The one venue that turned down The Beatles: “Keeping with good taste”
The Beatles’ music has reached the point of being a constant in people’s lives rather than a relic of the 1960s. Most acts of their ilk might be looked at as the kind of musical fodder to fill up a typical classic rock station but listening through everything the Fab Four ever made, there’s always something new to glean out of their music, whether it’s a strange guitar part that no one ever heard or Paul McCartney sprinkling in the perfect bass fill on every song. But that didn’t mean everyone had to like them in their early days.
Then again, it was going to take a lot for people to come around on any type of rock and roll in the early 1960s. As much as the genre was being perceived as dangerous, it was also grappling with something it had never dealt with before: being lame. Elvis Presley had gone into the army, Buddy Holly was dead, and Little Richard had become a pastor, so now all people had to show for rock and roll were people like Ricky Nelson and Frankie Avalon.
And while The Beatles did have their sensitive side in many regards, what made them stick out was how much they seemed interested in pushing the music forward. There were moments where they could let loose, but every now and again, you’d hear a strange chord that didn’t seem to fit in with rock and roll, yet always found its way to tie a song together perfectly.
That isn’t something an artist comes up with on a whim, but the Fabs had already become legendary from their years of gigging. They were never afraid to play anything that came into their heads, and after having to go through the Hamburg circuit of playing for eight hours at a time, they were battle-tested when they found their way to Abbey Road Studios to cut their first record.
For a band that would become known for some of their outlandish production tricks, hearing them make such an impression with Please Please Me is much more refreshing than their later works. They were never afraid to try something new, but with only one day to work with to record the album, this is a pure facsimile of what The Beatles sounded like in a live setting, down to McCartney’s euphoric count-off at the beginning of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.
“I was a fellow of London Zoo and, rather stupidly, thought that it would be great to have The Beatles photographed outside the insect house. But the zoo people were very stuffy indeed.”
George Martin
But once the band had to worry about getting the publicity shots for the album, their decision to go the London Zoo wasn’t taken well at all, with George Martin recalling, “I was a fellow of London Zoo and, rather stupidly, thought that it would be great to have The Beatles photographed outside the insect house. But the zoo people were very stuffy indeed: ‘We don’t allow these kinds of photographs on our premises, quite out of keeping with the good taste of the Zoological Society of London,’ so the idea fell down.”
Admittedly, it would have been a bit strange to see the Fab Four hanging out with a bunch of bugs and animals, but since the whole thing was as close to garage rock as the band ever got, it would have been a nice nod to how fundamental the rest of the album was. And judging by the rest of their career, this is among the last times they would have been turned down for anything.
By the time they hit the Ed Sullivan Show, the band were treated like musical gods half the time, and whenever they stepped out of their homes, it was almost mandatory for them to carry around certain disguises so mass hysteria didn’t break out everywhere they went. But for those few days around London, they were still a bunch of kids hoping to make their big break with the best tunes they could muster.
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