Still more to reveal about world’s greatest group

The Beatles have also contributed their own “Anthology”. But Doug Wolfberg can still promise, if not actually unrevealed episodes, then at least old ones with more details and better explained. His book has 16 chapters containing  a story each, and he advertises the following enticements – how a lucky bet on an unfancied racehorse helped birth The Beatles; how a drum salesman and a partially disabled signwriter created the group’s enduring logo; how Paul McCartney conjured the fictional name Eleanor Rigby in 1966, only later to find that the real one lay buried beneath his feet; how The Beatles battled racial segregation and played the first integrated concert in the South of the United States at the Gator Bowl in Jackson, Florida; why the Beatles were labelled as “hustlers” by the Rolling Stones; and how an innocent musical homage to Chuck Berry got John Lennon entangled with a hoodlum.

All very promising, and there is more, although when Wolfberg writes that he will be bringing to life “a colourful cast that includes a mobster, a flamboyant lawyer,  a duplicitous concert promoter, a free-spirited Liverpudlian housewife, a long-shot racehorse, a couple of anonymous drummers, and a gentle giant, among other captivating characters”, plus the long-dead woman and a flaming condom, even casual Beatles fans might immediately think, at least, of Mona Best, Jimmie Nicol, Andy White, Mal Evans, Eleanor Rigby and Hamburg.

The horse yarn sounds definitely intriguing and it is first up. This relates how 30-year-old Mona, mother of Pete and Rory and a free spirit looking to escape from an unhappy marriage to a domineering husband, pawned her valuable jewellery and betted all the money on racehorse Never Say Die, the 33-1 long-shot outsider in the 1954 Epsom Derby. She said she liked the horse’s name and it perfectly captured her spirit.

Improbably, unsung jockey Lester Piggott rode the horse to victory by two lengths, Mona’s winnings allowing her to retrieve her jewels and put a sizeable down payment on a rundown 15-room stately manor in leafy Liverpool suburb West Derby. In 1959 she set up the Casbah Coffee Club in the basement, home for a while to the Quarrymen. The rest, as they say, is…

The Beatle story moves on to the Reeperbahn in seedy Hamburg, Germany, a much-told episode receiving another outing here but with a Postscript by Wolfberg in which the guilty parties, McCartney and Pete Best, in later years cleared up any factual doubts about their prank of burning a condom on a concrete wall in a filthy backroom of a second-rate theatre, resulting in their deportation and putting a severe dent in The Beatles’ progress.

McCartney confirmed in the “Anthology” series of the 1990s that it was a condom which was involved, and Best in a 2008 interview cleared up what seems to Wolfberg to be “the enduring mystery of prophylactic provenance” by declaring that “they weren’t used”. The fact that Best says “they” and not “it” would only seem to deepen this rather overblown subject, and set the “scholars” on a new investigative trail. Shock – more than one condom?

Once the foursome got going again in Liverpool, landed a recording contract with George Martin at Parlophone and dumped drummer Best for Ringo Starr, came the day they made a stand against releasing “How Do You Do It”, a song they didn’t believe in. It had been written in hope by Lionel Stitcher in 1962, who later transformed into the more famous Micky Most, but The Beatles famously favoured a composition of their own, “Love Me Do”, a move that has seen them credited with helping bring about the downfall of the non-performing songwriters of London’s “Tin Pan Alley”, the central music area around Denmark Street. The Beatles, concludes Wolfberg, “did more than any other act in musical history to forever shift that balance of power in the music business”.

The recording of that one song, “Love Me Do”, involved three drummers, with the author recalling the oft-told tale of Pete Best, Ringo Starr and Andy White. The public eventually got to hear all three versions, Best’s from 1962 finally surfacing on “Anthology” in 1995.

An interesting chapter reveals how Starr and manager Brian Epstein went to Drum City on Shaftesbury Avenue in London to replace Ringo’s Premier kit, and chose a Ludwig Black Pearl Oyster kit, the “Downbeat” model. Epstein wanted The Beatles’ name on the bass drum and bigger than the manufacturer’s, so shop owner Ivor Arbiter quickly dreamed up and sketched the “big B, drop T” logo. It was painted on by his signwriter Edwin “Eddie” Stokes, who had use of only arm after childhood polio but deftly applied the logo that became a world icon.

Less interesting is the story of how Rolling Stones co-manager Andrew Loog Oldham went for a walk in September 1963 and bumped into Lennon and McCartney. He told them that the Stones were in the studio struggling to follow up their debut single, “Come On”, whereupon the two Beatles called in and offered the Stones an unfinished song, “I Wanna Be Your Man”.

Here the story diverges: did the two Beatles present themselves as finishing the song on the spot in front of the Stones, and thus hustle the Stones with their mock songwriting prowess in order to sell a song, or had they actually completed the composition earlier and even recorded it with The Beatles? It’s a “nagging question” for Wolfberg.

“The Lawyer Who Squandered the Beatles’ Merchandising Fortune” was flamboyant showbiz solicitor David Jacobs. Epstein, who saw the group’s principal income as record sales and concert fees, entrusted the licensing of The Beatles’ name and  likenesses to his friend and fellow Jew who had a celebrity client roster.

In 1963 such merchandising was not the phenomenon it would become a decade later, and Jacobs foolishly signed away 90 per cent of the rights to a consortium of six men, who then licensed hundreds of items from Beatles T-shirts to wigs, dolls, dishes, watches and so on. Wolfberg says most financial estimates of the debacle suggest that The Beatles lost a mind-blowing USD 100,000,000-plus from the agreement. This was more than all their records amd concerts earned combined throughout their career.

There were further financial shenanigans. The signalled mobster crops up in the tale of Lennon’s borrowing of the Chuck Berry phrase “Here come old flat top” in “Come Together”, resulting in legal action by New York tough guy Morris “Mo” Levy. Later, Wolfberg adjudges, one factor that surely played an outsized if not determinative role in The Beatles’ breakup, probably even more so than the much-maligned presence of Yoko Ono, was the entry of the dodgy Allen Klein into their world. And the author does an excellent job of untangling the various legal actions between The Beatles’ Apple Corps and Steve Jobs’ Apple Computer Inc.

Assistant Mal Evans and his life of service, the “cosmically implausible” tale of Eleanor Rigby, the singular work of Beatles art painted by the Fabs in Tokyo, the Lennon and McCartney “Toot and a Snore” of 1974, the signing by Lennon in Walt Disney World, Florida, that same year of the documents to dissolve the world’s greatest group… the stories rumble on.

As Wolfberg notes, his aim is to provide a fuller context and restore forgotten facts, clearing the haze of decades and bringing the stories back to their factual moorings. Read the book and play again the ground-breaking songs from all those years ago.