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Authors: John McMillian
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bands” that would “keep the show business sharks out of the scene.”“My motivation in all this had been cultural rather than business-oriented,” he explained. Besides, in addition to proselytizing for R&B, Gomelsky also dabbled in other bohemian-flavored pursuits, including Stanislavsky’s Method acting and experimental film. And even asthe Stones were burnishing their chops at the Crawdaddy, the energetic émigré had yet another project in mind: he wanted to direct a movie about the Beatles.
Outside of Liverpool, not many people could honestly boast that they were Beatles fans before the Beatles got famous. About two years earlier, however, while passing through Hamburg, Gomelsky had been lucky enough to catch the scruffy young Brits back when they were still playing bowdlerized R&B covers in seedy clubs. He remembered the Beatles as a“good, fluent band,” and one night while they were on break, he’d chatted amiably with them. Now, perhaps six months before the birth of Beatlemania, Gomelsky hoped to direct an avant-garde film about the group, one that was intended“to bring about the still unperceived wit and knockabout charm of the Beatles offstage characters.”
To that end, he met with Epstein at Teddington Studios on April 14, 1963, while the Beatles’ manager was accompanying his group during the taping of their third appearance on ABC-TV’s pop music show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Epstein agreed to discuss the proposal further, but Peter Clayton, a Jazz News writer whom Gomelsky had enlisted to draw up a rough script, later surmised that he was probably wary of the idea from the get-go. Still relatively new to showbiz, he likely mistook Gomelsky’s“explosive enthusiasm as just another attempt to stampede him into something.”
Nor did the Beatles themselves ever seem terribly interested in the film. Clayton recalls one meeting at Gomelsky’s flat when the group sat there eating omelets.“I suppose I should remember some of those tart witticisms which became such a feature of Beatles press conferences, but all I can recall are the omelets, each in the center of a big plate, like a stranded yellow fish,” he said. At another meeting, Lennon picked quietly at a mandolin while everyone talked around him, and McCartney seemed quiet and guarded—“a closed book.”
They perked up, however, when Gomelsky started raving aboutthe Stones. Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ road manager at the time, explained that the timing was propitious. The Beatles and their entourage were freshly arrived in London and therefore eager to hit the clubs,“to find out what was happening . . . since it was not yet our scene. We were the new boys in town.” And it just so happened, Gomelsky enthused, that the Stones were playing that very night.
“Hey you guys, you’ve got to listen to this band on the way home tonight,” he pleaded. “You’ve got to come and see this band when you finish recording the show, it’s on the way back, you’ve just got to come.”
“Yeah, okay, we’ll come,” someone said.
• • •
Over the next few years, the Beatles would have meticulously planned and well-documented summits with some of the most prestigious and successful performers of their era. Probably the most momentous such meeting was with Bob Dylan (at New York’s Delmonico Hotel on August 28, 1964). As James Miller explains in Flowers in the Dustbin ,Dylan “represented everything that Lennon still silently aspired to: artistic integrity, musical honesty, [and] the priceless cachet of being hip, not with screaming teenagers, but with serious adults—poets like Allen Ginsberg, artists like Andy Warhol, political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.” After sweeping past a roomful of people who had been waiting patiently to see the Beatles, and finding that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were just finishing up their room-service dinners, Dylan produced a lumpy bag of marijuana and started rolling up some
Outside of Liverpool, not many people could honestly boast that they were Beatles fans before the Beatles got famous. About two years earlier, however, while passing through Hamburg, Gomelsky had been lucky enough to catch the scruffy young Brits back when they were still playing bowdlerized R&B covers in seedy clubs. He remembered the Beatles as a“good, fluent band,” and one night while they were on break, he’d chatted amiably with them. Now, perhaps six months before the birth of Beatlemania, Gomelsky hoped to direct an avant-garde film about the group, one that was intended“to bring about the still unperceived wit and knockabout charm of the Beatles offstage characters.”
To that end, he met with Epstein at Teddington Studios on April 14, 1963, while the Beatles’ manager was accompanying his group during the taping of their third appearance on ABC-TV’s pop music show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Epstein agreed to discuss the proposal further, but Peter Clayton, a Jazz News writer whom Gomelsky had enlisted to draw up a rough script, later surmised that he was probably wary of the idea from the get-go. Still relatively new to showbiz, he likely mistook Gomelsky’s“explosive enthusiasm as just another attempt to stampede him into something.”
Nor did the Beatles themselves ever seem terribly interested in the film. Clayton recalls one meeting at Gomelsky’s flat when the group sat there eating omelets.“I suppose I should remember some of those tart witticisms which became such a feature of Beatles press conferences, but all I can recall are the omelets, each in the center of a big plate, like a stranded yellow fish,” he said. At another meeting, Lennon picked quietly at a mandolin while everyone talked around him, and McCartney seemed quiet and guarded—“a closed book.”
They perked up, however, when Gomelsky started raving aboutthe Stones. Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ road manager at the time, explained that the timing was propitious. The Beatles and their entourage were freshly arrived in London and therefore eager to hit the clubs,“to find out what was happening . . . since it was not yet our scene. We were the new boys in town.” And it just so happened, Gomelsky enthused, that the Stones were playing that very night.
“Hey you guys, you’ve got to listen to this band on the way home tonight,” he pleaded. “You’ve got to come and see this band when you finish recording the show, it’s on the way back, you’ve just got to come.”
“Yeah, okay, we’ll come,” someone said.
• • •
Over the next few years, the Beatles would have meticulously planned and well-documented summits with some of the most prestigious and successful performers of their era. Probably the most momentous such meeting was with Bob Dylan (at New York’s Delmonico Hotel on August 28, 1964). As James Miller explains in Flowers in the Dustbin ,Dylan “represented everything that Lennon still silently aspired to: artistic integrity, musical honesty, [and] the priceless cachet of being hip, not with screaming teenagers, but with serious adults—poets like Allen Ginsberg, artists like Andy Warhol, political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.” After sweeping past a roomful of people who had been waiting patiently to see the Beatles, and finding that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were just finishing up their room-service dinners, Dylan produced a lumpy bag of marijuana and started rolling up some
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