Podcasts about lewisohn

My guest has produced one of those rare books in The Beatles' literary canon not penned by an insider (or by someone named Lewisohn) that has arrived with a tidal wave of press; in advance and since. Ian Leslie, who in the past has written about psychology, has put together a thesis examining the singular personal and professional relationship between Lennon and McCartney, and how it manifested in their art. That's a lot to unpack but we cover a lot of ground in our conversation.  

Paul McCartney and Wings' One Hand Clapping is one of the most bootlegged albums in rock history. Fifty years later, the album is being officially released for the first time, with a fabulous new mix by Steve Orchard (and Giles Martin collaborating on the Atmos version). We're joined by Sam Whiles, host of the Paul or Nothing podcast and the Macca in your Attic YouTube series. Join us as we nerd out over one of the most interesting and exciting Paul McCarrtney releases in recent history!  Plus, we discuss Mark Lewisohn's letter to the Times regarding Tony Bramwell's obituary, the recent rise in anti-Lewisohn rhetoric online, and the latest casting rumors around the Sam Mendes Beatles biopics.  Listen to the Paul or Nothing podcast Watch Sam's Macca in Your Attic YouTube series --------------------- Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X for photos, videos, and more from this episode & past episodes — we're @bcthebeatles everywhere. Follow BC the Beatles on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening now. Buy us a coffee! www.ko-fi.com/bcthebeatles Contact us at bcthebeatles@gmail.com.

This week I am joined by the host of Fans on the Run and our own Chas Newby (and the guy who made that really neat graphic of "Rocky"), Ethan Alexanian.    He joins us to discuss the Mark Lewisohn kerfuffle.   For those who don't know, here is the dictionary definition of Kerfuffle: a commotion or fuss, especially one caused by conflicting views. "there was a kerfuffle over the chairmanship"

SUMMARY: This episode summarizes what we've learned from the series. It will include  our thoughts, apprehensions, and hopes for Mr Lewisohn's next book as well as some recommendations for additional listening. PLAYLIST Everyday BUDDY HOLLY Honey Hush BIG JOE TURNER I Fall to Pieces PATSY CLINE Problems THE EVERLY BROTHERS P.S. I Love You THE BEATLES Whispering Bells THE DELL-VIKINGS Que Sera, Sera DORIS DAY Johnny Angel SHELLEY FABARES Hit the Road, Jack RAY CHARLES Crying ROY ORBISON I'll Be On My Way THE BEATLES   MARK LEWISOHN INTERVIEW LINKS: Interview with Jean Louis-Polard, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ3Cb0c-tnI&t=1s Fabcast podcast, 2017 013 MARK LEWISOHN https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/013-lewisohn/id1108129093?i=1000383307889 Humans in Love podcast, 2018 #1 (Part One) Beatles Authority Mark Lewisohn (YouTube) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-part-one-beatles-authority-mark-lewisohn-on-travel/id1386766806?i=1000412043887 Fab4Cast podcast, 2019  Talking to Mark Lewisohn: #1 Writing The Beatles' History  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkrFSnGnriQ and #2 Spring 1969  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ-BMzJyGGA&t=17s Nothing Is Real podcast, 2019 The Mark Lewisohn Interview #14 Part One  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nothing-is-real-episode-14-the-mark-lewisohn/id1462587848?i=1000452821367 and  #15 Part Two  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nothing-is-real-episode-15-mark-lewisohn-part-2/id1462587848?i=1000453706171 Interview with Giljs Groenteman, 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuettzOVmhg I Am the EggPod podcast, 2019 The Star-Club tapes  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwZy3DfdPjU&t=186s From Me To You podcast, 2020 Mark Lewisohn In Conversation w/ Richard Courtney  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPMlGfXMR_4 Let It Roll podcast, 2020 Mark Lewisohn in Conversation w/Nate Wilcox  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0cbEEHXFp8 Let It Be Beatles podcast, 2020 Mark Lewisohn - The Complete 2020 Let It Be Beatles Interview Podcast (YouTube) https://soundcloud.com/user-86154098/mark-lewisohn-the-complete-2020-let-it-be-beatles-interview-podcast?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Fans on the Run podcast, 2022 Ep 73. Mark Lewisohn  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fans-on-the-run-a-podcast-made-by-for-and-about-beatles-fans/id1522056200?i=1000556606690

SYNOPSIS: No Greater Buddy examines how Tune In handles the naughty behavior of its resident Bad Boy, John Lennon. This is a study of Lewisohn's coverage of John's bad behavior (rather than the behavior itself). PLAYLIST Bad Boy LARRY WILLIAMS Let the Good Times Roll LOUIS JORDAN Jim Dandy LAVERN BAKER Handful of Keys FATS WALLER Undecided ELLA FITZGERALD Angel Baby ROSIE & THE ORIGINALS Night Train DAVID ROSE Devil or Angel THE CLOVERS I'll Be on My Way THE BEATLES SOURCES The Beatles by Hunter Davies (1968) The Other Side of John Lennon By Sandra Shevey (1990) Beatles Anthology (1995) Living in the Material World by Martin Scorcese (2011)

SYNOPSIS: This is a look at Tune In's most positive descriptions of John and Paul respectively. All examined passages will be from the text, i.e. the author's own depictions of John and Paul. By comparing how Lewisohn chooses to describe John versus Paul, we will reveal many undeniable discrepancies in word choice, enthusiasm, depth, and tone.  What do these discrepancies mean? We'll discuss! SOURCES Beatles Anthology (2000) Beatles Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies (1968) John, Paul and Me: Before the Beatles by Len Garry (1997) PLAYLIST Side By Side RAY CHARLES and BETTY CARTER Personality JOHNNY MERCER Deed I Do PEGGY LEE Young at Heart FRANK SINATRA Clarabella THE BEATLES In Spite of All the Danger THE BEATLES Twenty Flight Rock EDDIE COCHRAN Crazy Man Crazy BILL HALEY & THE COMETS Lawdy Miss Clawdy ELVIS PRESLEY They Can't Take That Away From Me ELLA FITZGERALD & LOUIS ARMSTRONG I'll Be On My Way THE BEATLES Visit our website for more: anotherkindofmind.com  

It's like Mark Bolan and T. Rex once said: "Get it on! Banger, Gong! Get it, Gong!” We're not certain who Gong is - according to Lewisohn, it's longtime Lennon idol Chuck Barris -  but we're sure fans of Beatle Bangers. And in Part Two of Part Two, we hear some killer listener-suggested Bangers, and also ask:

It was great! It sold! It's the bloody Beatles' White Album! And, no, Paul; we won't shut up. Because part one of the UBP Deep Dish on “The Beatles” is finally here! Tony and T.J. are sniffer-level giddy to discuss this album-unlike-any-other. And in part one, the Two Little Piggies delve into the history and packaging (#DingDongDingDong) of one of only two official Beatles-canon albums to be known, colloquially, by two names. (The other is “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which most first-gen fans know as, of course, “File Under Rock”.) And despite this record's massive length and girth (Sfx: a pained, guttural groan), Tony & T.J. find the time to ask:  

SUMMARY Phoebe and Daphne answer listener mail from social media site, tumblr. This 2-part episode offers a unique glimpse into feedback and questions from AKOM listeners. (Also, keep an ear out for a brief appearance by a special guest!) TOPICS FOR EPISODE 2/2 Paul's job v. John's art school  John refused to be alone with Paul?!  Paul's difficulty saying ILY Emperor of Eternity  John hit Yoko?!? WTB cover art  Lewisohn relations  The Hamburg crew and Paul  Paul is a weak drummer Paul in court  Paul put up with so much  Divorce Meeting (nervous laughter)  Was Yoko at entrapment session? Feminization of Paul  Paul/John in ‘66 v. ‘68  Victor Spinetti  We don't like Paul's solo work?!  Genius Composer PLAYLIST P.S. I Love You THE BEATLES (1963) Please Mr. Postman THE BEATLES (1963) Paperback Writer THE BEATLES (1965) MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/another-kind-of-mind

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. 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/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

Given Beatles author and historian Erin Weber's recently announced sabbatical from Beatling these days, I wanted to share with SATB listeners the Q&A we held last year for Fab4ConJam, where she fielded questions on the Beatles' literary canon.    Authors covered included:  Lewisohn (of course) Michael Braun Peter McCabe Barry Miles Mark Hertsgaard And much more... Also revealed: her favorite Beatles music - favorite Beatle - and why she detests "Jet."    Erin's website: https://beatlebioreview.wordpress.com/    Erin's podcast: https://anchor.fm/karen-hooper/episodes/All-Together-Now-A-different-approach-to-Beatle-Podcasting-e14v3rc 

A feature interview with Jane Lewisohn, Director of the Golha Project, about her multi-year mission to preserve Persian culture, music, poetry and art from the 20th Century, particularly by digitizing and archiving the legendary Golha radio programs from pre-revolutionary Iran. And, Iranian-New Zealander psychologist Tina Parsamand on her decision to return to Tehran to help those in need of mental health counselling, her upbringing as an Iranian girl in a homogenous New Zealand town, and her popular Instagram channel, “Insight with Tina Parsa.” Plus the Roqe Team with letters, and Jian tells the story of ordering “Canada Dry” as a 5-year old in 1970s Iran.

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

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

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Sweet Nothin's" by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. 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 "16 Candles" by the Crests. 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---- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of "Dynamite" I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period -- artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I've put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee's autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I've had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee's music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn't go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade -- just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she's almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer -- while membership of the "hall of fame" doesn't mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she's the only performer we've dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we're going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as "Little Miss Dynamite": [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "Sweet Nothin's"]  Lee's music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday -- a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape -- some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show -- and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you'll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, "Jambalaya"] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis -- Elvis' first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley's songs, the ballad "Old Shep". But more typical of Foley's style was his big hit "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Red Foley, "Sugarfoot Rag"] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement -- his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda's parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda's career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing "Jambalaya". Red Foley said of that performance many years later: "I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I'd forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes." Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee -- that's the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee's archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we've seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions -- Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name "Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)", though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of "Jambalaya", which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), "Jambalaya"] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she'd never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang "Jambalaya" backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley's manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings -- for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots -- and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como's. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background -- right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he'd done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts -- his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he'd helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens' brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he'd later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn't do was get a hit record. The song "Dynamite" gave her the nickname she'd be known by for the rest of her life, "Little Miss Dynamite", but it wasn't a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, "Dynamite"] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", didn't chart at all at the time, it's been a perennial hit over the decades since -- in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree"] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen -- they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren't having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried -- and largely succeeded -- to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn't start to hit until Beatlemania some years later -- and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten's efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled "Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!" But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda's first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren't the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like "Ain't I'm A Dog": [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, "Ain't I'm A Dog"] Self's biggest success as a performer came with "Bop-A-Lena", a song clearly intended to cash in on "Be-Bop-A-Lula", but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey -- astonishingly, this record, which some have called "the first punk record" was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, "Bop-A-Lena"] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self's only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable -- as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn't get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher's office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn't play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self's performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee's career - "Sweet Nothin's": [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "Sweet Nothin's"] "Sweet Nothin's" became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited -- but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released -- enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours -- "all-star revues". But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She'd recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville's first rock and roll band. They'd had a few minor local hits that hadn't had much national success, like "My Love Song For You": [Excerpt: The Casuals, "My Love Song For You"] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit "Everlasting Love". The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called "Look For A Star" that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, "Look For A Star"] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, "Look For A Star"] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he'd go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals -- Cason and Richard Williams -- had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of "Blue Velvet": [Excerpt: The Statues, "Blue Velvet"] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too... But it wasn't the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team -- Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis' early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda's biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular -- Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change -- but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee's first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound -- though it wasn't originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up "Sweet Nothin's", they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write "Guitar Man" for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "That's All You Gotta Do"] That went to number six in the charts -- a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self -- a short song called "I'm Sorry", which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said "I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry' over and over". But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "I'm Sorry"] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while "That's All You Gotta Do" was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years -- one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart -- and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland's choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as "the King and Queen of Rock and Roll", performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn't listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven't been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn't head to Germany until the end of May -- he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA -- she recorded her hit "It Started All Over Again" in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, "It Started All Over Again"] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn't even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn's utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing -- Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit "Fool #1" on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers -- and if Lewisohn doesn't mention something in his books, it didn't happen. (I've tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn't play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee's most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don't seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up -- her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang's first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, "Honky Tonk Angels Medley"] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day -- they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she's not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways -- Kanye West sampled "Sweet Nothin's" in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I'm afraid I can't excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there's a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. 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 “16 Candles” by the Crests. 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—- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of “Dynamite” I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period — artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee’s autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I’ve had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee’s music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn’t go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade — just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she’s almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer — while membership of the “hall of fame” doesn’t mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she’s the only performer we’ve dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we’re going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as “Little Miss Dynamite”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”]  Lee’s music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday — a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape — some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show — and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you’ll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, “Jambalaya”] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis — Elvis’ first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley’s songs, the ballad “Old Shep”. But more typical of Foley’s style was his big hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Red Foley, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement — his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda’s parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda’s career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing “Jambalaya”. Red Foley said of that performance many years later: “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.” Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee — that’s the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee’s archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we’ve seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions — Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name “Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)”, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of “Jambalaya”, which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), “Jambalaya”] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she’d never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang “Jambalaya” backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley’s manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings — for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots — and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como’s. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background — right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he’d done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts — his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he’d helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens’ brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he’d later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn’t do was get a hit record. The song “Dynamite” gave her the nickname she’d be known by for the rest of her life, “Little Miss Dynamite”, but it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Dynamite”] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, didn’t chart at all at the time, it’s been a perennial hit over the decades since — in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen — they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren’t having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried — and largely succeeded — to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn’t start to hit until Beatlemania some years later — and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten’s efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled “Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!” But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda’s first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren’t the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like “Ain’t I’m A Dog”: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m A Dog”] Self’s biggest success as a performer came with “Bop-A-Lena”, a song clearly intended to cash in on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey — astonishingly, this record, which some have called “the first punk record” was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Bop-A-Lena”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self’s only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable — as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn’t get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher’s office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn’t play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self’s performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee’s career – “Sweet Nothin’s”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”] “Sweet Nothin’s” became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited — but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released — enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours — “all-star revues”. But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She’d recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville’s first rock and roll band. They’d had a few minor local hits that hadn’t had much national success, like “My Love Song For You”: [Excerpt: The Casuals, “My Love Song For You”] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit “Everlasting Love”. The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called “Look For A Star” that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, “Look For A Star”] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, “Look For A Star”] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he’d go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals — Cason and Richard Williams — had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of “Blue Velvet”: [Excerpt: The Statues, “Blue Velvet”] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too… But it wasn’t the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team — Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis’ early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda’s biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular — Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change — but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee’s first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound — though it wasn’t originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up “Sweet Nothin’s”, they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write “Guitar Man” for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “That’s All You Gotta Do”] That went to number six in the charts — a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self — a short song called “I’m Sorry”, which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said “I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over”. But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while “That’s All You Gotta Do” was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years — one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart — and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland’s choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as “the King and Queen of Rock and Roll”, performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn’t listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven’t been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn’t head to Germany until the end of May — he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA — she recorded her hit “It Started All Over Again” in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “It Started All Over Again”] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn’t even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing — Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit “Fool #1” on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers — and if Lewisohn doesn’t mention something in his books, it didn’t happen. (I’ve tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn’t play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee’s most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don’t seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up — her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang’s first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, “Honky Tonk Angels Medley”] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day — they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she’s not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways — Kanye West sampled “Sweet Nothin’s” in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I’m afraid I can’t excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there’s a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

Episode seventy-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Sweet Nothin’s” by Brenda Lee, and at the career of a performer who started in the 1940s and who was most recently in the top ten only four months ago. 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 “16 Candles” by the Crests. 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—- Errata: I say that the A-Team played on “every” rock and roll or country record out of Nashville. This is obviously an exaggeration. It was just an awful lot of the most successful ones. It has also been pointed out to me that the version of “Dynamite” I use in the podcast is actually a later remake by Lee. This is one of the perennial problems with material from this period — artists would often remake their hits, sticking as closely as possible to the original, and these remakes often get mislabelled on compilation CDs. My apologies. Resources As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud playlist of all the songs excerpted in the episode. Most of the information in here comes from Brenda Lee’s autobiography, Little Miss Dynamite, though as with every time I rely on an autobiography I’ve had to check the facts in dozens of other places. And there are many decent, cheap, compilations of Lee’s music. This one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript  A couple of months ago, we looked in some detail at the career of Wanda Jackson, and in the second of those episodes we talked about how her career paralleled that of Brenda Lee, but didn’t go into much detail about why Lee was important. But Brenda Lee was the biggest solo female star of the sixties, even though her music has largely been ignored by later generations. According to Joel Whitburn, she was the fourth most successful artist in terms of the American singles charts in that whole decade — just behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles, and just ahead of the Supremes and the Beach Boys, in that order. Despite the fact that she’s almost completely overlooked now, she was a massively important performer — while membership of the “hall of fame” doesn’t mean much in itself, it does say something that so far she is the *only* solo female performer to make both the rock and roll and country music halls of fame. And she’s the only performer we’ve dealt with so far to have a US top ten hit in the last year. So today we’re going to have a look at the career of the girl who was known as “Little Miss Dynamite”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”]  Lee’s music career started before she was even in school. She started performing when she was five, and by the time she was six she was a professional performer. So by the time she first came to a wider audience, aged ten, she was already a seasoned professional. Her father died when she was very young, and she very quickly became the sole breadwinner of the household. She changed her name from Brenda Tarpley to the catchier Brenda Lee, she started performing on the Peach Blossom Special, a local sub-Opry country radio show, and she got her own radio show. Not only that, her stepfather opened the Brenda Lee Record Shop, where she would broadcast her show every Saturday — a lot of DJs and musicians performed their shows in record shop windows at that time, as a way of drawing crowds into the shops. All of this was before she turned eleven. One small piece of that radio show still exists on tape — some interaction between her and her co-host Peanut Faircloth, who was the MC and guitar player for the show — and who fit well with Brenda, as he was four foot eight, and Brenda never grew any taller than four foot nine. You can hear that when she was talking with Faircloth, she was as incoherent as any child would be: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth dialogue] But when she sang on the show, she sounded a lot more professional than almost any child vocalist you’ll ever hear: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee and Peanut Faircloth, “Jambalaya”] Her big break actually came from *not* doing a show. She was meant to be playing the Peach Blossom Special one night, but she decided that rather than make the thirty dollars she would make from that show, she would go along to see Red Foley perform. Foley was one of the many country music stars who I came very close to including in the first year of this podcast. He was one of the principal architects of the hillbilly boogie style that led to the development of rockabilly, and he was a particular favourite of both Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis — Elvis’ first ever public performance was him singing one of Foley’s songs, the ballad “Old Shep”. But more typical of Foley’s style was his big hit “Sugarfoot Rag”: [Excerpt: Red Foley, “Sugarfoot Rag”] Foley had spent a few years in semi-retirement — his wife had died by suicide a few years earlier, and he had reassessed his priorities a little as a result. But he had recently been tempted back out onto the road as a result of his being offered a chance to host his own TV show, the Ozark Jubilee, which was one of the very first country music shows on television. And the Ozark Jubilee put on tours, and one was coming to Georgia. Peanut Faircloth, who worked with Brenda on her radio show, was the MC for that Ozark Jubilee show, and Brenda’s parents persuaded Faircloth to let Brenda meet Foley, in the hopes that meeting him would give Brenda’s career a boost. She not only got to meet Foley, but Faircloth managed to get her a spot on the show, singing “Jambalaya”. Red Foley said of that performance many years later: “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice. One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.” Foley got Brenda to send a demo tape to the producers of the Ozark Jubilee — that’s the tape we heard earlier, of her radio show, which was saved in the Ozark Jubilee’s archives, and Brenda immediately became a regular on the show. Foley also got her signed to Decca, the same label he was on, and she went into the studio in Nashville with Owen Bradley, who we’ve seen before producing Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette, and Wanda Jackson, though at this point Bradley was only the engineer and pianist on her sessions — Paul Cohen was the producer. Her first single was released in September 1956, under the name “Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)”, though in fact she was almost twelve when it came out. It was a version of “Jambalaya”, which was always her big showstopper on stage: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old), “Jambalaya”] Neither that nor her follow-up, a novelty Christmas record, were particularly successful, but they were promoted well enough to get her further national TV exposure. It also got her a new manager, though in a way she’d never hoped for or wanted. Her then manager, Lou Black, got her a spot performing at the national country DJs convention in Nashville, where she sang “Jambalaya” backed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. She went down a storm, but the next night Black died suddenly, of a heart attack. Dub Albritten, Red Foley’s manager, was at the convention, and took the opportunity to sign Brenda up immediately. Albritten got her a lot of prestigious bookings — for example, she became the youngest person ever to headline in Las Vegas, on a bill that also included a version of the Ink Spots — and she spent the next couple of years touring and making TV appearances. As well as her regular performances on the Ozark Jubilee she was also a frequent guest on the Steve Allen show and an occasional one on Perry Como’s. She was put on country package tours with George Jones and Patsy Cline, and on rock and roll tours with Danny & the Juniors, the Chantels, and Mickey & Sylvia. This was the start of a split in the way she was promoted that would last for many more years. Albritten was friends with Colonel Tom Parker, and had a similar carny background — right down to having, like Parker, run a scam where he put a live bird on a hot plate to make it look like it was dancing, though in his case he’d done it with a duck rather than a chicken. Albritten had managed all sorts of acts — his first attempt at breaking the music business was when in 1937 he’d helped promote Jesse Owens during Owens’ brief attempt to become a jazz vocalist, but he’d later worked with Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb before managing Foley. Brenda rapidly became a big star, but one thing she couldn’t do was get a hit record. The song “Dynamite” gave her the nickname she’d be known by for the rest of her life, “Little Miss Dynamite”, but it wasn’t a hit: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Dynamite”] And while her second attempt at a Christmas single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, didn’t chart at all at the time, it’s been a perennial hit over the decades since — in fact its highest position on the charts came in December 2019, sixty-one years after it was released, when it finally reached number two on the charts: [Excerpt: Little Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”] Part of the problem at the beginning had been that she had clashed with Paul Cohen — they often disagreed about what songs she should perform. But Cohen eventually left her in the charge of Owen Bradley, who would give her advice about material, but let her choose it herself. While her records weren’t having much success in the US, it was a different story in other countries. Albritten tried — and largely succeeded — to make her a breakout star in countries other than the US, where there was less competition. She headlined the Paris Olympia, appeared on Oh Boy! in the UK, and inspired the kind of riots in Brazil that normally didn’t start to hit until Beatlemania some years later — and to this day she still has a very substantial Latin American fanbase as a result of Albritten’s efforts. But in the US, her rockabilly records were unsuccessful, even as she was a massively popular performer live and on TV. So Bradley decided to take a different tack. While she would continue making rock and roll singles, she was going to do an album of old standards from the 1920s, to be titled “Grandma, What Great Songs You Sang!” But that was no more successful, and it would be from the rockabilly world that Brenda’s first big hit would come. Brenda Lee and Red Foley weren’t the only acts that Dub Albritten managed. In particular, he managed a rockabilly act named Ronnie Self. Self recorded several rockabilly classics, like “Ain’t I’m A Dog”: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Ain’t I’m A Dog”] Self’s biggest success as a performer came with “Bop-A-Lena”, a song clearly intended to cash in on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, but ending up sounding more like Don and Dewey — astonishingly, this record, which some have called “the first punk record” was written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, two of the most establishment country artists around: [Excerpt: Ronnie Self, “Bop-A-Lena”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, but was Self’s only hit as a performer. While Self was talented, he was also unstable — as a child he had once cut down a tree to block the road so the school bus couldn’t get to his house, and on another occasion he had attacked one of his teachers with a baseball bat. And that was before he started the boozing and the amphetamines. In later years he did things like blast away an entire shelf of his demos with a shotgun, get into his car and chase people, trying to knock them down, and set fire to all his gold records outside his publisher’s office after he tried to play one of them on his record player and discovered it wouldn’t play. Nobody was very surprised when he died in 1981, aged only forty-three. But while Self was unsuccessful and unstable, Albritten saw something in him, and kept trying to find ways to build his career up, and after Self’s performing career seemed to go absolutely nowhere, he started pushing Self as a songwriter, and Self came up with the song that would change Brenda Lee’s career – “Sweet Nothin’s”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Sweet Nothin’s”] “Sweet Nothin’s” became a massive hit, reaching number four on the charts both in the UK and the US in early 1960. After a decade of paying her dues, Brenda Lee was a massive rock and roll star at the ripe old age of fifteen. But she was still living in a trailer park. Because she was a minor, her money was held in trust to stop her being exploited — but rather too much was being kept back. The court had only allowed her to receive seventy-five dollars a week, which she was supporting her whole family on. That was actually almost dead on the average wage for the time, but it was low enough that apparently there was a period of several weeks where her family were only eating potatoes. Eventually they petitioned the court to allow some of the money to be released — enough for her to buy a house for her family. Meanwhile, as she was now a hitmaker, she was starting to headline her own tours — “all-star revues”. But there were fewer stars on them than the audience thought. The Hollywood Argyles and Johnny Preston were both genuine stars, but some of the other acts were slightly more dubious. She’d recently got her own backing band, the Casuals, who have often been called Nashville’s first rock and roll band. They’d had a few minor local hits that hadn’t had much national success, like “My Love Song For You”: [Excerpt: The Casuals, “My Love Song For You”] They were led by Buzz Cason, who would go on to a very long career in the music business, doing everything from singing on some Alvin and the Chipmunks records to being a member of Ronnie and the Daytonas to writing the massive hit “Everlasting Love”. The British singer Garry Mills had released a song called “Look For A Star” that was starting to get some US airplay: [Excerpt: Garry Mills, “Look For A Star”] Cason had gone into the studio and recorded a soundalike version, under the name Garry Miles, chosen to be as similar to the original as possible. His version made the top twenty and charted higher than the original: [Excerpt: Garry Miles, “Look For A Star”] So on the tours, Garry Miles was a featured act too. Cason would come out in a gold lame jacket with his hair slicked back, and perform as Garry Miles. Then he’d go offstage, brush his hair forward, take off the jacket, put on his glasses, and be one of the Casuals. And then the Casuals would back Brenda Lee after their own set. As far as anyone knew, nobody in the audience seemed to realise that Garry Miles and Buzz Cason were the same person. And at one point, two of the Casuals — Cason and Richard Williams — had a minor hit with Hugh Jarrett of the Jordanaires as The Statues, with their version of “Blue Velvet”: [Excerpt: The Statues, “Blue Velvet”] And so sometimes The Statues would be on the bill too… But it wasn’t the Casuals who Brenda was using in the studio. Instead it was the group of musicians who became known as the core of the Nashville A-Team — Bob Moore, Buddy Harmon, Ray Edenton, Hank Garland, Grady Martin, Floyd Cramer, and Boots Randolph. Those session players played on every rock and roll or country record to come out of Nashville in the late fifties and early sixties, including most of Elvis’ early sixties records, and country hits by Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, George Jones and others. And so it was unsurprising that Brenda’s biggest success came, not with rock and roll music, but with the style of country known as the Nashville Sound. The Nashville Sound is a particular style of country music that was popular in the late fifties and early sixties, and Owen Bradley was one of the two producers who created it (Chet Atkins was the other one), and almost all of the records with that sound were played on by the A-Team. It was one of the many attempts over the years to merge country music with current pop music to try to make it more successful. In this case, they got rid of the steel guitars, fiddles, and honky-tonk piano, and added in orchestral strings and vocal choruses. The result was massively popular — Chet Atkins was once asked what the Nashville Sound was, and he put his hand in his pocket and jingled his change — but not generally loved by country music purists. Brenda Lee’s first number one hit was a classic example of the Nashville Sound — though it wasn’t originally intended that that would be the hit. To follow up “Sweet Nothin’s”, they released another uptempo song, this time written by Jerry Reed, who would go on to write “Guitar Man” for Elvis, among others: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “That’s All You Gotta Do”] That went to number six in the charts — a perfectly successful follow-up to a number four hit record. But as it turned out, the B-side did even better. The B-side was another song written by Ronnie Self — a short song called “I’m Sorry”, which Owen Bradley thought little of. He later said “I thought it kind of monotonous. It was just ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ over and over”. But Brenda liked it, and it was only going to be a B-side. The song was far too short, so in the studio they decided to have her recite the lyrics in the middle of the song, the way the Ink Spots did: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “I’m Sorry”] Everyone concerned was astonished when that record overtook its A-side on the charts, and went all the way to number one, even while “That’s All You Gotta Do” was also in the top ten. This established a formula for her records for the next few years — one side would be a rock and roll song, while the other would be a ballad. Both sides would chart — and in the US, usually the ballads would chart higher, while in other countries, it would tend to be the more uptempo recordings that did better, which led to her getting a very different image in the US, where she quickly became primarily known as an easy listening pop singer and had a Vegas show choreographed and directed by Judy Garland’s choreographer, and in Europe, where for example she toured in 1962 on the same bill as Gene Vincent, billed as “the King and Queen of Rock and Roll”, performing largely rockabilly music. Those European tours also led to the story which gets repeated most about Brenda Lee, and which she repeats herself at every opportunity, but which seems as far as I can tell to be completely untrue. She regularly claims that after her UK tour with Vincent in 1962, they both went over to tour military bases in Germany, where they met up with Little Richard, and the three of them all went off to play the Star Club in Hamburg together, where the support act was a young band called the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best. She says she tried to get her record label interested in them, but they wouldn’t listen, and they regretted it a couple of years later. Now, Brenda Lee *did* play the Star Club at some point in 1962, and I haven’t been able to find the dates she played it. But the story as she tells it is full of holes. The tour she did with Gene Vincent ended in mid-April, around the same time that the Beatles started playing the Star Club. So far so good. But then Vincent did another UK tour, and didn’t head to Germany until the end of May — he performed on the same bill as the Beatles on their last three nights there. By that time, Lee was back in the USA — she recorded her hit “It Started All Over Again” in Nashville on May the 18th: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “It Started All Over Again”] Little Richard, meanwhile, did play the Star Club with the Beatles, but not until November, and he didn’t even start performing rock and roll again until October. Brenda Lee is not mentioned in Mark Lewisohn’s utterly exhaustive books on the Beatles except in passing — Paul McCartney would sometimes sing her hit “Fool #1” on stage with the Beatles, and he went to see her on the Gene Vincent show when they played Birkenhead, because he was a fan of hers — and if Lewisohn doesn’t mention something in his books, it didn’t happen. (I’ve tweeted at Lewisohn to see if he can confirm that she definitely didn’t play on the same bill as them, but not had a response before recording this). So Brenda Lee’s most often-told story, sadly, seems to be false. The Beatles don’t seem to have supported her at the Star Club. Over the next few years, she continued to rack up hits both at home and abroad, but in the latter half of the sixties the hits started to dry up — her last top twenty pop hit in the US, other than seasonal reissues of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, was in 1966. But in the seventies, she reinvented herself, without changing her style much, by marketing to the country market, and between 1973 and 1980 she had nine country top ten hits, plus many more in the country top forty. She was helped in this when her old schoolfriend Rita Coolidge married Kris Kristofferson, who wrote her a comeback hit, “Nobody Wins”: [Excerpt: Brenda Lee, “Nobody Wins”] Her career went through another downturn in the eighties as fashions changed in country music like they had in pop and rock, but she reinvented herself again, as a country elder stateswoman, guesting with her old friends Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn on the closing track on k.d. lang’s first solo album Shadowland: [Excerpt: k.d. lang, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee, “Honky Tonk Angels Medley”] While Lee has had the financial and personal ups and downs of everyone in the music business, she seems to be one of the few child stars who came through the experience happily. She married the first person she ever dated, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and they remain together to this day — they celebrate their fifty-seventh anniversary this week. She continues to perform occasionally, though not as often as she used to, and she’s not gone through any of the dramas with drink and drugs that killed so many of her contemporaries. She seems, from what I can tell, to be genuinely content. Her music continues to turn up in all sorts of odd ways — Kanye West sampled “Sweet Nothin’s” in 2013, on his hit single “Bound 2” – which I’m afraid I can’t excerpt here, as the lyrics would jeopardise my iTunes clean rating. And as I mentioned at the start, she had “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” go to number two on the US charts just last December. And at seventy-five years old, there’s a good chance she has many more active years left in her. I wish I could end all my episodes anything like as happily.

Heroes of Progress is an outstanding Series created by HumanProgress.org by author Alexander C Hammond.Check out the rest of the Heroes of Progress by subscribing or going to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyxK8N8FZsA02jnZKolX6Et7MBduqg8n4You can find the source content here: https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=1536Truth + Character + Wisdom = Prosperity.*******************************************************************WHERE YOU CAN LISTEN TO/READ MY CONTENT:► TruthSeeker Newsletter- http://bit.ly/ohytruthseeker► PODCAST: SPREAKER- https://www.spreaker.com/show/oh-hale-yeah► PODCAST: iTunes - http://bit.ly/ohysubscribe► PODCAST: Google - http://bit.ly/OHYGoogle► QUORA - https://goo.gl/31USZa► MEDIUM - https://goo.gl/fMTWZR► TWITTER- https://goo.gl/85RFf2► PAYPAL- www.paypal.me/OHHALEYEAH► SUBSCRIBE - https://www.youtube.com/c/OhHaleYEAH********************************************************************All footage taken falls under ''fair use'' of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998). Therefore, no breach of privacy or copyright has been committed. Freedom of speech is the ability to speak without censorship.***************

Mark Lewisohn is finishing up his "Hornsey Road" tour, where he engaged audiences across the English countryside with stories behind the making of Abbey Road.    Despite the fact a United States run is not currently in the cards, a number of items taken from Lewisohn's research (which will eventually appear in Volume 3) have made a splash in the media.    This week we discuss the show, some of the stories, and hypothesize on what a Beatles post-Abbey Road album might have been like.

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Paul or Nothing (with the help of a USB plugin keyboard) and I am excited to bring you my review, recounting and recanting of Mark Lewisohn's "Hornsey Road"! This live talk/lecture/performance, whatever you want to call it is a sneak peak at Lewisohns "Tune In" series, as he does a live deep dive on The Beatles final album, Abbey Road.My special guest, long time friend of the show Matt Phillips, and I, were both lucky enough to catch the show on October 28th at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, UK. This is our review, and we hope you enjoy the show. Well, our show and Lewisohn's!!! Peace and love.   If you haven't seen the blog, check it out at www.paulmccartneypod.wordpress.com where you can see loads of episodes start out life as a random blog post, before being resculpted into the quality content you are here for today!  If you want to support the show, check out our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/mccartneypodcast To get in contact with the show, drop us an email at paulmccartneypod@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter for all Macca updates by searching @mccartneypod.  Hosted by Sam Whiles.

On Thursday, 30 May 1968, George Martin and The Beatles started to work on their next album, following Sgt Pepper. As the session got underway on 30 May, Lennon debuted a new song that would come to be known as “Revolution 1”, a standout composition from the Esher demos. With Martin and a whole array of people up in the booth, The Beatles perfected a rhythm track in eighteen takes, including Lennon’s lead vocal, McCartney’s piano, Harrison’s acoustic guitar, and Starr’s drums. As the longest performance of “Revolution 1”, the eighteenth and best take clocked in at more than ten minutes. The following days, they continued to work on Revolution 1, and finally split off the ‘outro’ of Revolution into a new track, Revolution 9. Th following Tuesday, June 4th, 1968, Yoko Ono attended these rehearsals and recorded them on a portable tape recorder. Unfortunately for Beatles fans, she also recorded her own voice, talking to herself, mainly about her relationship with John. She had met John not long before, and this was the first time she accompanied him into the studio. The one place where the Beatles had some privacy….. Although Yoko Ono was not the first (girl) friend that the Beatles had admitted there; McCartney had brought Francie Schwartz, Harrison had admitted his wife Pattie, and musicians such as David Crosby and Brian Jones had been invited. But in general, the studio was a place for the Beatles only. Although it is not entirely clear, it seems likely that Yoko sat in the control room on that day, listening to the Beatles through the speakers there. We can hear others (including George Martin) on the tape, who appear to go about their business as usual, not bothered by Yoko or even noticing her. Later, she would go into the studio, and sit on McCartney’s amplifier and stroke Lennon’s hair while they were recording…….. In total, Yoko recorded more than an hour of these rehearsals. The Beatles went through Revolution 1 and played some jams in between. As far as I know these rehearsals have not been released or bootlegged elsewhere; possibly, these rehearsals were not even recorded by George Martin and his team. Yoko’s voice obliterates the music in many places, but technology has now progressed so far that we can separate Yoko’s voice from the music and reveal these unknown White Album Rehearsals. At some later time, we may collect Yoko’s ramblings and analyse these; it might make Yoko blush to hear these today……. For the moment we focus on the music of the Beatles. The jams (that seem to go on forever) are very repetitive and not very interesting. But the early rehearsals of Revolution are worthwhile. It is not entirely clear exactly on which date these recordings were made. Yoko says at some point “ This is Tuesday, sixth of June 1968”. That doesn’t help us much, since June 6 was a Thursday (not a Tuesday) in 1968. It seems likely that this part of the tape was recorded on June 4th, since it is less likely that she would make a mistake in the day of the week. Furthermore, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed on June 5th, so she would probably have commented on that. Yoko does mention the shooting of Andy Warhol, which took place on June 3rd. During much of Yoko’s tape, the Beatles are remixing what would become the sound collage Revolution no 9. At this stage, it is still the outro of Revolution 1. Recently, these early takes of Revolution no 9 have become available in good quality. Listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XIRWpmqQV0 how Yoko captured the mixing of Revolution 1. Although some part of the tape was probably recorded on June 4th, it is possible that some of the tape was recorded earlier. Yoko started to come along to the studio as they began work on the White Album, on May 30th. On May 31, they recorded much of what would become Revolution 9, and Yoko was in the studio to add some vocals (“if I become naked…”). According to Lewisohn, organ and vocal overdubs (with John lying on his back on the studio floor) were done on June 4th, suggesting that the instrumental part of Revolution 1 was more or less finished on May 31st. Since some of Yoko’s recordings appear to be of an earlier version of Revolution 1, these fragments were probably recorded on May 30 or May 31st. Unfortunately, the usual reliable sources (Lewisohn, Emerick) don’t mention Yoko making any recording in the studio at all. Emerick remarks: “For the next couple of hours Ono just sat quietly with us in the control room. It had to have been even more uncomfortable for her than it was for any of us. She had been put in an embarrassing situation, plunked right by the window so that George Martin and I had to crane our heads around her to see the others out in the studio and communicate with them. As a result, she kept thinking we were staring at her. She’d give us a polite, shy smile whenever she’d see us looking in her direction, but she never actually said anything.” Therefore, we looked closer at the rehearsal of Revolution 1 itself. There is a prominent organ part, probably played by Paul. At some point, he tries some different chords (probably to avoid too much repetition) but these did not make it onto the finished take. The organ plays long chords, as in – later – Pink Floyd style. The guitar part (played rather loud) is probably Lennon; he has not arrived yet at the ‘boogie-woogie’ rhythm that would characterise the finished take. But overall, the structure of the song is pretty much there. There are no vocals on the tape, and since Paul played organ, there is no bass either. So we lifted the bass and vocals from the released version, maintaining the loosely played character of the rehearsal as much of possible. So here it is, a hitherto unknown rehearsal of Revolution 1. We should be grateful to Yoko Ono for preserving the session for posterity.

Why did the Futurists want Italians to stop eating pasta? Would you try Henri Toulouse-Lautrec sheep’s feet recipe? On this episode we discuss the relationship between art and food via creative cookbooks by artists and chefs. Discover some famous artists who have dabbled in gastronomy and determine whether you would be brave enough to try their recipes. Cookbooks discussed: 'The Futurists Cookbook' by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 'The Art of Cuisine' by Henri de-Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Joyant 'Cooking for Artists' by Mina Stone 'Food for Thought' by Ferran Adria, edited by Richard Hamilton 'Wild Raspberries' by Andy Warhol and Suzie Frankfurt This episode's guest: Cedar is an artist, writer, and curator who frequently explores the crossover between art and gastronomy. He’s worked with institutions like Tate and the British Council, and also taught classes on the history of food and art for the Royal Academy. He’s currently curator of a three-year project, Outside The Cube, for HangarBicocca foundation in Milan. Images: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O136797/reine-de-joie-poster-toulouse-lautrec-henri/ https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/hamburger-229855/ https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/dancer-ballerina-sea-132976 https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/towards-a-definitive-statement-on-the-coming-trends-in-mens-wear-and-accessories-a-together-let-us-explore-the-stars-199110/

Leonard Lewisohn is an American author, translator and lecturer in the area of Islamic studies and a specialist in Persian language and Sufi literature. He is the editor of Mawlana Rumi Review. He is a member of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in University of Exeter. Mawlana Rumi Review: http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/iais/research/centres/cpis/rumireview/ Some of Dr. Lewisohn's writings can be found here: https://exeter.academia.edu/LeonardLewisohn

The brilliant Mark Lewisohn joins Howie, Bard & Dave for special long, season two finale!!! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

节目相关文本：http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAwODM0NzE3OA==&mid=2654031292&idx=1&sn=02825348e5ab0685465915ab52d7baca#rd--------------------------------------------NO, THE TEN-THOUSAND-HOUR RULE ISN'T REALLY A RULE....Gladwell offered a catchy phrase: “the ten-thousand-hour rule.” According to this rule, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields. We had indeed mentioned this figure in our report as the average number of hours that the best violinists had spent on solitary practice by the time they were twenty. Gladwell himself estimated that the Beatles had put in about ten thousand hours of practice while playing in Hamburg in the early 1960s and that Bill Gates put in roughly ten thousand hours of programming to develop his skills to a degree that allowed him to found and develop Microsoft. In general, Gladwell suggested, the same thing is true in essentially every field of human endeavor—people don't become expert at something until they've put in about ten thousand hours of practice.The rule is irresistibly appealing. It's easy to remember, for one thing. It would've been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours of practice at anything, and you will become a master.Unfortunately, this rule—which is the only thing that many people today know about the effects of practice—is wrong in several ways. (It is also correct in one important way, which I will get to shortly.) First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen—approximately seventy-four hundred hours—but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number. And, either way, at eighteen or twenty, these students were nowhere near masters of the violin. They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go when I studied them. Pianists who win international piano competitions tend to do so when they're around thirty years old, and thus they've probably put in about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand hours of practice by then; ten thousand hours is only halfway down that path.And the number varies from field to field. Steve Faloon became the very best person in the world at memorizing strings of digits after only about two hundred hours of practice. I don't know exactly how many hours of practice the best digit memorizers put in today before they get to the top, but it is likely well under ten thousand.Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn't actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age. Gladwell misunderstood this fact and incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours.Third, Gladwell didn't distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.” For example, one of his key examples of the ten-thousand-hour rule was the Beatles' exhausting schedule of performances in Hamburg between 1960 and 1964. According to Gladwell, they played some twelve hundred times, each performance lasting as much as eight hours, which would have summed up to nearly ten thousand hours. Tune In, an exhaustive 2013 biography of the Beatles by Mark Lewisohn, calls this estimate into question and, after an extensive analysis, suggests that a more accurate total number is about eleven hundred hours of playing. So the Beatles became worldwide successes with far less than ten thousand hours of practice. More importantly, however, performing isn't the same thing as practice. Yes, the Beatles almost certainly improved as a band after their many hours of playing in Hamburg, particularly because they tended to play the same songs night after night, which gave them the opportunity to get feedback—both from the crowd and themselves—on their performance and find ways to improve it. But an hour of playing in front of a crowd, where the focus is on delivering the best possible performance at the time, is not the same as an hour of focused, goal-driven practice that is designed to address certain weaknesses and make certain improvements—the sort of practice that was the key factor in explaining the abilities of the Berlin student violinists.A closely related issue is that, as Lewisohn argues, the success of the Beatles was not due to how well they performed other people's music but rather to their songwriting and creation of their own new music. Thus, if we are to explain the Beatles' success in terms of practice, we need to identify the activities that allowed John Lennon and Paul McCartney—the group's two primary songwriters—to develop and improve their skill at writing songs. All of the hours that the Beatles spent playing concerts in Hamburg would have done little, if anything, to help Lennon and McCartney become better songwriters, so we need to look elsewhere to explain the Beatles' success.This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers. Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities—usually done alone—that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn't say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in my study implied this. To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.The question of whether anyone can become an expert performer in a given field by taking part in enough designed practice is still open, and I will offer some thoughts on this issue in the next chapter. But there was nothing in the original study to suggest that it was so.Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it's crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

节目相关文本：http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAwODM0NzE3OA==&mid=2654031292&idx=1&sn=02825348e5ab0685465915ab52d7baca#rd--------------------------------------------NO, THE TEN-THOUSAND-HOUR RULE ISN’T REALLY A RULE....Gladwell offered a catchy phrase: “the ten-thousand-hour rule.” According to this rule, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields. We had indeed mentioned this figure in our report as the average number of hours that the best violinists had spent on solitary practice by the time they were twenty. Gladwell himself estimated that the Beatles had put in about ten thousand hours of practice while playing in Hamburg in the early 1960s and that Bill Gates put in roughly ten thousand hours of programming to develop his skills to a degree that allowed him to found and develop Microsoft. In general, Gladwell suggested, the same thing is true in essentially every field of human endeavor—people don’t become expert at something until they’ve put in about ten thousand hours of practice.The rule is irresistibly appealing. It’s easy to remember, for one thing. It would’ve been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours of practice at anything, and you will become a master.Unfortunately, this rule—which is the only thing that many people today know about the effects of practice—is wrong in several ways. (It is also correct in one important way, which I will get to shortly.) First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen—approximately seventy-four hundred hours—but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number. And, either way, at eighteen or twenty, these students were nowhere near masters of the violin. They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go when I studied them. Pianists who win international piano competitions tend to do so when they’re around thirty years old, and thus they’ve probably put in about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand hours of practice by then; ten thousand hours is only halfway down that path.And the number varies from field to field. Steve Faloon became the very best person in the world at memorizing strings of digits after only about two hundred hours of practice. I don’t know exactly how many hours of practice the best digit memorizers put in today before they get to the top, but it is likely well under ten thousand.Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn’t actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age. Gladwell misunderstood this fact and incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours.Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.” For example, one of his key examples of the ten-thousand-hour rule was the Beatles’ exhausting schedule of performances in Hamburg between 1960 and 1964. According to Gladwell, they played some twelve hundred times, each performance lasting as much as eight hours, which would have summed up to nearly ten thousand hours. Tune In, an exhaustive 2013 biography of the Beatles by Mark Lewisohn, calls this estimate into question and, after an extensive analysis, suggests that a more accurate total number is about eleven hundred hours of playing. So the Beatles became worldwide successes with far less than ten thousand hours of practice. More importantly, however, performing isn’t the same thing as practice. Yes, the Beatles almost certainly improved as a band after their many hours of playing in Hamburg, particularly because they tended to play the same songs night after night, which gave them the opportunity to get feedback—both from the crowd and themselves—on their performance and find ways to improve it. But an hour of playing in front of a crowd, where the focus is on delivering the best possible performance at the time, is not the same as an hour of focused, goal-driven practice that is designed to address certain weaknesses and make certain improvements—the sort of practice that was the key factor in explaining the abilities of the Berlin student violinists.A closely related issue is that, as Lewisohn argues, the success of the Beatles was not due to how well they performed other people’s music but rather to their songwriting and creation of their own new music. Thus, if we are to explain the Beatles’ success in terms of practice, we need to identify the activities that allowed John Lennon and Paul McCartney—the group’s two primary songwriters—to develop and improve their skill at writing songs. All of the hours that the Beatles spent playing concerts in Hamburg would have done little, if anything, to help Lennon and McCartney become better songwriters, so we need to look elsewhere to explain the Beatles’ success.This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers. Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities—usually done alone—that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in my study implied this. To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.The question of whether anyone can become an expert performer in a given field by taking part in enough designed practice is still open, and I will offer some thoughts on this issue in the next chapter. But there was nothing in the original study to suggest that it was so.Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

Mark Lewisohn, Allan Kozinn and Richard Buskin join the guys to talk about the Beatles' arrival in America.

Author and historian Mark Lewisohn talks with Fab 4 Free 4 All about his new book 'All These Years Vol. 1: Tune In'.

The Beatles recorded "Money (That's What I Want)" in five takes on July 18, 1963. I suppose they intended it to be a smashing final track to With The Beatles, just as Twist & Shout had closed Please Please Me. Money had been featured in their shows since the Hamburg days, and they had converted it into a raunchy rocker song. The regular visitor to BDJ's Cellar immediately notices something odd about Money: it has centered vocals in the stereo (Album) mix ! In fact. It is the only track on Please Please Me and With The Beatles with the vocals recorded in the centre. Remembering that it was Martin's strategy (using a 2-track tape machine....) to record the isntruments on one track, and the vocals on the other, it is clearly impossible to centre the vocals and maintain a stereo image ! How did this enigma arise ? The soundscape of the original Money (by Barrett Strong) is dominated by the piano part. Lewisohn reports that George Martin played piano during the Beatles session, and spent a huge amount of time on recording and mixing his piano part for Money (probably without Beatles being present....). I suppose Martin was also lured to the piano by the track that they recorded just prior to Money: You Really Got A Hold On Me. Here, the piano adds some colour, but on Money Martin verges on overdoing it (in my view...). It is still OK im the mono mix, but the stereo mix features the piano part even more prominently. Listening closely to the stereo mix of Money, we can figure out what Martin did: the left channel is a mono mix of 'Beatles' instruments (no piano) with vocals, and the right channel is a mono mix of Martin's piano with the same vocals. Since the same vocals are recorded left and right, they appear centred. Still, the 'piano' track sounds a bit empty; even more importantly, it is doubtful if the Beatles actually wanted a piano part in this track. They cetainly gave it a blistering live preformance without piano ! Therefore, we remixed Money in such a way that the piano drops out; it gains in pure sound and rough rock power, while maintaining a stereo image.

She's Leaving Home is one the few songs of the later Beatles albums where Lennon contributes to a McCartney song. Standing out by Mike Leander's string quartet arrangement, it maintains its unique posiotion in modern pop/rock. Lewisohn mentions that 2 extra bars of cello (after each Bye-Bye)were edited out of the final release (on Sgt Pepper). This was done at the remix stage, indicating that the complete song (including vocals) was recorded including these cello parts. Recently, the original 4-track recording surfaced, revealing the extra cello parts. Here's the world premiere of the Original She's Leaving Home: New stero remix, now inclduing the original cello parts.

Walking past Dodge Hall, the former business school, Professor Dolkart points out Lewisohn Hall, designed by architect Arnold Bruner in the style that Charles McKim had established for the campus.