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Beatles forums => News => peregrine9's news => Topic started by: peregrine9 on February 12, 2012, 07:46:44 AM
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The independent
February 12, 2012
The man who rejected the Beatles
Exactly 50 years ago, Decca's Dick Rowe turned down the Fab Four, so heading an unenviable club of talent-spotters who passed up their biggest chance. But is it all an urban myth? A new book suggests so "Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein." With that airy dismissal of the Beatles, supposedly directed 50 years ago this month at the group's manager Brian Epstein, Dick Rowe of Decca made himself unwittingly but enduringly synonymous with catastrophic commercial misjudgements.He might be honorary president of an unenviable club that includes all the publishers who turned down a book about a boy wizard by a hopeful young writer called Joanne Rowling, and indeed William Orton, the president of the Western Union, who in 1876 decided not to pay $100,000 for Alexander Graham Bell's patent for the telephone, declaring the apparatus little more than a toy. Two years later an anguished Orton admitted that he would consider the patent a bargain at $25m.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/the-man-who-rejected-the-beatles-6782008.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/the-man-who-rejected-the-beatles-6782008.html)