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

by Mark Lewisohn

Kim Bennett had moved heaven and earth to help make “Love Me Do” a hit. No man could have done more,

and George himself did a lot less.

There was no time off from here to their Hamburg Christmas—the Beatles had thirty-one consecutive

workdays of every kind, requiring constant van and air travel up and down the country.

Kim Bennett was suddenly picking up airplay with relative ease: he’d flown to Germany to beg “Love Me Do” into Two-Way Family Favourites and now it made what Tony Barrow (in his “Please Please Me” press release) claimed was “the fastest-ever repeat

almost 40 percent of the measured audience, 18.8 million,

two minutes of exhilarating harmonies, melodies, riffs and runs—only this time they did it so much better and so much hotter, properly finding their feet in the studio for the first time. The vocals are a formidable fusion of John’s lead and Paul’s high-note harmony, bowling the song

John’s quadruple Come on! calls are echoed in snappy girl-group sound by Paul and George, rising in pitch to crank the tension.

“Love Me Do” was unlike anyone else’s recording and now “Please Please Me” took that initiative and ran several miles with

The influences were checked—Orbison, Everlys, Isleys, Smokey’s Miracles, Goffin and King—but the Beatles had taken

them and created something else, something vital, joyful, earthy, throaty, catchy and genuinely uplifting. For the second time,...

George Martin reached across Norman Smith, pressed the talkback key and let his voice boom into the studio below: “Gentlemen, you’ve ju...

Brian had found more than a music publisher—he was establishing, loosely speaking, a London representative for his management and artists.

Standard procedure was to plug the song and not the performer—this was why the charts could be clogged with multiple versions of the same number—but Brian made it clear that no one was to record competing versions of John and Paul’s songs

The more airplay they had, the more he earned; the more records they sold, the greater his income. Here was every incentive for a hardworking man to help make the Beatles as big as possible.

until fellow musician Ted Taylor had a quiet word with them about pancake. He demonstrated how to apply Leichner 27 with a wet sponge, and trace a thin black pencil line around the eyes and lips for definition under lights.

Paul was the first to socialize, coming over to ask what everyone was drinking. He took all the orders, including the other Beatles’, then went to the bar, and

when the barmaid said, “That’ll be £2 14s,” he turned round and said, “Bri! £2 14s for the drinks.” This was Paul, the generous host.

The song as it emerged from here incorporated a number of ideas. “John and I used to nick a lot. ‘We’ll have this bit from the Marvelettes, we’ll have that bit from …’ If you really nick then it’s a disaster, but [the way we did] it just gets you into the song, and in the end you never notice where it was nicked from. You pull it all together and it makes something original.”52

“I saw her standing on the corner”

“Young Blood,” and “she’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen” is from Chuck Berr...

“How could I dance with another / Since I saw her standing there” has a similar melody and meter to “I want to be in that n...

Paul cheerfully admitted to the wholesale lifting of the bass riff in Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You” that runs throughout “I Saw Her Standing There”:

Pat Hodgetts, a happy Cavernite from the south end of town (the Beatles knew her as Polythene Pat, because she chewed the stuff), has a particular memory of the last great Liverpool night of ’62: “John sang To Know Her Is To Love Her and he had

They went on stage one night as a trio, lacking John, so Horst Fascher went to hunt him down. In the spring, he’d felt the need to urinate on John while he was fickte a Fräulein; this time, finding John receiving oral sex in a backstage toilet cubicle, he doused the hot couple in ice-cold water from an adjacent shower.

get out zere and verk; John tore the toilet seat off its hinge and went on stage dripping wet, in Beatle boots, underpants and, around his neck, the toilet seat.*

John and Paul would have an exclusive contract with the new company for an agreed period of time, and instead of forfeiting their copyrights, as everyone did and as they had done until now, they’d maintain joint ownership. They would still sign individual agreements for each new song, for the standard royalties on sheet music sales and broadcast and mechanical fees, but, on top of that, they’d be entitled to 50 percent of the company’s profits.

playing them in the Cavern. But Ringo knows the numbers, and his musical synergy with John, Paul and George is complete. They can wing it, he can swing it, and their combination defines tight.

This is an important record of John Lennon in Hamburg. He’s surely drunk and/or speeding, and there’s a beguiling belligerence to his humor, a dominant cynical goading to his between-songs banter and the way he deals with hecklers.

don’t know whether you can understand me or not,” even saying it twice while Paul is singing “Your Feet’s Too Big,” and on one occasion he concludes it with “but piss off. You got that? Christmas or no Christmas.”

Paul gets to sing his song, John gets to undermine him. It’s just one facet of the complex sibling relationship they’ve always had, one among so many reasons they’re special together.

Tornados’ “Telstar,” recorded above a shop in north London, now big in North Dakota.

Brian had invested extraordinary energy in the Beatles these twelve months, fast-tracking their rise from rough local heroes to the brink of (and it really did seem due) national stardom.

my experience, is that which exists between the Beatles and myself. If I’d been domineering or dictatorial they would never have accepted me and it would all have gone wrong. You have to allow for freedom.”11

He loved the Beatles as people and he loved them as artists: he loved their authenticity, originality, attitude, talent, truth, cynicism and fun, the A Grade alchemy that grabbed him—and many others—100 percent. He loved them for their uncompromisingly direct communication, for stimulating and challenging his thinking. He loved their sheer lust for life.

tripled the Beatles’ income during 1962, from about £80 a week between them to a consistent £250 after his 15 percent commission—an incredible sum for a Liverpool group.

made a net loss on the Beatles’ first year,” he conceded in October 1963.

was also gulping Prellies and Scotch and pursuing a compulsively reckless

They were doing a lot of rock ’n’ roll standards but they were doing them in three-part harmony, and they did all their own arrangements. It was fabulous. I sat there totally gobsmacked.”14

They drew the line on December 31, 1962, having played more than 1,100 hours here

made true a hundred colorful metaphors, coming of age where wildness was allowed. John summarized it in ten words: “We went in young boys and came out old men.”15 It was the end of the Beatles as a club band, for now, and more or less the last time they played without everyone watching.

As leader Lennon would explain, “We were the best fucking group in the goddamn world … and believing that is what made us what we were. Whether you call it ‘the best rock ’n’ roll group’ or ‘the best pop group,’ whatever—as far as I was concerned, we were the best. We thought we were the best in Hamburg and Liverpool—it was just a matter of time before everybody else caught on.”16

played about twenty hours on this visit, adding to perhaps 1,090 from the previous four. As imprecise as these calculations must be, the Beatles’ Hamburg total was ±1,110 hours in thirty-eight weeks of playing—the equivalent of three hours every night for a full year.

1990.) “I wrote a lot of stuff thinking I was going to end up in the cabaret, not realizing that rock and roll was particularly going to happen. When I was fourteen there wasn’t that much of a clue that it was going to happen.”

George’s friend Arthur Kelly remembers going with George to learn guitar from a man at a pub in Edge Hill that they called “The Cat”—actually

He had a big mother of a guitar, probably a Gibson, with a pickup and

an amplifier. He taught us a few Hank Williams country songs like ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ ”

Luxembourg was now embracing a kind of permissible payola system where (as well as carrying regular shows and commercials) its schedule included “sponsored programs,” record companies buying exclusive airtime as shop windows for product,

remained the only place for British teenagers to hear the kind of music the BBC had scant space for and sometimes little inclination to play; also, crucially, while the BBC was hidebound by rigorous “Needletime” restrictions

EMI and Decca sponsored numerous programs, and because Decca had Elvis,