Podcasts about Misirlou

"I Do Do Do Like You" - Bing Crosby; "My Heart Is a Hobo" - Bing Crosby; "Chi-Baba Chi-Baba" Connee Boswell; "Keep on Smiling" - Fred Allen & Bing Crosby; "Misirlou" - Skitch Henderson; "I Want to Thank Your Folks" - Bing Crosby;

"MixTape 114 Classic Oldies Favorites" TRACK 1 AUDIO TITLE "Stand By Me" PERFORMER "Ben E. King" INDEX 01 00:00:00 TRACK 2 AUDIO TITLE "The Sound of Silence - Acoustic Version" PERFORMER "Simon & Garfunkel" INDEX 01 02:46:70 TRACK 3 AUDIO TITLE "All I Have to Do Is Dream" PERFORMER "The Everly Brothers" INDEX 01 05:31:35 TRACK 4 AUDIO TITLE "All You Need Is Love - Remastered 2009" PERFORMER "The Beatles" INDEX 01 07:41:11 TRACK 5 AUDIO TITLE "Ring of Fire" PERFORMER "Johnny Cash" INDEX 01 10:36:31 TRACK 6 AUDIO TITLE "Suspicious Minds" PERFORMER "Elvis Presley" INDEX 01 13:00:26 TRACK 7 AUDIO TITLE "Sugar, Sugar" PERFORMER "The Archies" INDEX 01 17:01:33 TRACK 8 AUDIO TITLE "Travelin' Man - Remastered" PERFORMER "Ricky Nelson" INDEX 01 19:36:73 TRACK 9 AUDIO TITLE "Splish Splash" PERFORMER "Bobby Darin" INDEX 01 21:52:10 TRACK 10 AUDIO TITLE "Do You Love Me - Mono Single" PERFORMER "The Contours" INDEX 01 23:49:50 TRACK 11 AUDIO TITLE "Runaway" PERFORMER "Del Shannon" INDEX 01 26:21:04 TRACK 12 AUDIO TITLE "Johnny B. Goode" PERFORMER "Chuck Berry" INDEX 01 28:23:33 TRACK 13 AUDIO TITLE "Tutti Frutti" PERFORMER "Little Richard" INDEX 01 30:49:36 TRACK 14 AUDIO TITLE "I Walk The Line - Single Version" PERFORMER "Johnny Cash, The Tennessee Two" INDEX 01 33:06:73 TRACK 15 AUDIO TITLE "Only the Lonely" PERFORMER "Roy Orbison" INDEX 01 35:20:16 TRACK 16 AUDIO TITLE "Dream Lover" PERFORMER "Bobby Darin" INDEX 01 37:35:34 TRACK 17 AUDIO TITLE "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" PERFORMER "The Shirelles" INDEX 01 39:53:17 TRACK 18 AUDIO TITLE "Brown Eyed Girl" PERFORMER "Van Morrison" INDEX 01 42:17:71 TRACK 19 AUDIO TITLE "You Never Can Tell" PERFORMER "Chuck Berry" INDEX 01 44:58:04 TRACK 20 AUDIO TITLE "I'm a Believer - 2006 Remaster" PERFORMER "The Monkees" INDEX 01 47:27:06 TRACK 21 AUDIO TITLE "Runaround Sue" PERFORMER "Dion" INDEX 01 49:57:73 TRACK 22 AUDIO TITLE "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" PERFORMER "Nancy Sinatra" INDEX 01 52:11:36 TRACK 23 AUDIO TITLE "Don't Be Cruel" PERFORMER "Elvis Presley" INDEX 01 54:34:24 TRACK 24 AUDIO TITLE "Bye Bye Love" PERFORMER "The Everly Brothers" INDEX 01 56:26:43 TRACK 25 AUDIO TITLE "Misirlou" PERFORMER "Dick Dale" INDEX 01 58:20:52 TRACK 26 AUDIO TITLE "Then He Kissed Me" PERFORMER "The Crystals" INDEX 01 60:24:66 TRACK 27 AUDIO TITLE "(What A) Wonderful World" PERFORMER "Sam Cooke" INDEX 01 62:45:16 TRACK 28 AUDIO TITLE "Do Wah Diddy Diddy - 2007 Remaster" PERFORMER "Manfred Mann" INDEX 01 64:44:71 TRACK 29 AUDIO TITLE "Be My Baby" PERFORMER "The Ronettes" INDEX 01 67:02:23 TRACK 30 AUDIO TITLE "Mambo Italiano (with The Mellomen) - 78rpm Version" PERFORMER "Rosemary Clooney, The Mellomen" INDEX 01 69:23:33 TRACK 31 AUDIO TITLE "Let's Twist Again" PERFORMER "Chubby Checker" INDEX 01 71:23:31 TRACK 32 AUDIO TITLE "Wipe Out - Hit Version / Extended Ending" PERFORMER "The Surfaris" INDEX 01 73:36:28 TRACK 33 AUDIO TITLE "Great Balls Of Fire" PERFORMER "Jerry Lee Lewis" INDEX 01 75:32:13 TRACK 34 AUDIO TITLE "Think" PERFORMER "Aretha Franklin" INDEX 01 77:16:50 TRACK 35 AUDIO TITLE "California Dreamin' - Single Version" PERFORMER "The Mamas & The Papas" INDEX 01 79:20:31 TRACK 36 AUDIO TITLE "Mrs. Robinson - From "The Graduate" Soundtrack" PERFORMER "Simon & Garfunkel" INDEX 01 81:42:59 TRACK 37 AUDIO TITLE "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" PERFORMER "The Animals" INDEX 01 85:02:61 TRACK 38 AUDIO TITLE "Oh, Pretty Woman" PERFORMER "Roy Orbison" INDEX 01 87:09:29 TRACK 39 AUDIO TITLE "Always On My Mind" PERFORMER "Elvis Presley" INDEX 01 89:59:40 TRACK 40 AUDIO TITLE "I Got You Babe" PERFORMER "Sonny & Cher" INDEX 01 93:19:73

Programa en directo desde La Vía Láctea, histórico enclave del madrileño barrio de Malasaña. Charlamos con Andrés Herrera “Pájaro” y el guitarrista Raúl Fernández sobre la trayectoria del músico sevillano recogida en la biografía “Pájaro; de Santa Leone al Gran Poder” (66 RPM Edicions). El autor del libro, Alfred Crespo, y el fotógrafo Alberto García-Alix, intervienen como invitados. En el tramo final disfrutamos de una deliciosa actuación acústica a dos guitarras bajo la atenta mirada de esas paredes con tanta historia. Playlist; PÁJARO “Santa Leone” PÁJARO “Colegios abandonados” PÁJARO “Perchè” PÁJARO “Viene con mei” PÁJARO “El pudridero” PÁJARO “Guarda che Luna” PÁJARO “Las criaturas II” (directo en El Sótano) PÁJARO “Lagrimas de plata” (directo en El Sótano) PÁJARO “Danza del fuego / Misirlou” (directo en El Sótano) PÁJARO “A galopar” (directo en El Sótano)Escuchar audio

Pulp Fiction se estrenó en cines el 14 de octubre de 1994. La película que catapultó a Tarantino a la fama ha acabado convertida en una pieza de la cultura pop. Su exitosa banda sonora fue confeccionada como una combinación de oscuras canciones del pasado junto a otras piezas bien conocidas del surf, soul, pop, country o rock’n’roll.Playlist;(sintonía) DICK DALE and THE DELTONES “Misirlou”KOOL and THE GANG “Jungle boogie”AL GREEN “Let’s stay together”DUSTY SPRINGFIELD “Son of a preacher man”THE TORNADOES “Bustin’ surfboards”THE LIVELY ONES “Surf rider”CHUCK BERRY “You never can tell”URGE OVERKILL “Girl you’ll be a woman son”RICKY NELSON “Lonesome town”RICKY NELSON “Waitin’ in school”WOODY THORNE “Teenagers in love”THE CENTURIANS “Bullwinkle part II”THE ROBINS “Since I first met you”MARIA McKEE “If love is a red dress (hang me in rags)”THE REVELS “Comanche”THE STATLER BROTHERS “Flowers on the wall”LINK WRAY “Ace of spades”Escuchar audio

On the October 14 edition of the Music History Today podcast, Pearl Jam breaks a record, JoJo finally gets to release a record, & Pulp Fiction breathes life into older music. Also, happy birthday to Usher. For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday On this date: * In 1906, legendary entertainer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson was not allowed to play for the Rutgers University football team because their opponents that day, Washington and Lee University, refused to play against a team that had a black person on it. * In 1939, music company BMI started operations. * In 1954, the musical movie White Christmas premiered. * In 1964, Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones married his wife Shirley Shepherd. * In 1966, Grace Slick first appeared with Jefferson Airplane. * In 1968, the Beatles finished work on the White Album. * In 1971, John Lennon & Yoko Ono appeared on the Dick Cavett Show. * In 1994, the movie Pulp Fiction premiered. From a musical standpoint, the movie helped revive interest in Dick Dale's music (he did the song Misirlou: the song with the crazy surf guitar & the screaming in the beginning of it). It also sparked interest in the early Kool & the Gang funk classic Jungle Boogie & Link Wray's classic Rumble. * In 2000, Pearl Jam broke a record on Billboard's albums chart when 5 of their released live albums from their European tour hit the chart in the same week. * In 2006, Rascal Flatts' opening act Eric Church was kicked off the tour after he repeatedly played over his allotted opening slot time. Apparently, that was the last straw with Rascal Flatts. Eric's replacement was a hotshot country newcomer at the time: Taylor Swift. * In 2006, singer Melina Leon married her husband Ruy Fernando Delgado. * In 2014, singer Kesha started her lawsuit against producer Dr. Luke in order to be released from her contract with him. * In 2017, country singer Kacey Musgraves married singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly. * In 2018, Steppenwolf performed in Baxter Springs, Kansas, which was their final show. * In 2023, Madonna started her Celebration tour, after having to delay it to deal with a bacterial infection which sent her to the hospital. In the world of classical music: * In 1924, the opera Die Gluckliche Hand premiered. * In 1956, the overture Robert Browning by Charles Ives premiered. In the world of theater: * In 1930, the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy premiered on Broadway & made stars out of Ginger Rogers & especially Ethel Merman. * In 1961, the Frank Loesser musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying premiered on Broadway. In award ceremonies that were held on this date: * In 1970, Merle Haggard won at the Country Music Association awards. * In 1974, Charlie Rich won at the Country Music Association awards. * In 1985, Ricky Skaggs won at the Country Music Association awards. In 2009, opera superstar Placido Domingo received the first Birgit Nilsson million dollar prize. In 2020, Post Malone & Billie Eilish were the big winners at the Billboard Music Awards. In 2022, Jefferson Airplane received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support

Rebroadcast - original aired for May 31, 2020   Click here for Notes Genesis 2:4b-7, 15-17; 3:1-8 Opening music: Misirlou, One Man 90 Instruments by Joe Penna/MysteryGuitarMan at MIM

We pay our respects to one of our biggest influences and one of the raddest, most hardworking dudes to ever shred the globe. You'll truly be missed. RIP Uncle Pat. A bunch of new ones, along with some skate- and surf-flavored tunes. Hit us up at brothersgrimpunk@gmail.com and download our music on our Bandcamp page.472 Playlist:RIP Uncle McPat...NYNY D-BEAT IN HELL 0:47 ARSON MÁS NOIZEDog Valley UK Institution 1:36 Gïlt Butchered Gilt TN SUFFOCATE 1:37 SCRUTINIZE DEMO Tokyo Is It Punk Enough? 2:02 Mea Culpa Is It Punk?Surfin After Death (bkgrd) 2:52 The Phantom Dragsters Surfin After Death 7in Farewell (RIP) 1:44 BGP Unreleased Single Drain Your Pool 0:44 Curb Creeps Skate n Thrash McShred 2:48 McRad Absence of Sanity Worthless Sunday Urgh 0:55 Surf Nazis must die Anti-Everything surf combat 1:17 Naked Raygun Demo 1983 Sewer Surf 0:43 PISS PANTS SHREDDER DICK You Can't Surf 1:22 JFA Speed of Sound_DC-Jam Recs Surf Lake City 0:35 Harvey Keitel CITY OF DIS COMP Surf And Destroy 0:45 HHH Urban Decline 80's Hardcore Mixtape Vol.1 Surf Fucked Me Up 1:07 BRONxxx POSER NOW POSER FOREVER Surf Scum 1:37 The Minor Inconveniences Acid Scum & Other Ass-Bangin' Hits Wipeout 1:01 Stupids Thrasher Skate Rock Vol. 5 Three Little Surfin' Birds 2:11 Bobby Ramone Rocket to Kingston Penetration (bkgrd) 3:26 Casey Cash Iron Lung Haunted 1:50 S.H.I.T. For A Better World- Iron Lung Recs GA LAB RATS 1:03 FUNERAL MESS FOLLOWING THE APOCALYPSE MX Ouroboros 1:15 Traición Cadena Perpetua SoCa Fakie 1:06 ANIMATED VIOLENCE 2024 Tour Tape RVA NYC Leave Behind 2:13 Shooting Pain Demo 2024 Brainrotter Japan Bear the Guilt 0:40 Kagami Kagami FL Divided By Death 1:04 The Troops Your Funeral Pray for Surf 2:21 The D.I.'s Thrasher Skate Rock Vol. 5 Misirlou (bkgrd) 2:26 Todd Jansen SurfGuitar101.com Brainrotter Broken World 1:28 Motive Three Song Promo Brainrotter Total Arse War 1:41 Skitter Man Bites Dog E.P. 1753 Recs L.A. Execution Act 1:45 Guillotine Guillotine - Demo 1753 A Scythe Above 1:03 Flesh Trade Flesh Trade - Choking in Blood Riverside euthanized 1:11 puppyplaytime dysml split Young 'Til I Die 2:09 7 Seconds Old School 12" Scooby Chase (bkgrd) 3:26 The Sandudes 3-2-2005 Practice Finland Cry Days 2:36 Troubles demo #2 Other ways to hear BGP:Archive.org#472 on ArchiveApple PodcastsYouTube PodcastsPunk Rock Demonstration - Wednesdays 7 p.m. PSTRipper Radio - Fridays & Saturdays 7 p.m. PSTContact BGP:brothersgrimpunk@gmail.com@Punkbot138 on Instagram@BrosGrimPunk on XMore Music:Bandcamp - Follow us and download our albums: Brothers Grim Punk, Fight Music, and more!YouTube - tons of our punk playlists, from Anarchy to Zombies!

La primavera me inspira, me trae a la memoria melodías cálidas, sensuales, de cielos y mar azules. Oído: The Manhattan Transfer con Djavan y Stan Getz; Towa Teo con Bebel Gilberto, Bossacucanova con Adriana Calcanhotto; Dave Grusin y Lee Ritenour que ya van con nuevo disco brasileño tras 50 años de relación artística; Rosa Passos, Astrid Gilberto, Kenny Rankin, Pedro Ruy Blas…DISCO 1 LAURINDO ALMEIDA & THE BOSSA NOVA ALL STARS Misirlou DISCO 2 THE MANHATTAN TRANSFER & DJAVAN Capim DISCO 3 CARWYN ELLIS ArpoadorDISCO 4 KAREN SOUZA Every Breath You Take  DISCO 5 PAULINHO MOSKA Nos Braços de Isabel DISCO 6 TOWA TEI & BEBEL GILBERTO Private Eyes DISCO 7 PEDRO RUY BLAS Me He Debido Morir DISCO 8 DANIELLE BRISEBOIS My Only DISCO 9 CIBELLE Sereia, Amor D’agua DISCO 10 ASTRUD GILBERTO The Face I Love DISCO 11 BOSSACUCANOVA & ADRIANA CALCANHOTTO Previsâo DISCO 12 DAVE GRUSIN LEE RITTENOUR IVAN LINS Before It’s Too Late (Antes Que Seja Tarde)DISCO 13 ROSA PASSOS Eu E Me Coraçao DISCO 14 KENNY RANKIN Birembau Escuchar audio

Eliott Janz had one heck of a mentor. That's because his mentor was the legendary Dick Dale. Dick didn't just teach Eliott his picking method and his music, he taught Eliott about life. Due to a chance meeting between Dick and Eliott's dad, Trevor, at an aviation show in the early 90s, Eliott got to know and befriend one of the greatest guitarists in history. Now Eliott honors both men with his new single, "Flight," and six-plus years of living clean."Scalped" performed by Eliott Janzwritten by Dick DaleOriginal recording ℗ 1994 Craft Recordings.℗ 2023 Eliott Janz. Used with permission of Eliott Janz."Flight (Surf Guitar Remix)" written and performed by Eliott Janz℗ 2024 Eliott Janz. Used with permission of Eliott Janz.Support the showSupport the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Producer: Rob MarnochaRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie AngelThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All rights reserved.

Electric Violinist Asher Laub joins Jenn Tully to talk about his music and the unique process (and sleepness nights) involved in its creation.https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6xqP9SeudjeJqqMk84eZWu?si=d6155b83b60346fc1. Neon Dreams2. Dreaming Awake3. Subtle Pulse4. Misirlou

This week, we explore the ebbs and flows of life with our guest, Ben Roorda, a husband, father, engineer, entrepreneur, and saltwater addict. How being brought up in a conservative evangelical home limited his exposure to music outside the church. How watching 'Under the Sea' from The Little Mermaid ignited his saltwater addiction and the realization that he could leave the life he knew, like Ariel did, 'Brown Eyed Girl' reminds him of his wife, and 'Three Little Birds' by Bob Marley serves as a life preserver during difficult times. We ride the waves of Ben's thrilling entrepreneurial and surfing adventures, with Jimmy Buffett and Alan Jackson's ‘Boats to Build' and Dick Dale's iconic ‘Misirlou'. Ben's story is a testament to the power of pursuing one's passions. You don't want to miss this one! Pull up a folding chair, grab a drink, find a spot around the fire, and enjoy the conversation and community.  Follow your hosts David, Raza, and Carolina every week as they embark on an epic adventure to find the songs that are stuck to us like audible tattoos to tell the story of who we are and where we've been. It's a life story told through 6 songs.WHO WE AREDAVID: Creator & Host @ALifeinSixSongsDrummer | Educator | Philosopher | Combat Veteran | PTSD Advocate CAROLINA: Co-Host @ALifeinSixSongsStoryteller | Head of Learning & Development Services @ReadySetRAZA: Co-Host @ALifeinSixSongsGuitarist | Lawyer | Solo Project @Solamente.BandRESOURCES & LINKSCheck out A Life in Six Songs playlist on Apple Music and SpotifyFollow  on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTubeSubscribe to our YouTube channel Are you a veteran who is struggling?  Get help here:Call the Veterans Crisis Line: Dial 988, then press 1.Text the Veterans Crisis Line: Send your message to 838255 Visit the Veterans Crisis Line website to chat virtuallyPTSD Online QuestionnaireNational Center for PTSDSupport the showCopyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit or educational use tips the balance in favor of fair use. The original work played in this video has been significantly transformed for the purpose of commentary, criticism, and education.

Los dos EP’s “Rockin’ Rollin’” (Sleazy Records) rescatan las grabaciones de Dick Dale antes de coronarse como el rey de la guitarra surf. Canciones de rock’n’roll y rockabilly que seguían los parámetros del momento, la antesala musical que precedió al comienzo de la leyenda. Playlist; (sintonía) DICK DALE and HIS DELTONES “Let’s go trippin’” (1961) DICK DALE “Ooh-whee-Marie” (Rockin’ Rollin’ Vol.1) DICK DALE “St Louis Blues” (Rockin’ Rollin’ Vol.1) DICK DALE “Jessie Pearl” (Rockin’ Rollin’ Vol.1) DICK DALE “Stop teasing” (Rockin’ Rollin’ Vol.2) DICK DALE “The fairest of them all” (Rockin’ Rollin’ Vol.2) DICK DALE and HIS DELTONES “Misirlou” (1962) LP and HIS DIRTY WHITE BUCKS “Up and go” (Black smoke and blue tears, 2023) THE COUNTRY SIDE OF HARMONICA SAM “Tell her” (single, 2023) JAKE LA BOTZ and SMOKESTACK LIGHTNIN’ “Never been wrong (about loving you)” (single, 2023) AISHA KHAN and THE RAJAHS “Good morning Midnight” (single, 2023) LOLA LOLA “Dropped me” (Double featured Vol. 5, 2023) MARCEL BONTEMPI “Mummy walk” (Double featured Vol. 5, 2023) THE JANCEE PORNICK CASINO “Somebody to love” (Demolición, 2021) BARRENCE WHITFIELD and THE SAVAGES “I’m ready, I’m ready” (Gloria, 2023) Versión y Original; BEAU DOLLAR “I’m ready, I’m ready (I got me some soul)” (1969) NICK WATERHOUSE “Plan for leaving” (The fooler, 2023) Escuchar audio

Welcome to this week's Indie Artist Music Hustle with Blonde Intelligence. I am your host Ms. Roni where I always seek to give you exquisite cranial repertoire. This week I had the pleasure of hearing a dope collaboration between Asher Laub, Ginny Luke, and JohannesGritschancher.  The song is titled, Misirlou which is Greek with a Rock twist. I could definitely see Misirlou in a major motion picture soundtrack such as; The Scorpion King or even Cleopatra. Asher speaks about Misirlou's conception and the collaboration process. Follow him @AsherLaub and follow me @rroneice or @Ms.Blonde.Intelligence_Roni. #Misirlou@GinnyLike #GinnyLuke #AsherLaub @JohannesGritschacher #JohannesGritschacherDirect Link to Podcast: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/https://chrt.fm/track/GF3B5B/https://pdcn.co/e/www.buzzsprout.com/1172687/13422169-asher-laub-talks-his-latest-project-misirlou-and-collaborating-with-ginny-luke-and-johannes-gritschacher.mp3?download=trueLink to Misirlou by Asher Laub: https://youtu.be/S9inmhAOhw8Don't forget to purchase your Indie Artist Music Hustle Merch at www.Blonde-Intelligence.comSupport the showhttps://www.Blonde-Intelligence.comhttps://youtube.com/c/IndieArtistMusicHustlewithBlondeIntelligencehttps://chrt.fm/track/GF3B5B/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/feeds.myhost.com/my.mp3

Esse é o AutoRadio Podcast. Radio Auto #13 - Instrumental Powered by Wisdomtech http://www.wisdomtech.com.br

Become a supporter of this podcast by going to www.patreon.com/howisthismovieIn this captivating episode, we delve into the world of one of cinema's most iconic and influential films, "Pulp Fiction." Join us as we unravel the narrative intricacies, analyze the distinctive characters, and uncover the layers of brilliance that make Quentin Tarantino's magnum opus a timeless cinematic masterpiece.We kick off the episode by setting the stage for the cultural impact of "Pulp Fiction." Released in 1994, the film revolutionized independent cinema and redefined the crime genre. We discuss how Tarantino's bold storytelling style, non-linear narrative structure, and sharp dialogue captivated audiences and critics alike, cementing its place in cinematic history.Next, we explore the film's rich ensemble cast, including John Travolta as Vincent Vega, Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winnfield, Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace, and Bruce Willis as Butch Coolidge. We examine their unforgettable performances and how they brought these complex characters to life, discussing the lasting impact these roles had on their careers.As we delve deeper into the narrative, we examine the film's interconnected stories, interwoven with dark humor, pop culture references, and profound philosophical discussions. We unravel the iconic scenes that have become etched in our collective memory, such as the "Royale with Cheese" conversation, the adrenaline-pumping dance scene, and the intense encounter with the Gimp.Furthermore, we explore the film's thematic depth, discussing Tarantino's exploration of violence, redemption, and the blurred lines between good and evil. We analyze the iconic dialogue and its significance in shaping the film's themes, while also addressing the film's cultural impact and influence on subsequent movies and filmmakers.To gain a deeper understanding of the film's creation, we examine Tarantino's visionary direction, his meticulous attention to detail, and his use of music to enhance the storytelling. From the catchy surf rock of Dick Dale's "Misirlou" to the soulful melodies of Al Green, we uncover the film's unforgettable soundtrack that perfectly complements its narrative.Finally, we conclude the episode by reflecting on the lasting legacy of "Pulp Fiction" and its continued relevance in popular culture. We discuss how the film has inspired countless filmmakers, spawned a cult following, and continues to captivate new generations of cinephiles.Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform by going to https://linktr.ee/DanaBucklerShowJoin our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/danabucklershowJoin Our Patreon for early access to all episodes, plus a new exclusive podcast, go to Patreon.com/howisthismovieEmail the show TheDanaBucklerShow@gmail.com For one time donations go to https://www.paypal.me/DanaBuckler11twitter.com/Danabucklershow

Damos acceso a nuestra playa secreta y cavamos hondo en los años dorados del surf instrumental. Rescatamos delicatessens que en su momento pasaron desapercibidas para años después convertirse en el mejor retrato de una de las primeras escenas juveniles y amateurs que dio el rocknroll, la antesala en la que se curtieron muchos grupos del garaje. Playlist; (sintonía) THE CHEVELLS “Let there be surf” THE PHANTOMS “XL 3” THE VISTAS “Moon relay” THE HUSTLERS “Inertia” JIM MESSINA and HIS JESTERS “Strange man” THE BEL-AIRS “Baggies” NATION ROCKIN SHADOWS “Anesthesia” NEWPORT NOMADS “Blue mallard” THE WOODCHUCKS “Bangkok cock fight” ROEMANS “Misirlou” GESTICS “Rockin’ fury” THE RUNABOUTS “Surfer’s fright” TOADS “Morpheous” THE SHONDELLS “Thunderbolt” THE KAN DELLS “Cloudburst THE DECADES “Strange worlds” THE MOTIVATIONS “The birds” DAVIEL ALLAN and THE ARROWS “The unknown rider” THE FUGITIVES “A fugitive” THE VELVETONES “Mister X” THE AVENGERS VI “Time bomb” THE TORQUETTS “Side-swiped”          Escuchar audio

I dette afsnit af 'Rockhistorier' dedikerer Henrik Queitsch og Klaus Lynggaard intet mindre end to timer og tyve minutter til 'The Beach Boys'. Vi skal derfor igennem en playliste med hele 30 numre, der blandt andet indeholder ”Surfin' USA”, ”Kiss me baby” og julenummeret ”Little Saint Nick”.Playliste: 1. "Surfin'" (1961) 2. "Surfin' Safari" (1962)3. "Surfin' USA" (1963)4. "Lonely Sea" (1963)5. "Misirlou" (1963)6. "Surfer Girl" (1963)7. "Little Deuce Coupe" (1963)8. "In My Room" (1963)9. "A Young Man Is Gone" (1963)10. "Little Saint Nick" - Single Version (1963)11. "Fun, Fun, Fun" (1964)12. "Don't Worry Baby" (1964)13. "The Warmth of the Sun" (1964)14. "I Get Around" (1964)15. "Girls on the Beach" (1964)16. "All Summer Long" (1964)17. "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" (1964)18. "She Knows Me Too Well" (1965)19. "Please Let Me Wonder" (1965)20. "Kiss Me, Baby" (1965)21. "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965)22. "Let Him Run Wild" (1965)23. "California Girls" (1965)24. "Girl Don't Tell Me"  (1965)25. The Little Girl I Once Knew" (1965)26. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" (1966)27. "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (1966)28. "God Only Knows" (1966)29. "I Know There's an Answer" (1966)30. "Caroline, No" (1966)

durée : 00:06:49 - Urdin Euskal Herri Irratia euskaraz / Les chroniques en basque de France Bleu - Andoni Oilokiegi est un jeune musicien de Pasaia : son truc c'est de revisiter les classiques basques ou internationaux, en modifiant les mélodies

Cette semaine, Magic Bolide vous donne un cours de Surf ! Un peu d'insouciance dans ce monde perturbé avec une émission spéciale Surf Musique, la branche du rock la plus déjantée, la réplique du séisme rock'n'roll du milieu des années 50 mais délocalisée sur la côte californienne au début des années 60. Des branleurs magnifiques qui, plutôt, que de tout casser comme les loubards, choisissent de se rebeller en faisant la fête sur un rock instrumental aux thèmes exotiques noyés dans la reverb. Au programme quelques classiques avec bien sûr le roi de la Surf Music Dick Dale, le créateur fantasque de Misirlou. Les Beach Boys ne seront pas loin non plus, The Surfaries, mais aussi plus près de nous La Femme et en invité l'un des groupes phares de la scène surf française actuelle : The Wave Chargers.

"Any of you fucking pricks move and I'll execute every mother fucking last one of you!!!" - Honey Bunny. Misirlou from Dick Dale & His Del-Tones hits an is now forever etched in history. Immediately you know what you're watching. "Get busy living or get busy dying. That's goddamn right." the legendary voice of Morgan Freeman as Red. You can hear it and see Andy Dufrense standing in the rain with his arms raised above his head. "Life is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you gonna get." The park bench and Tom Hanks resonate in our memories. Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, & Forrest Gump are just the big 3 from 1994. This year in film gave us so much more though! Clerks, The Crow, Interview with a Vampire, Leon: The Professional, Speed, Ed Wood, Legends of the Fall, The Lion King, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Natural Born Killers and the list just goes on and on! While we think 1999 is the best year in film 1994 is a close second. Join us as we dive in and re-visit one of the absolute best years in film of all-time. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jafnpodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jafnpodcast/support

Ok, looters. Time to grab your Big Kahuna cheeseburger and Sprite, and chill in the couch with your friends while listening to the latest special episode of The Movie Loot. In this episode, we talk about Pulp Fiction's iconic scene between Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Brett (Frank Whaley). I assure you, this is a tasty podcast! Check it out.All movie clips (c) Miramax Pictures"Jungle Boogie" clip (c) Kool & the Gang and Mercury"The Number of the Beast" clip (c) Iron Maiden and EMI"Misirlou" clip (c) Dick Dale and the Del-Tones

ep 107 with our special guest Eliott Janz who joins us from Wisconsin in sharing our passion for recovery.  Surf guitar legend Dick Dale who is widely known for his song  Misirlou which was heard by many on  the Pulp Fiction Soundtrack was instrumental in Eliott Janz life.  From the age of 14 Eliott was taken under Dick Dale's wing  who never touched a drink or drug in his life and  taught him how to master the guitar. With over four years sober Eliott still hangs onto his mentors advice “Never drink, Never do drugs, Your body is a temple” .Shout out to some of the sober artists in our lives who continue to inspire us.NIKKI SIXX  -  Eddie Van Halen - Dick Dale Visit Eliott Janz on his website here

Émission du 25 Mai 2022 avec des olives et de la féta,- La vie dangereuse d'un touriste à Athènes (émeute grecque et austérité par Luigi *2018)- Le mythe décomplexé (adaptation de la BD de Karibou par Tyb et Le Frigo *2020 )- Ça passe mal à Patras (rencontre de Lilux)- Platon, Socrate et Simone (Karibou adapté *2020)- Faire parler des vestiges (derrière le marbre blanc par Tyb *2020)- Le Minotaure (Karibou adapté *2020)- Comme un pont entre l'Occident et l'Orient (histoire populaire du Rébétiko par Luigi)*rediffusionsMusique :Malik Djoudi – Belles sueursKlaus Johann Grobe – Les greksThe original Misirlou et celui de Pulp Fictionavec un extrait de la scène finale de « Zorba le grec » et son célèbre Sirtaki (en image également)

Maluma - Sobrio Dick Dale - Misirlou Al Hirt - Green Hornet Theme

This weeks podcast (#335 on Tuesday, March 22, 2022) with Tom Mangelson, Lisa Mangelson & Brian Liggett from The Swongos! We talk: beginnings of the band, Misirlou, patio gigs and more. Enjoy the conversation!

Esse é o AutoRadio Podcast. Radio Auto #05 - Verao Powered by Wisdomtech http://www.wisdomtech.com.br

ROYALE WITH CHEESE Much like our Reservoir Dogs episode, this is your one of many explicit warnings for this episode because we are covering Pulp Fiction. There's so many songs in the movie that it's another 2 parter. Part 1 covers: "Misirlou", "Jungle Boogie", "Let's Stay Together", "Bustin' Surfboards" and "Lonesome Town". Ben reluctantly gives his thoughts on the trailer for the new Toy Story movie, Dietrich declares banana and peanut butter as the best milkshake and Alex lists the benefits of piercings for... Follow us on Twitter: @TSFTMpod subscribe. Like, share and Please consider leaving us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes. It means a great deal to us and makes it easier for other potential listeners to find us: Apple Podcasts Want to support us further? You can do this on Patreon from £1 ($1.50) a month: https://Patreon.com/TSFTM or via our merch store: https://TeePublic.com/user/TSFTM Thank you! Timestamps: 00:02:04 - What Have We Been Watching 00:06:42 - History 00:08:30 - Movie Discussion 00:15:24 - Effect on Pop Culture 00:18:55 - Critical Reception 00:21:05 - Overall Soundtrack Discussion 00:22:47 - "Misirlou" Discussion 00:27:34 - "Jungle Boogie" Discussion 00:30:31 - "Let's Stay Together" Discussion 00:35:14 - "Bustin' Surfboards" Discussion 00:36:41 - "Lonesome Town" Discussion

El cantante y guitarrista Brian Setzer, líder de los Stray Cats, publica su nuevo disco en septiembre, así que comenzamos con el segundo single qjue tiene un sonido basado en el Misirlou de Dick Dale. Los veteranos Blues Traveler regresan con un disco de grandes versiones de clásicos, el primero de Big Mama Thornton, que hizo famoso Janis Joplin, y el segundo un éxito de Phish. Joe Bonamassa sigue añadiendo muescas a sus guitarras como la serbia Ana Popovic, cercana a su sonido. Otras dos mujeres, Dana Fuchs y Danielle Nicole nos ponen la vena tierna antes de volver al R&B más actual con Teresa James y sus Rhythm Tramps. La Altered Blues Band, desde Milwaukee, Wisconsin, nos presenta su sexto disco Holler If You Hear Me, con piezas compuestas casi todas por su guitarrista Jeff Schroedl, quien las escribió para explotar la poderosa voz y exuberante personalidad del cantante y front man, Jeff Taylor. Otra más del gran Johnny Tucker con Kid Ramos nos pone en disposición de escuchar soul con Los Lobos antes de cerrar con la canción que Christone “Kingfish” Ingram dedica a su fallecida madre, quien le ayudó para que él pudiera vender su alma al rockandroll. ¡Emocionante, Kingsfish!Brian Setzer, Smash Up On Highway OneBlues Traveler, Ball and ChainBlues Traveler, Funky BitchJoe Bonamassa, NotchesAna Popovic, You Got The LoveDana Fuchs, Love Lives OnDanielle Nicole, Cry No MoreTeresa James & The Rhythm Tramps, Takes One To Know OneAltered Five Blues Band, Where's My MoneyJon Strahl Band, Hey Yeah All RightJohnny Tucker Featuring Kid Ramos And The Allstars, All Night Long, All Night WrongLos Lobos, Never No MoreChristone “Kingfish” Ingram, Rock And Roll

WARNING: SPOILERS!!! This week, join host Aeric Azana for a casual birthday-edition of the podcast, featuring a SPOILER-FILLED review of The Suicide Squad! Plus this weeks Comics Countdown, the Geeksplained Mailbag, and more! Time Stamps: 00:00:42 Intro 00:02:17 The Suicide Squad SPOILER Review 00:41:45 Comics Countdown 00:59:03 Wrap-Up & Geeksplained Mailbag Follow us! Twitter: twitter.com/geeksplainedpod?lang=en Instagram: www.instagram.com/geeksplainedpod/?hl=en Send us your questions for the Geeksplained Mailbag! Email: Geeksplained@gmail.com Music Sampled: "Sayonara" by SAKEROCK "Misirlou" by Dick Dale & His Del-Tones "Ratism" by John Murphy

Bon jeudi! On continue notre succulente semaine! Aujourd’hui: Chuck imite moyennement le début de la toune Misirlou de Pulp Fiction, Camille trouve un autre excellent contexte pour nous rentrer dan’ gorge qu’elle aime le film Titanic, Mélanie nous parle de ses inspirations d’écriture de certains sujets qu’elle ose aller et également des des limites qu’elle se dote pour  protéger sa bulle d’intimité et Vanessa est désormais capable de se proclamer “une charrue” grâce au livre de Mélanie. Un bel épisode l’fun pour s’en aller tranquillement vers le weekend!   Mélanie: https://bit.ly/2SrMnhV Camille: https://bit.ly/2QMPuka Vanessa: https://bit.ly/2RGVg47 Chuck: http://bit.ly/2L45sBi Instagram: https://bit.ly/3pvUHZy Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lepetitbonheur   YouTube: http://bit.ly/2MRWgml iTunes (Merci infiniment pour les ★★★★★!): http://goo.gl/n1411W Google Play: https://bit.ly/31HIJlI Spotify: http://goo.gl/QrK6Tv Twitter: http://twitter.com/lepbonheur   Merci tellement de nous suivre!

Durée : 57:43 - LET'S DANCE by MISIR and LOU - ( Beats / Ragga / HipHop / Trip Hop / Groove ) MISIR and LOU dansent EN DIRECT avec érotisme comme des dératés amoureux du groove et du dancefloor ! Une révolution sans danse est une révolution inutile ! Un voyage sur le dancefloor dans les breaks ragga/soul/hiphop ! EN JOIE ! PLAYLIST : 1 Dick dale - Misirlou ( d&b remix ) / 2 L'entourloop feat sharra Mucci - Mucci mata / 3 Steinski vs Farsala - Fire / 4 Cypress hill & J capri - Pull up to mi bumper ( dj Maars edit ) / 5 Wax tailor - i had a woman / 6 Lovage - stroker ace / 7 Electric guest - american day / 8 Mild high club - Kokopeli / 9 Mndsgn - Wherever U R / 10 Clément Bazin - come to this / 11 Chrome sparks - Marijuana / 12 Princess Nokia - Tomboy / 13 Jewels infinite - Poison feat Jahnigga da baptist / 14 Azelia Banks - Nirvana / 15 Hippie sabotage - i robbed a bank / 16 Funkie boogie brothers - ready ok / 17 Dynamic syncopation - intro / 18 Madvillain - great day ( four tet remix ) / 19 Emmanuelle - Italove LINK : https://www.facebook.com/lepetitbazarelectro

¿Qué tiene que ver este famoso tema, que mucha gente asociará a 'Pulp Fiction' y a Tarantino, con Grecia? Pues que 'Misirlou', que en griego significa 'mujer egipcia', es una composición griega de 1920 aproximadamente, y que después llegó a Estados Unidos

Sintonía: "Atlantis" - Les Baxter El primer volumen de la colección "Ultra-Lounge", editada por Capitol Records en 1996 "Swamp Fire" - Martin Denny; "Moon Mist" - The Out-Islanders; "Caravan" - 80 Drums Around The World; "Hypnotique" - Martin Denny; "Alika" - Webley Edwards; "Misirlou" - Martin Denny; "Lust" - Bas Sheva; "Hana Maui" - Chick Floyd & His Orchestra; "Voodoo Dreams/Voodoo" - Les Baxter; "Jungle Madness" - Martin Denny; "Babalu" - Yma Sumac; "Simba" - Les Baxter; "The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish" - Martin Denny; "Bali Ha i" - Tak Shindo; "Pyramid Of The Sun" - Les Baxter; "Quiet Village" - Martin Denny; "Wimoweh" - Yma Sumac Escuchar audio

Í Víðsjá í dag verður meðal annars rætt við Ara Eldjárn, uppistandara og handritshöfund, sem hlýtur Íslensku bjartsýnisverðlaunin fyrir árið 2020, Ari tók við verðlaununum á Bessastöðum um helgina. Rætt verður við Hannes Helgason og Jóhannes Birgi Pálmason, liðsmenn í sveitinni Dalalæðu, um nýja plötu sveitarinnar Dysjar. Einnig verður farið í tónlistarferðalag með Arnljóti Sigurðssyni undir yfirskriftinni Heyrandi nær, í dag mun Arnljótur rýna í sögu lagsins víðfræga Misirlou, en saga þess nær um það bil hundrað ár aftur í tímann og margt forvitnilegt sem kemur upp úr dúrnum við söguskoðunina. Umsjón: Guðni Tómasson og Eiríkur Guðmundsson

Í Víðsjá í dag verður meðal annars rætt við Ara Eldjárn, uppistandara og handritshöfund, sem hlýtur Íslensku bjartsýnisverðlaunin fyrir árið 2020, Ari tók við verðlaununum á Bessastöðum um helgina. Rætt verður við Hannes Helgason og Jóhannes Birgi Pálmason, liðsmenn í sveitinni Dalalæðu, um nýja plötu sveitarinnar Dysjar. Einnig verður farið í tónlistarferðalag með Arnljóti Sigurðssyni undir yfirskriftinni Heyrandi nær, í dag mun Arnljótur rýna í sögu lagsins víðfræga Misirlou, en saga þess nær um það bil hundrað ár aftur í tímann og margt forvitnilegt sem kemur upp úr dúrnum við söguskoðunina. Umsjón: Guðni Tómasson og Eiríkur Guðmundsson

Í Víðsjá í dag verður meðal annars rætt við Benedikt Hjartarson bókmenntafræðing sem þýtt hefur skáldsöguna Minnisblöð Malte Laurids Brigge eftir Rainer Maria Rilke. Bókin kom fyrst út árið 1910 og var eina skáldsaga Rilkes, sem var eitt af fremstu ljóðskáldum Evrópu á 20. öld. Benedikt segir frá þessari merku bók og þessu merka skáldi í Víðsjá í dag en þýðing hans er komin út í Lærdómsritaröð Hins íslenska bókmenntafélags. Einnig verður farið í tónlistarferðalag með Arnljóti Sigurðssyni undir yfirskriftinni Heyrandi nær, í dag mun Arnljótur rýna í sögu lagsins víðfræga Misirlou, en saga þess nær eitthvað um hundrað ár aftur í tímann og margt forvitnilegt sem kemur upp úr dúrnum við söguskoðunina. Og farið verður í jólagjafaleiðangur í Marshallhúsið úti á Granda en Nýlistasafnið heldur nú í annað sinn bazar í aðdraganda jóla þar sem hægt er að finna myndlist eftir félaga safnsins Umsjón: Eiríkur Guðmundsson

Í Víðsjá í dag verður meðal annars rætt við Benedikt Hjartarson bókmenntafræðing sem þýtt hefur skáldsöguna Minnisblöð Malte Laurids Brigge eftir Rainer Maria Rilke. Bókin kom fyrst út árið 1910 og var eina skáldsaga Rilkes, sem var eitt af fremstu ljóðskáldum Evrópu á 20. öld. Benedikt segir frá þessari merku bók og þessu merka skáldi í Víðsjá í dag en þýðing hans er komin út í Lærdómsritaröð Hins íslenska bókmenntafélags. Einnig verður farið í tónlistarferðalag með Arnljóti Sigurðssyni undir yfirskriftinni Heyrandi nær, í dag mun Arnljótur rýna í sögu lagsins víðfræga Misirlou, en saga þess nær eitthvað um hundrað ár aftur í tímann og margt forvitnilegt sem kemur upp úr dúrnum við söguskoðunina. Og farið verður í jólagjafaleiðangur í Marshallhúsið úti á Granda en Nýlistasafnið heldur nú í annað sinn bazar í aðdraganda jóla þar sem hægt er að finna myndlist eftir félaga safnsins Umsjón: Eiríkur Guðmundsson

Episode 2!  They said it wouldn't last but we are back to talk about the movie that's poster graced the walls of every college dorm and put Quentin Tarantino on the map: Pulp Fiction!  So many great characters to recast, let's try not to fuck it up *cue Misirlou*

Stray Cats "Rocked This town : From LA To London" : - "Runaway Boys" - "Too Hip, Gotta Go" - "Double Talking Baby" - "Three Time's A Charm" - "Stray Cat Strut" - "Mean Pickin' Mama" - "Gene & Eddie" - "Cry Baby" - "I Want Stand In Your Way" - "Cannonball Rag" - "Misirlou" - "When Nothing's Going Right" - "(She's Sexy) + 17" - "Fishnet Stockings" - "Rock This Town" Escuchar audio

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

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

Fridaycast 152 – O tema principal começa aos (3:10) Bancada: Carlos Anibale, Cris Bertold, Michel Gomes e Renato Crozatti Links Fridaycast: Instagram: instagram.com/fridaycast Twitter: twitter.com/fridaycastbr Facebook: facebook.com/fridaycast Participe do “Eu Tava Ali” e mande sua mensagem para o e-mail fridaycast@fridaycast.com.br ou por nossas redes sociais! Apoio: Shogun Livraria - shogunlivraria.com.br Edição: AudioTune - audiotune.com.br Arte de capa: Carlos Anibale - behance.net/anibalecarlos Hoje vamos falar sobre músicas que apareceram em filmes e que ficaram muito ligadas a eles. Pois é, nada de trilha sonora incidental como as orquestras de Star Wars, Senhor dos Anéis ou O Poderoso Chefão, mas sim, faixas compostas por outros artistas com bandas, cantores e etc, muitas delas lançadas em discos antes mesmo do lançamento dos respectivos filmes. Lembra da cena de abertura Pulp Fiction com aquela surf music? Foi lançada muitas décadas antes por Dick Dale, mas hoje está muito mais associada ao filme de Quentin Tarantino, afinal, ao ouvir os riffs e solos de guitarras dessa música, é mais provável que você se refere a ela como "aquela música do Pulp Fiction" do que seu o nome verdadeiro: Misirlou. Cada participante separou três faixas de três filmes diferentes e é delas que vamos falar aqui hoje!

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and the group’s roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and the group’s roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. 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. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It’s difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-three years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I’ve checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group’s early years. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher. The Beach Boys: Inception and Creation is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe’s Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins’ The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert’s Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson’s music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys’ Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. The Surfin’ Safari album is now in the public domain, and so can be found cheaply, but the best version to get is still the twofer CD with the Surfin’ USA album. *But*, those two albums are fairly weak, the Beach Boys in their early years were not really an album band, and you will want to investigate them further. I would recommend, rather than the two albums linked above, starting with this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, there are going to be two podcast episodes. This one, episode ninety-nine, will be a normal-length episode, or maybe slightly longer than normal, and episode one hundred, which will follow straight after it, will be a super-length one that’s at least three times the normal length of one of these podcasts. I’m releasing them together, because the two episodes really do go together. We’ve talked recently about how we’re getting into the sixties of the popular imagination, and those 1960s began, specifically, in October 1962. That was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the world almost end. It was the month that James Brown released Live at the Apollo — an album we’ll talk about in a few weeks’ time. And if you want one specific date that the 1960s started, it was October the fifth, 1962. On that date, a film came out that we mentioned last week — Doctor No, the first ever James Bond film. It was also the date that two records were released on EMI in Britain. One was a new release by a British band, the other a record originally released a few months earlier in the USA, by an American band. Both bands had previously released records on much smaller labels, to no success other than very locally, but this was their first to be released on a major label, and had a slightly different lineup from those earlier releases. Both bands would influence each other, and go on to be the most successful band from their respective country in the next decade. Both bands would revolutionise popular music. And the two bands would even be filed next to each other alphabetically, both starting “the Bea”. In episode one hundred, we’re going to look at “Love Me Do” by the Beatles, but right now, in episode ninety-nine, we’re going to look at “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari”] Before I start this story properly, I just want to say something — there are a lot of different accounts of the formation of the Beach Boys, and those accounts are all different. What I’ve tried to do here is take one plausible account of how the group formed and tell it in a reasonable length of time. If you read the books I link in the show notes, you might find some disagreements about the precise order of some of these events, or some details I’ve glossed over. This episode is already running long, and I didn’t want to get into that stuff, but it’s important that I stress that this is just as accurate as I can get in the length of an episode. The Beach Boys really were boys when they made their first records. David Marks, their youngest member, was only thirteen when “Surfin’ Safari” came out, and Mike Love, the group’s oldest member, was twenty-one.  So, as you might imagine when we’re talking about children, the story really starts with the older generation. In particular, we want to start with Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Morgans were part-time music business people in Los Angeles in the fifties. Hite Morgan owned an industrial flooring company, and that was his main source of income — putting in floors at warehouses and factories that could withstand the particular stresses that such industrial sites faced. But while that work was hard, it was well-paying and didn’t take too much time. The company would take on two or three expensive jobs a year, and for the rest of the year Hite would have the money and time to help his wife with her work as a songwriter. She’d collaborated with Spade Cooley, one of the most famous Western Swing musicians of the forties, and she’d also co-written “Don’t Put All Your Dreams in One Basket” for Ray Charles in 1948: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Don’t Put All Your Dreams in One Basket”] Hite and Dorinda’s son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I’ve seen some claims that often the songs credited to him were actually written by his mother, who gave him credits in order to encourage him. One of Bruce Morgan’s earliest songs was a piece called “Proverb Boogie”, which was actually credited under his father’s name, and which Louis Jordan retitled to “Heed My Warning” and took a co-writing credit on: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Heed My Warning”] Eventually the Morgans also started their own publishing company, and built their own small demo studio, which they used to use to record cheap demos for many other songwriters and performers. The Morgans were only very minor players in the music industry, but they were friendly with many of the big names on the LA R&B scene, and knew people like John Dolphin, Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cooke, and the Hollywood Flames. Bruce Morgan would talk in interviews about Bumps Blackwell calling round to see his father and telling him about this new song “You Send Me” he was going to record with Cooke. But although nobody could have realised it at the time, or for many years later, the Morgans’ place in music history would be cemented in 1952, when Hite Morgan, working at his day job, met a man named Murry Wilson, who ran a machine-tool company based in Hawthorne, a small town in southwestern Los Angeles County. It turned out that Wilson, like Dorinda Morgan, was an aspiring songwriter, and Hite Morgan signed him up to their publishing company, Guild Music. Wilson’s tastes in music were already becoming old-fashioned even in the very early 1950s, but given the style of music he was working in he was a moderately talented writer. His proudest moment was writing a song called “Two Step Side Step” for the Morgans, which was performed on TV by Lawrence Welk — Murry gathered the whole family round the television to watch his song being performed.  That song was a moderate success – it was never a hit for anyone, but it was recorded by several country artists, including the rockabilly singer Bonnie Lou, and most interestingly for our purposes by Johnny Lee Wills, Bob Wills’ brother: [Excerpt: Johnny Lee Wills, “Two Step Side Step”] Wilson wrote a few other songs for the Morgans, of which the most successful was “Tabarin”, which was recorded by the Tangiers — one of the several names under which the Hollywood Flames performed. Gaynel Hodge would later speak fondly of Murry Wilson, and how he was always bragging about his talented kids: [Excerpt: The Tangiers, “Tabarin”] But as the fifties progressed, the Morgans published fewer and fewer of Wilson’s songs, and none of them were hits. But the Morgans and Wilson stayed in touch, and around 1958 he heard from them about an opportunity for one of those talented kids. Dorinda Morgan had written a song called “Chapel of Love” — not the same song as the famous one by the Dixie Cups — and Art Laboe had decided that that song would be perfect as the first record for his new label, Original Sound. Laboe was putting together a new group to sing it, called the Hitmakers, which was based around Val Poliuto. Poliuto had been the tenor singer of an integrated vocal group — two Black members, one white, and one Hispanic — which had gone by the names The Shadows and The Miracles before dismissing both names as being unlikely to lead to any success and taking the name The Jaguars at the suggestion of, of all people, Stan Freberg, the comedian and voice actor. The Jaguars had never had much commercial success, but they’d recorded a version of “The Way You Look Tonight” which became a classic when Laboe included it on the massively successful “Oldies But Goodies”, the first doo-wop nostalgia album: [Excerpt: The Jaguars, “The Way You Look Tonight”] The Jaguars continued for many years, and at one point had Richard Berry guest as an extra vocalist on some of their tracks, but as with so many of the LA vocal groups we’ve looked at from the fifties, they all had their fingers in multiple pies, and so Poliuto was to be in this new group, along with Bobby Adams of the Calvanes, who had been taught to sing R&B by Cornell Gunter and who had recorded for Dootsie Williams: [Excerpt: The Calvanes, “Crazy Over You”] Those two were to be joined by two other singers, who nobody involved can remember much about except that their first names were Don and Duke, but Art Laboe also wanted a new young singer to sing the lead, and was auditioning singers. Murry Wilson suggested to the Morgans that his young son Brian might be suitable for the role, and he auditioned, but Laboe thought he was too young, and the role went to a singer called Rodney Goodens instead: [Excerpt: The Hitmakers, “Chapel of Love”] So the audition was a failure, but it was a first contact between Brian Wilson and the Morgans, and also introduced Brian to Val Poliuto, from whom he would learn a lot about music for the next few years. Brian was a very sensitive kid, the oldest of three brothers, and someone who seemed to have some difficulty dealing with other people — possibly because his father was abusive towards him and his brothers, leaving him frightened of many aspects of life. He did, though, share with his father a love of music, and he had a remarkable ear — singular, as he’s deaf in one ear. He had perfect pitch, a great recollection for melodies — play him something once and it would stay in his brain — and from a very young age he gravitated towards sweet-sounding music. He particularly loved Glenn Miller’s version of “Rhapsody in Blue” as a child: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “Rhapsody in Blue”] But his big musical love was a modern harmony group called the Four Freshmen — a group made up of two brothers, their cousin, and a college friend. Modern harmony is an outdated term, but it basically meant that they were singing chords that went beyond the normal simple triads of most pop music. While there were four, obviously, of the Four Freshmen, they often achieved an effect that would normally be five-part harmony, by having the group members sing all the parts of the chord *except* the root note — they’d leave the root note to a bass instrument. So while Brian was listening to four singers, he was learning five-part harmonies. The group would also sing their harmonies in unusual inversions — they’d take one of the notes from the middle of the chord and sing it an octave lower. There was another trick that the Four Freshmen used — they varied their vocals from equal temperament.  To explain this a little bit — musical notes are based on frequencies, and the ratio between them matters. If you double the frequency of a note, you get the same note an octave up — so if you take an A at 440hz, and double the frequency to 880, you get another A, an octave up. If you go down to 220hz, you get the A an octave below. You get all the different notes by multiplying or dividing a note, so A# is A multiplied by a tiny bit more than one, and A flat is A multiplied by a tiny bit less than one. But in the middle ages, this hit a snag — A#. which is A multiplied by one and a bit, is very very slightly different from B flat, which is B multiplied by 0.9 something. And if you double those, so you go to the A# and B flat the next octave up, the difference between A# and B flat gets bigger. And this means that if you play a melody in the key of C, but then decide you want to play it in the key of B flat, you need to retune your instrument — or have instruments with separate notes for A# and B flat — or everything will sound out of tune. It’s very very hard to retune some instruments, especially ones like the piano, and also sometimes you want to play in different keys in the same piece. If you’re playing a song in C, but it goes into C# in the last chorus to give it a bit of extra momentum, you lose that extra momentum if you stop the song to retune the piano. So a different system was invented, and popularised in the Baroque era, called “equal temperament”. In that system, every note is very very slightly out of tune, but those tiny errors cancel out rather than multiply like they do in the old system. You’re sort of taking the average of A# and B flat, and calling them the same note. And to most people’s ears that sounds good enough, and it means you can have a piano without a thousand keys.  But the Four Freshmen didn’t stick to that — because you don’t need to retune your throat to hit different notes (unless you’re as bad a singer as me, anyway). They would sing B flat slightly differently than they would sing A#, and so they would get a purer vocal blend, with stronger harmonic overtones than singers who were singing the notes as placed on a piano: [Excerpt: the Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World”] Please note by the way that I’m taking the fact that they used those non-equal temperaments somewhat on trust — Ross Barbour of the group said they did in interviews, and he would know, but I have relatively poor pitch so if you listened to that and thought “Hang on, they’re all singing dead-on equal tempered concert pitch, what’s he talking about?”, then that’s on him. When Brian heard them singing, he instantly fell for them, and became a major, major fan of their work, especially their falsetto singer Bob Flanigan, whose voice he decided to emulate. He decided that he was going to learn how they got that sound. Every day when he got home from school, he would go to the family’s music room, where he had a piano and a record player. He would then play just a second or so of one of their records, and figure out on the piano what notes they were singing in that one second, and duplicating them himself. Then he would learn the next second of the song. He would spend hours every day on this, learning every vocal part, until he had the Four Freshmen’s entire repertoire burned into his brain, and could sing all four vocal parts to every song. Indeed, at one point when he was about sixteen — around the same time as the Art Laboe audition — Brian decided to go and visit the Four Freshmen’s manager, to find out how to form a successful vocal group of his own, and to find out more about the group themselves. After telling the manager that he could sing every part of every one of their songs, the manager challenged him with “The Day Isn’t Long Enough”, a song that they apparently had trouble with: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, “The Day Isn’t Long Enough”] And Brian demonstrated every harmony part perfectly. He had a couple of tape recorders at home, and he would experiment with overdubbing his own voice — recording on one tape recorder, playing it back and singing along while recording on the other. Doing this he could do his own imitations of the Four Freshmen, and even as a teenager he could sound spookily like them: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys [Brian Wilson solo recording released on a Beach Boys CD], “Happy Birthday Four Freshmen”] While Brian shared his love for this kind of sweet music with his father, he also liked the rock and roll music that was making its way onto the radio during his teen years — though again, he would gravitate towards the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers rather than to more raucous music. He shared his love of the Everlys with his cousin Mike Love, whose tastes otherwise went more in the direction of R&B and doo-wop. Unlike Brian and his brothers, Mike attended Dorsey High School, a predominantly Black school, and his tastes were shaped by that — other graduates of the school include Billy Preston, Eric Dolphy, and Arthur Lee, to give some idea of the kind of atmosphere that Dorsey High had. He loved the Robins, and later the Coasters, and he’s been quoted as saying he “worshipped” Johnny Otis — as did every R&B lover in LA at the time. He would listen to Otis’ show on KFOX, and to Huggy Boy on KRKD. His favourite records were things like “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by the Robins, which combined an R&B groove with witty lyrics: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”] He also loved the music of Chuck Berry, a passion he shared with Brian’s youngest brother Carl, who also listened to Otis’ show and got Brian listening to it. While Mike was most attracted to Berry’s witty lyrics, Carl loved the guitar part — he’d loved string instruments since he was a tiny child, and he and a neighbour, David Marks, started taking guitar lessons from another neighbour, John Maus. Maus had been friends with Ritchie Valens, and had been a pallbearer at Valens’ funeral. John was recording at the time with his sister Judy, as the imaginatively-named duo “John & Judy”: [Excerpt: John & Judy, “Why This Feeling?”] John and Judy later took on a bass player called Scott Engel, and a few years after that John and Scott changed their surnames to Walker and became two thirds of The Walker Brothers. But at this time, John was still just a local guitar player, and teaching two enthusiastic kids to play guitar. Carl and David learned how to play Chuck Berry licks, and also started to learn some of the guitar instrumentals that were becoming popular at the time. At the same time, Mike would sing with Brian to pass the time, Mike singing in a bass voice while Brian took a high tenor lead. Other times, Brian would test his vocal arranging out by teaching Carl and his mother Audree vocal parts — Carl got so he could learn parts very quickly, so his big brother wouldn’t keep him around all day and he could go out and play. And sometimes their middle brother Dennis would join in — though he was more interested in going out and having fun at the beach than he was in making music. Brian was interested in nothing *but* making music — at least once he’d quit the school football team (American football, for those of you like me who parse the word to mean what it does in Britain), after he’d got hurt for the first time. But before he did that, he had managed to hurt someone else — a much smaller teammate named Alan Jardine, whose leg Brian broke in a game. Despite that, the two became friends, and would occasionally sing together — like Brian, Alan loved to sing harmonies, and they found that they had an extraordinarily good vocal blend. While Brian mostly sang with his brothers and his cousin, all of whom had a family vocal resemblance, Jardine could sound spookily similar to that family, and especially to Brian. Jardine’s voice was a little stronger and more resonant, Brian’s a little sweeter, with a fuller falsetto, but they had the kind of vocal similarity one normally only gets in family singers. However,  they didn’t start performing together properly, because they had different tastes in music — while Brian was most interested in the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshman, Jardine was a fan of the new folk revival groups, especially the Kingston Trio. Alan had a group called the Tikis when he was at high school, which would play Kingston Trio style material like “The Wreck of the John B”, a song that like much of the Kingston Trio’s material had been popularised by the Weavers, but which the Trio had recorded for their first album: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, “The Wreck of the John B”] Jardine was inspired by that to write his own song, “The Wreck of the Hesperus”, putting Longfellow’s poem to music. One of the other Tikis had a tape recorder, and they made a few stabs at recording it. They thought that they sounded pretty good, and they decided to go round to Brian Wilson’s house to see if he could help them — depending on who you ask, they either wanted him to join the band, or knew that his dad had some connection with the music business and wanted to pick his brains. When they turned up, Brian was actually out, but Audree Wilson basically had an open-door policy for local teenagers, and she told the boys about Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Tikis took their tape to the Morgans, and the Morgans responded politely, saying that they did sound good — but they sounded like the Kingston Trio, and there were a million groups that sounded like the Kingston Trio. They needed to get an original sound. The Tikis broke up, as Alan went off to Michigan to college. But then a year later, he came back to Hawthorne and enrolled in the same community college that Brian was enrolled in. Meanwhile, the Morgans had got in touch with Gary Winfrey, Alan’s Tikis bandmate, and asked him if the Tikis would record a demo of one of Bruce Morgan’s songs. As the Tikis no longer existed, Alan and Gary formed a new group along the same lines, and invited Brian to be part of one of these sessions. That group, The Islanders made a couple of attempts at Morgan’s song, but nothing worked out. But this brought Brian back to the Morgans’ attention — at this point they’d not seen him in three years. Alan still wanted to record folk music with Brian, and at some point Brian suggested that they get his brother Carl and cousin Mike involved — and then Brian’s mother made him let his other brother Dennis join in.  The group went to see the Morgans, who once again told them that they needed some original material. Dennis piped up that the group had been fooling around with a song about surfing, and while the Morgans had never heard of the sport, they said it would be worth the group’s while finishing off the song and coming back to them. At this point, the idea of a song about surfing was something that was only in Dennis’ head, though he may have mentioned the idea to Mike at some point. Mike and the Wilsons went home and started working out the song, without Al being involved at this time — some of the rehearsal recordings we have seem to suggest that they thought Al was a little overbearing and thought of himself as a bit more professional than the others, and they didn’t want him in the group at first. While surf music was definitely already a thing, there were very few vocal surf records. Brian and Mike wrote the song together, with Mike writing most of the lyrics and coming up with his own bass vocal line, while Brian wrote the rest of the music: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ (Rehearsal)”] None of the group other than Dennis surfed — though Mike would later start surfing a little — and so Dennis provided Mike with some surfing terms that they could add into the song. This led to what would be the first of many, many arguments about songwriting credit among the group, as Dennis claimed that he should get some credit for his contribution, while Mike disagreed: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ (Rehearsal)”] The credit was eventually assigned to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Eventually, they finished the song, and decided that they *would* get Al Jardine back into the group after all. When Murry and Audree Wilson went away for a long weekend and left their boys some money for emergencies, the group saw their chance. They took that money, along with some more they borrowed from Al’s mother, and rented some instruments — a drum kit and a stand-up bass. They had a party at the Wilsons’ house where they played their new song and a few others, in front of their friends, before going back to the Morgans with their new song completed. For their recording session, they used that stand-up bass, which Al played, along with Carl on an acoustic guitar, giving it that Kingston Trio sound that Al liked. Dennis was the group’s drummer, but he wasn’t yet very good and instead of drums the record has Brian thumping a dustbin lid as its percussion. As well as being the lead vocalist, Mike Love was meant to be the group’s saxophone player, but he never progressed more than honking out a couple of notes, and he doesn’t play on the session. The song they came up with was oddly structured — it had a nine-bar verse and a fourteen-bar chorus, the latter of which was based around a twelve-bar blues, but extended to allow the “surf, surf with me” hook. But other than the unusual bar counts it followed the structure that the group would set up most of their early singles. The song seems at least in part to have been inspired by the song “Bermuda Shorts” by the Delroys, which is a song the group have often cited and would play in their earliest live shows: [Excerpt: The Delroys, “Bermuda Shorts”] They messed around with the structure in various ways in rehearsal, and those can be heard on the rehearsal recordings, but by the time they came into the studio they’d settled on starting with a brief statement of the chorus hook: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] It then goes into a verse with Mike singing a tenor lead, with the rest of the group doing block harmonies and then joining him on the last line of the verse: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] And then we have Mike switching down into the bass register to sing wordless doo-wop bass during the blues-based chorus, while the rest of the group again sing in block harmony: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] That formula would be the one that the Beach Boys would stick with for several singles to follow — the major change that would be made would be that Brian would soon start singing an independent falsetto line over the top of the choruses, rather than being in the block harmonies.  The single was licensed to Candix Records, along with a B-side written by Bruce Morgan, and it became a minor hit record, reaching number seventy-five on the national charts. But what surprised the group about the record was the name on it. They’d been calling themselves the Pendletones, because there was a brand of thick woollen shirt called Pendletons which was popular among surfers, and which the group wore.  It might also have been intended as a pun on Dick Dale’s Deltones, the preeminent surf music group of the time. But Hite Morgan had thought the name didn’t work, and they needed something that was more descriptive of the music they were doing. He’d suggested The Surfers, but Russ Regan, a record promoter, had told him there was already a group called the Surfers, and suggested another name. So the first time the Wilsons realised they were now in the Beach Boys was when they saw the record label for the first time. The group started working on follow-ups — and as they were now performing live shows to promote their records, they switched to using electric guitars when they went into the studio to record some demos in February 1962. By now, Al was playing rhythm guitar, while Brian took over on bass, now playing a bass guitar rather than the double bass Al had played. For that session, as Dennis was still not that great a drummer, Brian decided to bring in a session player, and Dennis stormed out of the studio. However, the session player was apparently flashy and overplayed, and got paid off. Brian persuaded Dennis to come back and take over on drums again, and the session resumed. Val Poliuto was also at the session, in case they needed some keyboards, but he’s not audible on any of the tracks they recorded, at least to my ears. The most likely song for a follow-up was another one by Brian and Mike. This one was very much a rewrite of “Surfin'”, but this time the verses were a more normal eight bars, and the choruses were a compromise between the standard twelve-bar blues and “Surfin'”s fourteen, landing on an unusual thirteen bars. With the electric guitars the group decided to bring in a Chuck Berry influence, and you can hear a certain similarity to songs like “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” in the rhythm and phrasing: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari [early version]”] Around this time, Brian also wrote another song — the song he generally describes as being the first song he ever wrote. Presumably, given that he’d already co-written “Surfin'”, he means that it was the first song he wrote on his own, words and music. The song was inspired, melodically, by the song “When You Wish Upon A Star” from the Disney film Pinocchio: [Excerpt: Cliff Edwards “When You Wish Upon a Star”] The song came to Brian in the car, and he challenged himself to write the whole thing in his head without going to the piano until he’d finished it. The result was a doo-wop ballad with Four Freshmen-like block harmonies, with lyrics inspired by Brian’s then girlfriend Judy Bowles, which they recorded at the same session as that version of “Surfin’ Safari”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfer Girl [early version]”] At the same session, they also recorded two more songs — a song by Brian called Judy, and a surf instrumental written by Carl called “Karate”. However, shortly after that session, Al left the group. As the group had started playing electric instruments, they’d also started performing songs that were more suitable for those instruments, like “What’d I Say” and “The Twist”. Al wasn’t a fan of that kind of music, and he wanted to be singing “Tom Dooley” and “Wreck of the John B”, not “Come on baby, let’s do the Twist”. He was also quite keen on completing his university studies — he was planning on becoming a dentist — and didn’t want to spend time playing tons of small gigs when he could be working towards his degree. This was especially the case since Murry Wilson, who had by this point installed himself as the group’s manager, was booking them on all sorts of cheap dates to get them exposure. As far as Al could see, being a Beach Boy was never going to make anyone any real money, and it wasn’t worth disrupting his studies to keep playing music that he didn’t even particularly like. His place was taken by David Marks, Carl’s young friend who lived nearby. Marks was only thirteen when he joined, and apparently it caused raised eyebrows among some of the other musicians who knew the group, because he was so much younger and less experienced than the rest. Unlike Al, he was never much of a singer — he can hold a tune, and has a pleasant enough voice, but he wasn’t the exceptional harmony singer that Al was — but he was a competent rhythm player, and he and Carl had been jamming together since they’d both got guitars, and knew each other’s playing style. However, while Al was gone from the group, he wasn’t totally out of the picture, and he remained close enough that he was a part of the first ever Beach Boys spin-off side project a couple of months later. Dorinda Morgan had written a song inspired by the new children’s doll, Barbie, that had come out a couple of years before and which, like the Beach Boys, was from Hawthorne. She wanted to put together a studio group to record it, under the name Kenny and the Cadets, and Brian rounded up Carl, Al, Val Poliuto, and his mother Audree, to sing on the record for Mrs Morgan: [Excerpt: Kenny and the Cadets, “Barbie”] But after that, Al Jardine was out of the group for the moment — though he would be back sooner than anyone expected. Shortly after Al left, the new lineup went into a different studio, Western Studios, to record a new demo. Ostensibly produced by Murry Wilson, the session was actually produced by Brian and his new friend Gary Usher, who took charge in the studio and spent most of his time trying to stop Murry interfering. Gary Usher is someone about whom several books have been written, and who would have a huge influence on West Coast music in the sixties. But at this point he was an aspiring singer, songwriter, and record producer, who had been making records for a few months longer than Brian and was therefore a veteran. He’d put out his first single, “Driven Insane”, in March 1961: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, “Driven Insane”] Usher was still far from a success, but he was very good at networking, and had all sorts of minor connections within the music business. As one example, his girlfriend, Sandra Glanz, who performed under the name Ginger Blake, had just written “You Are My Answer” for Carol Connors, who had been the lead singer of the Teddy Bears but was now going solo: [Excerpt: Carol Connors, “You Are My Answer”] Connors, too, would soon become important in vocal surf music, while Ginger would play a significant part in Brian’s life. Brian had started writing songs with Gary, and they were in the studio to record some demos by Gary, and some demos by the Beach Boys of songs that Brian and Gary had written together, along with a new version of “Surfin’ Safari”. Of the two Wilson/Usher songs recorded in the session, one was a slow doo-wop styled ballad called “The Lonely Sea”, which would later become an album track, but the song that they were most interested in recording was one called “409”, which had been inspired by a new, larger, engine that Chevrolet had introduced for top-of-the-line vehicles. Musically, “409” was another song that followed the “Surfin’ Safari” formula, but it was regularised even more, lopping off the extra bar from “Surfin’ Safari”‘s chorus, and making the verses as well as the choruses into twelve-bar blues. But it still started with the hook, still had Mike sing his tenor lead in the verses, and still had him move to sing a boogie-ish bassline in the chorus while the rest of the group chanted in block harmonies over the top. But it introduced a new lyrical theme to the group — now, as well as singing about surfing and the beach, they could also sing about cars and car racing — Love credits this as being one of the main reasons for the group’s success in landlocked areas, because while there were many places in the US where you couldn’t surf, there was nowhere where people didn’t have cars. It’s also the earliest Beach Boys song over which there is an ongoing question of credit. For the first thirty years of the song’s existence, it was credited solely to Wilson and Usher, but in the early nineties Love won a share of the songwriting credit in a lawsuit in which he won credit on many, many songs he’d not been credited for. Love claims that he came up with the “She’s real fine, my 409” hook, and the “giddy up” bass vocal he sang. Usher always claimed that Love had nothing to do with the song, and that Love was always trying to take credit for things he didn’t do. It’s difficult to tell who was telling the truth, because both obviously had a financial stake in the credit (though Usher was dead by the time of the lawsuit). Usher was always very dismissive of all of the Beach Boys with the exception of Brian, and wouldn’t credit them for making any real contributions, Love’s name was definitely missed off the credits of a large number of songs to which he did make substantial contributions, including some where he wrote the whole lyric, and the bits of the song Love claims *do* sound like the kind of thing he contributed to other songs which have no credit disputes. On the other hand, Love also overreached in his claims of credit in that lawsuit, claiming to have co-written songs that were written when he wasn’t even in the same country as the writers. Where you stand on the question of whether Love deserves that credit usually depends on your views of Wilson, Love and Usher as people, and it’s not a question I’m going to get into, but I thought I should acknowledge that the question is there. While “409” was still following the same pattern as the other songs, it’s head and shoulders ahead of the Hite Morgan productions both in terms of performance and in terms of the sound. A great deal of that clearly owes to Usher, who was experimenting with things like sound effects, and so “409” starts with a recording that Brian and Usher made of Usher’s car driving up and down the street: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “409”] Meanwhile the new version of “Surfin’ Safari” was vastly superior to the recording from a couple of months earlier, with changed lyrics and a tighter performance: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari (second version)”] So at the end of the session, the group had a tape of three new songs, and Murry WIlson wanted them to take it somewhere better than Candix Records. He had a contact somewhere much better — at Capitol Records. He was going to phone Ken Nelson. Or at least, Murry *thought* he had a contact at Capitol. He phoned Ken Nelson and told him “Years ago, you did me a favour, and now I’m doing one for you. My sons have formed a group and you have the chance to sign them!” Now, setting aside the question of whether that would actually count as Murry doing Nelson a favour, there was another problem with this — Nelson had absolutely no idea who Murry Wilson was, and no recollection of ever doing him a favour. It turned out that the favour he’d done, in Murry’s eyes, was recording one of Murry’s songs — except that there’s no record of Nelson ever having been involved in a recording of a Murry Wilson song. By this time, Capitol had three A&R people, in charge of different areas. There was Voyle Gilmore, who recorded soft pop — people like Nat “King” Cole. There was Nelson, who as we’ve seen in past episodes had some rockabilly experience but was mostly country — he’d produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson, but he was mostly working at this point with people like Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers, producing some of the best country music ever recorded, but not really doing the kind of thing that the Beach Boys were doing. But the third, and youngest, A&R man was doing precisely the kind of thing the Beach Boys did. That was Nik Venet, who we met back in the episode on “LSD-25”, and who was one of the people who had been involved with the very first surf music recordings. Nelson suggested that Murry go and see Venet, and Venet was immediately impressed with the tape Murry played him — so impressed that he decided to offer the group a contract, and to release “Surfin’ Safari” backed with “409”, buying the masters from Murry rather than rerecording them. Venet also tried to get the publishing rights for the songs for Beechwood Music, a publishing company owned by Capitol’s parent company EMI (and known in the UK as Ardmore & Beechwood) but Gary Usher, who knew a bit about the business, said that he and Brian were going to set up their own publishing companies — a decision which Murry Wilson screamed at him for, but which made millions of dollars for Brian over the next few years. The single came out, and was a big hit, making number fourteen on the hot one hundred, and “409” as the B-side also scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Venet soon got the group into the studio to record an album to go with the single, with Usher adding extra backing vocals to fill out the harmonies in the absence of Al Jardine. While the Beach Boys were a self-contained group, Venet seems to have brought in his old friend Derry Weaver to add extra guitar, notably on Weaver’s song “Moon Dawg”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Moon Dawg”] It’s perhaps unsurprising that the Beach Boys recorded that, because not only was it written by Venet’s friend, but Venet owned the publishing on the song. The group also recorded “Summertime Blues”, which was co-written by Jerry Capehart, a friend of Venet and Weaver’s who also may have appeared on the album in some capacity. Both those songs fit the group, but their choice was clearly influenced by factors other than the purely musical, and very soon Brian Wilson would get sick of having his music interfered with by Venet.  The album came out on October 1, and a few days later the single was released in the UK, several months after its release in the US. And on the same day, a British group who *had* signed to have their single published by Ardmore & Beechwood put out their own single on another EMI label. And we’re going to look at that in the next episode…

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 ninety-nine, is on "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys, and the group's roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. 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. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-three years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group's early years. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher. The Beach Boys: Inception and Creation is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys' Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. The Surfin' Safari album is now in the public domain, and so can be found cheaply, but the best version to get is still the twofer CD with the Surfin' USA album. *But*, those two albums are fairly weak, the Beach Boys in their early years were not really an album band, and you will want to investigate them further. I would recommend, rather than the two albums linked above, starting with this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, there are going to be two podcast episodes. This one, episode ninety-nine, will be a normal-length episode, or maybe slightly longer than normal, and episode one hundred, which will follow straight after it, will be a super-length one that's at least three times the normal length of one of these podcasts. I'm releasing them together, because the two episodes really do go together. We've talked recently about how we're getting into the sixties of the popular imagination, and those 1960s began, specifically, in October 1962. That was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the world almost end. It was the month that James Brown released Live at the Apollo -- an album we'll talk about in a few weeks' time. And if you want one specific date that the 1960s started, it was October the fifth, 1962. On that date, a film came out that we mentioned last week -- Doctor No, the first ever James Bond film. It was also the date that two records were released on EMI in Britain. One was a new release by a British band, the other a record originally released a few months earlier in the USA, by an American band. Both bands had previously released records on much smaller labels, to no success other than very locally, but this was their first to be released on a major label, and had a slightly different lineup from those earlier releases. Both bands would influence each other, and go on to be the most successful band from their respective country in the next decade. Both bands would revolutionise popular music. And the two bands would even be filed next to each other alphabetically, both starting "the Bea". In episode one hundred, we're going to look at "Love Me Do" by the Beatles, but right now, in episode ninety-nine, we're going to look at "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari"] Before I start this story properly, I just want to say something -- there are a lot of different accounts of the formation of the Beach Boys, and those accounts are all different. What I've tried to do here is take one plausible account of how the group formed and tell it in a reasonable length of time. If you read the books I link in the show notes, you might find some disagreements about the precise order of some of these events, or some details I've glossed over. This episode is already running long, and I didn't want to get into that stuff, but it's important that I stress that this is just as accurate as I can get in the length of an episode. The Beach Boys really were boys when they made their first records. David Marks, their youngest member, was only thirteen when "Surfin' Safari" came out, and Mike Love, the group's oldest member, was twenty-one.  So, as you might imagine when we're talking about children, the story really starts with the older generation. In particular, we want to start with Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Morgans were part-time music business people in Los Angeles in the fifties. Hite Morgan owned an industrial flooring company, and that was his main source of income -- putting in floors at warehouses and factories that could withstand the particular stresses that such industrial sites faced. But while that work was hard, it was well-paying and didn't take too much time. The company would take on two or three expensive jobs a year, and for the rest of the year Hite would have the money and time to help his wife with her work as a songwriter. She'd collaborated with Spade Cooley, one of the most famous Western Swing musicians of the forties, and she'd also co-written "Don't Put All Your Dreams in One Basket" for Ray Charles in 1948: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Don't Put All Your Dreams in One Basket"] Hite and Dorinda's son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I've seen some claims that often the songs credited to him were actually written by his mother, who gave him credits in order to encourage him. One of Bruce Morgan's earliest songs was a piece called "Proverb Boogie", which was actually credited under his father's name, and which Louis Jordan retitled to "Heed My Warning" and took a co-writing credit on: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Heed My Warning"] Eventually the Morgans also started their own publishing company, and built their own small demo studio, which they used to use to record cheap demos for many other songwriters and performers. The Morgans were only very minor players in the music industry, but they were friendly with many of the big names on the LA R&B scene, and knew people like John Dolphin, Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cooke, and the Hollywood Flames. Bruce Morgan would talk in interviews about Bumps Blackwell calling round to see his father and telling him about this new song "You Send Me" he was going to record with Cooke. But although nobody could have realised it at the time, or for many years later, the Morgans' place in music history would be cemented in 1952, when Hite Morgan, working at his day job, met a man named Murry Wilson, who ran a machine-tool company based in Hawthorne, a small town in southwestern Los Angeles County. It turned out that Wilson, like Dorinda Morgan, was an aspiring songwriter, and Hite Morgan signed him up to their publishing company, Guild Music. Wilson's tastes in music were already becoming old-fashioned even in the very early 1950s, but given the style of music he was working in he was a moderately talented writer. His proudest moment was writing a song called "Two Step Side Step" for the Morgans, which was performed on TV by Lawrence Welk -- Murry gathered the whole family round the television to watch his song being performed.  That song was a moderate success – it was never a hit for anyone, but it was recorded by several country artists, including the rockabilly singer Bonnie Lou, and most interestingly for our purposes by Johnny Lee Wills, Bob Wills' brother: [Excerpt: Johnny Lee Wills, "Two Step Side Step"] Wilson wrote a few other songs for the Morgans, of which the most successful was "Tabarin", which was recorded by the Tangiers -- one of the several names under which the Hollywood Flames performed. Gaynel Hodge would later speak fondly of Murry Wilson, and how he was always bragging about his talented kids: [Excerpt: The Tangiers, "Tabarin"] But as the fifties progressed, the Morgans published fewer and fewer of Wilson's songs, and none of them were hits. But the Morgans and Wilson stayed in touch, and around 1958 he heard from them about an opportunity for one of those talented kids. Dorinda Morgan had written a song called "Chapel of Love" -- not the same song as the famous one by the Dixie Cups -- and Art Laboe had decided that that song would be perfect as the first record for his new label, Original Sound. Laboe was putting together a new group to sing it, called the Hitmakers, which was based around Val Poliuto. Poliuto had been the tenor singer of an integrated vocal group -- two Black members, one white, and one Hispanic -- which had gone by the names The Shadows and The Miracles before dismissing both names as being unlikely to lead to any success and taking the name The Jaguars at the suggestion of, of all people, Stan Freberg, the comedian and voice actor. The Jaguars had never had much commercial success, but they'd recorded a version of "The Way You Look Tonight" which became a classic when Laboe included it on the massively successful "Oldies But Goodies", the first doo-wop nostalgia album: [Excerpt: The Jaguars, "The Way You Look Tonight"] The Jaguars continued for many years, and at one point had Richard Berry guest as an extra vocalist on some of their tracks, but as with so many of the LA vocal groups we've looked at from the fifties, they all had their fingers in multiple pies, and so Poliuto was to be in this new group, along with Bobby Adams of the Calvanes, who had been taught to sing R&B by Cornell Gunter and who had recorded for Dootsie Williams: [Excerpt: The Calvanes, "Crazy Over You"] Those two were to be joined by two other singers, who nobody involved can remember much about except that their first names were Don and Duke, but Art Laboe also wanted a new young singer to sing the lead, and was auditioning singers. Murry Wilson suggested to the Morgans that his young son Brian might be suitable for the role, and he auditioned, but Laboe thought he was too young, and the role went to a singer called Rodney Goodens instead: [Excerpt: The Hitmakers, "Chapel of Love"] So the audition was a failure, but it was a first contact between Brian Wilson and the Morgans, and also introduced Brian to Val Poliuto, from whom he would learn a lot about music for the next few years. Brian was a very sensitive kid, the oldest of three brothers, and someone who seemed to have some difficulty dealing with other people -- possibly because his father was abusive towards him and his brothers, leaving him frightened of many aspects of life. He did, though, share with his father a love of music, and he had a remarkable ear -- singular, as he's deaf in one ear. He had perfect pitch, a great recollection for melodies -- play him something once and it would stay in his brain -- and from a very young age he gravitated towards sweet-sounding music. He particularly loved Glenn Miller's version of "Rhapsody in Blue" as a child: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] But his big musical love was a modern harmony group called the Four Freshmen -- a group made up of two brothers, their cousin, and a college friend. Modern harmony is an outdated term, but it basically meant that they were singing chords that went beyond the normal simple triads of most pop music. While there were four, obviously, of the Four Freshmen, they often achieved an effect that would normally be five-part harmony, by having the group members sing all the parts of the chord *except* the root note -- they'd leave the root note to a bass instrument. So while Brian was listening to four singers, he was learning five-part harmonies. The group would also sing their harmonies in unusual inversions -- they'd take one of the notes from the middle of the chord and sing it an octave lower. There was another trick that the Four Freshmen used -- they varied their vocals from equal temperament.  To explain this a little bit -- musical notes are based on frequencies, and the ratio between them matters. If you double the frequency of a note, you get the same note an octave up -- so if you take an A at 440hz, and double the frequency to 880, you get another A, an octave up. If you go down to 220hz, you get the A an octave below. You get all the different notes by multiplying or dividing a note, so A# is A multiplied by a tiny bit more than one, and A flat is A multiplied by a tiny bit less than one. But in the middle ages, this hit a snag -- A#. which is A multiplied by one and a bit, is very very slightly different from B flat, which is B multiplied by 0.9 something. And if you double those, so you go to the A# and B flat the next octave up, the difference between A# and B flat gets bigger. And this means that if you play a melody in the key of C, but then decide you want to play it in the key of B flat, you need to retune your instrument -- or have instruments with separate notes for A# and B flat -- or everything will sound out of tune. It's very very hard to retune some instruments, especially ones like the piano, and also sometimes you want to play in different keys in the same piece. If you're playing a song in C, but it goes into C# in the last chorus to give it a bit of extra momentum, you lose that extra momentum if you stop the song to retune the piano. So a different system was invented, and popularised in the Baroque era, called "equal temperament". In that system, every note is very very slightly out of tune, but those tiny errors cancel out rather than multiply like they do in the old system. You're sort of taking the average of A# and B flat, and calling them the same note. And to most people's ears that sounds good enough, and it means you can have a piano without a thousand keys.  But the Four Freshmen didn't stick to that -- because you don't need to retune your throat to hit different notes (unless you're as bad a singer as me, anyway). They would sing B flat slightly differently than they would sing A#, and so they would get a purer vocal blend, with stronger harmonic overtones than singers who were singing the notes as placed on a piano: [Excerpt: the Four Freshmen, "It's a Blue World"] Please note by the way that I'm taking the fact that they used those non-equal temperaments somewhat on trust -- Ross Barbour of the group said they did in interviews, and he would know, but I have relatively poor pitch so if you listened to that and thought "Hang on, they're all singing dead-on equal tempered concert pitch, what's he talking about?", then that's on him. When Brian heard them singing, he instantly fell for them, and became a major, major fan of their work, especially their falsetto singer Bob Flanigan, whose voice he decided to emulate. He decided that he was going to learn how they got that sound. Every day when he got home from school, he would go to the family's music room, where he had a piano and a record player. He would then play just a second or so of one of their records, and figure out on the piano what notes they were singing in that one second, and duplicating them himself. Then he would learn the next second of the song. He would spend hours every day on this, learning every vocal part, until he had the Four Freshmen's entire repertoire burned into his brain, and could sing all four vocal parts to every song. Indeed, at one point when he was about sixteen -- around the same time as the Art Laboe audition -- Brian decided to go and visit the Four Freshmen's manager, to find out how to form a successful vocal group of his own, and to find out more about the group themselves. After telling the manager that he could sing every part of every one of their songs, the manager challenged him with "The Day Isn't Long Enough", a song that they apparently had trouble with: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, "The Day Isn't Long Enough"] And Brian demonstrated every harmony part perfectly. He had a couple of tape recorders at home, and he would experiment with overdubbing his own voice -- recording on one tape recorder, playing it back and singing along while recording on the other. Doing this he could do his own imitations of the Four Freshmen, and even as a teenager he could sound spookily like them: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys [Brian Wilson solo recording released on a Beach Boys CD], "Happy Birthday Four Freshmen"] While Brian shared his love for this kind of sweet music with his father, he also liked the rock and roll music that was making its way onto the radio during his teen years -- though again, he would gravitate towards the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers rather than to more raucous music. He shared his love of the Everlys with his cousin Mike Love, whose tastes otherwise went more in the direction of R&B and doo-wop. Unlike Brian and his brothers, Mike attended Dorsey High School, a predominantly Black school, and his tastes were shaped by that -- other graduates of the school include Billy Preston, Eric Dolphy, and Arthur Lee, to give some idea of the kind of atmosphere that Dorsey High had. He loved the Robins, and later the Coasters, and he's been quoted as saying he "worshipped" Johnny Otis -- as did every R&B lover in LA at the time. He would listen to Otis' show on KFOX, and to Huggy Boy on KRKD. His favourite records were things like "Smokey Joe's Cafe" by the Robins, which combined an R&B groove with witty lyrics: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"] He also loved the music of Chuck Berry, a passion he shared with Brian's youngest brother Carl, who also listened to Otis' show and got Brian listening to it. While Mike was most attracted to Berry's witty lyrics, Carl loved the guitar part -- he'd loved string instruments since he was a tiny child, and he and a neighbour, David Marks, started taking guitar lessons from another neighbour, John Maus. Maus had been friends with Ritchie Valens, and had been a pallbearer at Valens' funeral. John was recording at the time with his sister Judy, as the imaginatively-named duo "John & Judy": [Excerpt: John & Judy, "Why This Feeling?"] John and Judy later took on a bass player called Scott Engel, and a few years after that John and Scott changed their surnames to Walker and became two thirds of The Walker Brothers. But at this time, John was still just a local guitar player, and teaching two enthusiastic kids to play guitar. Carl and David learned how to play Chuck Berry licks, and also started to learn some of the guitar instrumentals that were becoming popular at the time. At the same time, Mike would sing with Brian to pass the time, Mike singing in a bass voice while Brian took a high tenor lead. Other times, Brian would test his vocal arranging out by teaching Carl and his mother Audree vocal parts -- Carl got so he could learn parts very quickly, so his big brother wouldn't keep him around all day and he could go out and play. And sometimes their middle brother Dennis would join in -- though he was more interested in going out and having fun at the beach than he was in making music. Brian was interested in nothing *but* making music -- at least once he'd quit the school football team (American football, for those of you like me who parse the word to mean what it does in Britain), after he'd got hurt for the first time. But before he did that, he had managed to hurt someone else -- a much smaller teammate named Alan Jardine, whose leg Brian broke in a game. Despite that, the two became friends, and would occasionally sing together -- like Brian, Alan loved to sing harmonies, and they found that they had an extraordinarily good vocal blend. While Brian mostly sang with his brothers and his cousin, all of whom had a family vocal resemblance, Jardine could sound spookily similar to that family, and especially to Brian. Jardine's voice was a little stronger and more resonant, Brian's a little sweeter, with a fuller falsetto, but they had the kind of vocal similarity one normally only gets in family singers. However,  they didn't start performing together properly, because they had different tastes in music -- while Brian was most interested in the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshman, Jardine was a fan of the new folk revival groups, especially the Kingston Trio. Alan had a group called the Tikis when he was at high school, which would play Kingston Trio style material like "The Wreck of the John B", a song that like much of the Kingston Trio's material had been popularised by the Weavers, but which the Trio had recorded for their first album: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] Jardine was inspired by that to write his own song, "The Wreck of the Hesperus", putting Longfellow's poem to music. One of the other Tikis had a tape recorder, and they made a few stabs at recording it. They thought that they sounded pretty good, and they decided to go round to Brian Wilson's house to see if he could help them -- depending on who you ask, they either wanted him to join the band, or knew that his dad had some connection with the music business and wanted to pick his brains. When they turned up, Brian was actually out, but Audree Wilson basically had an open-door policy for local teenagers, and she told the boys about Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Tikis took their tape to the Morgans, and the Morgans responded politely, saying that they did sound good -- but they sounded like the Kingston Trio, and there were a million groups that sounded like the Kingston Trio. They needed to get an original sound. The Tikis broke up, as Alan went off to Michigan to college. But then a year later, he came back to Hawthorne and enrolled in the same community college that Brian was enrolled in. Meanwhile, the Morgans had got in touch with Gary Winfrey, Alan's Tikis bandmate, and asked him if the Tikis would record a demo of one of Bruce Morgan's songs. As the Tikis no longer existed, Alan and Gary formed a new group along the same lines, and invited Brian to be part of one of these sessions. That group, The Islanders made a couple of attempts at Morgan's song, but nothing worked out. But this brought Brian back to the Morgans' attention -- at this point they'd not seen him in three years. Alan still wanted to record folk music with Brian, and at some point Brian suggested that they get his brother Carl and cousin Mike involved -- and then Brian's mother made him let his other brother Dennis join in.  The group went to see the Morgans, who once again told them that they needed some original material. Dennis piped up that the group had been fooling around with a song about surfing, and while the Morgans had never heard of the sport, they said it would be worth the group's while finishing off the song and coming back to them. At this point, the idea of a song about surfing was something that was only in Dennis' head, though he may have mentioned the idea to Mike at some point. Mike and the Wilsons went home and started working out the song, without Al being involved at this time -- some of the rehearsal recordings we have seem to suggest that they thought Al was a little overbearing and thought of himself as a bit more professional than the others, and they didn't want him in the group at first. While surf music was definitely already a thing, there were very few vocal surf records. Brian and Mike wrote the song together, with Mike writing most of the lyrics and coming up with his own bass vocal line, while Brian wrote the rest of the music: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' (Rehearsal)"] None of the group other than Dennis surfed -- though Mike would later start surfing a little -- and so Dennis provided Mike with some surfing terms that they could add into the song. This led to what would be the first of many, many arguments about songwriting credit among the group, as Dennis claimed that he should get some credit for his contribution, while Mike disagreed: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin' (Rehearsal)”] The credit was eventually assigned to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Eventually, they finished the song, and decided that they *would* get Al Jardine back into the group after all. When Murry and Audree Wilson went away for a long weekend and left their boys some money for emergencies, the group saw their chance. They took that money, along with some more they borrowed from Al's mother, and rented some instruments -- a drum kit and a stand-up bass. They had a party at the Wilsons' house where they played their new song and a few others, in front of their friends, before going back to the Morgans with their new song completed. For their recording session, they used that stand-up bass, which Al played, along with Carl on an acoustic guitar, giving it that Kingston Trio sound that Al liked. Dennis was the group's drummer, but he wasn't yet very good and instead of drums the record has Brian thumping a dustbin lid as its percussion. As well as being the lead vocalist, Mike Love was meant to be the group's saxophone player, but he never progressed more than honking out a couple of notes, and he doesn't play on the session. The song they came up with was oddly structured -- it had a nine-bar verse and a fourteen-bar chorus, the latter of which was based around a twelve-bar blues, but extended to allow the "surf, surf with me" hook. But other than the unusual bar counts it followed the structure that the group would set up most of their early singles. The song seems at least in part to have been inspired by the song "Bermuda Shorts" by the Delroys, which is a song the group have often cited and would play in their earliest live shows: [Excerpt: The Delroys, "Bermuda Shorts"] They messed around with the structure in various ways in rehearsal, and those can be heard on the rehearsal recordings, but by the time they came into the studio they'd settled on starting with a brief statement of the chorus hook: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] It then goes into a verse with Mike singing a tenor lead, with the rest of the group doing block harmonies and then joining him on the last line of the verse: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] And then we have Mike switching down into the bass register to sing wordless doo-wop bass during the blues-based chorus, while the rest of the group again sing in block harmony: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] That formula would be the one that the Beach Boys would stick with for several singles to follow -- the major change that would be made would be that Brian would soon start singing an independent falsetto line over the top of the choruses, rather than being in the block harmonies.  The single was licensed to Candix Records, along with a B-side written by Bruce Morgan, and it became a minor hit record, reaching number seventy-five on the national charts. But what surprised the group about the record was the name on it. They'd been calling themselves the Pendletones, because there was a brand of thick woollen shirt called Pendletons which was popular among surfers, and which the group wore.  It might also have been intended as a pun on Dick Dale's Deltones, the preeminent surf music group of the time. But Hite Morgan had thought the name didn't work, and they needed something that was more descriptive of the music they were doing. He'd suggested The Surfers, but Russ Regan, a record promoter, had told him there was already a group called the Surfers, and suggested another name. So the first time the Wilsons realised they were now in the Beach Boys was when they saw the record label for the first time. The group started working on follow-ups -- and as they were now performing live shows to promote their records, they switched to using electric guitars when they went into the studio to record some demos in February 1962. By now, Al was playing rhythm guitar, while Brian took over on bass, now playing a bass guitar rather than the double bass Al had played. For that session, as Dennis was still not that great a drummer, Brian decided to bring in a session player, and Dennis stormed out of the studio. However, the session player was apparently flashy and overplayed, and got paid off. Brian persuaded Dennis to come back and take over on drums again, and the session resumed. Val Poliuto was also at the session, in case they needed some keyboards, but he's not audible on any of the tracks they recorded, at least to my ears. The most likely song for a follow-up was another one by Brian and Mike. This one was very much a rewrite of "Surfin'", but this time the verses were a more normal eight bars, and the choruses were a compromise between the standard twelve-bar blues and "Surfin'"s fourteen, landing on an unusual thirteen bars. With the electric guitars the group decided to bring in a Chuck Berry influence, and you can hear a certain similarity to songs like "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" in the rhythm and phrasing: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari [early version]"] Around this time, Brian also wrote another song -- the song he generally describes as being the first song he ever wrote. Presumably, given that he'd already co-written "Surfin'", he means that it was the first song he wrote on his own, words and music. The song was inspired, melodically, by the song "When You Wish Upon A Star" from the Disney film Pinocchio: [Excerpt: Cliff Edwards "When You Wish Upon a Star"] The song came to Brian in the car, and he challenged himself to write the whole thing in his head without going to the piano until he'd finished it. The result was a doo-wop ballad with Four Freshmen-like block harmonies, with lyrics inspired by Brian's then girlfriend Judy Bowles, which they recorded at the same session as that version of “Surfin' Safari”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfer Girl [early version]"] At the same session, they also recorded two more songs -- a song by Brian called Judy, and a surf instrumental written by Carl called "Karate". However, shortly after that session, Al left the group. As the group had started playing electric instruments, they'd also started performing songs that were more suitable for those instruments, like "What'd I Say" and "The Twist". Al wasn't a fan of that kind of music, and he wanted to be singing "Tom Dooley" and "Wreck of the John B", not "Come on baby, let's do the Twist". He was also quite keen on completing his university studies -- he was planning on becoming a dentist -- and didn't want to spend time playing tons of small gigs when he could be working towards his degree. This was especially the case since Murry Wilson, who had by this point installed himself as the group's manager, was booking them on all sorts of cheap dates to get them exposure. As far as Al could see, being a Beach Boy was never going to make anyone any real money, and it wasn't worth disrupting his studies to keep playing music that he didn't even particularly like. His place was taken by David Marks, Carl's young friend who lived nearby. Marks was only thirteen when he joined, and apparently it caused raised eyebrows among some of the other musicians who knew the group, because he was so much younger and less experienced than the rest. Unlike Al, he was never much of a singer -- he can hold a tune, and has a pleasant enough voice, but he wasn't the exceptional harmony singer that Al was -- but he was a competent rhythm player, and he and Carl had been jamming together since they'd both got guitars, and knew each other's playing style. However, while Al was gone from the group, he wasn't totally out of the picture, and he remained close enough that he was a part of the first ever Beach Boys spin-off side project a couple of months later. Dorinda Morgan had written a song inspired by the new children's doll, Barbie, that had come out a couple of years before and which, like the Beach Boys, was from Hawthorne. She wanted to put together a studio group to record it, under the name Kenny and the Cadets, and Brian rounded up Carl, Al, Val Poliuto, and his mother Audree, to sing on the record for Mrs Morgan: [Excerpt: Kenny and the Cadets, "Barbie"] But after that, Al Jardine was out of the group for the moment -- though he would be back sooner than anyone expected. Shortly after Al left, the new lineup went into a different studio, Western Studios, to record a new demo. Ostensibly produced by Murry Wilson, the session was actually produced by Brian and his new friend Gary Usher, who took charge in the studio and spent most of his time trying to stop Murry interfering. Gary Usher is someone about whom several books have been written, and who would have a huge influence on West Coast music in the sixties. But at this point he was an aspiring singer, songwriter, and record producer, who had been making records for a few months longer than Brian and was therefore a veteran. He'd put out his first single, "Driven Insane", in March 1961: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Driven Insane"] Usher was still far from a success, but he was very good at networking, and had all sorts of minor connections within the music business. As one example, his girlfriend, Sandra Glanz, who performed under the name Ginger Blake, had just written "You Are My Answer" for Carol Connors, who had been the lead singer of the Teddy Bears but was now going solo: [Excerpt: Carol Connors, "You Are My Answer"] Connors, too, would soon become important in vocal surf music, while Ginger would play a significant part in Brian's life. Brian had started writing songs with Gary, and they were in the studio to record some demos by Gary, and some demos by the Beach Boys of songs that Brian and Gary had written together, along with a new version of "Surfin' Safari". Of the two Wilson/Usher songs recorded in the session, one was a slow doo-wop styled ballad called "The Lonely Sea", which would later become an album track, but the song that they were most interested in recording was one called "409", which had been inspired by a new, larger, engine that Chevrolet had introduced for top-of-the-line vehicles. Musically, "409" was another song that followed the "Surfin' Safari" formula, but it was regularised even more, lopping off the extra bar from "Surfin' Safari"'s chorus, and making the verses as well as the choruses into twelve-bar blues. But it still started with the hook, still had Mike sing his tenor lead in the verses, and still had him move to sing a boogie-ish bassline in the chorus while the rest of the group chanted in block harmonies over the top. But it introduced a new lyrical theme to the group -- now, as well as singing about surfing and the beach, they could also sing about cars and car racing -- Love credits this as being one of the main reasons for the group's success in landlocked areas, because while there were many places in the US where you couldn't surf, there was nowhere where people didn't have cars. It's also the earliest Beach Boys song over which there is an ongoing question of credit. For the first thirty years of the song's existence, it was credited solely to Wilson and Usher, but in the early nineties Love won a share of the songwriting credit in a lawsuit in which he won credit on many, many songs he'd not been credited for. Love claims that he came up with the "She's real fine, my 409" hook, and the "giddy up" bass vocal he sang. Usher always claimed that Love had nothing to do with the song, and that Love was always trying to take credit for things he didn't do. It's difficult to tell who was telling the truth, because both obviously had a financial stake in the credit (though Usher was dead by the time of the lawsuit). Usher was always very dismissive of all of the Beach Boys with the exception of Brian, and wouldn't credit them for making any real contributions, Love's name was definitely missed off the credits of a large number of songs to which he did make substantial contributions, including some where he wrote the whole lyric, and the bits of the song Love claims *do* sound like the kind of thing he contributed to other songs which have no credit disputes. On the other hand, Love also overreached in his claims of credit in that lawsuit, claiming to have co-written songs that were written when he wasn't even in the same country as the writers. Where you stand on the question of whether Love deserves that credit usually depends on your views of Wilson, Love and Usher as people, and it's not a question I'm going to get into, but I thought I should acknowledge that the question is there. While "409" was still following the same pattern as the other songs, it's head and shoulders ahead of the Hite Morgan productions both in terms of performance and in terms of the sound. A great deal of that clearly owes to Usher, who was experimenting with things like sound effects, and so "409" starts with a recording that Brian and Usher made of Usher's car driving up and down the street: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "409"] Meanwhile the new version of "Surfin' Safari" was vastly superior to the recording from a couple of months earlier, with changed lyrics and a tighter performance: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari (second version)"] So at the end of the session, the group had a tape of three new songs, and Murry WIlson wanted them to take it somewhere better than Candix Records. He had a contact somewhere much better -- at Capitol Records. He was going to phone Ken Nelson. Or at least, Murry *thought* he had a contact at Capitol. He phoned Ken Nelson and told him "Years ago, you did me a favour, and now I'm doing one for you. My sons have formed a group and you have the chance to sign them!" Now, setting aside the question of whether that would actually count as Murry doing Nelson a favour, there was another problem with this -- Nelson had absolutely no idea who Murry Wilson was, and no recollection of ever doing him a favour. It turned out that the favour he'd done, in Murry's eyes, was recording one of Murry's songs -- except that there's no record of Nelson ever having been involved in a recording of a Murry Wilson song. By this time, Capitol had three A&R people, in charge of different areas. There was Voyle Gilmore, who recorded soft pop -- people like Nat "King" Cole. There was Nelson, who as we've seen in past episodes had some rockabilly experience but was mostly country -- he'd produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson, but he was mostly working at this point with people like Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers, producing some of the best country music ever recorded, but not really doing the kind of thing that the Beach Boys were doing. But the third, and youngest, A&R man was doing precisely the kind of thing the Beach Boys did. That was Nik Venet, who we met back in the episode on "LSD-25", and who was one of the people who had been involved with the very first surf music recordings. Nelson suggested that Murry go and see Venet, and Venet was immediately impressed with the tape Murry played him -- so impressed that he decided to offer the group a contract, and to release "Surfin' Safari" backed with "409", buying the masters from Murry rather than rerecording them. Venet also tried to get the publishing rights for the songs for Beechwood Music, a publishing company owned by Capitol's parent company EMI (and known in the UK as Ardmore & Beechwood) but Gary Usher, who knew a bit about the business, said that he and Brian were going to set up their own publishing companies -- a decision which Murry Wilson screamed at him for, but which made millions of dollars for Brian over the next few years. The single came out, and was a big hit, making number fourteen on the hot one hundred, and "409" as the B-side also scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Venet soon got the group into the studio to record an album to go with the single, with Usher adding extra backing vocals to fill out the harmonies in the absence of Al Jardine. While the Beach Boys were a self-contained group, Venet seems to have brought in his old friend Derry Weaver to add extra guitar, notably on Weaver's song "Moon Dawg": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Moon Dawg"] It's perhaps unsurprising that the Beach Boys recorded that, because not only was it written by Venet's friend, but Venet owned the publishing on the song. The group also recorded "Summertime Blues", which was co-written by Jerry Capehart, a friend of Venet and Weaver's who also may have appeared on the album in some capacity. Both those songs fit the group, but their choice was clearly influenced by factors other than the purely musical, and very soon Brian Wilson would get sick of having his music interfered with by Venet.  The album came out on October 1, and a few days later the single was released in the UK, several months after its release in the US. And on the same day, a British group who *had* signed to have their single published by Ardmore & Beechwood put out their own single on another EMI label. And we're going to look at that in the next episode...

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

Valentine's Day of 1949 brings us yet another confection, as Bob, Ray Sherman (piano), Jud De Naut (bass), and Ralph Collier (drums) perform both old standards and contemporary hits. After the "Sweet Georgia Brown" intro (and a Frank Barton lecture), the quartet launches into a song Tex Beneke would have success with, "Look Up". Then, song star Margo Powers steps to the mic for her rendition of "Far Away Places", a popular tune that in 1949 would have no less than four different performances on the air: Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Margaret Whiting, and Perry Como all hit the charts with it. The quartet then smolders once again for "Misirlou" (they'd done it back in January on Episode 4). Margo returns for a tune from the '20's, "Dear Old Southland" before Bob and the guys close out with "Crazy Rhythm". This particular transcription has a little more fuzz, but listen past that and enjoy this Valentine's treat!

1. Los Estudiantes - Whoo-hoo (1960) 2. Los Pekenikes- Jinetes en el Cielo (1961) 3. Los Relámpagos - Tambores de Guerra (1963) 4. Los Relámpagos -Baby Elephant Walk (1963) 5. Los Continentales - Hava Nagila (1964) 6. Los Estudiantes - Don Quijote (1964) 7. Los Pekenikes - Los Cuatro Muleros (1964) 8. Los Sonor - Los Campanilleros (1964) 9. Los Sonor - Barracuda (1964) 10.Los Flaps - Washington Square (1964) 11.Los Jets - Guitarra Enamorada (1962) 12.Los Relámpagos - Himno de Valencia (1964) 13.Micky y Los Tonys - Guadalajara (1964) 14.Los Tonys - Walk Don't Run (1964) 15.Los Rangers - Call Me (1964) 16.Los Rangers - La Mer (1964) 17.Los Flaps - Quizás, Quizás, Quizás (1965) 18.Los Jets - Shadoguie (1965) 19.Los Relámpagos - Misirlou (1965) 20.Los Pekenikes - Olor a Rosas (1967)