Best of the Beatles (14 page)

However, I have since tracked down Raymond Jones. He owned a printing works in Burscough, Lancashire and has now retired to Spain. He had seen the Beatles on several occasions and loved their music, and when he heard about their single, he ordered it from NEMS. Although he plays a small but significant role in the Beatles’ story, he has never wanted to appear at Beatle Conventions, hence the invasion of the imposters. Raymond Jones does exist, I promise you.

I have also spoken to Bill Barlow and Chas Newby, who had both been with Pete Best in the Blackjacks, and still play with him every year. Bill says, “We had decided to form our own group and we told Pete he could drum. He said that he couldn’t play but his mum bought him a drum kit and the Blackjacks was formed. He took to it extremely quickly and I thought he was terrific.”

When the Beatles came back from Hamburg without Stuart in December 1960, Pete asked Chas Newby to play bass for them and he was on stage at that historic gig at Litherland Town Hall on 27 December 1960. Chas Newby says, “I had played with them at the Casbah and the reception had been really good. Then we had been to the Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard with the Litherland Town Hall gig being the third. There was no inkling that it was going to be any different from the others when we started. Bob Wooler was on the microphone and the curtains were drawn on the stage. He was on the middle microphone and
he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Direct from Hamburg, the fabulous…’ and he was about to say ‘Beatles’ when Paul nudged him out of the way and screamed into ‘Long Tall Sally’. The audience, who were used to dancing, were suddenly confronted by this group in cowboy boots and leather trousers and jackets, stomping on the floor and singing classic rock ’n’ roll. Everyone shouted, ‘Yeah’ at the end of ‘Long Tall Sally’ and we just carried on. We finished with ‘What’d I Say’ and the response was great. There was no jealousy on my part. I was going to college on January 4 and I thought Stuart was coming back. There were no recording studios or music publishers in Liverpool and for them to penetrate the music business was amazing.”

And what did Chas remember most about the evening: “The fact they wore cowboy boots and they were stomping around the stage. I had normal shoes on but I had to copy them. I felt as though I’d been crippled when I came home.”

So that’s it, the story of the sacking of Pete Best. Maybe there’s no mystery at all. Maybe he wasn’t a good enough drummer for the Beatles. That’s what Brian Epstein told him and that may be all there is to it. However, I don’t believe that Pete Best was dismissed from the Beatles for one overriding reason, namely, that he wasn’t good enough, especially in the recording studio. At the outset I said that this was like an Inspector Morse mystery but it is more like
Murder on the Orient Express
where everybody is sticking the knife into Pete Best but for a whole host of different reasons.

I’d hazard a guess that the Beatles’ story is now as well known as the Nativity and I hope this book has thrown a little light on to a grey area.

Spencer Leigh
March 2015

Up to the 1980s, very few performances of the Beatles with Pete Best were available. The following, with one possible noted exception, are now known to exist:

First Session

Tony Sheridan and the Beatles with Pete Best

In June 1961, Tony Sheridan and the Beatles with Pete Best, George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney recorded at the Friedrich Ebert Halle, Hamburg (not at an official recording studio but on location in a school hall). At first, the records were credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers. Produced by Bert Kaempfert, the recordings were:

‘My Bonnie’

(Traditional, arranged by Tony Sheridan)

‘My Bonnie’ is about a claimant to the throne, Bonnie Prince Charles, who landed in Scotland in 1745 to start a rebellion. His troops were overwhelmed at Culloden and he spent 40 years as a fugitive in Europe. Ray Charles gave ‘My Bonnie’ an R&B treatment in 1958 and Duane Eddy
recorded the instrumental ‘Bonnie Came Back’ in 1960, a UK Top 20 hit.

Sheridan recorded two versions of ‘My Bonnie’, one with a slow introduction in German and another with one in English. Often the record is issued without either introduction. In a new variation, Paul McCartney talks over the English introduction on
Anthology 1
.

‘Nobody’s Child’

(Cy Coben/Mel Foree)

In 1948, Mel Foree, a song-plugger for Acuff-Rose had the unenviable task of trying to stop Hank Williams from drinking. Around that time, he wrote the country weepie, ‘Nobody’s Child’, which was recorded by Hank Snow in 1949. Lonnie Donegan recorded the song in 1956 for his ‘Lonnie Donegan Showcase’ album. His slow, bluesy treatment was Sheridan’s template, although Sheridan omitted his narration.

In the main, Tony Sheridan was a wild rock ’n’ roller, but John McNally of the Searchers recalls him at the Star-Club: “Sheridan was always best late at night when he’d got a few drinks inside him. He’d become very melancholy and do the blues. He was the best guitarist around and I’d watch him every night. He did a great version of ‘Nobody’s Child’ which was very slow and dynamic.”

Perhaps the Beatles should have brought ‘Nobody’s Child’ back to Liverpool. Lonnie Donegan: “I find the people in the North of England are much more emotional than in the South. I can bring people in Liverpool to tears with ‘Nobody’s Child’ and I couldn’t do that in London where they are more cynical.”

Although only two verses and choruses, the original recording by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles lasts 3 minutes
45 seconds, and their version has been truncated on some compilations. Accompanying himself on guitar, Sheridan recorded a 6-minute version in 1964. George Harrison encouraged the Traveling Wilburys to record the song for a charity single in 1990.

‘The Saints’

(Traditional, arranged by Tony Sheridan)

‘When The Saints Go Marching In’ was a favourite with jazz bands and was taken up by some rock ’n’ rollers – Bill Haley and His Comets (1955), Fats Domino (1958), Jerry Lee Lewis (1958) and the Isley Brothers (1959). Bill Haley’s version is usually quoted as the source for Sheridan’s version, which is unlikely as Haley changes the worlds to showcase his band, e.g. ‘When ol’ Rudy begins to play.’ Because the Comets’ drummer is given a solo, I wish Sheridan had followed Haley’s arrangement.

Normally, the song is repetitive with a slight change for each verse – Fats Domino, with a walloping bass drum, sings, ‘When the Saints go marching in’ four times and ‘When the sun refuse to shine’ once. Jerry Lee Lewis offers a variant with a different melody and gospel-styled verses about Paul and Silas. Sheridan sings, ‘When the Saints go marching in’ three times, ‘When the sun begin (not ‘refuse’) to shine’ twice and ‘When the ol’ Lord calls me there’ once and this places his version closer to the Isley Brothers.

One of Sheridan’s early groups was called the Saints and so he was very familiar with the work. On the recording, Tony Sheridan sounds very like Conway Twitty, but this impersonation is of his own doing as Twitty never recorded ‘The Saints’.

In 1963, the Searchers revived ‘The Saints’ as ‘Saints
and Searchers’ for the B-side of their second hit, ‘Sugar and Spice’.

‘Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby’
(Sometimes shown as Charles Singleton/Waldenese Hall, but more likely Jesse Stone, who was also known as Charles Calhoun. Confused? You should be.)

The blues guitarist Jimmy Reed introduced many songs into the beat groups’ repertoire: ‘Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby’, ‘Bright Lights Big City’, ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ and ‘Big Boss Man’. He recorded ‘Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby’, which is also known as ‘If You Love Me Baby’ after its first line, in Chicago in March 1959.

Tony Sheridan gives a creditable performance but his reference to “goddamned insurance” has been removed on a doctored version, which adds guitar, drums and harmonica.

‘Why (Can’t You Love Me Again)’

(Tony Sheridan/Bill Crompton
)

Tony Sheridan wrote this song with the British rock ’n’ roll performer Bill Crompton in 1958. Crompton recorded for Fontana and had considerable airplay on ‘A Hoot and a Holler’. Crompton also wrote a Top 20 instrumental, ‘The Stranger,’ for the Shadows. The clumsily-titled ‘Why (Can’t You Love Me Again)’ is an echo-drenched doowop ballad with a forceful middle-eight that sounds as though it belongs in another song.

Gerry Marsden: “I thought ‘Why’ was a nice song and I wanted to record it, but Tony said, ‘Hang on, I’ve got a better one’ and gave me ‘Please Let Them Be’, which I recorded some years later. It was one of the biggest flops in the history of records, but it was a lovely song.”

The
Beatles with Pete Best

Line up as previous, but without Tony Sheridan.

‘Ain’t She Sweet’

(Jack Yellen/Milton Ager)

Jack Yellen and Milton Ager were a successful pre-war songwriting partnership, their most enduring songs being “Happy Days Are Here Again’ and ‘Ain’t She Sweet’. The lyricist Jack Yellen had emigrated from Poland and this 1927 success was daring for its time as it used American slang (‘ain’t’) in its title. Umpteen recordings of the song have been made with no one version predominating.

‘Ain’t She Sweet’ was a standard by the time Gene Vincent recorded it in 1956. Effectively, the Beatles followed Vincent’s direction, but upped the tempo and omitted the whistling. Possibly Bert Kaempfert advised against whistling as Germans considered it insulting.

There is also a 1959 single by UK rock ’n’ roller Duffy Power. He says, “Larry Parnes heard the Gene Vincent version and asked me to do it with Ken Jones’ Palais de Dance orchestra. They were good musicians but they knew nothing about rock ’n’ roll.”

John Lennon took the lead vocal on the Beatles’ version, which has been overdubbed (with additional drums!) on some releases. Duffy Power: “It sounds to me like the Beatles hadn’t worked anything out. They were just chugging through the chords and adding a Chuck Berry blues walk. Nice guitar solo though.”

‘Cry For a Shadow’

(George Harrison/John Lennon)

While the Beatles and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were in Hamburg, the Shadows made the UK charts with the theme from the film
The Frightened City
. Rory was
wondering how it went and George Harrison and John Lennon told him they had heard it and improvised the instrumental which became, with gentle humour, ‘Cry For a Shadow’. For some time, Rory believed that their instrumental was the Shadows’ hit single.

Geoff Taggart, a St Helens musician who wrote ‘Breakthru’ on the best-selling album
The Sound of The Shadows
says, “This is a riff in E with a chord sequence over the top rather than a melody, and as such, it is more reminiscent of the fillers on the Ventures’ albums than the Shadows. It starts like the Shadows’ ‘Man of Mystery’ but it’s really a quicker version of the John Barry Seven’s ‘Rodeo’, which came out in 1958. The George Harrison solo is as dry as a plank, which is more like Joe Brown than Hank Marvin. Indeed, Joe gave Hank his echo unit because he couldn’t come to grips with it and Hank used it on ‘Apache’. The chord sequence is the same as Joe Brown’s ‘Shine’ and, incidentally, Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey! Baby’ although that wasn’t released until 1962. And there’s nothing wrong with Pete’s drumming on the track – he’s a good drummer.”

Second Session

The Beatles

New Year’s Day, January 1962, Decca Studios, West Hampstead, London. The producer was Mike Smith who made hit records with Billy Fury, Georgie Fame and the group Dick Rowe signed instead of the Beatles, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.

Irrespective of the standard of the performance, this is a representative cross-section of their repertoire at the time. There are three oldies, a show song, three originals and eight rock ’n’ roll covers. The talents represented remained, by and large, the Beatles’ favourites – Chuck
Berry, the Coasters (twice), Goffin/King, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Phil Spector and Tamla Motown.

Pete Best: “Decca was a major label, the company to be with, and we thought hard about the material we were going to play at the audition. It was a good cross-section of numbers, and we recorded them like a live set with just one or two takes on each number. We were trying to be cool, calm and collected about it but there were frogs in our throats. We weren’t on form and we could have been a lot better.”

The Beatles’ performances are often described as uninspired, but bear in mind:

They had travelled overnight for ten hours in a van with their equipment in a snowstorm.

They were travelling back the same way.

They were miffed that Brian Epstein had come to London by train and had stayed overnight with relations.

They had missed out on New Year’s Eve festivities.

Mike Smith arrived late because he had been to a party.

This was a recording test, never intended for public release.

They were cutting 15 songs in an hour.

However, I can’t accept Mark Lewisohn’s assertion that they were ‘nervous’ and ‘ill at ease’ (
The Complete Beatles Chronicle
, Octopus 1992). The Beatles were familiar with making records through their work with Tony Sheridan, they had been in the German charts, they had previously met Mike Smith at the Cavern and they had played in far more ominous places than this. I think their performances were uninspired (thought they have their moments) because they were thoroughly pissed off and their tiredness dulled their voices.

The fifteen songs include seven lead vocals from Paul and four each from George and John. It is odd that George
was singing as much as John, but perhaps not surprising that Pete didn’t do his party piece. What did Mike Smith and his boss, Dick Rowe, miss? Well, the three original songs became chart hits (one for a Decca group), two songs were featured on
With the Beatles
and two became hits for Decca artists.

Mike Smith says, “I thought the Beatles were absolutely wonderful on stage and I should have trusted my instincts. They weren’t very good in the studio and really we got to the Beatles too early. Nothing against Pete Best, but Ringo wasn’t in the band, and they hadn’t developed their songwriting. Had I picked up on them 6 months later, there was no way I couldn’t have recognised the quality of their songs. I went with Brian Poole and the Tremeloes because they had been the better band in the studio. So much in this industry depends on being in the right place at the right time and whether I did the right thing or not, I’ll never know. In fairness, I don’t think I could have worked with them the way that George Martin did – I would have got involved in their bad parts and not encouraged the good ones. When I met them later on they gave me a two fingered salute.”

‘Besame Mucho’

(Consuelo Velazquez/Sunny Skylar)

The opera
Goyescas
was written in Paris in 1914 by the Spanish composer, Enrique Granados. Because of the Great War, the opera was premiered in New York in 1916. After the performance, its cast and composer returned by ship to Europe, but it was torpedoed by the Germans and no-one survived. I wonder if the film director of
Titanic
James Cameron knows this story. ‘The Nightingale Aria’ from the opera was luckier: two pop writers converted it to ‘Besame Mucho.’

‘Besame Mucho’ became the ‘La Bamba’ of the 1940s. It was a million-selling record for Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra with vocalists Kitty Kallen and Bob Eberle in 1943 and the song is featured in the 1944 film musical
Follow The Boys
. The Coasters gave the song a straight treatment in 1960, unfortunately allowing their bass singer to take the lead vocal. Pete Best: “‘Besame Mucho’ was Paul’s idea. He may have been influenced by the Coasters but it was very much our arrangement and I like it very much.”

Paul McCartney in
Many Years From Now
: “It’s a minor (key) song and it changed to a major, and where it changed to a major is such a big moment musically. That major change attracted me so much.”

The Beatles often performed ‘Besame Mucho’ returning to it during the filming of
Let It Be
. The Decca recording is hurried and was slowed down by George Martin for inclusion on
Anthology 1
. Despite the ‘cha-cha-boom’, it is a novelty that doesn’t quite come off. Often they performed it on stage as a nod to Liverpool impresario, ‘Besammy Leacho’, which does amuse me.

In April 1962, Jet Harris, formerly of the Shadows, took a throbbing instrumental treatment of the song into the Top 30 for Decca. Celebrations took place in Guadalajara in August 1962 to celebrate the song’s 20th anniversary. This is where Consuelo Velazquez lived and many artists who had recorded the song took part in the festivities. No one knew then that the Beatles had also recorded it.