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

by Mark Lewisohn

Flexing the muscle they always had, John, Paul and George brooked no debate over Ringo’s merits.

the Beatles must break up and then re-form without the undesirable member, signing a new management contract that excluded him.

Brian would still be tied to Pete under the original agreement, however, and remain obliged to provide

him with paid work. If he didn’t, Pete could take action over loss o...

Japage 3,

or, as Paul was actively considering, Lennon-James.

was plain that they had something about them. They were charming and caustic in a way that only working-class Liverpool kids could be. Paul was a jaunty young man with the eyes of a spaniel, implacably confident of his charm, and John stuck in the odd barbed word. He was obviously wickedly funny but didn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to mess with. George was a rather shrinking presence and I’ve no recollection of Pete at all, or whether he was even there. And Brian was all charm and affability, cool but very enabling—he was going to make this Beatles thing “happen.”

it made sound business sense: the Beatles were the pacesetters, the hot property, and from now on, when he had to tell inquiring promoters they were busy on a requested date, he could offer an alternative group and keep the work in-house.

Now he’d come in, was running the best talent, raising group fees to record levels, and staging promotions for which he was attracting patrons’ spending money and selling tickets from his own busy shops slap in the center of town. (The footfall benefited the business of Nems Ltd., too.)

but the usual Butlin’s compensations were on tap, chiefly the stream of lasses looser with their elastic because they were on ‘oliday.

She broke the news in the place where the seed was sown, her room at 93 Garmoyle Road. “I watched his face drain of all its color, and fear and panic creep into his eyes. He was speechless for what seemed like an age. ‘There’s only one thing for it, Cyn, we’ll have to get married.’

John had always liked typewriters. He’d been a happy tapper from his early teens, hammering out the humor one arfingly mishit word at a time.

irreplaceable Lennon originals had gone, lost forever. “We had to let John know and met him that night at the Blue Angel,” Bill says. “When we told him,

“Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, a musical family from a poor black district of Cincinnati. It sold next to no copies in

The Beatles’ intense drive to stay one step ahead

of every rival (and they were already at least fifty clear)

August 16, 1962.

Pete Best fired

He’d been in the Beatles two years almost to the day—August 13 or 14, 1960, to August 16, 1962—so surely there had to be another reason for his dismissal, one they weren’t telling him. Otherwise, why would it take them all that time to say he wasn’t good enough?

This formally closed the door on Pete’s time in the Beatles and opened it for Ringo; it also set down the framework for a new and more robust contract between him and the Beatles that would cover all activities as far as 1967.

1. That the name Richard Starkey§ replaces that of Pete Best.

5. The rate of commission [is] to be changed in that the management receive 20% when the total earnings of an individual artist exceeds £100 per week, and that the management receive 25% should their earnings, individually, amount to more than £200 per week.

what is recalled is that they were, right from the start, a better, tighter band than before.

Pete had a tendency to speed up and slow down, Ringo didn’t, and he had charisma. But we felt sorry for Pete all the same.”61 Bobby Brown was thrilled to see the Beatles she loved take on a new dimension. “I really liked Ringo from day one, at Hulme Hall. As soon as he got up there I thought he was great. He was full of personality. He wasn’t this moody James Dean–like person at the back. Pete never smiled and Ringo always smiled.”

“They’d had a succession of drummers through the years and finally now they found one who integrated, someone

who fitted.

Until this point it was always ‘John, Paul, George and a drummer’—now it was John, P...

JOHN: There was always this myth being built up that he [Pete] was great, and Paul was jealous of him because he was pretty, and all that crap. They didn’t get on that much together but it was partly because Pete was a bit slow. PAUL: I wasn’t jealous of him because he was handsome. He just couldn’t play! We wanted him out for that reason. PAUL: What’s the truth about why Pete Best was sacked? Because George Martin wouldn’t have him, is one good reason. And

Asked thirty years later if he’d ever felt sorry for Pete, Ringo delivered a dose of the Liverpool straight-talk that showed him the match of his new bandmates: “No. Why should I? I was a better player than him. That’s how I got the job.”6

broad consensus confirms it was all over between one and two weeks later.

Pete was just a pretty guy. He never had anything to say and didn’t match their personalities at all. He just used to go home, disappear, very subdued, whereas Ringo was Mr. Showman.

They were much better with Ringo, without a doubt. He gave them that solid backbeat—he’s a great rock ’n’ roll drummer—and he fitted in brilliantly.

their first with synchronized sound, their first TV coverage and the only film of them in the Cavern.

So here they are—on film, with sound, at last, the Beatles. They do not disappoint. Ringo lays a solid, bricklaying beat behind a powerful three-guitar sound; John and Paul pitch full tilt at the lead vocal, side by side, intense and in harmony. Just like everyone says, they’re themselves, charismatic and dynamic performers, no faking. Except for a change of clothes and drummer, this is what Brian Epstein saw when he dropped into a lunchtime session nine months earlier, and here’s why he was hooked. John sings straight, strong and true, his right hand chopping out the

rhythm, the audience but a nearsighted blur. Paul sings with the same total commitment but is more self-aware, mostly looking up at the ceiling, making only occasional eye contact with the audience. George, off to the side, is solidly good on guitar and can’t suppress one wry, shy smile. Ringo is doing his job mostly in shadow, but close-ups catch him laughing and enjoying himself. Looks pass between them, they’re confident with who they are, where they are and what they are, and they’re ready to fly.

Though the camera didn’t see him, Pete was in the Cavern for this session. “I sneaked in and sneaked out again,” he wrote in his autobiography.

The Beatles’ habit of not giving one another gifts was well set, but Brian gave the newlyweds free use of his private flat for as long as they needed it; 36 Falkner Street was where Mr. and Mrs. Lennon would begin married life—and where, hopefully, Cyn would see through the last seven months of her pregnancy. It was a typically generous gesture, and both a surprise and great relief to John and Cyn, who’d done nothing to fix their own accommodation and would otherwise have been sleeping apart for the time being, she back in her crummy bedsit, he at Mendips. Cyn so genuinely overflowed with gratitude and emotion, Brian blushed crimson.

and Ringo was among those he kept in the dark. As he said in 1965, “I didn’t want it to get around and I didn’t know

how well I could trust him to keep a secret.”

“He talked about Cynthia ‘expecting,’ and—while I don’t remember exactly what he said—I got the clear sense he wasn’t happy about becoming a father. I also got the impression he loved Cynthia very much.”

He did, and another of John’s ways of preventing people thinking him married was to carry on carrying-on. For a short while longer, he kept up his fling with the girl who’d posed for his sexy photos, and he also started a new situation, with a dark-haired, Juliette Gréco–like beauty called Ida Holly.

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. I’d sat in with them before they offered me the job fully, so I knew them. But those sit-ins were really for kicks—as a stand-in. When I finally joined them I had to join—join

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. (It lasted a few weeks before Neil “got over it,” Ringo says.) The Beatles’ chemistry with 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. It was a heavy load for slender shoulders and Ringo felt his way

gradually. “Emotionally,” he’d say, “I had to ea...

They also didn’t know which way to take him: although he was very funny he could also be a bit feisty at

times,

and he’s nobody’s...

It was a move brought about by George, and consequently his and Ringo’s friendship was a viscerally close and fundamental bond. “Ringo’s relationship with George was always vastly different to what he had with Paul or John,” Neil Aspinall

“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.