The birth of the Beatles

International Herald Tribune By Dominic Sandbrook

Friday, June 29, 2007

 

It is 50 years since the legendary first meeting of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and a cynic might be forgiven for wondering why anybody cares.

 

In the age of the iPod, do the Beatles still matter? Of course they do, just as any other great artists - Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart - still matter.

 

The comparison is meant only half in jest. Even a skeptical historian like me, born four years after the band broke up and professionally wary of misty-eyed veterans of the 1960s, has to acknowledge the Beatles' astonishing global appeal. Their music is played and loved on every street corner in the world, and yet its origins could hardly have been less prepossessing.

 

When Paul McCartney wandered down to the Woolton church fête in Liverpool on July 6, 1957, he was an ordinary 15-year-old who had grown up in suburban English obscurity.

 

He had heard stories about an amateur teenage group called the Quarrymen, headed by a local grammar-school boy called John Lennon, 16 years old, who were supposed to be playing that afternoon; and he was also on the lookout for pretty girls.

 

The scene was quintessentially English, gently weighted with tradition. The band of the local yeomanry led a procession through the streets; housewives sold homemade cakes and sweets; schoolchildren in fancy dress chased and frolicked in the sunlight; stalls advertised traditional sideshows.

 

In a field behind the parish church, McCartney heard the music that would change his life: the sound of Lennon and the Quarrymen, playing rock'n'roll hits on a makeshift stage.

 

To young Paul's amusement, Lennon was singing the Del-Vikings recent hit, "Come Go With Me," but he had mistranscribed the words from the radio. Instead of singing, "Come go with me, please don't send me 'way beyond the sea," Lennon sang, "Come go with me, down to the penitentiary . . ."

 

Later, in the church hall, when McCartney showed the other boys his Gene Vincent and Little Richard impersonations, they were impressed by his ability but put off by his casual self-confidence. Yet a week later, a mutual friend told McCartney that Lennon wanted him in the band. Three months later they took the stage for the first time - at, of all places, the local Conservative Club.

 

Lennon always knew that McCartney was good; indeed, he initially suspected he was too good for their grammar-school band. But during the next few months, the two boys spent hours together, practicing their chords, honing their skills at birthday parties and church dances - and scribbling down lyrics.

 

Lennon would come over to McCartney's house, and they would sit in the living room with their guitars and an old school notebook. "I would write down anything we came up with, starting at the top of each page with 'A Lennon-McCartney Original' . . ." McCartney remembered in Barry Miles' book "Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now." "On the next page, 'Another Lennon-McCartney Original.' All the pages have got that. We saw ourselves as very much the next great songwriting team."

 

The myth endures that the Liverpool music scene was somehow unique because, as a port city, it came into close contact with American blues. But the truth is more mundane. For at the time there were literally thousands of other beat groups in England, appealing to a swollen and newly affluent teenage market.

 

By the turn of the decade, almost every provincial city, basking in the glow of postwar affluence, universal education and vastly expanded cultural horizons, boasted its own beat circuit of record shops, music papers and jazz clubs.

 

So what set Lennon and McCartney apart? Hard work, of course; their unquenchable thirst for new influences; their alertness to the cultural trends of the era; their willingness to develop and mature, both as men and as musicians. Then there was the matchless alchemy between them. They were very different characters: While Lennon was caustic and rebellious, McCartney was dependable and emollient. But their differences fueled their collaborative, competitive, ferociously creative drive.

 

Even at the beginning, smart critics recognized the achievement. In 1963, William Mann, of The Times, stunned the music world by naming the Beatles "the outstanding English composers of the year." Mann, perhaps partly tongue-in-cheek, praised "the autocratic but not by any means ungrammatical attitude to tonality (closer to, say, Peter Maxwell Davies carols in 'O Magnum Mysterium' than to Gershwin or Loewe or even Lionel Bart); the exhilarating and often quasi-instrumental vocal dueting, sometimes in scat or in falsetto, behind the melodic line; the melismas with altered vowels ('I saw her yesterday-ee-ay') and which have not quite become mannered, and the distinct, sometimes subtle varieties of instrumentation. . ."

 

Most readers thought that Mann had gone mad. Time, however, has proved him right: A century from now, when much 20th-century music is completely forgotten, it is a fair bet that people somewhere will still be singing "Hey Jude" or "Penny Lane."

 

Like Shakespeare, another provincial Englishman who produced greatness from nowhere, the Beatles surpassed their modest beginnings. They wrote in imitation of the American icons they loved, but they were more than slavish mimics. They drew on the rhythms of their childhoods, the nursery rhymes, sea shanties, working-class ballads and music-hall routines that made up the fabric of everyday English musical life.

 

Like all great artists, they transcended their immediate historical circumstances. Perhaps nobody has come closer to capturing the vigor, optimism and sheer possibility of being young.

 

While even the sunniest McCartney-Lennon compositions are often flecked with darkness and shadow, it is the bright buoyancy of their attitude to life, the irrepressible cheerfulness of the band once nicknamed the "Yeah Yeahs," that shines through.

 

From the church fête onward, with a new world of music in front of them, with their fathers' war behind them, and in the benign setting of their Liverpool upbringing, theirs was a music of affirmation, of hope, of youth. They were England's children, but they belong to the world.

 

Dominic Sandbrook, who teaches history at Oxford University, is the author of "Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles" and "White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties," the first two volumes of a cultural history of postwar Britain.

 

Any Comments about when John met Paul for the first time?

P.S. We love you too

By George Martin

International Herald Tribune

Friday, July 6, 2007

 

What was I doing on July 6, 1957, when 15-year-old Paul McCartney went along to hear 16-year-old John Lennon performing with his band at a church fête in Liverpool?

 

Most likely I would have been working at Abbey Road Studios in London, unaware of the significance of this seemingly uneventful meeting between a couple of teenagers carefully sizing each other up and looking forward to showing off what they could do on their cheap guitars.

 

John and Paul must have been wary of one another, wondering if they could play together, both trying to be cool yet excited, keen to get better at what they both loved - writing and performing songs.

 

At the time I may well have been in the Number Two Studio making an album with Peter Sellers, a member of The Goon Show, the immensely popular radio program. The Beatles adored the Goons and consequently treated me with some reverence when we met in June 1962. Not too much reverence, mind!

 

A kind of desperation brought me and the Beatles together. I was head of artists and repertory at Parlophone, an EMI subsidiary, and I had gotten a call from Syd Coleman, a friend and EMI music publisher, who had heard a tape of the group courtesy of their young manager Brian Epstein. I was looking for an act from the pop world, eager to branch out and score a success there. Epstein was in London for a last-ditch attempt to get someone interested in the Beatles.

 

George Harrison, the kid of the group, was the cheekiest, and charmed me the most at first. Pete Best was then the drummer, soon to be replaced by Ringo, the most seasoned of the bunch. But it was John and Paul who led the way. Even then they were the towering strength of the quartet that I had to judge. They auditioned with some of their original songs, "Love Me Do," "P.S. I Love You" and "Ask Me Why."

 

The rest was mostly old covers like "Bésame Mucho." The material didn't impress me, least of all their own songs. I was not at all convinced that they were capable of writing a hit. I signed them on the strength of their personalities, their charisma. They had a special kind of magnetism that made one feel diminished when they were absent. If I liked them so much, I reasoned, then their audience would, too - provided they could write good songs.

 

John and Paul had come up with a song, an attempt at a Roy Orbison type ballad that I found really dreary, and I told them so. "Maybe if you doubled the tempo you might get somewhere," I told them, never thinking anything would come of it.

 

The next time they came in, however, they showed me they had listened, and I realized then how anxious they were to learn. With a bit of harmonica and a tight arrangement, that dirge became their first number one hit. "Please, Please Me" entered the British charts early in 1963 and they followed it with no less than another 10 consecutive No. 1 hits.

 

For me, the most excitement came from seeing their talent grow like exotic plants in a hothouse. While I praised them, I said I still wanted something better, and sure enough they gave it to me. After "Please, Please Me," they brought in "From Me To You." Then along came "She Loves You." They amazed me with their fecundity and their care to vary their approach in each song. They never gave me a retread of their previous hit, never a "Star Wars II." There was always a new twist, a sparkling demonstration of how their song writing had blossomed.

 

Success seemed to suit them, and now with Ringo driving them along on drums, and George beginning to follow John and Paul in creating good songs we were on our way. Sometimes John would yell out, "Where are we going, fellas?" "To the top, Johnnie!" was their response.

 

John and Paul became brothers in arms. Though their joint creations carved their way, both had big egos. They had agreed to pool their talent, and every song listed both their names regardless of who wrote it. But soon they were writing almost entirely alone, and competitively. They were together on most things, but songwriting had an edge to it. They still loved each other, but they both wanted to be top dog. As it happened, that was a good thing - the competition stimulated them to greater achievements.

 

Of course it was a privilege to see such rapid artistic development, and as part of the creative process, it was my wonderful job to help them achieve their goals. I remember the first time John played "I Am The Walrus" for me. I asked him how he wanted it to sound, and he told me that he would like me to write a score for it, maybe some cellos and horns. "Right," I said. "Do you want to spend an afternoon with me working it out together?" He quickly came back at me, "No, that's your job," and walked off.

 

When John heard the result, he fell about laughing. I had booked this 12-piece choir doing ridiculous things, huge swoops of sound and maniacal laughter. He said he loved it, but years later he confided in me that he would love to record everything all over again. The images in his brain were so much better and more real to him than anything that humans could produce.

 

When I was young, I worshiped George Gershwin and Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would work alongside talent that could equal those giants of popular song. But along came John Lennon and Paul McCartney and my life was changed. Of course they leaned on me and worked me to death, but it was so worthwhile, and they still preserved that cheeky charm that had me hooked at the start.

 

I could see that they changed other people, too. Their music transcended differences among the nations, leapt frontiers and became omnipresent. Somehow they had managed to take the best of American music, absorb it into their systems and replay it back in a fresh, different and brilliant way. In a crucial time of change, when recorded music was becoming the dominant force in popular culture, they led the world.

 

They inspired people then, and are still doing so today. Every generation finds the Beatles for themselves, and they love what they hear. Their music speaks for itself, and its message is clear: Have love in your heart and peace for all men. Are you listening, Mr. President?

 

Sir George Martin signed the Beatles to their first recording contract in 1962. He produced and arranged all their albums, as well as sitting in on keyboards, until the group disbanded in 1970.

 

What do you think of this wonderful interview with the legendary Beatles producer?

I suppose he really was the "5th Beatle" in all but name, as he worked with them so closely. His take on things is very interesting.