Kevin: Before the episode starts, a word about Patreon. It's free to join. If you want more than the episode, patrons get a full written script of every episode, a bonus series where I take apart alternate history that other people have already made and grade it, and a vote on the next decision I reverse. In addition to that, anyone on the paid portion of it will get a printed map of the world as it stands at the end of one of the more interesting timelines. And that'll come out each December. The address is patreon.com/slash CTRLZ rewritten, all one word. And if you'd rather not pay for a podcast, listening and telling one person about the show does the job just as well. I really appreciate you being here. And now on with the show. February 6, 1962. A lunch table at Decca House, the record company's head office on the Albert Embankment in London. Brian Epstein is 27 years old. He runs his family's record shops in Liverpool, and he's managed a band for two weeks. Across the table sits Dick Rowe, the man who decides which singers Decca records. Beside him is Sidney Beecher Stevens, who runs the sales department. Five weeks ago, Four musicians from Liverpool drove 10 hours through the snow to a DECA studio five miles north of this table. Mike Smith judged their amplifiers too poor to use, so they played through the company's equipment. Then they played 15 songs in an hour. The two reels of tape from that morning are in Epstein's briefcase underneath his chair. Roe has already said no in a letter that reached Liverpool a week ago. Epstein tells him he's out of his mind. These boys, he says, will be one day bigger than Elvis Presley. So Ro offers a consolation. Decca will let a drummer who used to be in the shadows produce one single if Epstein pays the 100 pounds and costs himself. What Roe doesn't know is that Epstein has also been talking to the sales department. He's promised the sales staff that his shops will buy 3,000 copies of any single. DECA lets this group make. In 1962, a single that sells 3,000 copies has paid for itself. Roe will say, years from now, that if Epstein had given him that number, the math would have forced his hand. Beecher Stevens knows the figure, but he sits through the whole lunch without mentioning it. But what if he does? What if Beecher Stevens says the number out loud during the coffee conversation? Let's hit Control Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history, real 50-50 calls, and ask what happens if they go the other way. One decision, we try it the other way, and see what changes. Tony Barrow writes the words on the back of Decca's record sleeves for 16 pounds a week. In December of 1961, a letter from Liverpool lands on his desk in London. Barrow is 25 years old and from Crosby on the coast north of the city. Since he was 17 years old, he's reviewed records for the Liverpool Echo under the name Disker. The letter is from Brian Epstein, whose family owns Nems, the biggest record shops in the city. It asks whether Disker will write something about a group called The Beatles. Barrow answers that he reviews records and this group hasn't made one. Nems sells a lot of DECA records. Barrow walks down the corridor and mentions Epstein's name to the talent department. DECA sends Mike Smith. He's a 26-year-old former BBC technician. And he learned the trombone badly enough to be thrown out of an RAF station band. He's the assistant to Dick Rowe. On Wednesday, December 13th, Smith takes the train to Liverpool and has dinner with Epstein. Then he goes down the stone steps into the Cavern Club on Matthew Street for the evening set. He remembers the group as wonderful on stage and the crowd as something he had never seen. He offers them a studio test in London on the first day of the new year. Roe makes his own trip north without telling Smith and arrives in pouring rain. The line for the cavern runs up the street and he can't get in. Soaked through, he turns around and goes home. He tells the story himself later as the moment he should have understood what was happening. The Beatles leave Liverpool on New Year's Eve in a van driven by Neil Aspinall, who gets lost in the snow. The trip ends up taking 10 hours. They reach London at 10 p.m., in time, as John Lennon puts it, to watch the drunks jumping into the fountain in Trafalgar Square. Epstein comes down separately, by train. At eleven the next morning, they're in Studio 2 at 165 Broadhurst Gardens in West Hampstead. It's a red brick building that started life as a Victorian workshop and served for 40 years as a town hall for hire. Music has been recorded there since 1928. Mike Smith is late. He has a New Year's hangover and cuts on his face from a car crash three days before Christmas. He takes a look at the group's amplifiers and tells them to go ahead and use Deccas instead. A normal test is two songs, maybe five. The Beatles play 15 across a lunch break on a two-track tape, most of them in a single take. Epstein chose the list to show range. It has Broadway tunes, Buddy Hawley, Chuck Berry, a Spanish ballad called Besame mucho, and three songs Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote themselves. The drummer is Pete Best, a 20-year-old from Madras, and the member of the group The Cavern Girls scream for. Smith tells Epstein he sees no problem and will be in touch in a few weeks. That same day, a group called Brian Poole and the Tremolos plays a test in the same building. They already sing backing vocals on DECA sessions for other people. They've been on the BBC's Saturday Club all year without a record deal. Smith wants both groups, but Roe tells him he can only have one. Smith says they're both good. But one comes from 12 miles away in Essex, and the other comes from 10 hours away in Liverpool. Dec assigns the group with a shorter drive and sends the other one a rejection letter. The letter reaches Liverpool at the start of February, and Epstein goes back to London to argue. That's the lunch meeting on the embankment. Roe's offer of a 100-pound session with Tony Meehan leads to a meeting the next day. Meehan shows up late and keeps Epstein waiting. When he does sit down, he talks about the audition as if it had been a waste of his afternoon. Epstein writes to Roe on the 10th to decline and thanks him for his consideration. He leaves with the two reels of tape in his briefcase and takes the train home. A clerk on the sales floor writes the 3,000 copy promise into a DECA ledger. Twenty years later, Roe tells a biographer that nobody told him and that in the economics of 1962, A guaranteed 3,000 copies sold would have forced DECA to record the group whatever it thought of the music. The reels go to HMV shop on Oxford Street. A man Epstein knows from Germany runs the store, and he suggests cutting the tape onto discs so that it can play on any office turntable. The engineer who cuts them, Jim Foy, likes the three original songs. He sends Epstein upstairs to Sid Coleman, who runs a music publisher owned by EMI. Coleman wants the copyrights. Epstein wants a record deal. So Coleman arranges a meeting on February 13th with George Martin, who runs Parlophone, EMI's smallest label, and mostly makes comedy records with Peter Sellers and the Goons. Martin's diary for that day says, Meeting Bernard Epstein. Clearly got the name wrong. He listens, but doesn't commit to anything. Epstein waits three months before finally hearing back. His answer arrives in May in the form of a contract. EMI's managing director signs the Beatles as a favor to his friend Coleman, who still wants those songs. He hands the job to Martin, the producer he likes least that year. On June 6th, the group records four songs at Abbey Road with Pete Best on drums. The engineers tie string around Lennon's amplifier to stop it from rattling. Martin lectures them on their equipment, and George Harrison tells him he doesn't like his tie. But Martin has a second, quieter verdict from that night, and it's related to the drumming. On August 16th, Aspinall drops Best at the Nem's shop in Whitechapel, Liverpool. Best walks up to Epstein's office and is told the other three don't think he's good enough, and that George Martin doesn't either. Ringo Starr has been drumming for Rory Storm all summer at Butlands, a seaside resort for working families. He plays his first show as a Beatle two days later at a horticultural society dance in Port Sunlight. In September, Martin hands them a song called How Do You Do It as their first single. They cut it and tell them they don't want a record like that. So he gives it to Jerry and the pacemakers instead and lets the Beatles put out Love Me Do. All of that starts with the two reels Epstein carried out of Decca House. If the company keeps the tape, Sid Coleman never hears Like Dreamers Do, and George Martin never gets the phone call. And Dick Rowe, by his own account, only needed to hear one song to sign them himself. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. Sidney Beecher Stevens waits until the coffee comes, and then he says it. Epstein has guaranteed 3,000 copies through his shops. Dick Rowe puts his cup down and works out what 3,000 copies come to. Then he asks Beecher Stevens whether Epstein has put it in writing. He tells Epstein the company will record the group after all with Smith producing. A salesman tells Tony Barrow that afternoon. He goes home and writes the Beatles into the following week's Disco column. He has, at last, a record to review coming. Mike Smith gets them into Studio Two in early March before the group leaves for seven weeks in Hamburg. DECA uses session drummers on its records, and Smith has one behind the drum kit. Pete Best angrily watches the session through the control room glass with his sticks stuck in his jacket pocket. Roe chose the single a week before the session. He wants a Billy Fury record out of them, a ballad first. The A side is Till There Was You, a ballad from a Broadway musical. The B side is Like Dreamers Do, the song of McCartney's that Smith liked on New Year's Day. Lennon argues for one of their own on the top side. Roe says that a Broadway ballad has already sold and the group hasn't. The single comes out in May while the Beatles are on stage every night at the Star Club in Hamburg. In Whitechapel, a NEMS store clerk spends a Saturday morning stacking 60 boxes of a record from a band nobody has heard of yet. His boss has ordered 3,000, and they have to go somewhere. DECA sells the rest on its own, and the record reaches number 21 on the record retailer chart, whose weekly chart the British music industry treats as official. Smith brings them back to Studio 2 in June. He hears a slow, mournful song called Please Please Me in the style of Roy Orbison. He records it at that speed in two takes and sends the reel upstairs. Roe puts a Chuck Berry number on the A side. Ringo Star spends August at the Butlands Resort in Skegness, finishing the summer season behind Rory Storm. He's 22 years old, and he's already said yes to what he considers a life-changing offer. King Size Taylor, a big rock and roll singer from Liverpool who trained as a butcher, wants him in Hamburg for £20 a week. In September, Ringo sales with Taylor's dominoes. He takes over the drum stool at the Star Club where the Beatles finished their run in May and plays until three in the morning. In 1963, he's the drummer on a live record the Dominoes make in the club for a German label called Ariola. He's on the album they cut for Polydor under the name The Shakers, whose three singles in England sell pretty poorly. In the spring of 1964, Chuck Berry comes to Britain for the first time, and the Dominoes are his backing band. So Ringo plays Memphis, Tennessee. Behind the man who actually wrote it. The dominoes break up that summer, and Ringo stays in Hamburg with pickup bands for two more years before coming home to Liverpool in 1966 to play the clubs and work days. Brian Epstein hates confrontation. In our world, he spent August 1962 dreading a conversation he couldn't find the words for. But here he never has to have it. Mike Smith has no opinion about the drummer. The Cavern crowd chants Best's name louder than anyone's. Pete Best is the drummer for the Beatles, plain and simple. Deka issues an album of 12 Beatles cover versions in October on its budget label, Ace of Clubs, and does the same for the Tremolos six months later. The front cover carries no group name, and Tony Barrow's notes are on the back. DECA pays the group nothing for it since it's just an album of covers. The Beatles cut their first Proper DECA LP in Studio 2 over two days in February 1963, live to tape. 14 songs, four of them originals. In March, Epstein brings the rest of his acts to the same building. Jerry and the pacemakers sign with DECA. So do Billy J. Kramer and the Foremost. Roe turned a group down 13 months earlier because Liverpool was too far away. But now he has four groups from that city on his floor, all produced by Mike Smith. Roe sits on a judging panel at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool on May 10th for a beat group contest. The judge beside him is George Harrison. Harrison, who is now one of Roe's own artists, tells him the best new group in England is a London blues band called the Rolling Stones, and that he should drive to Richmond and see them. So Roe drives to Richmond. The Stones are signed within the week. Andrew Lug Oldham, their 19-year-old manager, keeps them out of Decca studios after the first single and leases finished tapes to the company instead. The Beatles and Stones share a pressing plant in New Malden from that summer on. The Beatles put out Twist and Shout as a single in June. Lennon sings it hoarse as he did at the Cavern, and it goes to number one. Brian Pruell and the Tremolos, DECA's other guitar group, answer with a cover of Do You Love Me in September. In October, it takes the top of the chart for three weeks. Ro has two groups at number one in the same year, both of them singing other people's songs. As a result, he sees no reason to change anything. Lennon and McCartney see one though, and in August, they walk into Decca House with Epstein and a new song. They tell Ro the next single is She Loves You or There's No Follow Up. Roe has stood in the rain outside the cavern and watched Twin Shout sell, so he acquiesces to their request. She loves you is the first record with Lennon and McCartney's names on the A side. It's the biggest selling single in Britain that year. Ed Sullivan's flight out of London is held on the ground at Heathrow Airport on Halloween of nineteen sixty three. Several thousand teenagers are screaming at another plane, and he asks who's on it. Epstein flies to New York on November eleventh with the answer. He signs the Beatles to three Sullivan shows in February and then walks into the offices of London Records on West 25th Street. London is DECA's American outlet. It was set up in 1947 to sell British classical records in the US, and its biggest seller in America to date has been Montovanis Orchestra. Its singles aren't even pressed in America. The discs come off a Decca line in Hampshire with Made in England stamped on the label before being shipped to the US. So the record that plays on American radio in January of 1964 is made by a press operator in Hampshire who's likely never even heard of the group. He loads 40,000 copies of I Wanna Hold Your Hand onto a Truck Bound for the Docks. On February 9th, 73 million people watch Four Boys from Liverpool on the Ed Sullivan Show. London Records with a promotion budget a fraction of what Capital would have spent. Gets the single to number one in America on the Billboard charts in the second week of March. The Rolling Stones' first American single, on the same label that spring, stalls at number 48. The building at Broadhurst Gardens is full for three years. Mike Smith spends a week in June 1964 producing the Beatles' third album in Studio Two in the mornings. In the afternoon, he produces a group called the Applejacks. The Applejacks have a bass player named Megan Davies, a former Cub Scout leader. Lennon and McCartney have given them Like Dreamers Do, the song that sat on the B-side of the first Beatles single two years before, and Smith makes the second recording in the same room as the first. The Applejacks version reaches number twenty on the charts. Across town, George Martin leaves EMI in the summer of nineteen sixty five with three other producers. They form a company called AIR in an office on Park Street in Mayfair. The idea is that producers should own a royalty on the records they make. EMI and DECA both refuse to pay their staff one. Martin's calling card is Peter Sellers and the Goons. AIR's early money comes from producing Tom Jones and Lulu for DECA and the Hollies for EMI. One of his three partners, Peter Sullivan, walked out of DECA to join him. Mike Smith stays at DECA through all of it. Then, during a Tremolo session in the spring of 1966, He learns that the group's van driver is paid more than DECA pays him. He goes to Roe and asks for a raise or a royalty. Roe says no to both. Sir Edward Lewis, who owns DECA, sets that policy himself. He's owned the company since 1929 and has never paid a producer a royalty in his life. Smith quits that same afternoon. He's the producer of The most valuable act in the world, and he leaves over a pay grade. When the Tremelo's contract runs out that year, he takes them to CBS with him. ESPN goes to DECA House and proposes hiring George Martin and AIR from the outside at a royalty to produce the Beatles. Lewis refuses him on the principle he applied to Smith and tells him DECA will assign a producer from its own staff. The producer Roe assigns is Tony Clark. Clark came into DECA as a session bass player and then moved to the promotion department in 1963. He transferred to production under Roe in 1964 and spent his first year writing down song titles and running times. His first hit, a single titled Mirror Mirror by a group called Pinkerton's Assorted Colors, reached number eight that winter. His engineer is Derek Varnals, who trained on classical sessions. The other young man at the desks in the building is Gus Dudgeon. Who will go on to make Elton John's records a decade later? Clark's first meeting with the Beatles is in Studio 2 in the summer of 1966, the room they originally auditioned in. Lennon brings a reel of tape loops he's made at home by running old recordings backwards through a broken machine. Varnals listens to it. He then explains that DECA's rooms are wired to record what is played in them. The company has put its money for 1967 into stereo. The label is building a new imprint called Deerham to show off a stereo recording system it wants to sell to the world, and Roe picks the Beatles to make the record that demonstrates it. They work from May to November 1967 in Studio 3, the room DECA added in six years earlier for orchestras. It's 4100 square feet. The ceiling is about 38 feet high, and a three-tier riser is built to hold a hundred musicians. Peter Knight, a DECA arranger, Writes string and horn parts for members of the London Symphony Orchestra who sit on the riser in the afternoons. The band records at night after the orchestra has gone home, and then Varnels mixes the two together. The album runs through a single day, from dawn to a song about the night. Between the tracks are orchestral bridges that Knight writes himself. McCartney loves it, but Lennon's Reel of Loops stays in its box at home. One Tuesday afternoon in October, the orchestra tunes on the riser, knight raises his baton, and the sound comes down 38 feet onto four musicians from Liverpool. Pete Best hears it through the control room glass next to Varnals. Despite being the official drummer of the biggest band in the world, he's watched every recording session from that chair since 1962. Brian Epstein dies in his flat in London on August 27, 1967, of an overdose of sleeping pills. The album He Didn't Live to Hear comes out in November. The band records with Clark in West Hampstead through 1968 and 69, arguing more each year. The final album's cover is shot in the doorway of 165 Broadhurst Gardens. Four men on the front step of a red brick building on a residential street. With a woman walking past pushing a stroller. Paul McCartney announces the breakup in April of 1970. Ringo Starr is 29 that spring. He drums in a club in Liverpool called The Blue Angel four nights a week and then works his days at a warehouse. He reads about the end of the Beatles in The Echo. He had sat in with them once in Southport on a night in February 1962 when Pete Best was sick. The story he tells at the bar of the Blue Angel is that he was the drummer they should have asked. Sir Edward Lewis dies on january twenty ninth, nineteen eighty, at seventy-nine years old, having run DECA for fifty-one years. Within the year, Polygram, a Dutch and German company, buys what he built. A moving truck comes to Broadhurst Gardens on a Tuesday morning in April 1981. Polygram has closed DECA's classical operation and wants the mixing desks for its own studios. A crew of six starts in Studio One and unbolts the console from the floor. Dick Row stands in the corridor and watches them. He's 59, he's been retired for six years, and he's come up from Greenwich on the train because a reporter from the Melody Maker asked to meet him at the building. She wants to know, four months after John Lennon was fatally shot in New York, why the man who signed the Beatles let their producer walk out over a raise. Roe tells her that he refused the raise himself in his office, and that Sir Edward heard about it only after Smith had left. Mike Smith has made number one records for CBS in the 15 years since. And whenever anyone asks him, he says the van driver was paid more. At 10 o'clock that same Tuesday morning, a tour bus pulls up outside and 40 people get off. They're Americans mostly with cameras, and they line up on the sidewalk to photograph the front step where the last album cover was shot. A woman from Ohio asks one of the crew which window is Studio 2. The manager Polygram is sent over from the Netherlands, watches the bus from the doorway, goes back inside, and calls the head office. The crew stops at the door of Studio 3. The desk in that room stays bolted to the floor with the riser behind it. Polygram keeps the building as a rental studio, and that fall it puts a plaque by the front step. The bus comes back at 10 o'clock the next day and the day after that. Seventeen years later, Seagram, the Canadian Alcohol Company, buys Polygram and folds it into Universal Music, and every master reel from Studios 2 and 3 go with that deal. In Liverpool, the Beatles are worth about 120 million pounds per year to the city, along with 2,500 jobs. Each year, 800,000 people go down the Matthew Street steps into the rebuilt cavern. A tour guide stands outside 24thland Road, where McCartney grew He tells a bus from Ohio that Pete Best still lives across the city and signs autographs at a museum on the Albert Dock on Saturdays. 165 Broadhurst Gardens, September 2026. It's Universal Music's London studio now. Studio three is booked for a string session at 10 in the morning, 40 musicians on the riser. The traffic cones go out on the street at nine to keep the photographers off the roadway. Plaque by the door gives the date of the first session, March 5th, 1962. Two miles away, Abbey Road is EMI's old classical studio, listed in 2010 for its orchestras and its Peter Sellers records. Cars stop at the zebra crossing outside of it for people carrying shopping, but there's no additional significance to it. In our world, the same building has stood empty for years. English National Opera used it for rehearsals and then moved out. It's on the market at eleven million pounds, protected by law since twenty twenty one for its pitch pine floors and the three studios inside of it. Studio two, where the Beatles borrowed the amplifiers on New Year's Day nineteen sixty two, has had its recording equipment removed and its roof replaced. The story everybody tells about DECA Records is that it turned down the Beatles and lost the biggest act in history. But change that decision, and DECA loses them anyway. Their producer walks out over a raise in 1966, and 14 years later, Sir Edward Lewis dies and PolyGram buys the company. The tapes end up at Universal Music, the same corporation that owns them in our world through EMI. The label that said yes and the label that said no both arrive at the same building in 2026, with the same master reels on the shelf. We don't have to guess how DECA would have handled the biggest band in the world after it said yes, because 15 months later, it said yes to the second biggest. Dick Rowe signed the Rolling Stones in May 1963. DECA kept them for seven years on the same terms as everybody else. In the summer of 1970, their contract ran out and they left. They set up their own label, and Decca was left with the records it had already sold, but no band. The Beatles lose a drummer and a producer to DECA, and four years of records with them. DECA loses nothing it wouldn't have lost on its own. Dick Rowe made a mistake, but it was smaller than the legend. He passed on a group. He couldn't have passed on the songs. Lennon and McCartney wrote those at home in Liverpool before any label was involved. Those two boys fill the Ed Sullivan show in this timeline, and in 1970, they break up. They're just recorded by different men in a different building. The only decision Dick Rowe ever made about the Beatles was which men would record them and in which building. Rowe went on to sign the Rolling Stones, Tom Jones, them, and the Moody Blues. He picked tits as well as anyone in the business, but every obituary upon his passing in 1986 led with the group that he turned down. In our world, he spent 24 years answering for that fateful lunch. In the other one, he spans them answering for the raise he wouldn't approve. Decisions don't get doovers, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Control Z with me. Control Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you've got a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on YouTube. That's CTRLZ Rewritten, all one word, and leave it in the comments.