The first Beach Boys album, Surfin’ Safari, is released by EMI on the very same Friday that “Love Me Do” goes on sale, and across the ocean, in New York City, twenty-one-year-old Bob Dylan, whom NME’s weekly US columnist, Nat Hentoff, dubs “the most startling of all the American city folk singers,” is playing Town Hall, on West 43rd Street.

Just a few months earlier, a young student from Iran named Fery Asgari revitalizes a basement music venue in west London called the Ealing Club by starting a weekly R&B night. The Ealing Club quickly becomes one of the hottest spots in London, with people lauding its R&B musicians, especially blues guitarists Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. There, in April, Korner introduces young R&B fanatic Brian Jones to a nineteen-year-old student from the London School of Economics named Mick Jagger and Mick’s friend Keith Richards. The rest is rock ’n’ roll history. At the same time that the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Dylan are debuting, Jones, Jagger, and Richards’s newly formed band, the Rolling Stones, is playing its tenth gig down in Surrey.

“The Stones were playing little clubs in London—doing Chuck Berry songs and blues and things—and we thought we were totally unique animals, [that] there was no one like us,” Mick Jagger says, reminiscing. “And then we heard there was a group from Liverpool. They had long hair, scruffy clothes and a record contract, and they had a record in the charts, with a bluesy harmonica on it, called ‘Love Me Do’—when I heard the combination of all these things, I was almost sick.”

The two bands frequent the same clubs. Mick Jagger sees the Beatles out one night in their matching suede coats.

“Fuckin’ hell! I want one of those coats,” he says. “I want a long coat like that, but to do that, I’ll have to earn money.”

With a record climbing the charts, the Beatles are on their way.

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“Love Me Do” rises to number 46 in Record Retailer.

Then it goes to number 41.

And it keeps climbing.

“I was on my own at home this morning, and when I looked at the NME and saw we were in at 27 I was delirious,” Paul later says. “‘There it is! There we are!’ I was shaking.” Being on the charts is proof they’ve really made it. “Twenty-seven was the height.”

Even when they return from another two-week gig back in Hamburg that Brian won’t let them out of, “Love Me Do” remains at number 27 on the NME top thirty and is still moving up other charts. At the end of December, they head back to Germany again for their fifth—and final—Hamburg gig.

“We went in young boys,” John later says about their time in Hamburg, “and came out old men.”

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