes would stick him on a bill with a bunch of Parnes’ acts, Good would put him on the TV show and promote him in Disc magazine, and the tour and TV show would split the costs. Wilde was, at the time, about to go into a career slump. He’d just got married, and he and his wife were trying for their first kid — they’d decided that if it was a girl, they were going to call her Kim. It seemed likely they were going to lose his audience of teenage girls, as he was no longer available, and so Larry Parnes was trying to move him from rock and roll into musical styles that would be more suitable for adults, so his latest single was a ballad, “Bad Boy”: [Excerpt: Marty Wilde, “Bad Boy”] That meant that Wilde’s band, the Wildcats, made up at this point of Tony Belcher, Big Jim Sullivan, Licorice Locking and Brian Bennett, were no longer going to be suitable to back Wilde, as they were all rock and rollers, so they’d be fine for whichever rock star they could persuade over to the UK. Vincent was the only rock star available, and his latest single was even called “Wildcat”. That made him perfect for Parnes’ purposes, though Vincent was slightly nervous about using British musicians — he simply didn’t think that British musicians would be any good. As it turned out, Vincent had nothing to worry about on that score at least. When he got to the studios in Didsbury, in Manchester, where Boy Meets Girls was filmed, he met some of the best session musicians Britain had to offer. The house band for the show, the Flying Squad, was a smaller version of the bands that had appeared on Good’s earlier shows, a nine-piece group that included organist Cherry Wainer and session drummer Andy White, and was led by Joe Brown. Brown was a Larry Parnes artist, who at this point had released one rather uninspired single, the country-flavoured “People Gotta Talk”: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “People Gotta Talk”] But Brown had an independent streak, which could be seen just from his name — Larry Parnes had tried to change it, as he did with all his acts, but Brown had flat-out refused to be called Elmer Twitch, the name Parnes had chosen for him. He insisted on keeping his own name, and it was under that name that he became one of Britain’s most respected guitarists. Vincent, amazingly, found these British musicians to be every bit as good as any musicians he’d worked with in the USA. But that was about all that he liked about the UK — you couldn’t get a hamburger or a pizza anywhere in the whole country, and the TV was only in black and white, and it finished at 11PM. For someone like Vincent, who liked to stay up all night watching old monster movies on TV, that was completely unacceptable. Luckily for him, at least he had his gun and knife to keep him occupied — he’d strapped them both to the leg iron he used for his damaged leg, so they wouldn’t set off the metal detectors coming into the country. But whatever his thoughts about the country as a whole, he couldn’t help loving the audience reaction. Jack Good knew how to present a rock and roll star to an audience, and he’d moved Vincent out of the slacks and sweater vests and blue caps into the kind of leather that he’d already had Vince Taylor wear. He got Vincent to emphasise his limp, and to look pained at all times. He was imagining Vincent as something along the lines of Richard III, and wanted him to appear as dangerous as possible. He used all the tricks of stagecraft that he’d used on Taylor, but with the added advantage that Vincent had a remarkable voice, unlike Taylor. Sadly, as is the case with almost all of the British TV of the period, the videotapes of the performances have long since been wiped, but we have poor-quality audio that demonstrates both how good Vincent was sounding and how well the British musicians were able to adapt to backing him: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “Summertime”, live on Boy Meets Girls] After making three appearances on Boy Meets Girls, Vincent was put on tour backed by the Wildcats, on a bill with acts like Wee Willie Harris and the Bachelors (the ones who recorded for Parlophone, not the later act of the same name), and “Wildcat” started going up the charts. Even though Gene Vincent hadn’t had a hit in three years, he was a massive success with the British audiences, and as a result Parnes and Good decided that it might be an idea if they got another American star over here, and the obvious choice was Eddie Cochran. Cochran had the same agent as Vincent, and so there was a working relationship there; they both knew each other and so Vincent could help persuade Cochran over; and Cochran had had a string of top thirty hits in the UK, but was commercially dead in the US. It was tempting for Cochran, too — as well as the obvious advantage of playing to people who were actually buying his record, the geography of Britain appealed. He’d been terrified of flying since Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens had died, but the British tour would only involve the transatlantic flight — all the travel once he was in the UK would be by road or rail. Before he came over, he had to record his next single, to be released while he was over in the UK. So on January the 8th, 1960, Eddie Cochran went into Gold Star Studios with his normal bass player, Guybo, and with his friends Sonny Curtis and Jerry Allison, the guitarist and drummer of the Crickets, and they cut what turned out to be his last single, “Three Steps to Heaven”: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Three Steps to Heaven”] Two days later, he was in Britain, for the start of what was the biggest rock and roll tour in British history to that point — a hundred and eight live appearances, plus several TV and radio appearances, in a little over three months, playing two shows a night most nights. Parnes felt he had to work them hard to justify their fees — Vincent was getting $2500 a week, and Cochran $1000, while for example Billy Fury, at that point the biggest of Parnes’ acts, was on a salary of twenty pounds a week. While Vincent had made a great impression largely despite himself, Cochran was a different matter. Everyone seemed to love him. Unlike Vincent, he was a musician’s musician, and he formed close friendships with the players on the tour. Joe Brown, for example, remembers Cochran explaining to him that if you swap the G string on your guitar for a second B string, tuned down to G, you could bend a note a full tone — Brown used that trick to make himself one of the most sought-after session players in the UK before his own pop career started to take off. It was also apparent that while Jack Good had had to create a stage act for Gene Vincent, he didn’t have to do anything to make Cochran look good in front of the cameras. Marty Wilde said of him “The first thing I noticed about Eddie was his complexion. We British lads had acne and all the usual problems, and Eddie walked in with the most beautiful hair and the most beautiful skin – his skin was a light brown, beautiful colour, all that California sunshine, and I thought ‘you lucky devil’. We had Manchester white all over us. And he had the most beautiful face — the photographs never did the guy justice”. From the moment Cochran started his set in Ipswich, by saying “It’s great to be here in Hipswich” and wiggling his hips, he was utterly in command of the British audiences. Thankfully, because they did so many TV and radio sessions while they were over here, we have some idea of what these shows sounded like — and from the recordings, even when they were in the antiseptic environment of a BBC recording studio, without an audience, they still sounded fantastic. On some shows, Cochran would start with his back to the audience, the band would start playing “Somethin’ Else”, the song that Sharon Sheeley had written for him that had been a minor hit, and he’d whirl round and face the audience on the opening line, “Well look-a there!” [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, “Somethin’ Else [Eddie Cochran vocals]”, Saturday Club version] The shows all had a number of acts on, all of them other than the stars Larry Parnes acts, and because there were so many shows, acts would get rotated in and out as the tour went on. But some of those who played on many dates were Vince Eager, who had named himself after Gene Vincent but quickly grew more attached to Eddie Cochran, who he started to regard as his best friend as the tour went on, Tony Sheridan, who was building a solo career after leaving the Oh Boy! band, Georgie Fame, who was already more interested in being a jazz and R&B pianist in the mould of Mose Allison than he was in being a pop star, Johnny Gentle, a Liverpudlian performer who never rose to massive success, and Billy Fury, by far the most talented of Parnes’ acts. Fury was another Liverpudlian, who looked enough like Cochran that they could be brothers, and who had a top ten hit at the time with “Collette”, one of many hits he wrote for himself: [Excerpt: Billy Fury, “Collette”]  Fury was something of a sex symbol, aided by the fact that he would stuff his pants with the cardboard tube from a toilet roll before going on stage. This would lead the girls to scream at him — but would also lead their violent boyfriends to try to bottle him off stage, which meant he had more reason than most to have stagefright. Cochran would joke with Fury, and try to put him at ease — one story has him telling a nervous Fury, about to go on stage, to just say to himself “I am the greatest performer in the world”. Fury repeated back “I am the greatest performer in the world”, and Cochran replied, “No you’re not — I am!” This kind of joking led to Cochran becoming immensely popular among all the musicians on the tour, and to him once again falling into his old role of protecting Gene Vincent from the consequences of his own actions, when Vincent would do things like cut up a suit belonging to one of the road managers, while the road manager was inside it. While Vincent was the headliner, Cochran was clearly the one who impressed the British audiences the most. We have some stories from people who saw the tour, and they all focus on Eddie. Particularly notable is the tour’s residency in Liverpool, during which time Cochran was opening his set with his version of “What’d I Say”: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, “What’d I Say [Eddie Cochran vocals]”, Saturday Club version] We have this report of Cochran’s performance in Liverpool: “Eddie blew me away. He had his unwound 3rd string, looked good and sang good and he was really getting to be a good guitarist… One moment will always represent Eddie to me. He finished a tune, the crowd stopped screaming and clapping, and he stepped up to the mike and before he said something he put both his hands back, pushed his hair back, and some girl, a single voice in the audience, she went ‘Eddie!’ and he said ‘Hi honey!’… I thought, ‘Yes! That’s it – rock ’n’ roll!’” That’s a quote from George Harrison in the early 1990s. He’d gone to see the show with a friend, John Lennon — it was Lennon’s first ever rock and roll gig as an audience member, and one of a very small number he ever attended. Lennon never particularly enjoyed seeing live shows — he preferred records — but even he couldn’t resist seeing Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent on the same bill. The Liverpool shows were massive successes, despite both American rockers being increasingly bored and turning more and more to drink as a result. Apparently the two would drink a bottle of bourbon between them before going on stage, and at one Liverpool show Cochran had to hold on to a mic stand to keep himself upright for the first two songs, before he sobered up enough to let go. The shows were successful enough that a local promoter, Allan Williams, asked if he could book Cochran and Vincent for another show, and Larry Parnes said yes — after Liverpool, they had to play Newcastle, Manchester, London, and Bristol, taking up another month, and then Eddie Cochran was going to be going back to the US for a couple of weeks, but he could pencil them in for six weeks’ time, when Cochran was going to come back. It’s quite surprising that Cochran agreed to come back, because he was getting thoroughly sick of the UK. He’d asked Sharon Sheeley to fly over and join him, but other than her and Vincent he had nothing of home with him, and he liked sunshine, fast food, cold beer, and all-night TV, and hated everything about the British winter, which was far darker and wetter than anything he’d experienced. But on the other hand, he was enjoying making music with these British people. There’s a great recording of Cochran, Vincent, Billy Fury, and Joe Brown jamming on the Willie Dixon blues song “My Babe” on “Boy Meets Girls”: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Billy Fury, Joe Brown, “My Babe”] But by the time the tour ended in Bristol, Eddie was very keen to get back. He was going to be bringing Vince Eager over to America to record, and arranged to meet him in London in the early hours of Easter Sunday. They were going to be taking the lunchtime plane from what was then London Airport but is now Heathrow. But there was a problem with getting there on time. There were very few trains between Bristol and London, and they’d have to get a car from the train station to the airport. But that Easter Sunday was the day of the annual Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons. These were massive marches which were big enough that they spawned compilation albums of songs to sing on the march, like Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s “Brother Won’t You Join the Line”: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, “Brother Won’t You Join the Line?”] But the main effect the march was having on Cochran and Vincent was that it meant that to be sure of catching their plane, they would have to travel overnight by car. At first, they asked one of the other artists on the tour, Johnny Gentle, if they could go in his car, but he already had a carful, so they ended up getting a local driver, named George Martin (not the one at Parlophone Records) to drive them overnight. They got into the back seat of the car — Cochran sitting between Vincent and Sheeley, as Sheeley couldn’t stand Vincent. Vincent took a sleeping pill and went to sleep almost immediately, but Sheeley and Cochran were in a good mood, singing “California Here We Come” together, when Martin took a turn too fast and hit a lamppost. Vincent and Sheeley suffered major injuries and had to spend time in hospital. Cochran died. A short while later, Johnny Gentle’s car made its way onward towards London, and ran out of fuel. As all-night garages weren’t a thing in Britain then, they flagged down a policeman who told them there’d been a crash, and they could see if the breakdown vehicle would let them siphon petrol from the wrecked car. They did, and it was only the next day they realised which car it was they’d taken the fuel from. One of the police at the scene – maybe even that one – was a cadet who would later change his name to Dave Dee, and become the lead singer in Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch. As soon as the news got out about Cochran’s death, “Three Steps to Heaven”, which had come out in the US, but not yet in the UK, was rush-released: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Three Steps to Heaven”] It went to number one, and became Cochran’s biggest hit. Larry Parnes didn’t see why Cochran’s death should put a crimp in his plans, and so he immediately started promoting the shows for which Vincent and Cochran had been booked, calling them Eddie Cochran Tribute Shows, and talking to the press about how ironic it was that Cochran’s last song was “Three Steps to Heaven”. Vince Eager was so disgusted with Parnes that he never worked with him again. But those shows turned out to have a much bigger impact than anyone could have imagined. Allan Williams was worried that without Cochran, the show he’d got booked in Liverpool wouldn’t get enough of a crowd, so he booked in a number of local bands — Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, Nero and the Gladiators, and Gerry and the Pacemakers — to fill out the bill. This led to all the bands and musicians in Liverpool realising, for the first time, how much talent there was in the city and how many bands there were. That one show changed Liverpool from a town where there were a few bands to a town with a music scene, and May the third 1960 can be pointed to as the day that Merseybeat started. Parnes was impressed enough by the local groups that he decided that Liverpool might be a good place to look for musicians to back his singers on the road. And we’ll pick up on what happened then in a few months. Sharon Sheeley, once she’d recovered from her injuries, went on to write hits for Brenda Lee, Jackie DeShannon, the Fleetwoods, and Irma Thomas, and when Jack Good moved back to the US, she renewed her acquaintance with him, and together with Sheeley’s husband they created Shindig, the most important American music show of the sixties. But by the time she died in 2002, all her obituaries talked about was that she’d been Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend. And as for Gene Vincent, he was already in chronic pain, suffering mood swings, and drinking too much before the accident hospitalised him. After that, all those things intensified. He became increasingly unreliable, and the hits dried up even in Britain by mid-1961. He made some good music in the sixties, but almost nobody was listening any more, and an attempted comeback was cut short when he died, aged thirty-six, in 1971, from illnesses caused by his alcoholism. Despite their tragic deaths, Vincent and Cochran, on that 1960 UK tour, almost accidentally catalysed a revolution in British music, and the changes from that will reverberate throughout the rest of this story.

Episode eighty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Three Steps to Heaven” by Eddie Cochran, and at the British tour which changed music and ended his life. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Quarter to Three” by Gary US Bonds. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Toen ik met Beatle George Harrison in een limo langs de Amsterdamse gracht reed riep hij: daar sprongen ze het water in om naar onze rondvaartboot te zwemmen. Zo populair waren de Beatles in 1963. Niet bij mijn vader, die ouderling was en al die beatbands met lang haar des duivels vond. En hier zit ik dan, één generatie later, en als ik tegen George enthousiast begin over punkbands haalt hij zijn neus op. “Afschuwelijk! En die punks maken herrie!”Ooit maakten de Beatles herrie in clubs in Hamburg. Ik ben er gaan kijken. De Starclub van toen is nu sexclub Salambo. Caroline, een omgebouwde man uit Brazilië, is er de topattractie. Die nacht zal ik bij haar op haar kamer luisteren naar haar verzameling albums van Herman van Veen. Je moet er wat voor over hebben om even te kunnen verblijven in het appartement waar ooit de Beatles woonden! Ik sprak hun eerste manager in Liverpool, Allan Williams, die deze lastige jongens weg gaf aan Brian Epstein, een maand voor ze wereldberoemd werden. De Man Die De Beatles Weg Gaf heet zijn boek. En in dat boek lezen we hoe John Lennon in een Arnhemse muziekwinkel een dure mondharmonika stal, waarop hij zijn eerste hit, Love Me Do, zou spelen. Die ben ik alsnog even gaan betalen. The Beatles –het hele verhaal uit Liverpool en Hamburg hoor je in Soundcheck, de Starcast van Peter van Bruggen. Inclusief degenen die jammerlijk de boot misten. Je vind Soundcheck via de NPO Radio 5 App of je favoriete podcast-app.

We continue the story of young John, Paul, and George as they meet future bandmates, Stuart and Pete, and manager, Allan Williams. The origins of the name Beatles is also mentioned. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/welcome-to-stereo/support

CliffCentral.com — October is recreation month in South Africa, with National Recreation Day happening on the 5th of October. Allan Williams and Hendrick Modise from the Sport for Social Change Network are behind this, and other splendid initiatives to get South Africans more active. They chat to Gareth Cliff about how this all started, and the social change that sport can achieve when implemented. SSCN · Sport for Social Change Network

VAT is a huge issue that has gone under the radar, but it is set to change dramatically post-Brexit. Firms potentially face a serious cashflow issue under a new system that is yet to be clarified. To understand more, Allan Williams speaks to Liz Maher, a VAT specialist, to find out what changes mean for business.

Allan Williams and Mike Spicer return for the latest podcast, discussing the latest from Brexit, following the amendments to the Customs Bill, and the impact on import VAT. In the second half, Jane Gratton interviews Andy Briggs, CEO of Aviva UK, to discuss how to manage, employ and support an older workforce.

The BCC was gripped with World Cup fever this week, as Allan Williams and Mike Spicer looked to digest what the Chequers agreement meant for business. Allan also spoke to Ian Robinson, a partner at Fragomen, to discuss the Settled Status Scheme and what it means for EU nationals.

Housing is the key focus of the first episode of this relaunched podcast series, discussing at length the government's housing pledge, and why generations of governments have failed to build enough homes. Allan Williams and Mike Spicer also review events of the previous fortnight, from train timetables to inflation.

Allan Williams interviews Sara Abbonizio, Head of Business Engagement in the Gender Pay Gap team at the Government Equalities Office, to discuss gender pay gap reporting for business.

Allan Williams and Mike Spicer look for a quieter year, following 2017 - with productivity, skills and Brexit all set to dominate the agenda.

The Industrial Strategy has gone under the radar in recent months, but how important is it to focus on the domestic agenda? Allan Williams, Mike Spicer, and Ashley Shackleton discuss.

Our shopping list to tackle key business issues grows ever larger for the Chancellor. Allan Williams is joined by Suren Thiru, Mike Spicer, and Jane Gratton, to talk about what businesses want to see from the Chancellor's statement next month.

Beatle expert Ken Michaels discusses the past & present of the Fab Four.

Labour was a carnival, Conservative... wasn't. Allan Williams is joined by Orla Hennessy, Ashley Shackleton and Fiona Krasniqi to discuss the fallout from the party conferences, Brexit, and the future leadership of both parties.

The BCC team is back from their break over the summer, ready to discuss more of the issues dominating the agenda. Allan Williams is joined by Mike Spicer and Ashley Shackleton. *The initial upload of this podcast was an old version, apologies for the inconvenience.*

The Queen's Speech was Brexit heavy but thin on the ground - Allan Williams is joined by Research Director Mike Spicer and Head of Economics Suren Thiru to discuss what it means for business, as well as the future of interest rates.

The BCC discusses the latest on the election front. Are the pollsters wrong? Is it a Presidential campaign? Are we hearing anything for business? Allan Williams is again joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer and Head of Public Affairs Ashley Shackleton.

The election campaign ramped up this week with #torymanifesto, Labour manifesto and the debates! Allan Williams, Mike Spicer and Ashley Shackleton dissect the manifestos and what they mean for business, on #infrastructure, #immigration and more!

The BCC podcast is back! Reviewing the week that was in #business and #politics, to give our view of events that affect the Chamber business community. Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer and Head of Public Affairs Ashley Shackleton.

The new financial year is imminent, but what changes are coming that will impact your business? From apprenticeship levy, to immigrant skills charge, living wage increases, and corporation tax, the team discuss. Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer and Head of Economics Suren Thiru.

In this special expended edition of SATB, Richard and Robert sit down with Beatles historian and author Mark Lewisohn to review the life and times of the Beatles’ first manager (yes, manager), who passed away late last year. Songs include “Ramrod” and “Shimmy Shimmy.” [Art assistance by Mary Ruth Webb] Find Robert’s books here. Find Richard’s books here. The post 94: The Man Who Gave The Beatles Away – Allan Williams Remembered appeared first on Something About The Beatles.

In this special expended edition of SATB, Richard and Robert sit down with Beatles historian and author Mark Lewisohn to review the life and times of the Beatles’ first manager (yes, manager), who passed away late last year. Songs include “Ramrod” and “Shimmy Shimmy.” [Art assistance by Mary Ruth Webb] Find Robert’s books here. Find Richard’s books here. The post 94: The Man Who Gave The Beatles Away – Allan Williams Remembered appeared first on Something About The Beatles.

Business rates has long been regarded as a huge tax burden for businesses of all sizes - but how are the recent and forthcoming changes likely to affect firms across the country? Allan Williams is joined by Head of Economics and Business Finance Suren Thiru, Director of Research Mike Spicer, and Christian Spence, Head of Research at Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce and Business Rates Fellow of the BCC.

Last week Theresa May gave her plans for Brexit - leaving the Single Market, and controlling immigration. Allan Williams is joined by Ashley Shackleton, BCC Head of Public Affairs, and Andrew Fielding from Brussels, a former Commission adviser, to discuss how her speech was received at home and in Europe.

A look back at those we lost from the Beatles world in 2016.     George Martin stands at the fore, but many more passed, with the last few weeks of the year bringing the end of two figures particularly important to the early days.      We remember many of these figures, and present their stories in their own words from music and interviews.      Remember: "The soul does not love, it is love itself It does not exist, it is existence itself It does not know, it is knowledge itself 'How to Know God' Page 130" -- via "Brainwashed" by George Harrison.

It's a new year, and inflation is looming as a concern on the horizon. How can businesses mitigate inflationary pressures, and what can the Bank of England do to avoid it rising far above target? Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer and Head of Economics Suren Thiru, with a guest appearance from Vicky Pryce, former head of the Government Economic Service.

This week, the TWST guys kick off 2017 with a look at those who left us in 2016, including, most recently, Allan Williams and Sam Leach, and also look ahead to 2017 with Paul McCartney's first concert dates.  As always, we want to hear your thoughts on our show. You can send them to our email address thingswesaidtodayradioshow@gmail.com, join our "Things We Said Today Beatles Fans" Facebook page, tweet us at @thingswesadfab or catch us each on Facebook and give us your thoughts. And we thank you for listening. Don't forget, you can stream the show from our very own YouTube page. And we invite you to please write a review of our show on our iTunes page. 

The BCC reviews the year and looks ahead to 2017, talking EU referendum, politics, inflation, and other critical business issues. It's been quite the year! Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer, Head of Public Affairs Ashley Shackleton, and Press Officer Orla Hennessy

The BCC team discusses the Supreme Court hearing on Article 50, recent proposals on corporate governance and the future of rail. Allan Williams is joined by Head of Public Affairs Ashley Shackleton and Director of Research Mike Spicer.

The BCC team analyses the Chancellor's Autumn Statement and what it means for business. Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer, Head of Economics Suren Thiru, Head of Public Affairs Ashley Shackleton, and Henrietta Brealey, Director of Policy at Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce.

Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States - the BCC discusses what this means for UK-US trade policy, and an impact on any Brexit discussion. There's also an update on the recent goings on with the Brexit process. Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer, Head of Public Affairs Ashley Shackleton, and special guest Emanuel Adam, Director of Trade at British American Business

It's been a long time coming, but the government has announced plans for a new runway to be built at Heathrow Airport! Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer and Jane Gratton, Deputy Chief Executive of Staffordshire Chambers of Commerce to talk about what happens next, and what businesses are looking for.

In this episode Allan Williams is joined by Director of Research Mike Spicer, Head of Public Affairs Ashley Shackleton, and Public Affairs Officer Fiona Krasniqi, to discuss the various changes in government and how they will affect business.

Allan Williams, Mike Spicer, and Suren Thiru are joined by Vicky Pryce to talk about economic and monetary policy in the wake of the EU referendum.

This week we hop on the minibus with Allan Williams, Beryl Chang, Lord Woodbine and five unknown musicians from Liverpool as they make their way to "that city of sin" Hamburg to learn about music and life.     About the only question that doesn't get answered is whether Mimi actually did "pay the taxi" after John's inglorious return home from the first trip.     Continued in part 2.

Ped is joined by Matt Jones and Allan Williams to talk about Everton's 2-2 draw with Watford and preview the game against Southampton. Audio by Ste Brannigan

The panel of producers, presenters and bookers -- Meredith Blair, Mike Isaacson, Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Steven Schnepp and Allan Williams -- discuss what works and what doesn't on the road; the challenges of educating audiences about a show; what content might be considered too risky for road productions; how important Broadway is for promoting road shows; whether plays have a place, and can be successful, in road tours; finding shows off-Broadway that can be put on tour; and how long a show needs to play to be profitable.