Brian Epstein Learned He’d Been Complaining About The Beatles Long Before He Knew Them

After Brian Epstein began managing The Beatles, the band rose to astronomical success. He first heard about the group when someone requested their record at his family’s store. He began looking into their music, when someone informed him that he’d already met the band. Epstein realized he’d seen The Beatles at the store and complained about their behavior.

Brian Epstein met The Beatles in 1961

Epstein first saw The Beatles perform at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in late 1961. Though he had no experience as a band manager, he wanted to try with The Beatles.

“I suppose it was all part of getting bored with simply selling records,” he said, per the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “I was looking for a new hobby. The Beatles at the same time, though I didn’t know it and perhaps they didn’t either, were also getting a bit bored with Liverpool. They were wanting to do something new. To expand and get on to something new.”

He requested to meet with them and, when he offered to manage them, they agreed.

“I had money, a car, a record shop,” he said. “I think that helped. But they also liked me. I liked them because of this quality they had, a sort of presence. They were incredibly likable.”

He hadn’t heard of the band, but he realized he knew them

Initially, Epstein found out about The Beatles when a customer requested their record. Epstein couldn’t find it, which bothered him. He made a few phone calls, but nobody had heard of the band.

“I might have stopped there, but for the rigid rule I’d laid down that no customer should ever be turned away,” he explained. “I was also intrigued to find out why a completely unknown disk had been asked for three times in two days. Because on Monday morning, before I’d started making inquiries, two girls came in and asked for the same record.”

He asked his customers about The Beatles, and they told him that he’d seen them before. They often hung around the store, irritating Epstein.

“One of the girls told me they were the boys I’d once been complaining about, hanging around the counters all day listening to records but not buying any,” he said. “They were a scruffy crowd in leather. But they were supposed to be quite nice really, so all the girls told me, so I’d never actually asked them to leave. Anyway, they filled the shop up in the afternoon.”

The Beatles felt lost without Brian Epstein as their manager

Epstein managed The Beatles until his untimely death in 1967. The band began to pull apart at the seams when he died.

“It’s discipline we lack,” Paul McCartney said in The Beatles: Get Back. “We’ve never had discipline. We had a sort of slight, symbolic discipline. Like Mr. Espstein. You know, he sort of said, ‘Get suits on,’ and we did, you know. And so we were always fighting that discipline a bit.”

Losing Epstein was like losing a parental figure.

“There really is no one there now to say, ‘Do it.’ Where is, there always used to be,” McCartney said. “Daddy’s gone away now, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp. I think we either go home or we do it. I think we’ve got a bit shy, you know?”