Podcasts about so george

Hello, dear listener. I’m Marc Hershon, your every-other-weekly host of this show. Happy to be back. Last week co-host Tyson Saner was in the hot seat with Succotash Shut-In Epi240, favoring your pearly shell-like ears with clips from such audio wonderments as What Had Happened Was, Oprah's Master Class, and The Al Franken Podcast. You can still catch that installment at our homesite, http://SuccotashShow.com, as well as from Apple and Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, the Laughable app and wherever diner soundcasts are streamed and/or downloaded. Just last week - the past two weeks, actually - I was a guest on the Chillpak Hollywood Hour, with Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness, where, along with comedian and writer Suli McCullough, I participated in a comedy roundtable discussion. We talked about our comedy influences, the effect of the pandemic on live performance and the creative process, and more. Check it out when you can at their homesite: ChillpakHollywood.com, or wherever you grab your favorite soundcasts. Back in July I did an episode focusing on some soundcasts that I called Doin’ It Down Under with Jason McNamara, and I tapped our old friend Jabs to find me a quartet of soundcasts from Australia and New Zealand. For this installment, Epi241, entitled Crossin’ The Pond, I leaned on another friend of the show, George Grimwood, to load us up with a four-pack of shows from England and he came through with flying colors. It’s not like we don’t occasionally feature British comedy soundcasts. We recently clipped From the Oasthouse with Alan Partridge, and Strange Times with our friend Davian Dent. But on tap today we’ve got four shows we’ve not featured before, including Looks Familiar, The CheapShow, Rule of Three, and The Adam Buxton Podcast. This episode is sponsored by Henderson’s Pants new Camo Cut-Offs. Let me wax on about George Grimwood for a moment. We met via the socials back in the early 20-teens and then crossed paths in real life at, I believe, the third Los Angeles Podcast Festival. You can hear a short chat I had with him while we were hovering in the lobby area back exactly a hundred episodes ago, in Succotash Episode 141. George runs the Podnose Network that carries a number of soundcast over in England which he points out is “the UK’s leading independent entertainment podcast network,” with thousands of hours of content and more on the way. He himself is rebooting the show he hosts, called The Talk Show Talk Show (no relation to Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast Soundcast…), in which he analyses classic (and not-so-classic) episodes of Late Night talk shows, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and more. So George not only suggested the shows we’re clipping today (I actually harvest them myself), but gave me little blurbs about each show which is a tremendous help. Thanks, George! Without further ado, let’s get into this collection of English clips. (Do you think they call snippets crisps over there?) Looks Unfamiliar Our first show, Looks Unfamiliar, features journalist and writer Tim Worthington speaking with a guest about lost nostalgia - aspects of pop culture that have been discarded and forgotten in time, but often remembered fondly or with fear by the guest. Our clip is from recent episode 73 with director Matt Lee, and they’re talking about this service that used to exist called Dial-A-Song, where you could call a number on your phone and hear music played on your phone. CheapShow The CheapShow is a soundcast featuring Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman searching for bizarre treasures one may find in the Poundlands – which is a chain of British variety stores – I think it must be like our Dollar Stores here in the US, as well as bargain bins and charity shops, often culminating in some very unusual discoveries and hilarious segments. Our clip has the two lads reading a submission from a listener about a very strange find. Spoiler alert: It’s a turd. Rule Of Three This next soundcast, Rule of Three, was the winner of the best Arts and Culture division at last year’s British Podcasts Awards…and then promptly went on hiatus. But comedy writers Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris are coming back for more, according to our man George. And good thing, too – this is a super show! The hosts talk to comedians about something funny that they love. Guests pick whatever it is that makes them laugh — a book, a film, a tv show, a comic, a radio show, anything — and then the hosts and guest dig in. Our clip features a guest that I wish was a friend of Succotash, Eddie Izzard. He’s funny, and smart, and the thing he picked to highlight on the show was John Lithgow, specifically from his appearance on TV’s 3rd Rock from The Sun. The Adam Buxton Show The Adam Buxton Show is an interview show, or a “chat show” as they say across the Atlantic. Adam was originally part of Adam & Joe, a thoroughly enjoyable cult television series he did with Joe Cornish. They then became radio personas and, while Joe has been busy directing films, Adam has been podcasting. And writing, too — he recently released a memoir entitled Ramble Book. Our final clip of this episode features Adam’s “Ramble” with Canadian comedian Tony Law, where they share their experiences of being a stranger in a strange land – Disneyland. That’s a wrap on our listen to a few shows from Across the Pond. I realize that some of those accents from the British Isles might be a bit think for some of our US listeners, so I’ll advise you do what I do – listen again. It’s the King’s English, people! You’re bound to pick it up. Thanks once again to George Grimwood of the Podnose Network. If you want to reach out to him, you can email him at podnose@gmail.com. He tells me that they are looking to expand beyond the UK content next year. Who knows? Maybe Succotash can finally get our network stripes! I would love to authentically be able to say, “We’re getting the sign from the network to wrap it up…” Until then, we’re just going to have to wrap it up ourselves. Remember that Tyson will be here next week with another bouquet of soundcasts clips for you. And I’ll be back the week after with something nice for your ears. Until that time, stay safe, keep warm, wear a mask, wash your hands and if anyone asks if you’ve heard anything good lately, won’t you please pass the Succotash? — Marc Hershon

George, the manager of a small U.S. trucking company, was alerted around 6 a.m. on a recent Monday that an employee was having computer problems. So George investigated. At first he thought it was a garden variety computer virus. But this was no ordinary virus.The anti-virus software was disabled, and all of the files were encrypted. The same had happened to all the other computers left on over the weekend, as well as the server. The hackers left notes in text files to begin the process of attempting to extort the carrier. This was a ransomware attack. The hackers wanted $300,000.Long-Haul Crime Log tells the story of how George and his company grappled with the cyberattack. The crime left him shaken, especially since the hackers managed to access the digital nerve center of the company: the Transportation Management System, or TMS. This week’s episode is hosted by FreighWaves journalists Nate Tabak and Clarissa Hawes. Reach out at crime@freightwaves.com or find us on Twitter @LongHaulCrime.Reach out at crime@freightwaves.com. Read the headlines at FreightWaves.comSubscribe on Apple PodcastsSubscribe on SpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts

George Salinas is a Texas super lawyer with a list of achievements as long as your arm. But he, like many lawyers, knows that he's in a competitive game and that being great at what you do isn't always enough. So George found a way to set himself apart from the crowd.George set out to make his firm, The Law Offices of George Salinas, different from the others by putting customer service at the heart of everything it does. In this episode we talk how his firm keeps its clients happy and how he utilizes hybrid marketing to communicate his brand.What's in This Episode Who is George Salinas? How do you deliver the ultimate client experience? What do you look for when hiring new members of the team? How do you communicate your firm's values to clients? How do you keep fit with such a demanding schedule? How do you know when it's the right time to start your own firm?

Malcolm Atkin - A Life Time Of Music - Has worked in music throughout his life. He was a musician, a technician and a go-to pro who got "It" done. When Sir George Martin said, I'm building a studio in the Caribbean, Malcolm was on the crew that built it and made a reality.  Malcolm works with our friend Wes Maebe frequently. When Wes said, we need to hear some of Malcolm's stories, we said yes. Jon Leon Guerrero hosts this episode and it's fantastic.  Now we just need to get another session from the incredible life of Malcolm Atkin.  -  Haiku Equipment needs fixed Monserrat won't build itself So George sent Malcolm Similar episodes:  -   -   - Executive Producer/Host: Pete A Turner    Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev  ​ ​ ​​ ​​ ​​The Break It Down Show is your favorite best, new podcast, featuring 5 episodes a week with great interviews highlighting world-class guests from a wide array of shows.

https://tribus.captivate.fm/ (Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.) Jorge Guerra built one of the most successful brokerages in Miami and the South Florida real estate market. RESF, https://resf.com (Real Estate Sales Force), has over 450 agents and has grown to one of the largest independent brokerages in the Miami market by focusing on what agents need. TRANSCRIPTION  (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/2eEKHf0sWI7d9otbShwkIh5q2FcsXUdvE1JpiWTnTubBttakkegRUofi7hQHJrFAD32HQcvVFfQGuSp2_-hurIGY3vQ?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=0.93 (00:00)): Thanks for listening to Brokerage Insider. This week's episode was recorded live during the explore virtual conference on Thursday, September 24th. We look forward to returning to our regular scheduled program soon, but until then enjoy this session in this episode, our VP of product, Katie Ragusa interviews, Jorge Guerra, the founder of RESF, the Real Estate Sales Force with 450 agents in the South Florida area. He's also the 2020 chairman of the Miami association of Realtors. Katie Ragusa (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/2eEKHf0sWI7d9otbShwkIh5q2FcsXUdvE1JpiWTnTubBttakkegRUofi7hQHJrFAD32HQcvVFfQGuSp2_-hurIGY3vQ?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=34.101 (00:34)): So I just wanted to tell everybody a little bit about who they're going to be hearing from. So Eric mentioned some of your credentials just leading into your session, but in addition to that, George launches, brokerage firm, real estate Sales force, or our ESF 15 years ago. And he's since grown it into four offices and nearly 500 agents. So they cover the South Florida market. And most recently he was named 2020 chairman of the Miami association of Realtors, the largest real estate association in the nation and the 2021 global liaison for the national association of Realtors. So lots of credentials there, you run a brokerage, you hold, you wear many hats. So I think today we want to focus on operating on and keeping your brokerage running in a post COVID environment and just lessons that hopefully we won't be here forever in these circumstances. So lessons really that we can apply to any major shift in the industry. So I remember I got my license back in 2008 during the downturn. So there, there just seems like, no matter what, if you're in the business long enough, you're going to hit some crisis or, or something is gonna rock your world or our industry. So I really want to talk about lessons that we can apply longer term. So George, I think you're muted there. So hopefully we can hear from you, Jorge Guerra (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/2eEKHf0sWI7d9otbShwkIh5q2FcsXUdvE1JpiWTnTubBttakkegRUofi7hQHJrFAD32HQcvVFfQGuSp2_-hurIGY3vQ?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=119.18 (01:59)): You know what? I was talking to my executive assistant in between class and asking him for a water. So Katie Ragusa (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/2eEKHf0sWI7d9otbShwkIh5q2FcsXUdvE1JpiWTnTubBttakkegRUofi7hQHJrFAD32HQcvVFfQGuSp2_-hurIGY3vQ?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=126.92 (02:06)): Man of water so George, what makes your brokerage res special and unique as a company? Jorge Guerra (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/2eEKHf0sWI7d9otbShwkIh5q2FcsXUdvE1JpiWTnTubBttakkegRUofi7hQHJrFAD32HQcvVFfQGuSp2_-hurIGY3vQ?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=135.95 (02:15)): Ooh, I don't think we have enough time for that Katie to be, but you know what, I'm going to be honest with you. I think what makes us special honesty is number one, we're, we're an independent company. So, so we have a great pulse on what's going on in the market and, and being an independent company means I only have one boss and it's my wife. Besides that I'm able to move and shift at the speed of now and get as creative as I want to. And for me, that flexibility and that ability to pivot and market at, at the speed of now works best for me personally, you know, luckily real estate, there's so many ways to do business, so many different models that you can operate. It's...

Welcome to another episode of Monday minutes where we kick start your week. Every Monday in less than five minutes, I think today might be six or seven. And the only rule is that I want you to put it into action, Quickstart your week, kickstart your heart, do whatever you do that gets you going, but just make sure you never get stuck and never get those feet cemented in place because this is about moving forward because it's about progress and not perfection.Last week, I talked about grace in a very heartfelt episode that I felt was needed. And this morning when I was meditating, something kept popping in my mind. I was listening to quantum mechanics and quantum physics. And this thing didn't let me go. And I had this gut intuition that this is what I was going to share.And so now that we have grace, you know what we need the story of you. And one of my favorite songs is by an artist named  SatSang. And it's called the story of you. My second favorite song is called I am. But the reason I say this is because there is no other, you. I need you, your friends need you, your family needs you. Your team needs you and the world needs you because your story is powerful. And so today I would like to share part of my story by reading something that somebody wrote about me. It took me 10 years of being interviewed, pull out somebody write a story about me that I was willing to put on my website because of the level of acceptance and grace that I had worked towards to love myself.And I love myself. And so I'm just going to read this story. If you want to read along. It's on  www.mindofgeorge.com and it's on the about page. But as I read this, I want you to understand that your story is you and I don't ever want you to dim that story or did not light. I want you to shine it bright and far. And so full disclosure, this episode might go over a couple of minutes, it's not a long story, but I'm just going to read the story because it's important to me and your story's important to you in the world. And so I'd like to share mine. This story was written by one of our mastermind members and family members, Eliya Finkelstein. Her website is heyeliya.com. She's the master of storytelling. So Eliya, thank you for interviewing me for three hours and pulling the story out and writing it for me and helping me.Here we go in a single moment as time hung suspended in air, a little hazel eyed boy teetered on the edge of a decision that they'll pivot for him in his own life was about to be monumental for his father. The little boy knocked something off a table. And as it hit the floor and smashed into me tiny pieces, he frozen place, a reflexive move, young children use, or they way the meaning of a new moment.Well, he weighed these questions? What just happened? Did I do something wrong? Am I in trouble? Am I safe? Am I okay? Am I okay? The silence quickly filled with sobs is tiered flowed, freely time collapsing again, because of this simple unknowing, a quest for acknowledgement and a need for answers opened a new void that was filling with fear and more tears as fast as the tears came. So did his father who wrapped his son in his arms to do his great fathers do and answer the questions, a bait, the fear and fill the void. It was an accident. It's not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong, Bubs. You are okay. You are not broken. You are okay. I love you. Okay.But as that father built his son up in one of those moments, parents innately know to be crucial in their child's life. He was crumbling inside. The events of his own life, filled his mind. All the times he beat himself up and was angry at himself for doing something wrong, how it turned into the desperation to control each moment of his life to manipulate the situation and to never let his guard down. He realized that he wasn't okay. He had never been okay. Not from the time he himself was a small boy looking for the very reassurance he was now giving his own son. A reassurance that never appeared as a result, his life had been filled with hurt. And in turn, he had been spending his life hurting himself, hurting his relationships and hurting his business.As he stood, rocking his baby in his arms, he realized he didn't love himself the way he loved his son. And he never had, and it was destroying him. As far back as George Bryant can remember, he has searched for someone to tell him he was okay. Born as a baby addicted to cocaine, to a mother who struggled with severe mental illnesses and a dysfunctional family. Life was never okay. He talks openly now of stories of abuse, first physical and sexual of driving his father's Harley Davidson through the door of a shed at four years old of violence, bullying, self harm, eating disorders, screaming for attention, screaming for validation, desperate to feel loved and desperate to just feel.He talks openly about what can only be comprehended as his unwavering will to survive the life the hand he had been dealt. His story from there as one of your accounts, as a cycle of not feeling good enough, driving himself physically harder than should be humanly possible just to prove his worth and then sabotaging his progress only to repeat that process again.It played out in his years in the Marine Corps were an extreme addiction to body image and weight loss led to bulemia, overexercising, compartment syndrome, where he almost lost his legs recovery, a world record, attempt to triathlons, a paleo lifestyle. And then finally his outwardly successful brand, the civilized caveman.Finally, it seemed like he had one, like he was enough, like things were okay, but even then behind the scenes, life was falling apart. Civilized caveman, it turned into another form of addiction for George who found himself addicted to the dopamine and the feeling of being loved. Every single decision he made to scale that business turned from one of helping others to a quest for another way to amass more likes on social media, more comments and more fans.I started to see it as a demon in my life. George says, but it was also a backdoor I was keeping open. Like a backdoor to mediocrity, a backdoor into old patterns and habits and addictions. I knew I needed to get rid of it, but I didn't have the courage. I wasn't willing to own that civilized caveman was my identity and I'd identified myself as it. I wasn't really willing to let it go because I didn't want to stand in my power. I was more committed to being right than I was committed to being good.So George continued to pour in a civilized. Caveman is all addicts do without seeing or knowing a way out. He was allowing it to be his identity, a place of comfort and familiarity. Still things continued to integrate around him in his relationships with others and himself. At the same time, he picked up working as a digital marketing consultant on the side, a move that would serve as the final permission slip that he needed to close the door on civilized caveman. Seeing other succeed was the first time George started to believe in his own abilities.It finally came to a head when the morning after a transformational experience at Iowasca George woke to make the first business decision he ever made completely for himself. He called a friend and handed over his entire civilized caveman empire, the whole company, and simply walked away even then old ways die hard. And his work as a consultant initially went down the same path as everything he had just walked away from. A lot of those demons carried over. He said for about a year and a half, I felt like I was in purgatory. And it was worse than when I had caveman. Being a digital marketing guy who was creating millions and millions and millions of dollars in results. But I was so empty and dead inside because I was just recreating the same addiction. And then one day his small son dropped something on the floor and the world changed for George.I got to witness my story happen and an 18 month old, pure ball of love and perfection. And it broke me. Tell me how a one and a half year old is afraid of doing something wrong.I had 30 years of my life flash before my eyes, all the times that I beat myself up and I was angry at myself. I never needed to be it rocked George to his core, left him empty and void and scared in a whole new way. He realized he hadn't loved himself like he loved his son. Like the ball of pure love and perfection he wants was to who just needed to know if he was wrong or if he was okay.It just took George 30 years to answer that for himself. 30 years to begin to fix what was broken within himself. What most of us never even recognize, let alone face head on. You can put a nail in a fence and if you take the nail out, the hole is still there. Right? That shifted everything for me, because I realized I can't be a father. I can't be a business coach. I can't be a business partner. If an every conversation I'm coming from a place that I'm broken, there's something wrong with me. I'm just going to make everybody's problems worse and repeat the same cycle. If I do that. I knew I needed to dedicate my life to falling in love with myself and documenting the journey.So I fired all of my clients that were once my heroes and I walked away and cut out every bit of cancer that was in my life and filled every leak in my bucket. It was hard, but it was the only thing that would allow me to be in integrity. Integrity is what George walks in every day. It's in every relationship he built with his team, with his customers, his family and himself.You see in the way he shares his stories and the way he builds his business, nothing is forced or faked from fear. George shows up from his heart authentic and humble and real. His business exists as a part of himself now, not as a separate entity and it's stronger for it. His signature framework is as a lighthouse, the quintessential immovable, unshakable solid strong symbol of light and hope and guidance.Every lesson he teaches comes from his journey back to love. And once you know what to look for, you see it everywhere. Fulfillment, sequences, nurture sequences, and out carrying the competition. Even as trademark slogan relationships beat algorithms. All of it, straight from the pages of his own love story. It's why I say nobody has a marketing problem. Everybody has a relationship problem with themselves, their team and their customers informed not order because the biggest shifts in my life happened when I started doing more with less and spending that time with myself, George pauses, chuckles and escapes in a quick moment of reflection.And I can't believe I'm rewarded for being a decent human.So for those of you listening or watching, thank you. For letting me share my story. Eliya, thank you for writing my story. And I want to remind you today that your story is yours and the world needs your story and you are amazing, perfect, loving, complete whole human being. And I'm honored to have you in my world.And I can't wait to hear, see, and feel your story and the impact that it has on the world. And I've gotten a couple comments and messages lately about how I am online or what people see or what you hear in the podcast. And one of them struck me and I understand., I followed you because I thought you were this and now you're this, but then you're back to this.And I realized that I'm documenting my growth in my journey. And that's okay. People that inspire you be around people that pull out the best version of yourself, but never advocate your responsibility or sovereignty to somebody else. My mission for the rest of my life is to be authentic and congruent to who I am. And so there's going to be podcasts that I cry posts, where I laugh ones that I'm scared ones that I may be lost and trying to find myself, but they will all be authentic to where I am in that moment. And I'm sure I'm going to bump my knee and skin, my shins and stub my toe plenty of times, but I'm welcoming that journey of growth and love. And I invite you to do the same.So thank you for being here and this Monday minute, that ended up being around 13 to 15 minutes. Bonus episode for those that you listened, I hope you enjoyed it. Remember, your story is yours and the world needs it. Kickstart your week. Positive mindset. Put progress into motion. Keep moving forward. If you lose focus, come back. If I can do anything to support you, I will be in the Facebook group. And remember that relationships will always beat

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

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

Jared Goff's big deal Two weeks back Jared Goff signed a massive 4-year, $134 million extensions. That puts Goff into the top 5 in average annual salary for quarterbacks. George examines his record under Sean McVay, looks at what happens when Goff carries more of the responsibility in the offense and decides on whether Goff is worth the cash. Breaking News George starts the show by talking about the breaking news on New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton and on Miami Dolphins cornerback Minkah Fitzpatrick. Payton has signed a long extension that will not only end any talk of him coaching the Dallas Cowboys, but it will also set him up to stay with New Orleans for nearly two decades, a rare achievement in the NFL. Fitzpatrick requested a trade and reporting from Neal Driscoll of ProFootballNetwork.com indicates the Dolphins are receiving substantial offers for him. George talks about what he would take if he were sitting in the Miami front office. Expanding the NFL playoffs The NFL is talking about adding two teams to the playoffs to make 7 in each conference, and 14 units total for the next collective bargaining agreement. The NFL muted this proposal at the last CBA negotiations. George looks at the argument from both ends. The playoffs last expanded in 1990 to 12 teams. So George looks at who would've got in from 1990 until now and gives you the numbers on the sort of teams that would've made it and how many of them were good teams. Then George talks about it from the perspective of the groups that were seeded second and would go from getting the first week off to play at home. George tells you how many 13-win (and even 14-win) teams would not have got the week off as well as pointing out how much this policy could've changed the recent history of the NFL. Questions for the podcast team What should the Dolphins ask for in a trade for Minkah Fitzpatrick? Is Jared Goff worth the money? Do you want to see the NFL playoffs expanded New to the show? Make sure to follow our host George Templeton on Twitter and PFN: @temptherat @TheTravisYates @PFN365 Let them know your thoughts on the podcast by using the #PFNPodcastNetwork. Following PFN and our hosts will keep you up to date with the podcasts coming out of our site. *Find the Pro Football Network All-Access pass here. Catch up with the other podcasts hosts on Twitter and PFN Handle your business: Click here!Twitter: @temptherat Fantasy fixers: Click here!Twitter: @TheTravisYates & @CALL_ME_SOS Nosebleed Seats: Click here!Twitter: @ChiofaloSports & @ZachWolchuk Against the Spread: Click Here!Twitter: @JSarney_PFN365 & @rygosling Any given Friday: Click here!Twitter: @SamuraiiRadio, @Eric_Cam_, & @AshburnPFN

So George kind of forced us into starting this episode with absolutely zero prep... so be prepared for a trainwreck... Buy Our Merch: SlapDuck Store - Spreadshirt https://shop.spreadshirt.co.uk/slapduck-store Instagram: @slapduckpodcast @sullyiqbal @luka_sheehan @jooji_art / @goosejam YouTube: bit.ly/SlapDuckYT Twitter: twitter.com/SlapduckPodcast twitter.com/sully_iqbal twitter.com/PaperThinGeorge Email: slapduckpodcast@gmail.com Websites: George: www.joojiad.com Sully: www.sullyiqbal.com Luka: www.lukasheehan.com Radio Haver: www.radiohaver.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/slapduck-podcast/message

On February 13, Godwin High's beloved Drama teacher - Mac Damron - passed away over a month before a scheduled ceremony where the school's theater would be dedicated in his name. With several decades of teaching experience, Mr. Damron changed the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of students, one of which is our host, George Sirois. So George decided to reach out to his classmates from those years to see if anyone wanted to come on Excelsior Journeys to share some stories about Mr. Damron. Three classmates were able to accept: musician & animator Sruli Broocker, mother & photographer Kelly Wright Myers, and the first returning guest on Excelsior Journeys, artist & author Elizabeth Meggs.

On February 13, Godwin High's beloved Drama teacher - Mac Damron - passed away over a month before a scheduled ceremony where the school's theater would be dedicated in his name. With several decades of teaching experience, Mr. Damron changed the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of students, one of which is our host, George Sirois. So George decided to reach out to his classmates from those years to see if anyone wanted to come on Excelsior Journeys to share some stories about Mr. Damron. Three classmates were able to accept: musician & animator Sruli Broocker, mother & photographer Kelly Wright Myers, and the first returning guest on Excelsior Journeys, artist & author Elizabeth Meggs.

Dinosaur George answers a listener submitted question about how a religious belief will effect his dream of wanting to become a paleontologist.  This is a very controversial subject but has been asked on numerous occasions. So George dedicates the entire podcast to this subject.

On Tuesday, Top Drawer Soccer staff writer and Howler contributor announced that he’s leaving the industry altogether. So George called him up to talk about why he got into sportswriting, the forces that are shaping the industry, and why the lack of investment by major outlets is bad for all soccer fans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder reflect on some key historical battles and whether they challenge GPF's model of how the world works. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I'm JLS, your usual host. I am joined by Xander Snyder, and Xander I believe you are all the way in Iceland, aren't you? XS: Coming at you live from Reykjavik. JLS: How about that? And today, we want to do something a little different than we've been doing. Instead of going around the world and recapping some important part of something happening in geopolitics, we want to take a little bit of a different direction. So George a couple weeks ago wrote a piece about the Battle of Midway and thinking about what would've happened if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway and the United States had lost it. And one of the reasons George wanted to look at this particular battle, and one of the reasons he talks about this battle all the time, especially to us, other employees on GPF staff but just in general if you ever meet George because for him it's a major challenge to everything we do at GPF. Our whole premise is built on the fact that you can predict things because there's a certain order and logic to how geopolitics develop. There are imperatives and there are constraints, and the broad impersonal forces of history are what shape events. But then you have things like the Battle of Midway in the middle of World War II. Probably World War II would have worked out the same way in the end. But the Battle of Midway was really decided by chance, by nothing that you could have predicted or nothing that was completely rational. The Japanese outnumbered the United States and even with the U.S. breaking the Japanese code, there's some argument there to say that this is a moment where all the broad impersonal forces that we deal with on a daily basis in our writing and when we talk on these podcasts, didn't mean that much. I think this is actually a moment that all people who are in this line of work have. I know that when I was talking to Xander right when Xander started, one of the things Xander you brought up was that for you the Battle of Waterloo was this thing that always fascinated you. For me, it was the Battle of Gettysburg and I actually just wrote a piece that will be coming out on July 3 that sort of talks about that thing. So what we thought we'd do on the podcast today is that Xander and I would spitball a little bit about, you know, Xander telling us a little bit about the Battle of Waterloo and me talking a little bit about the Battle of Gettysburg and then trying to take a step back and thinking about how the geopolitical model that we work with deals with events like these, whether it's understandable or not or whether this is just something that we have to somehow build in to how we're thinking about the world. So Xander maybe the first question that I could just start you out with is why Waterloo? Why was Waterloo a battle that caught your attention and made you want to learn more about it? XS: Yeah, when I was first discussing with George Midway, the way he describes the evolution of the battle was a moment when this one air squadron, I think Torpedo 8 is what it was called, had you know a couple minutes basically to fuel up before they could turn to try to figure out where the Japanese were in the Pacific near Midway and the squadron commander decided to turn one way and found basically the entire Japanese fleet. And that let one squadron distract some of the fighters, the Torpedo squadron dove down, distracted the fighters and basically all got annihilated but that left the high-altitude bombers basically completely wide open to begin to just annihilate the Japanese fleet. And if that hadn't happened, if Japan had in fact been able to basically win at Midway, that would've put a lot of pressure on Hawaii because they would've been able to station long-range bombers and that could've radically changed the way the war on the Pacific developed and therefore how the entire war developed. So I started thinking about Waterloo which is the battle that I'd studied somewhat recently, and basically this battle evolved after Napoleon came back from exile in Elba in 1815 and all of the French troops that were sent by the Bourbon king to arrest him ended up joining up with him because he was their emperor. And he decided that the only way that he really had a chance to break the allies, which were Britain, Prussia, Russia, the Dutch, was to attack them quickly so that he could divide their forces, drive the British back to the sea and hopefully at that point sue for some sort of settlement that worked in France's favor because in the long run if it turned into a battle of attrition, he was going to lose. He didn't have the forces to compete with the massive Allied military of something like 800,000 troops. So he went north very quickly, he fought the Prussians at a place called Ligny, I am probably mispronouncing that. But this was several days before Waterloo. He drove them back, he won that battle and the Prussians kind of retreated and tried to regroup. And Napoleon though they were going to go to the northeast. And so he sent this one guy named Marshal Grouchy with a detachment of about 33,000 French troops to pursue him. Turns out the Prussians actually regrouped much further to the north, which was important and I'll come back to that. The next battle he fought was at a place called Quatre Bras, which was against the British, and he was able to push them back there too. Again he was hitting each army individually before they could group together and he pushed them back. Wellington regrouped at this place called Waterloo. The Prussians, instead of going to the northeast, went north to a place called Wavre. And by the time Marshall Grouchy, the guy who was sent off to Napoleon's right flank to basically pursue them, recognized where they were, it was kind of later in the game. They were able to regroup, and Napoleon sent later on sort of a follow up dispatch saying, “Ok, yeah, keep pursuing these guys as I initially ordered you to, but try to link up with us to the west so that you'll actually be involved in this big battle that's coming.” This is a great summary. But before he got that dispatch, he was kind of at this moment where he heard the cannons begin to go off at Waterloo, and one of his inferiors basically said, “Look we should march at the sound of the cannons.” And so Grouchy found himself in this position where should I strictly follow Napoleon's orders, basically just to pursue the Prussians rear and to keep them distracted, or should I pursue them in a way that would allow me to link back up to where I think this battle is going to be. Now take all of that, and now think just about the Battle of Waterloo where really the tactic for Napoleon was to break the British center at this place called La Haye Sainte before the Prussians could link up on the east, and if you could do that, he could basically win that battle and keep pushing the English or the British north before the Prussians linked back up to him. And he was finally able to do this at the very end of the battle, but by that point, it was too late; the Prussians had come and linked up and the game was over for Napoleon. Now if Grouchy had been able to link up with Napoleon, many historians think it's fairly likely that he would've been able to break the center earlier. So the question kind of comes down to either one misinterpreted order or miscommunication, some people say a bad decision by Grouchy but others will defend him saying he was following orders as strictly as he could. But you know, then the question is, if Waterloo is where Napoleon was ultimately defeated, what would have happened had he won that battle? And that's kind of why that came to mind when George was talking about Midway. JLS: You raise an important point, and this was one of our colleagues on staff raised this to me the other day, which was that when you are talking about warfare especially in the 17th and 18th century even into the 19th century, you seem to always have these stories about orders that either weren't delivered or orders that were ambiguous, were not followed directly. And if the regimental commander or whoever it was had just followed the order, then maybe things would've gone well. But the problem of course was there were no cell phones, there was no quick way to get in touch with people. You were dealing with large masses of people and you had to delegate an awful lot of authority and an awful lot to the commanders underneath you. So it's nice to imagine that Napoleon was this romantic genius sitting on top of this army and that he was pulling all these puppet strings and if everybody had just marched to his beat, everything would've been fine. But the reality in battle is that it doesn't exactly work that way. If you go to Gettysburg and visit the confederate lines at Gettysburg, it will take you the better part of a couple hours to walk up and down what the entire confederate line was. It wasn't the type of thing where the general who was sitting on top of everything could just go and order everything. So I think one thing to think about is that, a lot depends in these types of battles where you have large groups of men facing off against each other, a lot depends on the decisions that are made by the commanders and whether the general, the overall commander of the force, has trust in the people that are underneath and whether the people that are underneath him understood what they were supposed to do and when they were supposed to pursue one part of an order or maybe pursue another part of an order. XS: Right. You can look at Napoleon again. Like you say, he's supposed to be seen as this romantic military genius and in a lot of ways he kind of was, but he sent these ambiguous orders and that kind of in a way might have been his undoing at Waterloo. Now, we can get into how that particular battle plays into the geopolitics of the Napoleonic wars but I think before we do that, it's worth talking about your case with Gettysburg because then we can compare and contrast the two and see what we can draw and what we can bring back to this larger theory that we use to broadcast events. JLS: Yeah before I dive into it, the issue of ambiguous orders and even orders in general figures hugely into Gettysburg at multiple points. First of all, it was the Confederacy's and Lee's second campaign into the Union. The first campaign was in 1862 and ended at the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Sharpsburg, and what happened there was famously that General Lee's orders got lost and the Union got them. General McClellan got his hands on dispatches that showed where the Confederate Army was actually going to be and that was what allowed the Army at the Potomac to find the battleground at Antietam and really caught Robert Lee off guard the first time that he came north. The second time Robert E. Lee comes north to fight, it's 1863, the war is not going well for the Confederacy, the longer the war went on, the worse it was going to be for the Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant was putting a great deal of pressure on Vicksburg, and Vicksburg probably wasn't going to be able to hold and so Robert E. Lee goes to Jefferson Davis and to the Confederate leadership and says, “I need reinforcement so that I can take the Army of Northern Virginia north into the Union once more.” And he does and at multiple times throughout the battle you have this issue of orders being somewhat ambiguous. On the first day, for instance, Richard Ewell is pushing into Gettysburg and he whips the Union forces. He's got them pretty well managed and they go into the town of Gettysburg and there's a chance there where Ewell can send maybe 2,400, 2,500 troops to take some high ground at Culp's Hill where there were only just a few hundred Union defenders. They were exhausted from fighting all day and Ewell had more people coming in. He could have very easily taken that ground on Culp's Hill. And the thing was that Lee sends him an order that says something like pursue the enemy but don't bring on a general battle because on July 1, the first day of Gettysburg, Lee still doesn't exactly want to fight at Gettysburg. He hasn't decided that that's where he's going to fight yet and he doesn't want to again get caught in a battlefield that isn't of his own choosing. So he gives Ewell what Ewell interprets as a contradictory order. So, “should I actually send my troops to take Culp's Hill or should I not bring on a general engagement? I don't know what to do.” One of the what ifs that historians throw around with Gettysburg all the time was if Stonewall Jackson hadn't died months before Gettysburg and he had been the one commanding those troops, not Richard Ewell, Jackson would have absolutely understood exactly what Lee meant and would've known that that was the moment where, forget about the general battle thing, here was a chance to take the high ground. And they didn't. And that really defines the rest of the battle of Gettysburg because at the end of the first day, even though the Confederacy does very well, the Union has all the good defensible positions. The second day, Lee tries to attack again. They get very close to winning. They don't actually win in the end and then on the third day, Lee commits his catastrophic mistake and maybe this is the one where its different than Waterloo or even different than Midway. Because the way I see it, the Battle of Gettysburg was in the end decided because Lee made a catastrophic error and he let himself not see what was in front of him. He saw what he wanted to see in front of him, and he didn't see what was actually in front of him. And this question of questionable orders comes back in a little bit. One of Lee's top commanders General Longstreet didn't want to make the assault on the third day and therefore there's a disconnect because Longstreet thought that Lee was going to tell Pickett to get his troops ready for a charge first thing in the morning, and Lee thought that Longstreet was going to do it. So nobody actually told Pickett, who was supposed to lead the charge and who did eventually lead the charge, that he should be ready in the morning. And because he wasn't ready in the morning, the Confederate forces weren't in sync so one group of forces attacked in the morning, Pickett wasn't even ready in the morning. So it took them all morning to get to the point where Pickett was ready, and then they get to the afternoon and Pickett's charge begins and 15,000 Confederate soldiers march a mile over territory that I can't even imagine. I've been to Gettysburg and I've walked Pickett's charge and it's incredible. It doesn't make sense that men could march slowly and methodically – which all the history accounts sort of talk about how the Confederates marched on the Union's positions – through a field with no cover, with artillery coming at you every which direction, straight into a well-defended Union line and the Confederates just get massacred. And it's the highwater mark of the Confederacy and really it's even amazing that the Confederacy is able to fight for another two years after that. But it all turns on Lee ordering Pickett's charge. He could have withdrawn, he could have taken a defensive posture and let the enemy come to him. I don't think that the Confederacy would have won the Civil War even if the Battle of Gettysburg had gone differently but certainly a major part of the way the war developed and the way peace developed afterwards all came down to Robert E. Lee's decision to order a charge that by any logical or rational metric that I could come up, he shouldn't have ordered. XS: Yeah now and in this piece that you wrote – and one of the perks of working at Geopolitical Futures is I get to read some of these big pieces before they get published, right? And in this piece, you mention a couple of things that just seem like someone should be aware of this, right? Like Lee did not check his ammunition stores before he ordered the charge across this milelong stretch of field which in theory could have at least provided some degree of cover for the men going across. And up to that time in the war, Lee, really with a great lack of resources compared to the North, had been able to pull off some really astonishing victories. So what do you think lead Robert E. Lee to make that decision? What could have happened if he had been more collected, if he had thought differently? I certainly don't want to criticize a guy who was so successful up until that point because, as we'll come back and mention, one of the great weaknesses of thinking through these events in retrospect as well, all human beings make some errors at some point, right? But how could this have played out differently? JLS: Yeah so I think there's two different ways to answer that question. The first is to realize that while we are here talking about individuals and individual choices that happen, those broad impersonal forces that we discuss all the time are still extremely relevant. One of the reasons Lee and the Confederates won the victories they won was because they were much more desperate and they had to take many more risks than the Union had to take and that meant high-risk, high-reward maneuvers. Now Lee was facing an army, the Army of the Potomac, that the leadership structure was in complete chaos. Lincoln could never find a commander that he really trusted. The top was being shifted around all the time. And you know they were technically fighting on enemy territory, right? They were fighting in the South, they were fighting in Virginia and they were fighting in the places that Lee's soldiers called home. All of that I think matters a great deal. But the other thing was that Lee had to take risks that McClellan and the other Union generals didn't have to take. And so that puts him in a position to win certain battles and go on the aggressive in Virginia that maybe doesn't work quite as well once he moves into Maryland and Pennsylvania. The second thing to point out though I think – and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the orders and about what it means to command that many men at the same time – Lee relied on the commanders underneath him to understand his orders. He delegated a great deal of authority to them. And one of the reasons the loss of Stonewall Jackson was so important to the Confederacy was because Stonewall Jackson understood Lee. He knew what Lee wanted; he knew what he was thinking. Longstreet was another one who really understood Lee. So when he lost Jackson, he lost one of his main lieutenants. And then on top of that he had to replace Jackson with people he wasn't completely confident in. But this goes back to the artillery question, right? Because there is no way that a general like Robert E. Lee or even Napoleon could know every single thing that was happening on a battlefield. You know, we're talking about armies that are 100,000 people large, even larger in some cases, and you can't expect that general to know the disposition of every single company and brigade and how many artillery is in this here and how many artillery in that here. In some sense, they are supposed to sit on top of it and they are supposed to organize it all. But when Lee is talking to the person who is in charge of his artillery and the person who is in charge of his artillery isn't very good and says that everything's fine, Lee doesn't have time to go check that. Lee has to depend that his subordinates know what they're talking about and will raise disagreements with him. This is another part and I wonder if there's any of this with Napoleon. I think another part of Gettysburg was that Lee by that point had won so many battles and the men trusted him so much and believed in him so much that they lost a little bit of the will to question him. I'm not saying that Longstreet and the others didn't question him but you know the day before Pickett's charge, the night before Pickett's charge, Longstreet's criticism and his concerns were not nearly as vocal as they were the morning of the actual charge. And once it's the morning of the actual charge, Lee sticks to his guns. If Longstreet had felt able to speak up the night before or even some of the other regimental commanders had or Pickett had the sense to say, “General Lee, this isn't a good idea, there's no way that we could do this,” maybe things would have been handled a little bit differently. But the ironic thing is that the more battles Lee won, the more the men trusted him and believed in him such that when it came time to order Pickett's charge, those men were more afraid of disappointing or saying no to their order than they were to marching across a field with certain death at the end of it. Those are two things to think about. XS: Yeah hubris definitely played a role at Waterloo too. The day of the battle or maybe it was the day before the battle, one of his inferiors said to Napoleon, I think as it related to sending Grouchy off to his right flank to the east, “Is this a good idea? Should we be dividing our forces right now as we get ready to go up against the British?” And I am paraphrasing Napoleon's response but it's been recorded and it's very close to something like, “You're not listening to me when I tell you this. Wellington is a bad general. He is not a good general.” Like, “Shut up, I know what I'm doing,” right? And one of the things that Napoleon really perfected in his military tactics in the 19th century was moving artillery rapidly in conjunction with infantry to support infantry. And a tactic that Wellington had developed and used several times before was just hiding men behind a ridge so that they were out of range of the artillery. They just couldn't hit them because they were behind. So by the time the infantry marched up and they had tried to battle these positions with artillery, not much had happened because they were completely protected. So Wellington was recorded as saying afterwards, again paraphrasing something like, “Napoleon marched right in the same old way he always did, and we beat him the same old way we always did.” JLS: Yeah, there's a similar thing happening in Gettysburg. I mean, Lee was not wrong to think that the Union commanders were bad. He had time and again beaten the Union because people like McClellan or Burnside just hadn't done very well and General Meade, who commanded the Union forces at Gettysburg, had only been put in place very recently. Lincoln had removed Hooker and put Meade in place. So really when Lee went North, he thought he was going to be facing Hooker. It turned out he was facing Meade and he didn't see there was any great difference between the two. And he was wrong about that. Meade was a solid general and a had good sense of what was going on and in general had made the right decisions there. So there is certainly an element of confidence that has to happen there. But I would also say that, I think in general for military leaders and things like this, you also have to have that confidence. Once you make that decision, you have to trust that you've gotten through everything and you have to act with a certain amount of confidence. You have to have flexibility to respond to changes as they happen on the battlefield. But it really, in a case like Lee's or in a case like Napoleon's, we start talking about things like tragic flaws because the thing that makes them so good also ends up being their Achilles' heel sometimes in a situation where things aren't going the way that they did before for them. So I think that's another thing to think about. XS: Yeah now when we talk about these moments in history – and I've kind of come to call them Midway moments just because George really emphasizes the element of chance in the Battle of Midway – I think that the three that we have talked about in this episode all are slightly different, right? With Gettysburg, it was really the decision of one man that kind of swung the pivot one way or another. In the case of Waterloo, it was basically the decision of two men: both Napoleon and Grouchy could have acted differently. Grouchy could've figured it was his role to – he was delegating responsibility; he could have moved his forces in a way that linked back up with Napoleon. Napoleon could've been clearer, right? And in the case of Midway, it was really kind of just chance. Do I turn left or do I turn right? And turning the right way lead them to the Japanese fleet. Now, I think if we tried to put these Midway moments in the context of some of these larger personal trends that we talk about. Looking at Waterloo, Napoleon let's say he could have won Waterloo. With some consideration and after a conversation that I had with George on this topic, I really don't think that there is any way for Napoleon to have won the war that he started in 1815. There was at that point simply too many resources on the other side. Even if he had achieved his sort of midterm strategic objective of driving the British to the ocean, getting them off a continent and blocking off the Prussians from their allies on the west, the Russians were still mobilizing. They were just doing it a lot slower, which is why they weren't involved in the Battle of Waterloo. So it was kind of a matter of time before Napoleon was going to be overwhelmed by incredible force and he could've at that point attacked the Russians, tried to push them east. But so long as the Prussians retained supply lines all the way back to home, they can pull back and hold a defensive position until the Russians came. So I think in that case the balance of resources was just so overwhelmingly on the side of the allies. They also had more troops available to them. I mean Napoleon was really – France had already been just completely wiped out of military-aged men almost by that point from the first almost 20 years of Napoleonic wars. There just weren't that many military resources, both men and materiel, that he could pull from at that point. And that was not necessarily the case on the allied side. So I think we can talk about Waterloo as a Midway moment and still recognize that in that case, impersonal trends probably in this what if scenario probably would have led to a very similar historical outcome. What do you think about Gettysburg? JLS: Well I think that your point is well taken and I think that even though it's a lot of fun to talk about these things, and I really do believe some of these things could have turned out differently depending on the individuals that we are talking about, but the side that basically should have won on paper in terms of resources and impersonal forces and geopolitics and all that other stuff, won in each three of these cases. The United States overall was a greater power than Japan in the long run and it prevailed in the end. In the Civil War, the Confederacy was not going to be able to defeat the Union. Their only chance of defeating the Union, at first, it was to try and inflict a couple really harsh defeats and hope that that would cow them into negotiation. Once the war was going on this long, their only hope was to try and prolong the conflict and make the Union see that it wasn't going anywhere such that they could get international recognition and maybe some help and some resources from outside and maybe even get a pro-peace candidate to replace Lincoln in the next Union presidential election. But everything was relying on using the battles to influence political conditions to make it more amenable to some kind of settlement. And as you just said in Waterloo, Napoleon didn't really have the troops to make it work against the allies that he was fighting against. So yeah, the answer to that is that I don't think if Lee had won at Gettysburg, I don't think the Confederacy would have won the Civil War and I also don't think that we would've then lived in this alternate universe where the fighting spirit of the Union had been broken and there would have been some kind of negotiated settlement and you have had a Union and a Confederacy for some amount of time before they joined back together. I think in the end, the odds were very much stacked against – and this is where sort of the sheer-force statistics makes it work. The Confederacy had a very, very small margin for error. It could not afford to make the sort of catastrophic mistakes that happened at Gettysburg; the Union could. The reason that Ulysses S. Grant succeeded as a general was because he was willing to take the casualties and knew that the Union could replenish itself and the Confederacy couldn't. And this is actually a concept that we think about often when we're thinking about geopolitics today. When we talk about American power, the United States has not fared well in many of its recent wars. It lost the Vietnam War for all intents and purposes. I think we can say that the second Iraq War it lost. It will lose the war in Afghanistan. These are not wars where the United States is going to be able to achieve its political objective. I should say right now that doesn't mean that the U.S. didn't fight courageously or that it didn't win a great number of battles, but if the definition of victory in a war is to carry the political objective that you wanted, the U.S. couldn't do that in Vietnam, it hasn't done that in the second Iraq War, it has not been able to do it in Afghanistan and the U.S. can survive that. The U.S. can survive losing wars and making mistakes because of the depths of its power. A much smaller country can't survive those kind of mistakes. And sometimes if a smaller country makes those kind of mistakes, it ends up in the outright destruction of those countries. I am sure we can think of multiple instances in history where a small country because of whatever reason loses a great deal of its sovereignty because it tries to do something that doesn't work. So again in all of these situations, I think that Lee's decisions and Napoleon's decisions and Torpedo 8, I think that's all a part of the fabric of history and one of the things about studying wars is that geopolitics can take you most of the way to understanding how a war was started and why it was started and what the objectives are, but at a certain point, war is complicated and messy and relies on the actions of individuals. At the same time, even when those individuals' actions are the most important and everything hangs in the balance, those individuals are still there because the impersonal forces that we always talk about brought them to those points. We can map out exactly why Lee was at Gettysburg and we can even map out why he felt a little bit desperate probably and how that influenced his decision-making. I am sure you can do the same for Napoleon. XS: Yeah he had absolutely no margin of error just like you said with Lee. JLS: So at that point it becomes are we really talking about individuals shaping history or is this the broad geopolitical forces that we talked about shaping the individuals and the individuals marched along to their own drum? For me, I think that Gettysburg is such a compelling test case for this because I really do think that Pickett's charge was just a mistake. It was not the type of thing that you could've predicted because it didn't make sense. It still doesn't make sense to me with all the evidence that we know that Lee had in front of him, it does not make sense to me why he ordered it. The only way it makes sense to me is if I can think back to moments in my own life or moments in human history where I've been blinded by passions or I've been blinded by something else instead of the thing that was in front of me. But if you're talking about as a sober, rational military tactician, and that was what Lee was, he was a very disciplined general, making that decision, it doesn't make sense. He let himself get caught up in the moment and he didn't see what was going on and he didn't know what he didn't know. And for me trying to explain how a man got that far and then makes that mistake is the challenge and in some ways, it will yield an unsatisfying answer because I don't think I have an answer beyond the fact that he was human and he made a mistake. Maybe a mistake that we can empathize with and understand based on what he was. But at the same time, that particular thing on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg just comes down to Lee making a mistake and his men following orders. XS: Yeah so in all of these circumstances you can imagine how with a different decision made by an individual or a couple of individuals, the outcome might have still looked somewhat similar. However, the process to get to that outcome might have played out entirely differently. For example, in World War II, if the U.S. had lost Midway, if they wanted to stay in the war, they would've beaten Japan in the long run, it just may have taken much longer. It probably would've taken many more lives, it probably would've taken a lot more resources and it probably would've taken a focus away from the European theater to focus on the Pacific theater first. And what might have happened to Russia while it was basically trying to beat back the Nazis on its own at that point? And would the U.K. have received American arms? It's hard to tell but it seems likely that the Allies still would have won. It's just the process to get there would've looked entirely different, right? JLS: Yeah, it would've looked entirely different, and this is again one of the things we talk about a lot internally and which I talk about all the time, and it's one of the more interesting things to talk about which is, the shorter your time horizon, the more the individual matters. I think sometimes in GPF writing, we have a tendency to dismiss the individual and that's because in the broad scheme of things, we do think individuals are less important. But when you think about history 50 years, 100 years out, these forces that we're talking about and just the magnitude of the number of the decisions that have to be made by human beings sort of settles into something of a logic that you can predict. But the shorter and shorter and shorter the time horizon, the more important the individual gets. You know sometimes, people ask us, “Well you didn't predict X was going to happen.” And I think one of the things to say there is we don't presume what's going to happen tomorrow. If you can predict what's going to happen tomorrow, you have an incredibly high degree of intelligence about what's going on with a particular set of actors. What we can say is that, you don't really need that intelligence to understand the most important things that are going to develop over the course of years and decades and perhaps on the magnitude of a century. But again that's what makes this all so difficult and what makes this job challenging is that you can't just sort of plug everything into a formula. You can make a model of it, and you can hope that it works the way it does. And we'll be putting our 2017 forecast report card which is a really good way of thinking about this tension, right? Because we've made a set of forecasts for the year and every day we're tracking them. So we have to decide, well this happened today – how good are we doing? How bad are we doing? Should we call this an incomplete? Should we call this a failure? Should we call this a whatever? And that gets back to the exact same questions that we're talking about here, right? Well this particular thing happened on this particular day. We didn't see that Saudi Arabia was going to engage in this diplomatic offensive against Qatar and was going to try to isolate Qatar. We certainly though knew that Saudi Arabia and Iran were going to be competing more this year. And we said as much. So it's this weird space, and I think we are all individuals, all of us are individuals, so we get seduced by stories like Robert E. Lee and like Napoleon and like Torpedo 8 because we can wrap our brains around that. We can imagine the Civil War is a massive conflagration that happens because of a lot of different geographic and political forces and the same is true with Napoleon. World War II is like the mother of all things in that regard just because of how complicated it was. But it's very easy to think of yourself as ok, well I am General Lee and I go visit the Battle of Gettysburg site and I can walk the line and I can walk Pickett's charge and I can put everything in front of me and I can think on a tangible basis, well what did it mean to be here? And in some sense that becomes very important, and it's very important to think about that stuff emotionally if you're going to empathize with the stuff that we're analyzing. At the same time though, if you let that be all that you're seeing, you're going to miss sort of the broad sweep of history. XS: So if you're a fan of the Civil War, be sure to check out Jacob's piece that will be coming out on the Battle of Gettysburg. It's on July 3, it will be published, right? JLS: It will and maybe if it does well and if people enjoy this conversation, we'll let you take a whip at the Battle of Waterloo and maybe we'll even think about trying to do maybe every once in a quarter or once in a blue moon, doing some of these pieces. XS: Definitely and on that point, please do let us know, readers and listeners, what you are interested in hearing more of. You can reach us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. We do our absolute best to respond to all of them, and we look forward to hearing more about what you want to receive from us. JLS: Well thanks, Xander, and we'll see you out there next week.

The Spouse Escape plan Meet George. He’s a business owner with a lot on his plate. Meet Pam. She’s George’s wife and while she worked in the business a long time ago, the business has grown up and she is no longer involved. Meet Sam – he’s George’s second in command and a great manager. George is busy making plans to grow his business while Sam runs the day to day operations. But today George is worried and he needed a solution. See, If George dies, he wants to make sure that Pam won’t have to worry about running and selling the business. So George met with his planner and came up with a Spouse Escape Plan. George had a Valuation done that indicated his business is worth $3million. So George and his key employee Sam entered into an agreement that if George dies, Sam will buy the business from Pam for $3 million dollars. If George dies, the business will be re-appraised and if it’s worth more, Sam will pay the difference to Pam in installments over a 5 years period. To make sure the money will be there, Sam will take out a $3 million life insurance policy on George. Even though George has some other personal life insurance, this policy will make sure that a business transaction will take place and give Pam an Escape plan. George’s Company will pay the premiums and give Sam a tax-deductible bonus that will cover the policy premiums and the tax cost. George feels better. Now he can go back to working on his business and know that Pam won’t have to worry about the business if he dies. Very Smart!

VecsCast is back after quite a considerable break and today we don't have Dan! So George comes in to replace him. The guys get up to all sorts of ramblings involving, the Olympics, George's new channel and Pokemon Go.Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you know when the next one comes out which will hopefully be very soon! And don't forget you can watch the guys in this podcast episode as well as listen to them over on their YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/vecspassvideosSocial Media Details:Facebook - www.facebook.com/vecspassvideosTwitter - www.twitter.com/vecspassSam - www.twitter.com/sambettyridge_Dan - www.twitter.com/danwigmoreMake sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel!www.youtube.com/vecspassvideosE-mail us!vecspass@gmail.com

It was a Sunday Early Turn and George was looking forward to taking things easy, after all nothing ever happens on a Sunday morning does it? Even better since there were more than enough drivers on duty that day he had been posted as the operator on the RT Car as a treat. The RT Car is the pursuit car on the Division and its name refers to the days when the police in the UK were just beginning to embrace the new fangled communication technology, RT stands for Radio Telephone.So George was sitting back and relaxing while his driver Donald steered the Radio Telephone Car out of the back yard of the police station and made their way onto the High Street. No sooner had they turned on to the main road than they found themselves staring at the back of a queue of traffic held up for roadworks.George grinned as he slouched even further down in his seat, realising the day was getting easier by the minute, not only was there little to do but they wouldn't be getting anywhere quickly to do it either. There was little to see other than the small van in front of them.There were a few pedestrians around and although there was a hold up the traffic was still quite light, it was Sunday after all. George watched as a young woman stepped off the kerb on their nearside and walked in front of the staionary police car on her way across the road. Suddenly he caught a flicker of movement ahead and everything seemed to slow down, a car on the other side of the road was speeding very rapidly toward them. The woman hadn't noticed the car and the car driver obviously hadn't seen the woman.George shouted at the top of his lungs in slow motion for the woman to stop, already knowing it was too late and that nothing he could do would stop what was about to happen. He watched in horrified fascination as the woman stepped in front of the speeding car, he heard the shrill squeal of tyres skidding and saw the smoke boil off them as the driver finally saw the pedestrian and struggled to avoid hitting her.It was no use. Even as George and Donald threw open their doors and bundled out of the car, the woman was struck by the other car, her body was thrown ten feet into the air and the car passed directly under her before smashing into a series of cast iron bollards in the roadside. The woman's body was flung another ten feet along the road before it landed in a tangled heap near the gutter.Everything returned to normal speed as George and Donald reached the woman and were astonished to find she was unconcious and still breathing. The scene was cordoned, help arrived, the air ambulance flew the woman into a hospital in the City Centre for Intensive Care and slowly the story emerged. Apparently the young man driving of the now mangled sports car had been trying to change channels on the radio and hadn't even been looking at the road as he sped through the High Street.The most remarkable thing about the entire incident didn't happen until days later. The woman who had looked like such a terrible mangled mess after being hit by a speeding car and thrown so far through the air, remained in a coma for over a week. After about ten days she regained conciousness and apart from a loss of memory covering the entire accident she only had a couple of minor fractures and a few bruises. She made a full recovery.George remembers the incident because it was one of those occasions when he was completely helpless and unable to control a situation. As a police officer he has grown very much accustomed to being in charge of a situation at any given time and having things happen the way he wants them to. This was one of those times when neither he nor anyone else could do anything but accept the role of spectator and sit back and watch until events had taken their course.This is an experience that George will be glad never to have to repeat.'Right Click' and 'Save as' to download the audio version

Trouble is brewing in Europe! So George and Jimmy bring over MattVisual to spend more time talking about SGDQ, Shovel Knight, Korra and movie games instead.

The Guardian, late last night, led with a story about George Osborne coming north later this week to dash the chances of a currency union. It’s a topic we’ve not really covered in the podcasts over the recent past. So George, Ed and Danny prompted Lesley to clear the pod studio and assemble a few thoughts in response. Is this a ‘special’ pod or a ‘dinghy’ pod trailing after the main @lesleyriddoch podcast; it’s up to you. Certainly, Lesley sees this intervention as a potential gamechanger in the flow of the #indyref debate.     And, there are some new ways of accessing the podcast; there is a ‘Lesley Riddoch Podcast’ page over at Facebook . You can get the Lesley Riddoch Podcast on a free subscription on iTunes here.  And, if Android is your platform of choice, we hear good things about ‘Pocketcasts’  - any listener feedback on this one would be appreciated. As ever, we make these podcasts from scratch each, so it’s delivered fresh, straight from the Feisty Studios to you each week-ish.

In the United States, Do You Want To Know a Secret was the first top ten song to feature Harrison as a lead singer, reaching number 2 on the Billboard chart in 1964 as a single released by Vee-Jay, VJ 587. The Beatles' version was never released as a single in the UK, where a cover version by Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas hit number one in the NME chart. Lennon said he based the song on Wishing Well, from Walt Disney's 1937 animated feature film Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Indeed, the opening lines of the lyrics are taken from this film song. However, the melody of DYWTKAS appears to owe more to "I Really Love You", a song released by The Stereos in 1961. This record, issued on Cub Records, a subsidiary of MGM Records, reached number 29 on the Billboard Top 40 chart. The lead singer on I Really Love You was Ronnie Collins. This song was covered by the le George Harrison in his 1982 studio album Gone Troppo, so indeed it appears to have been well known to the Beatles. Lennon later said that he gave "Do You Want to Know a Secret" to Harrison to sing because "it only had three notes and he wasn't the best singer in the world". So George did pretty well with these 3 notes..... The song was recorded during a ten-hour session on 11 February 1963 along with nine other songs for Please Please Me. Take 8 was best — being a superimposition take of the harmony vocal and two drum sticks being tapped together (You can hear them from 1:09 to 1:20.), onto take six. Here, we used take 7 and Take 8 to create a stunning true stereo version.