Gary James' Interview With The Author Of NEMS And The Business Of Selling Beatles Merchandise In The U.S. 1964-1966
Terry Crain



The title of Terry Crain's book just about says it all when it comes to explaining the book he's written about The Beatles. Well, almost. It's a comprehensive look at what went into all of The Beatles merchandise that found its way onto store shelves. Terry Crain spoke with us about his book.

Q - Terry, I just have to say this is a beautiful book. Just when you think everything that can be written about The Beatles has been written, along comes a book like yours. How long did it take to put this book together?

A - Well, the main research probably took a little over two years. I've always been collecting little tidbits now and then. I've been retired now for a year and a half. So, right before I retired and once I retired I really got into it pretty heavy. So, it still took over two years to get all this together.

Q - You're no doubt promoting the book at Beatles conventions.

A - Oh, yes. I have always gone every year to the Chicago Fest for Beatles fans, twenty years in a row. This year, my twentieth year was the first year I was on the other side of the table selling something other than walking through and buying things. But I've attended Chicago. I went to the Fabfest out in North Carolina. I went to the Beatles On The Beach down in Delray, Florida and I've got a couple more coming up here. I'm making the rounds, yes.

Q - Were always a Beatles fan?

A - Yeah, I was. My sister, who was a little bit older than I was, in '64 she had the Beatle memorabilia and I could see it in her room. I have always been a fan, yeah.

Q - Where did you acquire all the letters from the merchandising companies you show in your book? Some of them have to be from the companies themselves.

A - Some of them are, yes. I think I got pretty lucky and did some pretty deep stuff there. One of the main collectors in the United States is Jeff Augsburger. He's a guru of Beatles memorabilia. He's a god in my opinion. I have befriended him and he's allowed me to have some access to some of his stuff. So, he had some letters. Other collectors have had that. You can find the most obscure things sometimes out on the web and the internet just when you're not looking for something. You just go, "Oh, my God! There's that! How did it get over there?" It's just cool what you can find and piecing things together. I have been pretty lucky running into and contacting certain people like the guy from Hohner Harmonica. I got online and befriended a guy from Hohner Harmonica and he had a treasure full of files. He allowed me some of that. A lot of the companies that were still around allowed some access to me for different things. So, that made it so much cooler when you stare at stuff like that and go, "Oh, my gosh! This was written in '64, '65." It's pretty cool.

Q - The memorabilia in the book isn't all yours then? Whoever owned it allowed you to take a photo of it?

A - Yes. There were three main collectors that allowed me into their home. I took my camera in there and my little photography equipment and shot some pictures. The Beatle world with all the friends out there, Facebook, all over the U.S. and the world are more than happy to share images of their own collection. There would be times when I couldn't find a certain image and I knew it was out there. I'd put something out on a Facebook site and it was just amazing what the feedback I would get back. All these things would start coming in and it was just great. People would help me fill in the gaps on some things I just could not find myself.

Q - What is the most valuable piece of Beatle memorabilia?

A - The Beatles record player, which sold for $21.95 in 1964, you can now get $10,000 for on eBay. There were only five thousand made.

Q - Who would you say your book is for? Who would buy a book like this?

A - I have a two part answer to that. First off, it was basically for somebody who was a collector of Beatles items and I'll use myself as an example. I always heard and I think The Beatles items '64 to '66 were the wackiest, coolest stuff you've ever seen. It was just the coolest stuff out there. Well, I'd always heard there were about one hundred and fifty items. So, I started looking around. I would get all the price guides and all the websites. Some sites would list one hundred and ten. Another site would list eighty-nine, but they weren't the same eighty-nine that were on the one hundred and ten list. So, I realized there was not a list out there. I just wanted a list. I wanted to find the one hundred and fifty items. Sometimes authors write books because they can't find it. I wanted those one hundred and fifty items in alphabetical order and unlike a price guide, although they're wonderful and I've got all of 'em, but the one thing I kept noticing about a price guide is that I would look up an item and it would say here's the Remco doll. It was five inches high. It had black hair and it held a guitar and the entire rest of the description talked about how much it was worth. I didn't really care what it was worth. Tell me about the item. Tell me about the company who made it, who designed 'em. That kind of stuff. I couldn't find in one place something like that. So that's what drove me to do that. I'm sorry to make a long story even longer, but the second part or that is, it dawned on me after I started giving presentations on the book, I'd always have somebody come up to me and say, "I had some of this stuff when I was young, but I didn't know there was this much more," or "The book brought back so many memories. I remember this. I remember that." So, I started realizing that the book is a wonderful memory trigger. People will read it and they'll go, "I remember when I had this. I remember when I had that." They'll come up and tell me that. It takes 'em back to when they were younger, life was easier and all that kind of stuff. So, it has turned into kind of a real neat little item of that kind. I'll see people stop by my tables and they'll just start leafing through the book, one page at a time. They'll go. "Oh, I had that. Oh, I had that." You'll see all these memories coming back. Although I didn't start out writing the book that way, I'm so glad the book turned out that way. That has added so much to the people who are purchasing the book and looking at it.

Q - As I understand it, The Beatles had a 90/10 split with the manufacturers of Beatle merchandise. Brian Epstein turned negotiations with these manufacturers over to his lawyer, David Jacob, who thought it was beneath him to negotiate deals with companies for t-shirts and other merchandise. It wasn't until much later that Brian Epstein realized it wasn't a good deal. Had the deals been a 50/50 split, would that have been fair? Would you have written a book? Would we be talking right now?

A - Right off the bat, with hindsight, it would have been a fair deal. These one hundred and fifty items would still have been out there. About the 90/10 split, in my opinion, after I've looked at everything, and I've done the research, I think at this moment Brian Epstein kind of gets a raw deal on this, alright? The way I look at it, there was no handbook. There was no experience in the U.S. about this mass merchandising. There was some that I mention in there, about The Wizard Of Oz and some of the Disney, some of the super hero stuff after the Second World War, but there was no mass merchandising on a scale of what happened to The Beatles after they hit on Ed Sullivan. So, nobody knew what they were supposed to do. No one knew that this percentage is better than this one. There was nothing to go on. So Brian and the company he hired to take care of all of this, the way they looked at it was, "Let me get this straight; I'm going to loan you some photographs of the band and maybe some signatures and I don't have to do anything and you're going to hand me a check every month for 10%? This is the greatest country in the world!" There was nothing to go by on this. I say hindsight makes everybody smart by giving 'em 20/20 vision. Everybody knows all of a sudden the floodgates opened that this merchandising was a massive thing, bigger than anything that ever hit the U.S. Now everybody goes, "You shouldn't have done 90/10." Six months after all this hit in '64, he negotiated for more of a 50/50 split, but at the time there was nothing to go by. He did as good as he could do. He thought he had a good percentage because no one thought, except for Brian, that this was going to go on and you and I are going to be talking about it fifty years later. So, nobody thought this was going to go on like that. All these businesses thought, "I'm going to get in while it's hot because in six months it might be dead." So, I cut Brian a tremendous break on this. He did as good as he could for the blueprint that he had, which was none. Later on with experience, I guess he basically wrote the book, either it was the good or the bad part of the book on mass merchandising in the U.S.

Q - Terry, actually there was a precedent to The Beatles mass merchandising. Elvis Presley. I don't put Brian Epstein down. Dealing with John Lennon must have been a handful.

A - (laughs) Even with the Elvis merchandising it was still nothing near to what happened with The Beatles. It was nothing like what happened with The Beatles after The Ed Sullivan Show when it exploded. I found something out just a couple of months ago. They always talk about the 90/10 split, that they signed that legal document in December, '63. Actually, as you said, there was a precedent already. I found a document signed with a U.K. company in early November of '63. The company was just making some cheap rag dolls and toys, and of all things there was a 90/10 split in that. So, NEMS already had a precedent that that is what we're doing. "We're doing a 90/10 split. We'll just leave it like it is." Around August or September of '64, Brian did tell his lawyers to renegotiate that 90/10 split and they renegotiated it to 50/50 or 51/49. Then the damage money wise had been done because most of these one hundred and fifty items had already been signed and were the 90/10 split.

Q - I recall John Lennon alluding to that in a 1975 Tom Snyder TV interview when Tom Snyder asked him, "Did you save your money?" And John replied, "What we could get our hands on."

A - I also think there were many factors in that. Sure the mass merchandising and the 90/10 split was a factor in that. I don't go into this at all. If you look at payment of royalties on songs, royalties on songs as a songwriter versus a performer, if you put a lot of that into perspective, you might find that with all the money going in there were other things besides mass merchandising that probably they worried about getting their split out of also. Sure, mass merchandising was a big part of it, but I bet you can't say that's what caused maybe some of them not getting their money. There was a little bit of everything. All you have to do is talk about the taxes they had to pay with George Harrison writing "Taxman". (laughs) It's all one big picture is what it is. The 90/10 on merchandising is probably just one part of many different parts that added together they weren't getting as much money as they thought. My research shows right around seven months, Epstein realized he made a mistake. I think that was right around March or April of '64 when he started getting the royalty checks and realizing if a royalty check was on 10%, what are the other guys getting? (laughs) He told his lawyers to start renegotiating that and it took them seven months, which probably would've put them at September, October, November of '64, somewhere in there. When they renegotiated, NEMS got 49% of that stuff. So, it went from 10% to 49%, seven months after it started hitting the store shelves in February of '64. But between February and November of '64, a lot of these licenses to make a doll or a wig had already been signed under the 90/10 rule.

Q - How long did that license last? Do you know?

A - I don't have that (information). I don't know if it was consistent over the one hundred and fifty items. I have never seen all one hundred and fifty license agreements with NEMS or Seltaeb (Beatles spelled backwards), so I don't know if they were all the same. Two years, five years, whatever it was. I cannot answer that. I do not know. One would think it would all be the same, to be consistent when you're granting a license, but I've not been able to figure out if they were all that way. Usually, I think it's pretty standard for five years and five years in Beatle life from '64 to '69 is a long time. (laughs)

Q - It could have been an open-ended contract, but it probably wasn't.

A - It probably wasn't, and even if it was something like five years, by that time the wigs had worn off, the handkerchiefs had worn off, the Remco dolls had worn off, so it kind of waned themselves out. They probably didn't have to go to that line of the contract anyway and enforce it.

Q - Have you ever seen any of The Beatles in person?

A - I got about twenty feet from Ringo. That's as good as I got so far, (laughs) which was pretty cool. Every July he wishes everybody, "Peace and love" on his birthday and I was at one of those, the one down in Nashville, Tennessee. I have met Pete Best, and he was a Beatle at one time.

Q - Terry, the only thing about writing a book on The Beatles merchandising is you've covered it all. There's no part two.

A - One thing I think worked out perfectly for me is the concerts were getting over with. There's almost like a natural line drawn between '66 and '67 because in '67 all of the "Yellow Submarine" stuff started seeping out and that was the next wave of items to come out. It was wonderful. I've got a nice dividing line as you might say. My book's about the stuff before "Yellow Submarine".

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