The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  Voormann adds, “It was hilarious.”

  * * *

  On May 9, 1962, George explodes into the room, wide-eyed, bursting at the seams with excitement and waving a telegram.

  “We’ve got a record contract!”

  CONGRATULATIONS BOYS EMI REQUEST

  RECORDING SESSION PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL.

  The boys fire off telegrams back to Brian:

  [JOHN:] WHEN ARE WE GOING TO BE

  MILLIONAIRES

  [PAUL:] PLEASE WIRE TEN THOUSAND POUND ADVANCE ROYALTIES

  [GEORGE:] PLEASE ORDER FOUR NEW GUITARS

  Most significant is the line “Please rehearse new material.” Usually the record companies choose the material—but the Beatles are going to get to play their own songs.

  After a lot of debate, Paul and John decide to revisit “Love Me Do,” the best of their early songs. The first thing they do is rewrite it in the key of G, which gives the song a great bluesy sound, and John—influenced by a new song called “Hey! Baby”—incorporates a harmonica part they all like. Pete suggests adding a skip beat, a kind of fluctuation in tempo. It’s a strange idea, but the result is solid. John and Paul accept it.

  A week later, they’ve got two more new songs: “Ask Me Why” and “P.S. I Love You.” By the time the Beatles return home, on Saturday, June 2, they’ve got three brand-new Lennon-McCartney songs for EMI’s Parlophone label.

  Their recording is in less than four days.

  We’ve got a lot of work to do.

  Chapter 14

  It’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it.

  —“It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It)”

  After three days of feverish rehearsals, the Beatles set off for London on Tuesday, June 5, and on the late afternoon of June 6, they lug their road-worn equipment to Abbey Road and into EMI’s huge Studio Two.

  The studio had “great big white studio sight-screens, like at a cricket match, towering over you,” Paul recalls, “and up this endless stairway was the control room. It was like heaven, where the great gods live, and we were down below. Oh God, the nerves.”

  He’s hoping to keep the band’s loosely guarded secret. “None of us really knows how to read or write music. The way we work it is like: just whistling. John will whistle at me, and I’ll whistle back at him.”

  Today, the band will be recording four songs selected by Parlophone: “Besame Mucho” and three originals—“Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” and “Ask Me Why.”

  When the engineers, dressed in white lab coats, tell them it’s time, everyone’s nerves spike.

  They all look at one another. It’s Us against Them. Liverpool against London.

  The red recording light goes on.

  * * *

  The man operating the tape machine is Chris Neal. He listens to the Beatles play a couple of songs, then looks to Norman Smith, the balance engineer, and says, “I’m not all that impressed.”

  Smith replies, “Oi, go down and pick up George from the canteen and see what he thinks of this.”

  George is George Martin, the head of Parlophone.

  The label’s publishing arm, Ardmore and Beechwood, is eager to obtain potentially lucrative song copyrights, so George makes the practical determination that he can turn this band into a profitable version of EMI superstars Cliff Richard and the Shadows. “That was how my mind was working at the beginning,” he explains, “looking for the possibilities of one of them being the lead singer. When I met them, I soon realized that would never work.”

  George enters the control room and listens to the group play “Love Me Do.”

  Smith’s concern is their rubbish equipment. “I got nothing out of the Beatles’ equipment except for a load of noise, hum, and goodness-knows-what.”

  George is only nominally interested in pop, but as a classically trained musician himself, he quickly pinpoints the main issue with “Love Me Do”: the arrangement.

  * * *

  The four young men from Liverpool stop playing and nearly stand at attention when they see a tall and dapper man in his thirties, wearing a black tie with a red horse motif, approach them. He introduces himself as George Martin, the head of Parlophone. George’s crisp accent alone is enough to prove intimidating—as intended—though in truth he isn’t upper class at all.

  After they exchange hellos, Mr. Martin tells them he’s got a few issues with “Love Me Do.” For example, John can’t both sing the title line and play the harmonica.

  “Someone else has got to sing ‘love me do’ because you’re going to have a song called Love Me Waahhh. So, Paul, will you sing ‘love me do’?”

  George Harrison puts aside his electric guitar and picks up an acoustic.

  The producer returns to the control room.

  The Beatles start “Love Me Do” from the beginning.

  Paul’s big moment arrives. Everything stopped, no backing. The spotlight is going to be on me, he thinks, leaning toward the microphone.

  * * *

  George Martin watches. Listens.

  Paul McCartney’s voice won’t stop shaking.

  Take after take after take.

  “Well that was twenty minutes of torture,” says Norman Smith with a sigh.

  But the real problem is the subpar drumming.

  “He’s useless,” producer Ron Richards says of Pete. “We’ve got to change this drummer.”

  George nods in agreement. “Tell them to come up to the control room.”

  The Beatles shuffle inside the small room and find places to stand. The space is tight, the air thick with a haze of cigarette smoke. The boys from Liverpool openly gawk at all the unfamiliar pieces of equipment.

  George has them listen to the playback of the recordings. When it ends, the room is silent. Then Pete pipes up: “I think they’re good.”

  George Martin shakes his head and delves into all the issues he’s seeing and hearing.

  “He was giving them a good talking to,” engineer Ken Townsend remembers of George’s lecture, but Smith recalls, “They didn’t say a word back, not a word.”

  “Look,” George finally says. “I’ve laid into you for quite a time, and you haven’t responded. Is there anything you don’t like?”

  After an uncomfortably long pause, George Harrison drawls, “Well, for a start, I don’t like your tie.”

  George Martin stiffens at the insult. The tension seems to draw on for hours…

  And then the Beatles laugh.

  George Martin does, too.

  He hadn’t been expecting comedy from the band, but next to classical music, comedy is what George Martin knows best. It’s the icebreaker that saves what could have been a disaster.

  The boys from Liverpool spend the next twenty minutes keeping the studio in absolute stitches. At least John, Paul, and George do—Pete, as usual, stays silent in the corner. By the time the Beatles leave, Norman Smith has to dry his tears of laughter. He turns to George Martin and says, “Phew! What do you think of that lot then?”

  As George Martin would say later, “I did think they had enormous talent, but it wasn’t their music, it was their charisma. When I was with them they gave me a sense of well-being, of being happy. The music was almost incidental.”

  If they have this effect on me, he thinks, they are going to have that effect on their audiences.

  Chapter 15

  You’ve got to hide your love away.

  —“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”

  At home in Liverpool, the Beatles are preparing to face an audience of one. One of their own.

  John, Paul, and George decide to tell Brian that he has to handle the uncomfortable job of firing Pete. As George will later admit, “Being unable to deal with the emotional side of that, we went to Brian Epstein and said, ‘You’re the manager, you do it.’”

  Brian is upset by the news. “I think you should keep Pete,” he says.

  But the others felt they’d already given Pete enough of a cha
nce. Another local drummer recalled encountering Paul and Pete huddled together at the Mandolin Club one afternoon in 1962, after a lunchtime session at the Cavern. “Paul was showing Pete the drum pattern he wanted on a particular song,” the drummer remembered. “Pete tried to do it, but he didn’t get it.”

  “It had got to the stage that Pete was holding us back,” Paul later explains. “What were we gonna do—try and pretend he was a wonderful drummer? We knew he wasn’t as good as what we wanted.”

  “Do you have someone in mind for his replacement?”

  “Ringo,” John says.

  “He’s rather loud,” Brian says. “I don’t want him.”

  “But we do.” John lists the reasons why the Beatles want—need—Ringo. When Ringo is around, the Beatles feel like a full unit, both on and off the stage. And they know Ringo’s interested. “We want Pete out and Ringo in.”

  Ringo, the three of them believe, is the key to making the band better.

  On Thursday, August 16, 1962, a band meeting is called at the NEMS office. Only Brian and Pete attend. John and the others don’t show up.

  Though Mersey Beat later reports that Pete Best left the band “amicably,” that’s far from true. Pete had been in the Beatles for nearly two years, and to have been dismissed by Brian Epstein right when the band got its record deal…it cut deep.

  “I knew the Beatles were gonna go places, I knew we were going to be a chart group—and to be kicked out on the verge of it actually happening upset me a great deal,” Pete later tells an interviewer. “And the fact that they weren’t at the dismissal hurt me a lot more. It was vicious and backhanded and I felt like putting a stone round my neck and jumping off the Pier Head.”

  * * *

  On August 18, 1962, Ringo Starr lugs his drum kit into the Cavern for a two-hour rehearsal.

  John is the first to notice how different Ringo looks. Not only has Ringo shaved off his beard, he’s also restyled his hair to look like the rest of the band—something Pete never did.

  John has always liked Ringo—has been, truthfully, a little bit in awe of him. Neither of them suffers fools, and both are quick and sharp with the tongue; and they both grew up with absent fathers. Both enjoy drinking and flirting and laughing, generally having a good time. Ringo hasn’t had much formal schooling, yet he’s very intelligent. Sharp.

  John describes feeling a little intimidated by Ringo to a journalist. “To be so aware with so little education is rather unnerving to someone who’s been to school since he was fucking two onwards.”

  The rehearsal goes amazingly well. They have great fun together.

  And the chemistry is perfect.

  “We were all very happy to have him,” George will later say. “From that moment on, it gelled—the Beatles just went on to a different level.”

  Not all the fans see it that way.

  Pete’s a local favorite, and his firing is the talk of Liverpool’s music scene. When the Beatles return to the Cavern on Sunday, the audience is buzzing with gossip—mainly theories that the rest of the band was jealous of Pete. As the Beatles take the stage, some people start shouting, “Pete Best forever, Ringo never!”

  “The birds loved Pete,” Ringo explains. “Me, I was just a skinny, bearded scruff. Brian didn’t really want me either. He thought I didn’t have the personality. And why get a bad-looking cat when you can get a good-looking one.”

  Brian declares himself “the most hated man in Liverpool.”

  Granada TV shows up three days later, for the band’s lunchtime session at the Cavern. It’s the first time the band will be on camera.

  The Beatles give a rousing performance. The new foursome is tight and has great fun together. Unlike the surly Pete, Ringo smiles and laughs as he plays. The cameras capture the new Beatles in all their glory—despite, between takes, some fans shouting, “We want Pete!”

  Pete, it turns out, is there.

  In the audience.

  Years later, in his autobiography, Pete reveals, “I sneaked in and sneaked out again.”

  The fans just need some time to warm up to Ringo, John thinks.

  Besides, he doesn’t have time to worry about how Pete’s fans are taking the news.

  He’s getting married tomorrow.

  * * *

  “You’re too young!”

  Mimi’s voice thunders and echoes inside her kitchen.

  “Cyn is having a baby. We are getting married tomorrow; do you want to come?” John has just told her.

  The following morning, John and his longtime girlfriend, Cynthia Powell, exchange their vows at the registrar’s office, with Paul and George as witnesses and Brian as best man.

  When they leave the building, it’s pouring rain.

  It’s all so absurd that they burst out laughing.

  Chapter 16

  I can’t do what ten people tell me to do…

  —“(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”

  Brian hands John an acetate disc.

  “What’s this?” John asks.

  “The song that will be your first record for EMI. You’re going back in the studio Tuesday to record it. Mr. Martin believes it’s going to be a number one song.”

  The Beatles come together at Brian’s record store to listen. The song, “How Do You Do It,” is pop treacle. They hate it.

  Paul holds up the disc. “Well,” he says, frustrated, “what are we going to do with this?”

  They decide to rearrange it.

  * * *

  The Beatles resume their gigs at the Cavern, mixing in their own songs. On Monday, September 3, the day before their studio date in London, the band debuts a new song, John’s “Please Please Me.”

  On Tuesday, September 4, 1962, at 2:00 p.m., the Beatles enter the Abbey Road studios once again. John feels a bit more relaxed than he did the first time—they all do, because they have a real drummer with them.

  It’s brilliant how this all worked out. I brought in Paul, Paul brought in George, and George brought in Ringo.

  As they rehearse “Please Please Me,” the head of Parlophone comes down from the control booth to address the group.

  “You need to tone down the drumming,” George Martin says, looking at Ringo.

  A tense silence follows, and the producer cuts into it with further criticism.

  “Double the speed,” he says, and the song “might have something.”

  But the Beatles are there to record “How Do You Do It.” Though they polish it in two takes, they still don’t like the song.

  “We want to record our own material,” John says, “not some soft bit of fluff written by someone else.”

  George Martin accepts the challenge and extends one of his own. “I’ll tell you what, John. When you write something as good as that song, I’ll let you record it.”

  That seems to be the last word, but a few days later, back in Liverpool, Brian tells them Mr. Martin wants the Beatles back in the studio. “‘Love Me Do’ will be the first Beatles single.”

  They couldn’t have hoped for a better result. Now they just have to prove they were right.

  George Martin isn’t altogether wrong about “How Do You Do It,” either—when Gerry and the Pacemakers record it a few months later, it goes straight to number 1.

  Chapter 17

  We all want to change the world.

  —“Revolution”

  On Friday, October 5, 1962, the day “Love Me Do” first goes on sale, John plays it for his aunt.

  “What do you think, Mimi?”

  “If you think you are going to make your name with that, you’ve made a big mistake!” she tells him.

  “Remember, I said I’d be famous,” John says.

  “What always worried me, John, was that you wouldn’t be so much famous as notorious,” Mimi shoots back.

  Luckily for the Beatles, others are more enthusiastic.

  “The whole of Liverpool went out and bought it, en masse,” Ringo marvels proudly in later years. The Liver
pool fans are loyal and numerous—they flock to the record stores in such huge numbers that the rumor mill immediately begins churning out theories that Brian personally bought ten thousand copies to artificially inflate sales.

  “It sold so many in Liverpool the first two days—because they were all waiting for us to make it—that the dealers down in London thought there was a fiddle on,” John recalls. “‘That Mr. Epstein feller up there is cheating.’ But he wasn’t.”

  He is kicking his promotions into high gear, though. Parlophone isn’t doing much in the way of publicity, so Brian picks up the slack, and “Love Me Do” sneaks into Record Retailer’s top fifty, at number 49.

  Next he books the Beatles on a bill with one of their longtime idols: Little Richard.

  Little Richard—though much more restrained in 1962 than he was in his fiery 1950s persona—leaves the Beatles starstruck. “We were almost paralyzed with devotion,” says John. Conversely, though Little Richard finds John a bit crass, he deems both Paul and George “sweet.”

  And he’s a bona fide fan of their music. “Man, those Beatles are fabulous!” Little Richard tells Alan Smith of the New Musical Express. “If I hadn’t seen them I’d never have dreamed they were white. They have a real authentic Negro sound.”

  * * *

  John has no idea that his band is the start of a music revolution.

  The first Beach Boys album, Surfin’ Safari, is released by EMI on the very same Friday that “Love Me Do” goes on sale, and across the ocean, in New York City, twenty-one-year-old Bob Dylan, whom NME’s weekly US columnist, Nat Hentoff, dubs “the most startling of all the American city folk singers,” is playing Town Hall, on West 43rd Street.

  Just a few months earlier, a young student from Iran named Fery Asgari revitalizes a basement music venue in west London called the Ealing Club by starting a weekly R&B night. The Ealing Club quickly becomes one of the hottest spots in London, with people lauding its R&B musicians, especially blues guitarists Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. There, in April, Korner introduces young R&B fanatic Brian Jones to a nineteen-year-old student from the London School of Economics named Mick Jagger and Mick’s friend Keith Richards. The rest is rock ’n’ roll history. At the same time that the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Dylan are debuting, Jones, Jagger, and Richards’s newly formed band, the Rolling Stones, is playing its tenth gig down in Surrey.