Notes

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Just six months after their first true recording sessions in Germany lending essentially uncredited support to singer Tony Sheridan, The Beatles seemed perilously close to signing a recording contract under their own name back home in England. Even before officially becoming the band’s manager, Brian Epstein was apparently already delivering on his promise to get them a record deal when he arranged an audition with Decca Records in London for New Year’s Day, 1962. John, Paul, George and Pete left Liverpool by van the night before with Neil Aspinall driving. Owing to extreme winter weather, which caused Neil to get lost a little more than a third of the way around Wolverhampton, the roughly 340 km trip from Liverpool took ten hours. The next day, Epstein, The Beatles and Aspinall arrived at Decca studios for their 11 am appointment with Decca A&R assistant Mike Smith, who had seen the band perform on 13 December 1961 at the Cavern. The Beatles’ road-worn amplifiers did not impress Smith, and he insisted they use the studio’s equipment for the audition instead, compounding the group’s sense of unease after a grueling trip. An hour later they had filled two reels of tape with a total of fifteen songs, and Smith rushed the group out to make way for Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, his next audition of the day. Under these less-than-ideal conditions, The Beatles for the first time stood on their own in a recording studio. Though from our current vantage point there is a certain charm to hearing them falter through their first audition, there is very little obvious evidence of the band’s later brilliance to be found in these fifteen performances. Decca head of A&R singles Dick Rowe, long pilloried for rejecting The Beatles, can be forgiven for not hearing the architects of a revolution in the acetates Mike Smith cut for him. While Epstein specifically chose these songs from the band’s stage repertoire in an attempt to highlight their diversity, the selection was not representative of how The Beatles saw themselves, a fact which resulted in the band subsequently asserting full control of the music while Epstein was left to tend to business concerns. If these recordings, then, are not an entirely accurate picture of The Beatles as performers at the time, they nonetheless capture a moment in the band’s history when they were nervously hopeful, hedging their bets, yet very close to making the connection that would allow them to discover their full potential.


Song List

1 Like Dreamers Do 2:36
2 Money (That’s What I Want) 2:24 (Janie Bradford and Berry Gordy, Jr.)
3 Till There Was You 3:00 (Meredith Willson)
4 Sheik of Araby 1:43 (Harry Smith, Francis Wheeler & Ted Snyder)
5 To Know Her Is To Love Her 2:36 (Phil Spector)
6 Take Good Care of My Baby 2:28 (Jerry Goffin and Carole King)
7 Memphis, Tennessee 2:22 (Chuck Berry)
8 Sure To Fall 2:04 (Carl Lee Perkins, Quinton Claunch & William Cantrell)
9 Hello Little Girl 1:40
10 Three Cool Cats 2:25 (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller)
11 Crying, Waiting, Hoping 2:03 (Buddy Holly)
12 Love of the Loved 1:52
13 September in the Rain 1:56 (Al Dubin and Harry Warren)
14 Besame Mucho 2:40 (Sunny Skylar and Consuelo Velazques)
15 Searchin’ 3:08 (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller)