FORMER BEATLES' PROMOTER REMINISCES ON THE FAB FOUR

The Beatles conquered America 50 years ago, when the country got its first look at collarless jackets, porridge-bowl haircuts and screaming mobs in the thousands. But by then John, Paul, George and Ringo were familiar faces to Paul Russell.

Russell, a Dublin-based music promoter in the late 1950s, guided The Beatles through a tour of England when they were the opening act for Roy Orbison. In 1963, he also helped organize and promote the group's concerts in Dublin.

"The screaming, the shouting, the hysterics," he recalls. "I couldn't believe what I was looking at."

Russell came to America in the 1970s, working for CBS in New York and eventually the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. Then a series of strokes felled him and he's living now in a medical facility near Broward Health on Andrews Avenue in Fort Lauderdale.

He has a photograph from The Beatles' Dublin period, taken while he was introducing them on stage. Ringo is crawling up his back; George and John are pulling off his necktie and mock-strangling him with it while Paul looks on, laughing.

"I didn't know what I was getting into," he says.

Russell, now 77, had his own band for a time called The Viscounts, and worked variously as tour arranger for fledgling British performers. London managers would send him their fresh talent, asking him to give them some exposure on stages in Ireland.

"I worked with Dusty Springfield, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Gerry Dorsey, who became Engelbert Humperdinck, then Billy J. Kramer — The Searchers. Tom Jones," he says.

Russell says at first he found The Beatles to be amateurish and giddy. "But when the show started they were very professional. Nothing else mattered."

By 1963 Brian Epstein was managing the group, "and they were terrified of him," he says. "Before they went on stage [Epstein] would come around and check their hair, their Beatle boots, and their fingernails."

Paul was Russell's favorite.

"He was intelligent, he was a gentleman," he says. "He liked the limelight and he was dead-bent on getting The Beatles to where they should be. And he was a natural musician. None of them could read music. It was all done by ear."

Then came New York and The Ed Sullivan show and the explosion. "I never saw them again," Russell says.

But he wasn't surprised at their mega-success.

"Musically they were a cut above all the other bands," he says. "Their harmonies were amazing. And they had charisma. And they knew how to make it last."