He must be some smart guy. I haven't seen the doc but I understand he owns the rights to 'Ready, Steady, Go'. Some foresight, eh?
What he did was, on finding out the master tapes ofReady, Steady, Go, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Juke Box Jury had been erased I this country, was track down copies of them sold to other countries and bought up the rights to them. Also he got the Oti Redding Special (best 40 minutes on YouTube in my opinion), , the Dusty Springfield Motown Special and ones by The Beatles and The Stones. Trouble is he is unwilling to release some of the RSG recordings as they were and inserts DC5 clips into shows they weren't on. Interesting article about him in Daily Mail supplement. Always a shrewd businessman, he kept ownership of all the group's master tapes, published and produced all their own records. He negotiated a royalty rate 4 times higher than the Beatles. Amazing to think that after their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show they were asked back but he said they had to get back to London as he had things to sort out and some of the band still had jobs there. I remember him at the height of their success famously flying back from America just to get his haircut by his favourite barber and then flying straight back. He was one of the last people with Freddie Mercury before he died. Aged 70 he has never married.
Brian Epstein didn't have much of a clue in some ways when it came to deals. From what I've read he virtually gave away the Beatles merchandising rights in the USA.
Yes. Apparently a bloke approached Epstein and said he would take care of all the merchandising and its marketing for them. He said "Does 8% sound reasonable?" meaning he wanted 8% for his efforts. Epstein replied that he thought the boys would be delighted with that. That bit of stupidity is thought to have cost the Beatles over 600million. 600 million in the mid sixties!
True. It was all new then. Only Col Parker had done it with Elvis and then only in a relatively low key way. Great time though. Everything was new and anything seemed possible.
I saw the Beatles around that time. They did a week at Llandudno and I saw them on the last show, the Saturday night (there'd been a matinee show). About 2-3 weeks later they had 6 singles in the Top 20!
I don't think they knew the amount of money theBeatles would generate. There has been nothing like what happened at the height of Beatlemania before or since.
You may find this an interesting read...and the word amongst many of the musicians from that era I have spoken to or worked with suggest that it was session drummer Clem Cattini and not DC who played on the early hits.
It was said that when they played at Scarborough the curtains behind Dave Clark parted to reveal another drummer. Maybe apocryphal.
More than likely Castros, I've worked with a lot of older musicians who have said and actually seen the same thing when touring with various bands. Obviously, the technology didn't exist then to create the big sound on the DC5 records live and two kits would have gone some of the way to getting the sound. BTW I know Stan will know who Clem Cattini is, but if anyone is curious, he was a session drummer on pretty much 75-80% of all the British rock and roll records of the late 50s and early 60s (and beyond). He was on 40 odd number one records including Telstar and countless others (without being credited) and he was also the TOTPs in house drummer. About 2-3 years back he worked with Paul Weller. Check out the drum break on Shaking All Over by Johnny Kid & Pirates...pure gold!
Shaking All Over was the only rock and roll record which matched the Yanks. There was hardly a record in the sixties which didn't feature him, Page or Big Jim Sullivan. Joe Brown was on a fair few as well. Funny to think that Clive Dunn's Grandad featured him and was written by cool guys like Herbie Flowers who did the intro on Walk On The Wild Side and Kenny Pickett the singer of one of my favourite bands in the sixties, The Creation.
