DAY MACCA SANG ME BEATLES’ US SMASH ( )
And he gave me a song John said wasn’t good enough... which I then took to number one with my mate Gordon!
IT ALL started when Peter Asher heard the strains of a song drifting from the spare bedroom in his parents’ London home. It was Paul Mccartney; he’d moved in as he was dating Peter’s sister, Jane, and he was singing A World Without Love. Paul was about to abandon the song as, curiously, John Lennon felt it wasn’t up to Lennon-mccartney standards.
It was early 1963 and Peter, whose own folkie pop duo, Peter And Gordon, had just won a recording deal, urged Paul to let them have it. The Beatles were about to make it big but six months after they became the first British group to top the US charts, Peter And Gordon and A World Without Love were No 1 there too.
Peter, who became a record executive, Grammy-winning producer and manager, is still entranced by The Beatles. His weekly US radio show, From Me To You, offers wonderfully British recollections that have led to an equally charming book. And it all goes back to that song...
Paul was besotted with Jane and they spent five years together although actress Jane (she and Peter appeared in 1950s TV show The Adventures Of Robin Hood) went on to marry cartoonist
Gerald Scarfe.“paul was hanging around the house and my parents took pity and offered him the guest room,” says Peter, 76, from the Californian seaside home in Malibu he shares with Wendy, his wife of 37 years.
“When we signed with EMI, two guys with acoustic guitars, I think they imagined us to be folkie, Peter and Paul without Mary. They asked if I knew of any good songs and I thought, ‘Maybe I do!’”
Peter also saw the creation of The Beatles’ US breakthrough, I Want To Hold Your Hand. “Our basement had a music room where my mother gave lessons – she was oboe professor at the Royal Academy of Music. She told Paul that when he wanted to play piano there was one he was welcome to use. This day John came over and they were down there, no guitars, and finished a song and called up to ask if I’d like to hear it. I sat on this little sofa and they sat side by side at the piano, both playing.”
Paul also famously woke up one morning with the tune to Yesterday in his head, convinced it was someone else’s song. “I missed that,” he says ruefully. “It was my mum who was first to hear it.”
When Peter And Gordon struck gold, Gordon Waller was still at Westminster School. Peter, with thick-rimmed specs and tousled red hair, had left to study philosophy at Kings College London: “The head of department gave me a one-year leave of absence to explore all this rock’n’roll nonsense, get it out of my system... I’m still on that leave.”
In 1966 Peter And Gordon toured Germany with the Fab Four, travelling on a train usually reserved for heads of state, including the Queen. “I remember sitting at this long, fabulous table at which treaties had been hammered out playing poker with The Beatles and Brian Epstein. Brian won... managers rule!”
Peter saw the birth of Beatlemania – and the start of the end. By 1966 he owned the Indica gallery, near Piccadilly, with artist John Dunbar (Marianne Faithfull’s husband; Peter was best man)
and writer Barry Miles. A controversial young artist, Yoko Ono, was booked – and John Lennon was at the opening.
Does Peter accept his part in the downfall of modern civilisation? “Well, I do a live show, A Memoir Of The 60s And Beyond, and recently someone jumped to their feet and said, ‘IT WAS YOU!’
“But I don’t remember there being a moment when their eyes met and the room went silent. I certainly didn’t go, ‘John, Yoko... Yoko, John’.”
PETER WAS part of the band’s Apple organisation, asked by Paul to produce records and discover talent. He’d recently produced a single, And The Sun Will Shine, for Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones. “It was a modest hit but I put together a seriously good band: there was Jeff Beck on guitar – and Paul Mccartney played drums, which he does extremely well!”
Peter’s big find was singer-songwriter James Taylor. His 1968 debut wasn’t a success but Peter was convinced enough to quit his Beatles post (“I wrote an official letter of resignation!) to move to America as Taylor’s manager and producer. The result? Iconic album Sweet Baby James, a transatlantic hit now celebrating its 50th anniversary. “James and I thought the peak of success would be selling out the folk clubs,” he says. “Madison Square Garden and the cover of Time magazine wasn’t on the agenda!”
It was Grammy-nominated album of the year with single Fire And Rain nominated as record of the year (he won producer of the year in 1977 and 1989).
Alongside 15 years with Taylor, Peter also steered Linda Ronstadt’s career and made records for everyone from Diana Ross to Randy Newman, Cher to Ringo. Senior vice-president of Sony Entertainment (1995-2002), he played reunion shows with Gordon, who died in 2009.
He has produced comedian Steve Martin’s critically acclaimed bluegrass albums, even turning the songs into a Broadway musical, Bright Star.
“It ran for 100 shows – not enough for people to get their money back but I loved it!” he says, and the 2016 album did bring him his most recent Grammy nomination – the year after the Queen appointed him a CBE for services to music.
Peter hosts music festival cruises – the Flower Power Cruise with the likes of the Zombies and the Moody Blues’ John Lodge departs Miami on March 20. He’s also keen to bring his solo show to the UK – he’s here regularly and was over for meetings with Apple when lockdown hit and only narrowly fled back to the sun.
His radio show, on subscription service Siriusxm’s Apple-sanctioned Beatles Channel, started in 2017: “I’ve just recorded the 170th show... 170 hours of me blathering away about The Beatles!”
His book, The Beatles From A To Zed, is part inside story, part autobiography, as likely to baffle Americans by noting the Belisha beacons at Abbey Road zebra crossing as it is to discuss songs. “I digress massively!” laughs the man who couldn’t imagine a world without Beatles...
‘170 hours of me blathering away!’
The Beatles From A To Zed (St Martin’s Press) is out in paperback on November 2