This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.
A note particular to this volume: no era of popular music is more heavily documented, and the documentation is unusually lopsided. The Beatles’ every studio hour is logged; the import trade that fed the whole scene left almost no paper at all. The shops, the seamen’s kitbags, the base-exchange counters and the slowed-down turntables survive chiefly in memoirs and interviews given decades later by interested parties, and the text has flagged, case by case, where it is standing on recollection rather than record.
The Beatles’ documentation. Mark Lewisohn’s work is the evidentiary spine wherever this book states a Beatles date, session fact or contract term: Tune In, the first volume of his biography, and The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, built from EMI’s own logs. Philip Norman’s Shout! and the standard later biographies supply the wider narrative, and disagree with each other often enough that this book has preferred Lewisohn’s documents where they conflict.
Memoirs by participants, all to be read as interested accounts: Brian Epstein, A Cellarful of Noise, ghost-written in his lifetime and the source of the Raymond Jones story in its classic form; Keith Richards, Life; Bill Wyman, Stone Alone, the nearest thing the Rolling Stones’ finances have to a ledger kept from inside; Andrew Loog Oldham, Stoned and 2Stoned, indispensable and openly performative; Ray Davies, X-Ray, and Dave Davies, Kink; Pete Townshend, Who I Am; Eric Burdon’s several volumes of recollection; Pete Best’s accounts of his dismissal. Where a story in this book exists only in these pages (the cassette by the motel bed, the razored speaker cone, the kitchen songwriting siege) the text has said whose telling it is.
On the management and the money. Johnny Rogan, Starmakers and Svengalis, the standard study of British pop management, and Simon Napier-Bell’s insider accounts. Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld, Apple to the Core, on the Beatles’ finances including Seltaeb and the NEMS terms. Brian Southall, Northern Songs, on the publishing company from formation to sale. Sean Egan’s work on the Animals for the Jeffery and Yameta history, alongside the surviving members’ interviews. The Rolling Stones’ arrangements with Impact Sound, Decca and Allen Klein are documented in Wyman, Oldham and the litigation record; the Klein structures were argued in court for years, and the text presents the outcomes that are not in dispute.
The scene and the import trade. Paul Du Noyer, Liverpool: Wondrous Place; Spencer Leigh’s Merseybeat histories and Cavern chronicles; Bill Harry’s Mersey Beat paper, the contemporaneous record of the Liverpool circuit; Pete Frame, The Restless Generation, on British popular music before the boom; Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City, still the clearest account of the transatlantic licensing economy. The London R&B scene’s rooms and personnel are reconstructed from the memoirs above plus the interviews of Giorgio Gomelsky and the surviving Ealing and Crawdaddy regulars. Blues Unlimited (from 1963) and the jazz press document the collector and mail-order economy. On Dusty Springfield, Lucy O’Brien’s biography; on the American side of the covers, the sources of this series’ blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and doo-wop volumes, which this book has leaned on for consistency and cited at the point of use.
The trade and national press of the period (Melody Maker, NME, Record Mirror, Disc, Billboard, Cash Box) for release dates, chart positions, tour reports and the contemporaneous framing, including the coining and hardening of the phrase this book’s title preserves under protest.
For chart positions, the Official Charts Company’s historical data (with the text noting where the early-sixties multiplicity of British charts makes a single answer dishonest) and the Billboard archives.
On the business mechanics. The compulsory mechanical licence, the two-cent statutory rate, publishing splits, recoupment and the performer/writer divide are set out in any reputable music-business text; Donald Passman’s standard work remains the clearest general explanation, though it describes a later era. The specific 1962–1967 figures in this book (the penny royalty, the twenty-five per cent commission, the Seltaeb percentages, the Shea Stadium takings) are drawn from the biographies and documents named above, and the text has marked each one that rests on a participant’s claim rather than surviving paper.
Where figures and stories are disputed, the Raymond Jones request, the remark attributed to Dick Rowe, the rumoured bulk-buying of Love Me Do, the true weight of the Cunard Yanks, the House of the Rising Sun credit, the origin of the My Generation stutter, the Muddy Waters ladder at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, the sums lost to Seltaeb and Yameta, the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.
