Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ like the Tower Ballroom and Liverpool Empire. In November the Beatles and Little Richard went to Hamburg for two weeks at the Star-Club, and then it was back to London to record with George Martin, working this time in a place that would become integral to Paul’s musical life: Studio Two at EMI – a large, lofty hall with a parquet floor, cream walls and a steep staircase leading to the control room, with a banister Paul would slide down when he was in a celebratory mood. George Martin peered down at his artists from the glazed control room like God.

      After the modest success of ‘Love Me Do’, and the Beatles’ high-handed rejection of ‘How Do You Do It?’, Martin was anxious to see if the band had what it took to score a hit. He was sure ‘How Do You Do It?’ would have made number one, as indeed it later did for fellow Merseysiders Gerry and the Pacemakers, whom Brian signed to NEMS Enterprises as the second of what became a stable of local acts. The Beatles were unrepentant. ‘John just said it was crap,’ says singer Gerry Marsden. ‘We proved [that it wasn’t and] I say thank you to John every night on stage for giving me my first number one, because if they would have done it and released it we wouldn’t have had that song to do.’ Accepting that the Beatles really didn’t want to sing this hack song, Martin asked them sternly what they had that was better, to which they suggested ‘Please Please Me’, a song John and Paul had had knocking around for a while. Recalls Iris Caldwell:

      [Paul] sung that song in the house, ‘What do you think of it?’ I said, ‘I’ve never heard of such rubbish.’ Last night I said these words to my girl, why don’t you ever even try girl, come on, come on, come on, come on, please please … ‘I think it’s terrible!’

      As recorded, ‘Please Please Me’ was brighter than ‘Love Me Do’, the opening guitar chords creating a big, optimistic sound, while the lyric was frankly sexual in a way adolescents could identify with: trying to get your girl to do what you both wanted, but were scared of in the age before the contraceptive pill became commonplace, in case you fell pregnant like Dot, and now like Cynthia, too. Unlike Paul, John had gone ahead and married his pregnant girlfriend, though secretly. The Lennons were expecting their first child in April.

      At the end of 18 takes of ‘Please Please Me’, George Martin pronounced from his lofty control room that the boys had cut their first number one. Before they could find out whether George’s confidence was well placed, the Beatles returned to Hamburg to play a final stint at the Star-Club, a venue that had been the apex of their career only recently, but which, like the Cavern, they had now outgrown. It was December. The boys shared Christmas dinner with club friends and members of Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes. Paul bought a pair of leather gloves to take home to Iris, and on their last night in town persuaded his long-term German girlfriend Ruth Lallemann to come to the airport and wave him off . ‘He said, “Please take me to the airport, because I think it’s the last time I come here, because we’re going to get big.”’ The next time Ruth saw Paul would be in London when he was a superstar. All of a sudden, after a time when the Beatles seemed to be moving in slow motion, everything was happening very fast.

      Back home, the Beatles found they had virtually no free time, as they rushed from club to theatre to recording studio, often travelling long distances to fulfil relatively minor engagements. For example, after a hectic day of promotion for ‘Please Please Me’ in London on Thursday 22 January 1963, recording for three different BBC radio shows, the band was driven back to Liverpool to appear at the Cavern. A new boy was behind the wheel of their van, a burly former post office worker named Mal Evans who’d joined the Beatles as a roadie, junior to Neil Aspinall who was increasingly filling the role of road manager. Schlepping up country to Liverpool on a freezing cold, foggy day, a stone shattered the van’s widescreen. Mal punched out the glass, and battled on, the bitter wind blowing full in his face, as the Beatles huddled together in the back as ‘a Beatle sandwich’, as Paul described it.

With the release of ‘Please Please Me’ Paul found himself in direct rivalry with Frank Ifield, whose two previous singles had gone to number one, and who was looking for a hat trick with ‘The Wayward Wind’. ‘I found that they were chasing me up the charts. I thought, Well that’s fine. I give them a break on a show and now they’re chasing me up the bloody chart!’ recalls the Australian star. ‘I thought they were going to knock me out of the number one, but they didn’t.’ The Beatles’ single stalled at number two.* Paul was doubly defeated when Iris finally dumped him for Frank. Surprisingly, given Paul’s later well-documented love of animals, the break-up was triggered by cruelty to a dog.

      One night in March 1963, shortly before Iris’s birthday, Paul and Ringo called in at Stormsville after driving up from London. ‘They’d got to our house really late. Me brother and I opened the door, said, “Come in, the kettle’s on,” you know, and they said, “Oh, we’re starving. We’re so tired. We’ve been recording.”’ Ringo mentioned that just before they got to the Caldwells’ house, he and Paul had accidentally run over a dog. The Caldwells were great animal lovers, with a pet dog named Toby, which Paul never liked. ‘Toby used to want to be stroked all the time and he used to go, “Oh, it’s got fleas,”’ recalls Iris. ‘He didn’t like dogs.’ Concerned by what Ringo had said, Rory and Iris asked the boys if the dog they’d hit was all right. Ringo said they’d been too tired to stop and find out.

      ‘Get out of the house! I never want to speak to you again!’ Iris raged at the boys, appalled by such lack of feeling. She later reflected that Ringo might have simply made the story up to rile her. Still, it was enough to make her finish with Paul, who pursued her for a while, calling and visiting her house, also trying to see her when she was working summer season at Great Yarmouth, but she shunned him. ‘He kept saying to me mother, “Why won’t she see me?” And me mother said, “Because you’ve got no heart, Paul.”’

* The second part of this couplet is credited to John Lennon.

* UK chart positions are based on the Record Retailer chart, used in turn for the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles. ‘Please Please Me’ went to number one in other UK charts in 1963, but the Beatles do not claim it as a number one, as is evident by its omission from the Beatles’ 1 album.

       CHAPTER 5 THE MANIA

      THE FIRST ALBUM

      Seeking to capitalise on the success of ‘Please Please Me’, George Martin called the Beatles back to EMI and asked them to perform their stage show for him, thus creating in one amazing day, Monday 11 February 1963, a complete album. The Beatles recorded ten songs on the day, to which EMI later added the four numbers previously released as singles, making a 14-track LP. It opened with John and Paul singing in joyful harmony ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, one of eight original Lennon-McCartney compositions on the record, and ended with John alone – his voice by now in shreds – screaming ‘Twist and Shout’.

      This, the Beatles’ début album, established the convention whereby John and Paul would write and sing most of the songs, with at least two lead vocals reserved for George and Ringo. Not yet a songwriter in his own right, George was given ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ on the first LP, while Ritchie croaked out the Dixon-Farrell number ‘Boys’, as he had with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Ringo’s voice was limited, but a Ringo song was part of what became the successful recipe. Here then was essentially the sound of the Beatles on stage in 1963, as they would have sounded at the Cavern: four young men having the time of their lives, as emphasised by the album cover photo of the lads grinning from the stairs at EMI headquarters in Manchester Square. Entitled Please Please Me, to hook fans who’d bought the single, the LP went to number one in May 1963 and held the top spot month after month, right up until the band’s second СКАЧАТЬ