While it seemed like The Beatles had been manufactured in a laboratory with a musical ability beyond all explanation, that wasn’t the case. Although their story is nothing short of a fairytale, the early chapters in their history are splattered with failure, but they didn’t let the setbacks keep them down and instead worked hard to improve their craft.
It took countless gigs and hundreds of hours together before The Beatles learned to understand each other on an innate level. When they first started out, the Fab Four had yet to build this chemistry that would take them to unimaginable heights, fuelled by their shared dedication. However, before they took themselves to Hamburg, which was critical in their evolution, they were just another aspiring band in the Merseybeat scene.
As teenagers during these early years, each member was desperate to play as many shows as possible and would do anything to play on a stage. When McCartney played his first show with the band that later morphed into The Beatles, he was a nervous wreck and nearly sabotaged their performance.
Reminiscing about that performance, he once told Reverb: “When I got up on stage at the very first gig I totally blew it. I had never experienced these things called nerves before…This was still with the Zenith, yeah. Might have got a pickup on it by then… yes, I did, I got a little pickup and a little wire, bought the pickup separately, tried to gash it on there.”
Although they steadily improved, there were still plenty of road bumps in their journey. In those days, it was common for bands to compete in contests, and while one would suspect The Beatles won every time, they were yet to become the fully-formed group who’d take over the world in a matter of years.
In Anthology, McCartney reflected on this challenging time before they enlisted a drummer and operated with three guitarists. Notably, he had yet to take up the bass, which gave them an extremely unbalanced sound.
He recalled noting: “We would show up for gigs just with three guitars, and the person booking us would ask, ‘Where’s the drums, then?’ To cover this eventuality we would say, ‘The rhythm’s in the guitars,’ stand there, smile a lot, bluff it out. There was not a lot you could say to that, and we’d make them very rhythmic to prove our point.”
He continued: “We failed miserably in the contest — we always got beaten. We never won a talent show in our lives. We were always playing little late-night ones at pubs and working-men’s clubs. We were inevitably beaten by the woman on the spoons, because it was eleven at night and everyone was well tanked up, they didn’t want to hear the music we were playing.”
While The Beatles earned a reputation for being perennial rule-breakers who did things however they pleased, even the ‘Fab Four’ had to conform to the traditional framework of a band and needed to enlist a rhythm section.
