It was 60 years ago today that the Beatles found a shell to play. The 60th anniversary of the band’s first show at the Hollywood Bowl will be commemorated in a presentation by well-regarded Beatles expert Martin Lewis, who will speak Friday night at L.A.’s Philosophical Research Society, along with bringing some audio and video curiosities for attending Beatlemaniacs.
Lewis — a Brit who assisted Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, served under famed Beatles publicist Derek Taylor and has helped market retrospective projects like “Anthology” — has several topics he intends to address during “The Greatest Beatles Story Never Told,” a self-described TED Talk-style event at the Los Feliz auditorium. One subject, obviously, will be the pertinent anniversary in question, and how the Aug. 23, 1964 concert at the Bowl accelerated the advent of outdoor shows. He’ll also discuss the Beatles-related subject he can be most passionate about, the legacy of manager Brian Epstein, who will be the subject of a biopic, “Midas Man,” coming out this fall.
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But he’ll also be debuting a couple of mashups, one in audio form and one video, that should be of interest to devotees. The publicity for the event has promised the unveiling of a never-before-heard curio that will intrigue fans of the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” era. No, it’s not “Carnival of Light” going public at last, but an oddity that may still tickle intrigued fans. (More on that agenda item momentarily.)
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First, that anniversary. “The Philosophical Research Society is four miles away from the Hollywood bowl. And when they asked me, ‘When would you like to do it?’ [a talk], having had Derek Taylor as my mentor, I knew one thing he would say: ‘Always pick an anniversary. It’s a good hook.'” But Lewis does have serious thoughts about what the 1964 Bowl show represented, as the first of three gigs they did there (the other two followed in ’65). “Obviously it not only was a big deal for the Beatles, but I think it really kicked off the outdoor rock concert. By the next year, it was stadiums and beyond.”
He also remains fascinated by a period 6-9 months before their Bowl debut, when the group was first exploding in the States. “I’m doing the story of the background of how the Beatles suddenly became so successful in America. I always say they went viral before there was an internet,” Lewis says. “On Christmas Day ‘63, no one had heard of them. But from then till February 9th (of 1964), in those 45 days, they’d become the biggest thing ever, and 73 million people are tuning in to ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ So that’s going viral old-style, and that’s an interesting story I’ll be telling at the event, because people still don’t really know the story.”
Lewis says he “especially want(s) to do a nod to Brian Epstein, who I’ve always had a thing about promoting. I always feel like he’s the undersung hero,” he says, while acknowledging that may no longer so much be the case after this fall’s movie makes him a leading man. Lewis campaigned for 16 years to get the manager into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which finally happened in 2014.
“Derek Taylor, before he passed, was always talking about Brian and really felt it was a terrible shame that he was becoming a forgotten man, and he pretty much laid it on me” to republicize his reputation. “I mean, I was a fan of Brian Epstein — because being a Jewish kid growing up in England, there were no British Jewish pop singers, you know? America had Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon. We didn’t have any Jews. Jews were managers or agents; they weren’t pop singers. So as a kid, I was like, ‘Wow, the Beatles’ manager is Jewish’— that was a big deal for me.”
Notes Lewis, “Derek and I worked very closely together on ‘Anthology.’ I was the U.S. marketing strategist while he was (running point) in England. And he kept talking to me about Brian. There had been an Epstein biography that had come out by Ray Coleman, who wrote the Lennon biography, but no one paid much interest. In ‘97, Ray Coleman passed away and Derek was ill. And he kept saying, ‘There is nobody left…’ Queenie Epstein, Brian’s mother, had just died. Coleman had died. ‘There is no one left that seems to give a fuck. This is your mission.’ So I helped organize the reissue for the first time since its original publication of his autobiography, ‘A Cellarful of Noise,’ in ‘98. And I started this campaign to get him into the Hall of Fame, but it was so difficult — at the time, no one was interested. So I’ve had this bee in my bonnet that he’s undersung for ages.”
Still, he knows an Epstein discussion probably isn’t the main “catnip” for Beatles fans — the promise of a previously unheard track to be debuted at the event is. So what is it?
Lewis offers the full backstory from 1967, involving a short but sharp dispute between one of the Beatles and their producer/arranger. “My internal jokey thing was to call this part ‘Fixing a Hole in the Paul McCartney/George Martin Relationship,’ but obviously it didn’t last very long, because they became the best of friends again. McCartney wrote ‘She’s Leaving Home’ [with an assist from Lennon], and in the hotbed of the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ sessions, like any excited artist, especially if you’re a multimillionaire Beatle, he wanted to record it immediately. He knew it needed a string arrangement, so he calls up George Martin and asks him to write a string arrangement immediately, because when you’re 23, everything has to be immediately. I don’t blame McCartney because I remember how impatient I was when I was 23, and I didn’t have a million dollars!
“George was working with another artist, and he said, ‘I’ll do it the day after.’ But Paul said, ‘No, that’s not good enough.’ I mean, it was the only argument they ever had. And in George Martin’s biography, he devotes half a chapter to how hurt he was. If you check history, no one else arranged strings apart from George Martin — apart from later on Phil Spector on the ‘Let It Be’ album. So Paul gets a guy called Mike Leander, a young kid who did arrangements, who later became famous for writing and producing Gary Glitter songs; Paul had met him at a Marianne Faithfull session. Paul gets Mike Leander to write the string arrangement of ‘She’s Leaving Home,’ and it’s a little bit melodramatic and saccharine with the harp and everything. George Martin was very hurt, but he’s game and he conducts the orchestra, and does the recording and producing, even though it bugs him. When you think about ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yesterday’ and those sort of songs, the string arrangements are always very subtle and elegant, or baroque. The only one that was intentionally schlocky was ‘Good Night,’ which Ringo sang, and that was because John Lennon said, ‘Make it like Mantovani.’
“George Martin had just set up his own company called Air London, and he produced other artists. And there was a British duo called David & Jonathan that George had discovered… George is so ticked off, he calls up David and Jonathan,and says, ‘I got a song for you.’ He gets them to record ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as a single to come out the same day as the Beatles’ album. You couldn’t get a license ahead of a Beatles album, but it came out the same day as ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ and it was a cover of ‘She’s Leaving Home.’ And what did he do? He wrote an orchestral arrangement for it, which was the arrangement he’d have written if Paul hadn’t been in such a hurry. And it’s beautiful and it’s baroque. It’s similar, but it’s different. It’s baroque, it’s got an oboe on it. It’s what you’d expect of George Martin, very classy. But the single isn’t a hit, and shortly after that David & Jonathan break up, and go and become successful as songwriters, writing ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.’
“So for years, I always thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to get that arrangement, and… I suppose the word is to mash it up, though I hate that bloody expression. Roll along the new technology that we got for ‘Now and Then’ and for the ‘Get Back’ film, and I got an engineer friend of mine and we isolated Lennon and McCartney’s vocals and we isolated this long-lost orchestral arrangement. And we had to make a lot of adjustments because the tempo and key were different. But we’ve managed to create what would’ve been ‘She’s Leaving Home’ had Paul not been in a hurry. I’m not claiming it’s the holy grail. But it’s a curio… the alternate universe version.”
Obviously this version of “She’s Leaving Home” with the Martin orchestral arrangement won’t be coming out through any proper channels, and can only be played for fun, in this kind of non-profit, academic setting. But, says Lewis, probably accurately gauging the fandom’s interest, “For the trainspotter Beatle fans, I think it’ll be kind of fun.”
Lewis has one other mashup up his sleeve for the event. “Do you remember that whole Wizard of Floyd thing?” he asks, about the odd blip in history in which it became a thing to marry “The Dark Side of the Moon” to “The Wizard of Oz.” “A friend of mine is a great film editor, and he was working on a historical project, on a 1940s David Lean film, ‘This Happy Breed,’ and he found a sequence that is literally identical in duration and subject matter to ‘She’s Leaving Home.’ The film sequence all about a girl leaving home, and it’s three and a half minutes, and he got out the music and just set it to it to see what would happen, and it literally synced up,” as if it were meant to be a music video for the Beatles’ song that just happened to filmed two decades before McCartney came up with it. “It’s what Jung called a meaningful coincidence. It’s synchronicity. There’s no causal relationship between a David Lean film written by Noel Coward and Paul McCartney writing his song 23 years later. But just by one of those coincidences where the planets align, we’ve got a Wizard of Floyd thing, so we’re going to play that as well.”
