Tune In (The Beatles: All These Years, #1)

by Mark Lewisohn

Lindy Ness was just home from Norway and

He’d asked her to bring him back a gift and she brought a wooden troll with trousers around his ankles, sitting on a potty. She found John, with George, by the bandroom, and had a conversation audible only to its participants:

‘Oh I thought it was another wedding present,’ and John said, ‘SHUT UP!,’ and then he looked at it and said, ‘What’s this, Norwegian wood?’ ”15

and happened to see her in Liverpool while driving his car—his proud and precious Ford Consul Classic, which he bought new (“on the never-never”)

hadn’t believed what Paul said about their increasing fame—being brought up working-class in that era, we were given to believe “our sort” couldn’t become successful.17

I was lucky to be on their wavelength when I joined the group. I had to be or I wouldn’t have lasted. They all have strong personalities and unless you can match it, you’re in a bit of trouble.

They were bringing in not just a drummer but an attitude, something fresh into the mix. What they knew of Ringo, they liked. He was a risk-taker, hungry for new experiences, forthright, never afraid to stand up for himself; he was funny and courageous and had a Big Time ego, as shown by his first-night row with Neil.

Pete had never been right because they needed boldness, brashness, openness, someone with strengths and vulnerabilities similar to theirs, a tough-minded individual and a team player with personality.

He was also their “Dingle Boy,” a name they teased him with if he was exhibiting behavior a little more salty than theirs, but it was more endearment than indictment.

the Beatles a few uniformities, taking Ringo gave them a different and more appealing feature—contrast.

“Ringo’s relationship with George was always vastly different to what he had with Paul or John,” Neil Aspinall said. “He felt he owed George.”25

He called it “the Chain.” John brought in Paul, and Paul brought in George, and George brought in Ringo. John, Paul, George and Ringo doesn’t just trip nicely off the tongue, it was (is) a natural order, and connections of great intricacy wend within and without its links.

was impressed by Ringo’s innate intelligence and a sharpness that belied his missed classroom years. As John put it, “To be so aware, with so little education, is rather unnerving to someone who’s been to school since he was fucking two onwards.”26

On the one hand, a big one, Paul was full of admiration for the kind of man Ringo was and what he’d achieved, and the fact he was 22

always is, always has been. I suspect when he was about three he was a grown-up.”29

As Paul would say a few years later, “When Ringo joined us I used to act all big time with him because I’d been in the business a bit longer and felt superior. I was a know-all. I’d

John and Paul both wrote songs, now Ringo came up with one—the Beatles’ third songwriter. Showing real guts, he revealed for their approval a little country and western ditty he called “Don’t Pass Me By.”

he wrote it on a piano (he knew a few chords as well as boogie-woogie), which might account for his comment that when he played it to John, Paul and George they had hysterics and said it was a rewrite of a Jerry Lee Lewis B-side.

They loved oddballs and eccentrics and he certainly was one.

They made him their equal from the start, on a full quarter share of the money, just as Pete had been.

were paid London-type fees in Liverpool: Ringo was in the band, he was one of them, he got the same.

Along with his pay, accounted for with honesty and transparency, came instructions telling Ringo where to be and at what hour, how to look his best, what to do and sometimes what not to do.

Ringo would describe the four as being “three-and-one” for some time to come, such is the nature of insecurity and such was the complexity of these relationships.

George brought Ringo into the group but chose not to room with him when they stayed at hotels in order to avoid the possibility of the Beatles falling deeper into two divisions, with them in one and John and Paul the other.

the Beatles faced a downturn when they went into their obscure American R&B numbers. Liverpool audiences had come to appreciate these songs but no one else knew them.

had an interesting verbal trick—where the last word of one line, lonely, rhymed with the first of the next line, only—but otherwise “Tip of My Tongue” was a thin creation, its hooks never quite catching.

That they promoted all five of their new numbers at the expense of any other they did so well—“Soldier of Love,” “Some Other Guy,” “Baby It’s You,” “Twist and Shout” and the like—is the strongest indication of their wanting a uniquely new take on success: earned on their own terms with their own sound and music.

“They played me “Please Please Me” but it was very slow and rather dreary. I told them if they doubled the speed it might be interesting.”

“We were a bit embarrassed that he had found a better tempo than we had,” Paul says …

the producer discerned that Ringo couldn’t play a drumroll. There would be unhappy repercussions.

this made them highly unusual in 1962. With “Love Me Do,” they were among very few acts even trying a blues groove in a British studio.

The way it’s mostly related, the Beatles went together to register their protest. All

But “How Do You Do It” was scrapped for reasons the Beatles knew nothing about.

John and George had taken delivery of their expensive new Jumbo Gibson guitars, shipped to Liverpool all the way from Kalamazoo, Michigan. These became integral to the faster, harder reworking of “Please Please Me”

George Martin was aware of the contract situation … and he was on their side. He now knew the Beatles, liked them, and believed their unusual “group sound” could get them a hit—provided they recorded the right song.

George would put it, “An attitude came over John and Paul of ‘We’re the grooves and you two just watch it.’ They never said that, or did anything, but over a period of time

“When Paul and I first got together, we wanted to be the British Goffin and King.”

the Tornados’ space-age instrumental “Telstar”).

Nobody believed in it [“Love Me Do”] at all.”7 This apathy extended to George himself, who broke down no walls to push the record he didn’t like and which Ardmore and Beechwood had forced him to issue.

artists postwar (and probably prewar as well) launched with an already thriving sales base. The business had never been geared this way—singers were always “discovered” and then promoted in the usual clichéd ways.

Mick Jagger made the speech inducting the Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (an institution ludicrously improbable in 1962),

The Stones were playing little clubs in London—doing Chuck Berry songs and blues and things—and we thought we were totally unique animals, [that] there was no one like us. And then we heard there was a group from Liverpool. They had long hair, scruffy clothes and a record contract, and they had a record in the charts, with a bluesy harmonica on it, called “Love Me Do”—when I heard the combination of all these things, I was almost sick.21

young northerners and young southerners in England shared an affinity for Chuck Berry, Arthur Alexander and Bo Diddley,

The Beatles went for Motown, the Stones for Chess; the Beatles for Goffin-King, the Stones for Howlin’ Wolf; the Beatles for Richie Barrett, the Stones for Jimmy Reed; the Beatles for Luther Dixon, the Stones for Willie Dixon.

The result is that this first-ever published quote by Mick Jagger about the Rolling Stones is “I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ’n’ roll outfit.”22

“Many journalists that day treated the Beatles badly,” Calder says, though he himself was much impressed

The Beatles were a breath of fresh air in everything they did. There was no crap. They were wearing leather jackets, not suits, and must have been on speed because they had an energy I’d never seen before.

His chat was fantastic—I’d never heard any artist go straight into it like that; it didn’t matter what the question was, he knew what he was going to say and he said the same thing in every meeting.

and other stars announced they didn’t smoke or drink, the Beatles knew it was nonsense. “We used to think they were soft,”

was the first to play the Beatles in London. “We took our initial copy of ‘Love Me Do’—a one-sided white label test-pressing—straight to the Lyceum on a Tuesday,” Dexter says. “Sammy played it three times that night and people came to ask us what it was.”12