Thursday, February 2, 2023

"Parlophone Recording Artistes": Press Cuttings May to October 1962

 1) 'Disker', Liverpool Echo, 26 May 62:


2) Chester Chronicle and Cheshire and North Wales General Advertiser, 4 August 62:


3) Runcorn Weekly News and District Reporter, 23 August 1962:



4) Hull Daily Mail, 20 October 1962:



5) Whitstable Times, 20 October 1962:




Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Beatles 1964 US Tour Part 10: Pittsburgh

The booking of The Beatles in Pittsburgh was arranged by Tim Tormey and his protege Pat DiCesare. The latter wrote a long piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2009 in which he detailed the events. Tormey was managing Lou Christie and therefore knew Roz Ross at the William Morris Agency, which handled Christie. Ross put Tormey in touch with Norman Weiss. Lenny Litman had already announced he had booked The Beatles so there was pressure on Tormey and DiCesare to seal a deal before Litman's was signed. Ross then called DiCesare and advised him that he could get the rights to sign up The Beatles for $5,000 in cash, which DiCesare then obtained from his father. A deal was then negotiated for The Beatles to receive $25,000 (negotiated down from $35,000 by DiCesare) or 60% of gross sales, whichever was higher.

The concert was announced in the Pittsburgh newspapers on May 14, 1964. All tickets were priced at $5.90 and were to be obtained by mail only from Tim Tormey Associates, P.O. Box 431, Pittsburgh 22, PA. Tormry told reporter Kaspar Monahan the day before that he had spent over two months negotiating with General Artists Corp, the organization run by Weiss. Capacity was to be 11,300 with around 100 police in attendance.

Arrangements at the Pittsburgh Arena were to be identical to a previous concert by Judy Garland (19 Oct 1961, the first-ever concert there), while the Dave Clark 5 were due to play there on June 5. On July 28, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the original contractual clause that no seats be sold behind the stage had now been rescinded and that 1200 seats would therefore be made available in the upper rear section behind the platform, adding to 11,431 already bought in the original sale.

Arrangements for the day of the concert hit a snag: booking a hotel proved too problematic. There had been major problems caused by mob scenes when the Dave Clark 5 had stayed at the Carlton House. It was therefore agreed that the group would fly straight to Cleveland after the concert.

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

Blues Myths And The Beatles

Elijah Wald's excellent book Escaping The Delta debunks many assumptions about the 'authentic' blues being a music form primarily produced by men in rural settings, especially in Mississippi. Such myths of authenticity deprive women such as Bessie Smith of their rightful place in the narrative, but also fail to recognize how urban blues artists continued to innovate and explore their art. In addition, Wald notes that conventional accounts omit the degree to which African-American blues audiences were familiar with popular trends and expected performers to know the hits of the day, which meant their work was always contemporary.

Such myths became toxic when white audiences and rock performers began to dominate how blues was perceived. Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, for example, had to perform in Europe to be treated as artists (as had happened to many jazz greats) and often faced pressure to shape their repertoires around the expectation that the music would reflect the rural black America of 1900-1940 rather than the urban black experience of 1955-1965. They were, in effect, obliged to play the role of living museum exhibits. These processes were partly because the blues had been "rediscovered" in the Fifties as a kind of rural black folk music rather than what it had really become: urban electrified blues. In 1966, for example, a Muddy Waters collection was entitled Real Folk Blues despite the fact its tracks were recorded for Chess several years after Waters had moved to Chicago and included such electrified numbers as "Mannish Boy" and "Walking Through The Park." 

In the same year, Waters told students at Stanford, "I had to come to you behind The Rolling Stones and The Beatles." Bo Diddley was quoted in Billboard, "We all owe a debt to The Beatles. They started playing r&b with country rhythms and changes. It had to come over from there for American kids to listen" (both quoted by Arnold Shaw, "The Rhythm and Blues Revival: No White Gloved, Black Hits", Billboard, 690816, p.S-3, 'The World Of Soul' supplement). These British groups, unlike their American folk contemporaries, did value the electric guitar in blues, but their appreciation was still tied to a stereotype of black expressiveness that opposed it to traditions of European art music. This then led to the myth that Sgt. Pepper and other concept albums were a departure from black music rather than artistically parallel to the artistic explorations of modal jazz which combined influences from non-western musical forms (most notably India, which also influenced The Beatles) with a deep blues feeling (for example, see 'India' by John Coltrane, as discussed here). 

The White Album was underappreciated for many years (relative to Revolver and Pepper) partly because its rock tracks, with heavy blues parts, were perceived wrongly as a retrograde step from the psychedelic art music of the previous year. Such misconceptions need to be discarded before the Beatles' relationship with the blues is properly appreciated in a way that does justice both to the Beatles themselves and the blues artists who influenced them.

Sunday, July 25, 2021

Competing Narratives: John and Paul on the Break-Up, September 1969 to December 1970

All sources agree that, on September 20, 1969, John Lennon told Paul McCartney that he wanted "a divorce" from The Beatles. However, when Paul and John were interviewed separately by Ray Connolly and Jan Wenner respectively in 1970, they gave conflicting accounts of the meaning of that statement. Paul told Connolly, in an interview that appeared in the Evening Standard on April 21, that it was a "trial separation" and portrayed the period as one in which John's return to the group was still considered by him to be a realistic possibility:

Anyway, I hung on for all these months wondering whether the Beatles would ever come back together again…and let’s face it I’ve been as vague as anyone, hoping that John might come around and say, “All right lads, I’m ready to go back to work,” and naturally enough, in the meantime, I began to look for something to do. And the album, McCartney, turned out to be the answer in my case (The Ray Connolly Archive, Kindle Edition, pp. 86-87).

Lennon's description of the period to Wenner in December 1970, printed in Rolling Stone as "Lennon Remembers", is clearly a contradiction of Paul's understanding. For example, Lennon claimed to Wenner that "It’s like he knew really that this was the final thing; and six months later he comes out with whatever." McCartney clearly did not describe September 20 as "the final thing" but rather something far more provisional. The problem this created for the historiography of The Beatles is that Wenner's interview shaped the dominant narrative of the break-up in subsequent biographies, and this has not yet been properly debunked.

Historians who still support Lennon's claim may point to Paul's interview with Life, published on November 7, 1969, in which he stated that "the Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we have done, and partly by other people." However, the comment was only a measure of how Paul felt at that moment and does not preclude his waking up on other days feeling more hopeful, in the manner he explained to Connolly in April. It is also unclear whether Paul meant the phrase "the Beatle thing" to refer to all Beatles projects or just, say, joint Lennon-McCartney songwriting credits on future Beatles albums and collaborations on each other's arrangements in the studio. Furthermore, Lennon's own position in December 1969, as outlined to Alan Smith in the NME, was far more provisional than the one he presented to Wenner a year later, and far closer to McCartney's April 1970 description:

“The Beatles split up? It just depends how much we all want to record together. I don’t know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it. I really do.

“The problem is that in the old days, when we needed an album, Paul and I got together and produced enough songs for it. Nowadays there’s three if us writing prolifically and trying to fit it all onto one album. Or we have to think of a double album every time, which takes six months.

“That’s the hang-up we have. It’s not a personal ‘The Beatles are fighting’ thing, so much as an actual physical problem. What do you do? I don’t want to spend six months making an album I have two tracks on. And neither do Paul or George probably. That’s the problem. If we can overcome that, maybe it’ll sort itself out."

The Wenner narrative would have to assume that John was camouflaging his true feelings in this interview, but there is no reason why John needed to maintain a fiction indefinitely into 1970. It is not convincing that he would have remained silent just to maintain the commercial interests of the "Get Back" project, which Lennon cared little for and which still made money after the group's split became public knowledge in April 1970 (arguably it made more money than if the band had still been together). 

A more plausible narrative is that John and Paul became more convinced of the split in early 1970. John recorded 'Instant Karma' without offering it as a Beatles project, and Paul escalated his work on his solo album around the time that 'Instant Karma' came out. This supports the idea that Paul was still waiting for John to make a move up to February 1970 and viewed the release of 'Instant Karma' as Lennon's confirmation that he was not coming back.

Where does this leave us on motivation, psychology and the dynamics of interpersonal interaction between two close but bitter friends? John had an incentive after the break-up to present himself as decisive and Paul as Machiavellian. In reality, John and Paul were experimenting tentatively and indecisively with a trial separation while keeping the band alive and future options still, to a degree, open. However, both of them went through three changes between September 1969 and February 1970. Firstly, John was getting used to being a 'Plastic Ono Band' performer; his identity as a non-Beatle was becoming more plausible to him. Paul equally was expanding his home studio work and becoming less centred on London. Secondly, as with many separated couples, the resentment was simmering and absence was making the heart grow colder. Grievances that could be smoothed over by daily contact were being allowed to fester. Thirdly, their ability to communicate with each other seems to have collapsed. Whatever signals they had been using to give each other reassurance were replaced by behaviours that each other perceived as provocations. They were not viewing each other's signals through rational eyes. These three processes, alongside the longer-standing issues of managerial conflict, song credits and suitable song choices for albums (Revolution 9, Cold Turkey, Maxwell's Silver Hammer) eventually convinced John to make the split permanent with the Instant Karma release, which Paul correctly perceived to be the final nail in the coffin.

Saturday, June 20, 2020

Strawberry Field Documents and Reports, 1880 to 1953

Between 1880 and 1912, the head of household at Strawberry Field in Woolton was the shipping owner George Hignett Warren, born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 5, 1852. His father died on October 10, 1880, in Bellagio, Italy, as reported in The Standard on October 19 (1):



George Hignett Warren was listed in the 1881 census at Strawberry Field:



He was still at Strawberry Field when he died on February 3, 1912. He was buried four days later at St Peter's, Woolton (where John met Paul).




The property was sold to Alexander Cameron Mitchell, who died aged 83 on July 23, 1927.


His widow sold it to the Salvation Army in 1934.

In 1953, a study reported in The Manchester Guardian provided details of the 38 girls in the Strawberry Field home:


(1) I strongly recommend Philip Kirkland's From Silk to a Song: A Complete History of Strawberry Field for more details on the Warren and Mitchell families, including this reference.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Beatles 1964 US Tour Part 9: Local Florida Issues

Jacksonville secured a major scoop when it signed up The Beatles. Miami and Tampa had also expressed an interest in hosting the group, galvanized by fan pressure and the interests of local radio. Tampa's spark was a letter from 11 year old Debra [Debbie] Stilley, described by Patrick Kelly in the Tampa Tribune of 12.7.64, p.19-A:


It is notable that Tampa's elite was taking The Beatles seriously as a cultural force, even though Florida's newspapers still assumed their mature readers did not rate The Beatles as songwriters or musicians. The same article goes on to describe the Tribune's first correspondence with The Beatles' US representatives in New York:


The other "Southern city" was Kansas City, discussed here and here, whose promoter Charles O. Finley eventually got the group for $150,000 but made a loss.

By July 22, the mayor, Nick Nuccio, had written directly to Brian Epstein, as reported again by Kelly (Tampa Tribune, p.2-B).


Nuccio's plea had an amusing fate. At the Jacksonville press conference on September 11, Derek Taylor handed Paul McCartney the keys to the city on Nuccio's behalf but mispronounced Nuccio's name twice (see Carol Stubbe's report here). At the same press conference, available on Youtube, Jean Morris asks John Lennon about coming to Tampa (from: 1:06). 

Three fans who believed that Nuccio had gained them access to the press conference were turned away disappointed (Tampa Times, 14.9.64, p.5-D)


Snobbery was still expressed in many quarters. Many newspapers refused to review the book edition of "A Hard Day's Night", or "Love Letters To the Beatles", published mid-July 1964, edited by Bill Adler, including the Miami Herald on August 30th, which made a point of snubbing both. 


Radio stations played a far more supportive role but were also competitive. Sponsor WAPE in Jacksonville discouraged Tampa from trying to host a Beatles concert, and showed its proprietorial rights by having its logo on the tickets. However, radio stations in Tampa and Miami, such as WALT and WFUN, among others, supplied trains and planes to the concert. My thanks to Courtney O'Connell for supplying these:



Larry Kane's station WFUN gave away 100 tickets for Florida Tours super constellation flight to the concert (Miami News, 19.9.64, p.8-B). Rival station WQAM reportedly gave away 123 tickets (Miami News, 12.9.64, p.3-A).

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Beatles 1964 US Tour Part 8: Jacksonville, FL, 11.9.64

Jacksonville was a difficult experience for The Beatles in several respects. The wind was still strong from the outer edge of Hurricane Dora; other Florida cities, such as Tampa, wanted to grab a part of the prestige of The Beatles being in the state; the group's management had to demand that the audience not be segregated and that unauthorized filming equipment be removed; and they had to join a union in order to be allowed to perform (1):


The group's act was described by Courtenay O'Connell, 13, the granddaughter of Arthur Sears Henning (who had a prominent journalism career in Chicago, such as here). Courtenay was hired by The St. Petersburg Times for the concert after sending a letter to the paper (2, 3):







The Tampa Tribune sent another 13 year old, Carol Stubbe, who was able to witness Paul accepting the keys to the city at the press conference: (4)



Photos from the concert can be seen here (5):



(1) Miami Herald, 12.8.64, p. 2-B.
(2) St Petersburg Times, 11.9.64, pp. 1-B, 15-B.
(3) St Petersburg Times, 13.9.64, pp. 1-B, 3-B.
(4) Tampa Tribune, 14.9.64, pp. 1-B, 2-B.
(5) Miami News, Final Home Edition, 12.9.64, pp. 1, 3A.