Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

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СКАЧАТЬ having given him a lift into town. Neil and Pete were very close. Curiously, the Beatles’ roadie had recently embarked on a relationship with Pete’s 38-year-old mother, with the result that Mo Best had given birth to a son, a boy they named Roag. Pete and Neil were thereby now related in blood. Neil was astounded to hear that his band had sacked his lover’s son, and considered quitting their employment in protest. Pete told him there was no need, and indeed Aspinall stayed with the Beatles for the rest of his working life, ultimately becoming the head of their corporation. All that time he played an active part in Roag Best’s life, while Uncle Pete suffered the daily humiliation of being a rejected Beatle. ‘A very unique situation, and one that I didn’t know any different from, because that was my normal life,’ says Roag today. ‘Pete was an ex-Beatle, and my dad worked for the Beatles. It was just the way it was.’ Pete’s story was a sad one. Forced to give up his show business ambitions, he worked at a series of everyday jobs in Liverpool, becoming so depressed during the height of the Beatles’ success that he tried to gas himself.

      Pete’s replacement in the Beatles was a short, goofy-looking fellow with a skunk-like streak of white in his hair. He wore a beard to conceal a weak chin and balance a large nose, despite which he was actually quite handsome. Ringo Starr was at once the junior Beatle and the oldest member of the band, born three months prior to John in 1940. His real name was Richard Starkey – Ritchie to family and friends (and consequently referred to as such in this book) – the only child of Richard and Elsie Starkey, who met working in a Liverpool bakery. Dad deserted the family when Ritchie was three, and the Starkeys fell on hard times. They lived in a condemned house in the inner-city Dingle, with Elsie doing what work she could to make ends meet, including scrubbing floors, placing the Starkeys below the McCartneys in the working-class hierarchy. Despite their poverty, Elsie made a great fuss of Ritchie. It is worth noting that all four Beatles were blessed with such loving matriarchs – Mary McCartney and Aunt Mimi included – helping imbue their boys with confidence. When Ritchie was 13, Elsie married Harry Graves, who also became a benevolent presence in Ritchie’s young life. The boy suffered two severe bouts of illness, firstly at age 6 when his appendix burst, again when he contracted pleurisy at 13. He never went back to school and was only semi-literate as a result. ‘I can read, but I can’t spell – I spell phonetically.’ After school, Ritchie became an apprentice engineer, chucking his apprenticeship to play drums with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a local band fronted by an athletic blond lad whose real name was Alan Caldwell, but who went by this more exciting moniker. Rory insisted his band also adopt stage names, so Ritchie became Ringo Starr, named after the rings he wore Teddy Boy-style.

      Rory Storm and the Hurricanes played the same circuit as the Beatles in Liverpool and Hamburg, and Ringo had sat in with the Beatles more than once, so was already a mate. John, Paul and George agreed that Ringo would be the ideal replacement for Pete. By nature, he was an amiable sort without much ambition, someone who would fit in and do what he was told. Ritchie was playing Butlins at Skegness with the Hurricanes when John and Paul asked him to join the Beatles, winning Ritchie over with the offer of more money and the promise of a record deal. Cavern dwellers were indignant when Ringo took the stage with the band the first time. ‘We want Pete!’ they chanted, reluctant to give up on their favourite. ‘Pete forever. Ringo – never!’

      With the arrival of Ringo the Beatles were complete: four cheerful lookalike mop-tops who acted as one – the ‘four-headed monster’, as Mick Jagger described them – though they were not equals. John, Paul and George had been together for four years and had a history that Ringo had not been a part of. Joining the band was, he said, ‘like joining a new class at school where everybody knew everybody but me’. Ringo would serve the others, without the talent to challenge John and Paul creatively. He was always the least important Beatle. Next up in seniority was George, never able to overcome the basic fact that he was nine months and one school-year junior to Paul, who treated him ‘as though George worked for him’ in the words of Tony Barrow, the Decca sleeve-note writer who would shortly come to work for the boys as their PR man. John was the boss, because the Quarry Men had been his band. Comments Barrow:

      And along came this guy McCartney who could play a few chords, so he was in, but he was only in as a band member, and it meant that, from the beginning, if Paul wanted to achieve equal status or, better still, leadership of the Beatles, he had to work hard at it, and he did. Internally, he did, from the very beginning, and most of the time I don’t think John noticed – in the early days at any rate – how pushy Paul was being within the group.

      Paul almost leapfrogged John at the start of their recording career. In the early 1960s most pop groups were made up of a front man and his backing band: Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and on a much lowlier level Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. As he prepared to record his new signing, George Martin considered releasing a record by ‘Paul McCartney and the Beatles’. There was also an argument for ‘John Lennon and the Beatles’. It was hard to decide. ‘George and I were walking up Oxford Street one day trying to work out whether it should be Paul – the good-looking one – or John, who had the big personality,’ Martin’s assistant Ron Richards told author Mark Lewisohn. When Martin couldn’t choose, the issue drifted away. Unusually, the Beatles would have two equal front men.

      George Martin was reunited with the boys at Abbey Road on 4 September 1962, when the Beatles set to work recording their first single. Smartly dressed in suits and ties – a press photographer was present – they rehearsed during the day, broke for supper, then recorded in the evening. Anxious for a hit, and not yet trusting the Beatles’ own material, Martin gave the band a madly catchy tune titled ‘How Do You Do It?’, written by professional song-writer Mitch Murray. The boys recorded it without enthusiasm, John and Paul making it clear they would prefer to cut their own songs rather than the work of hack writers. The best they had to offer was ‘Love Me Do’, the slow, bluesy number written when John and Paul were boys and already demonstrated at their first meeting with Martin. They ran through it again with less than satisfactory results, Martin still detecting a weakness in the rhythm section.

      When the band returned to the studio six days later to have another go at ‘Love Me Do’, Ritchie was dismayed to discover that Martin had hired a professional session drummer, Scotsman Andy White, to take his place. White describes the awkward moment Ringo saw him in the studio: ‘When he came in I was setting up my drums. He obviously thought, Don’t tell me! It’s happening to me now!’ Suspecting he was to suffer the same fate as Pete Best, Ringo went up the stairs to the control room and sat, stone-faced, with George Martin while John and Paul taught Andy their material. ‘They didn’t have any written music. So everything was word of mouth and trial and error,’ says the Scots drummer, who found it a refreshing change to play on original songs with the writers. They then recorded ‘Love Me Do’. Ringo’s mood was ameliorated slightly when Martin permitted him to bang a tambourine in accompaniment on what was the Beatles’ début single. Ritchie wasn’t fired from the band, but he never entirely forgave George Martin for replacing him with Andy White on that first session.

      Not as much of a dirge as it had been, ‘Love Me Do’ was still a rather ponderous number, the lyric childishly simple, though John and Paul’s use of personal pronouns – ‘love me do/you know I love you …’ – was effective, making it seem as if they were singing directly to the listener. They used the same device on the slower ‘PS I Love You’, the lyric of which took the form of a love letter of the type Paul had written home to Dot from Hamburg. Indeed, Dot says Paul wrote the song for her before their break-up. Martin thought well enough of ‘PS I Love You’ to use it as the B-side of the first single.

      When ‘Love Me Do’ was released on 5 October 1962, it meandered around the charts before reaching number 17 shortly before Christmas. While this wasn’t at all bad for a début single, it fell short of being a smash hit, possibly because EMI gave the record little promotion. There was resentment in the company that Brian Epstein had got his band in through the back door after being told the Beatles weren’t wanted on HMV or Columbia. Says Tony Barrow:

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