On a rare day off, the group spent the morning doing a photo session with Dezo Hoffmann for the New Record Mirror. They first went to the barber shop in the basement of Horne Brothers on Lord Street, where they had their haircut by Jim Cannon, who gave Ringo his first Beatle haircut.
They then travelled to Allerton Golf Course, Paul in his recently purchased four-door Ford Consul Classic in Goodwood Green, George in his Ford Anglia and Hoffmann driving his more stately Austin Cambridge A60. He took several shots of them and was himself filmed by Paul and then George putting new film in his camera. They then went to Paul’s house a half-mile away at 20 Forthlin Road, Ringo riding as Paul’s passenger, with John in the back filming the journey on an 8mm camera. They then all had a nice cup of tea.
In the evening, along with Brian Epstein, Bob Wooler, Danny Betesh and others, Paul attended the opening night of Mister Smith’s, a new nightclub in Manchester, which saw Frankie Howerd top the bill. Hoffmann travelled with him and snapped a photo of the pair together. Hoffmann later recalled, “I asked the editor about doing a photo feature in Liverpool on these boys. He said it was too expensive to go to Liverpool. It took me three months to convince him to send me. When I arrived, I went to see Brian Epstein, and we had the most fantastic type of rapport straight away. Maybe that was because I didn’t want to take the kind of pictures he expected, you know, the sort where people are shaking hands in the office. I stayed there for three days, And that’s how the Beatles and I became friends.”
“I came over from Los Angeles for that tour in 1963 because I was Chris Montez’s manager at the time and had written ‘Let’s Dance.’ It was back in the day when you could be the owner of the record label and the artist’s manager. It’s a conflict of interests of course, but it was the way it was done in many instances. One day early in the tour the promoter knocked on Chris’ dressing room door and told him that he wanted to change the billing and put the Beatles at the top. I told him, ‘That’s not going to happen or if it does happen, we’re out of here - no more shows. We’ll go back to the States. That’s the way it’s going to be. We’re not going to change it,’ and it wasn’t changed. They backed off and let it go on as planned. Chris and Tommy Roe were the stars of the show. If you think back at that time no English artist had ever been big in America. Once in a while someone would come along and have a hit, but did I think the Beatles would have a hit in America? At that time, it didn’t even occur to me.
I can’t really remember specific times and places, but we pretty much spent twenty-four hours a day with the Beatles - we slept in the same hotels, travelled on the bus with them. I recall them writing on the bus once. Paul was sitting on the arm of a seat while John was sitting on the arm across the aisle and they both had a guitar and were writing. There was another time when I was already on the bus and they came on and they were walking down the aisle toward me and I’m trying to get a picture of some scenery. I had this camera - and back then, they weren’t that user friendly. You had to know what you were doing and I didn’t, but I had this Yashica movie camera that was very good, but you had to set apertures and do this and that and so forth and I was trying to use the damn thing and I’m trying to get pictures of the scenery and they got in the way and I was trying to get them to move. So I still have this double exposure of them walking down the aisle of the bus. You can see it’s them but it’s a double exposure because it’s two pictures.
They wore pink shirts onstage and after each show they’d roll them up in a ball and put them in a suitcase and then the next night they’d undo the ball and the shirts would have thousands of wrinkles in them from the sweat that had dried, but you couldn’t see that from the audience. I noticed whenever they took off their clothes their legs were blue from the fade of the jeans when they sweated. During one of the shows we were waiting back in our area and John had a little record player he carried with him everywhere and he kept playing ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me.’
We would always have to eat late - by this time everything had closed - we would often be in the kitchen of one of these hotels and eating odds and ends. Anyway, we were in this mezzanine style room at a hotel and we were all goofing off and people started going to bed because it was late and John got up and he walked across the floor and when he got to about the centre of the floor his pants fell down around his ankles. He did it on purpose of course.
I do remember when we got to Liverpool, Ringo and I went out and got drunk together. What I remember clearly is both of us in a rest room at a urinal, drunk taking a pee. That’s all I can remember about that night - after all I was drunk. We spent two days in Liverpool and I remember meeting Brian Epstein at his record store.
Growing up in southern California, I took accordion lessons for two years, but I wasn’t much into practising when I was supposed to be practising. In fact after my first lesson I started writing a melody and I came back to my second class and I wanted to play it and of course the instructor was not at all interested in that because that was not what I was supposed to be doing. He said when you’re supposed to be learning something you don’t go off and write something and come up with tunes until you can play the instrument. I worked at it but never really hard, but I was always fascinated by the little names below the title as opposed to the artist’s name.
I had a job in an aircraft plant in San Diego and I got on the night shift so I could go to Hollywood in the daytime and in 1958 I was managing a group called the Strangers and we had a modest hit with a song called ‘Caterpillar Crawl.’ Naturally this meant I started getting tired at work and not doing my job very well or even missing work or whatever. So finally I got called in one morning and the supervisor said, ‘Jim, you’re one of our best workers when you’re here. I want you to get this out of your system. We’re going to fire you.’ So I got fired about 6am and that was the last regular job I ever held.
I then got a job working for a record distributor up in LA. What I didn’t know was that they were looking for a sucker, and I was perfect. I was very young, around 22, really wide-eyed and wanting to get into the music business. My job was to go around and get their records played on the radio. The guy who owned the distributors decided to close down the business and go and buy a ranch, so after about six weeks I was without a job. But he gave me a great letter of recommendation and got I job with another distributor. In fact I went to work for nothing to prove myself. I said, ‘If I get this record played on KRLA,’ which was one of the big stations there, ‘then hire me.’ They said, ‘OK.’ I had moved up from San Diego with a fellow by the name of Sam Riddle and we shared an apartment in LA. He got a job at KRLA and I managed to get him to play the record. They were very impressed with that so they gave me a paying job.
One day, a couple of guys came in who wanted us to distribute one of their records. They were the owners of Indigo. We struck up a friendship and I ended up being their A&R man. I found Kathy Young singing at a Wink Martindale show and I recorded ‘A Thousand Stars’ with her and that was a huge hit. So I thought I knew what I was doing. I then went to work for Monogram but that didn’t last long as a label, so I went back to work as a promotion man, but I wanted to start my own label.
There was a small publishing company run by Billy Sherman and Barry De Vorzon and they had brought a song into Monogram when I was there with Chris Montez singing on it, but nothing had come of it. Later I began thinking about it and wondered what had happened to it. So I called Billy and said, ‘What are you doing with that record?’ He said, ‘It’s just sitting here.’ I said, ‘Can I put it out?’ and he said, ‘You can have it.’ I made a distribution deal with Era and we put it out and it was a big hit in LA. That gave me some money to make ‘Let’s Dance.’ Chris didn’t particularly care for it. I think he’s on record as to saying he didn’t think it was a hit. The musicians on it were Joel Scott Hill, who later spent some time in Canned Heat and the Flying Burrito Brothers, on guitar, Ray Johnson on organ, Ray Pohlman on bass and Jesse Sailes on drums. I’ve always felt bad that I didn’t use Jesse on the follow-up ‘Some Kinda Fun.’ I should have and it’s bothered me for years. I used Hal Blaine instead, who wasn’t a big deal at the time.
There was a clothing store on North Vine Street in Hollywood called Beau Gentry and it’s where I got my clothes and in time I took Chris there. The Beatles took a shine to his suits and had their tailor Dougie Millings make their own version of the style. We loved the boots they wore, so the day after the tour finished we went to Anello and Davide and bought some for ourselves. The following day we went to Dougie Millings’ place in Old Compton Street. When the Beatles came to Hollywood they very much wanted to go shopping at Beau Gentry. They wanted privacy so I managed to get the owner to open the store up at midnight so they could go in and shop. I did the same for the Rolling Stones. I also took both groups - at different times of course - to the Whisky A-Go Go. I remember giving a watch to George or Ringo on that trip as well as going to party for them in Beverly Hills, but it was crazy with all these hangers-on - a far cry from the tour in 1963.
My relationship with Chris ended sometime late ’65/early ’66. I was going through a divorce so my life was in turmoil, everything was kind of a mess. Chris was unhappy because his records weren’t selling. A&M wanted to sign him but only if he could get a release from me. I was fine with that and the agreement was that I would never have to pay him any more royalties on anything.
I struggled for a while but then picked up a guitar, having never learnt it. I learnt three or four chords and that worked and I got a job at a little club in Burbank across from Disney Productions. Then I got a bass player and a drummer and we were packing the place three or four nights a week. I got a job at a club on Lankershim Boulevard and did that for a year. That wore me out and I quit. I wandered about LA for a while and eventually around late ’72 I got a call from one of the guys at Indigo who I had been really close with and he said, ‘Jim, I’ve just got back from England and “Let’s Dance” is in the Top 10.’ It did the same in Germany. I called up the record company and told them I wanted my money. So I took my royalties and bought a house up in Northern California where real estate was inexpensive. In the process I saw how easy real estate seemed to be. I thought if the guy who sold me my house could do it, so could I. Maybe I’d write songs in the winter and sell houses in the summer. That worked out great and now I’m retired, but I’ve been doing a fair amount of recording the past few years.
I remember when the bus returned to London after the final show on that Beatles tour and we were all going our separate ways. It was very foggy and I have this picture in my mind of the four of them kind of walking off into the fog and disappearing. It was like the ending of a film where they walk off into the fog and you don’t see them anymore.”
JIM LEE, SONGWRITER, BOULDER CREEK, CALIFORNIA, USA