Brown Meggs

• 1. Introduction

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  Brown Meggs heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand" for the first time in early November 1963. Beatles manager Brian Epstein played him a demo of the recording in New York. Capitol's reviewer Dave Dexter Jr. had twice passed on earlier Beatles singles. Meggs caught what others had not: intentional American gospel elements woven into the track. He predicted mass appeal and immediately signed the group to a major distribution deal, promising Epstein a $40,000 promotional campaign. By early December, Meggs discovered that the UK single had amassed one million advance orders before its release there on the 29th of November. The scale of what Capitol was about to handle had become clear. The man at the center of it had arrived at the label eight years earlier as a classical music devotee and aspiring writer. He was not a pop enthusiast by temperament. Brown Moore Meggs was born in Los Angeles on the 20th of October, 1930. In 1974, Paul McCartney's Black Lab had a litter of seven puppies; McCartney named one of them Brown Meggs.

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• 2. The Beatles Are Coming

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  Carroll James was a deejay at WWDC in Maryland. On the 17th of December, 1963, he received a British copy of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by jet airliner and began broadcasting it. Other stations obtained their own copies and followed. Capitol had planned an American release on January 13, with an initial pressing of 200,000 copies. Both decisions collapsed. The label moved the release to December 26 and raised the pressing to one million.

  Paul Revere's famous warning gave Meggs his marketing frame: "The Beatles Are Coming!" In late December, Capitol placed a small advertisement in Billboard magazine with those words alongside a black mop-top haircut. Staff were given mop-top wigs to wear. In early January 1964, the label distributed many thousands of stickers, two by three inches, bearing the slogan and four mop-top silhouettes printed in reddish ink. They went free to retail sales staff, radio station workers, and high school students across the country. By the 1st of February, 1964, the song had reached number one in the United States, one week before the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  Meggs and his colleague Fred Martin handled the logistics of the band's first American visit in February 1964. They arranged transportation, lodging, security, and scheduling across New York City and Miami. On the way to John F. Kennedy International Airport to greet the band, Meggs studied the cover of Meet the Beatles! His secretary, Stacy Caraviotis, had labeled each photograph with the right name. He rode in the limousine with the group and sat with them at press conferences. Meggs offered his own tribute to the song: he composed a French horn piece based on its melody, titled "Variations on 'Komm, gib mir deine Hand'", and performed it in the classical style at a New York concert. Music journalist Fred Bronson later wrote of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" that, next to "Rock Around the Clock," it was "the most significant single of the rock era, permanently changing the course of music."

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• 3. Building the Brand

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  In March 1964, Meggs conceived a fan club magazine to promote Capitol artist the Beach Boys. The first issue appeared in October of that year as a free insert to the live album Beach Boys Concert. Meggs served as chief editor. Veteran teen magazine journalist Earl Leaf joined as guest editor to help find the right tone.

  The second issue, published in March 1965, was printed in a run of 500,000 copies. Meggs told Billboard magazine it was "the largest teen-oriented advertising-merchandising campaign in the history of CRDC." The first issue had been devoted entirely to the Beach Boys. The second carried stories on Capitol artists Donna Loren, Bobby Rydell, Peter & Gordon, and the Beatles. By November 1965, Meggs handed editorial control to Judith Sims, who was 25 years old. Sims understood her readership and took TeenSet into new territory, shaping it into one of the best teen magazines of the 1960s.

  John Van Hamersveld joined Capitol in 1967, hired by Meggs on the strength of his work on the surfer film poster The Endless Summer. Hamersveld recalled that Meggs's first words to him were: "You are going to take this job and you can't turn it down." Meggs made him Capitol's personal art director. In that role, Van Hamersveld created covers for the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. He also designed Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of Grateful Dead.

  Capitol promoted Meggs to vice president of the Capitol Records Distribution Company in 1964, putting him in charge of merchandising, advertising, and public relations. He was one of three VPs, reporting to President Stan Gortikov. His first act was to cancel Capitol's two competing advertising agency contracts, divided between east and west coast offices. He hired Foote, Cone & Belding to cover all of Capitol's advertising instead. In 1971, he was promoted to worldwide marketing while continuing to oversee the classical side; he streamlined operations by removing four division manager positions.

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• 4. Classical Instincts

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  Sviatoslav Richter and conductor Kirill Kondrashin were Soviet artists whose recordings Meggs brought to American listeners through an agreement with the Soviet label Melodiya. He negotiated the deal through Capitol's classical imprint, Angel Records, which he had already reorganized for better profitability. His preference as a listener had always been for opera and classical music. The pop world was his professional arena; the classical catalog was his genuine love.

  Seraphim Records, which Meggs founded in September 1966, was built around a mission he summed up in a single phrase: "Champagne at beer prices." The label remastered and reissued classic recordings from EMI artists such as composer-conductor Paul Hindemith and pianist Myra Hess. Seraphim also drew from unsold stock at other labels, primarily Angel, to give overlooked titles a second chance at a lower price.

  Brook Meggs, speaking in 1997, described his father's musical priorities without ambiguity. The senior Meggs had appreciated Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Brook said, "and he certainly recognized the Beatles' talent. But from the time he was a kid, classical music was it for him."

  Capitol appealed to Meggs in 1984 with an offer he could not refuse: the presidency of Angel Records, now operating as a separate division. He accepted and set about reviving the label for the digital age. His priority was Compact Disc: he reissued Angel's catalog on the new format. He also reworked Seraphim, stopping all vinyl pressings and shifting its bargain titles to Compact Cassette only. Mid-priced lines would release on both cassette and CD. Meggs left Capitol for the last time in 1990; it was his writing, not his music career, that would occupy his final years.

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• 5. The Writing Life

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  Sponsored by the Appaloosa Horse Club of Moscow, Idaho, the documentary film Appaloosa was scripted and co-directed by Meggs. He shot the 30-minute color film in Idaho in 1961 alongside producer Fred Rice. The film was narrated by television actor Dale Robertson. In 1962, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center named it the best documentary of the year. Each filmmaker received a bronze statuette representing a Charles M. Russell painting called Wrangler.

  Saturday Games, published in 1974, was Meggs's first crime novel. Its plot followed three bachelor playboys implicated in the death of a woman they had all known. A police detective sought the truth. Meggs had first submitted the manuscript to mystery editor Barbara Norville of Bobbs-Merrill Company. She returned it with suggestions for improvement. Meggs reworked the book and brought it to Random House, which published it for more money. The novel was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of Best First Novel. That award was won in 1975 by Gregory Mcdonald for Fletch.

  Aria, published in 1978, drew on Meggs's years inside the classical record industry. The novel told the story of a company's struggle to record Giuseppe Verdi's Otello. The New York Times called it "required reading" for anyone contemplating the record industry. The fictional struggle had a real model: Maria Callas had spent more than a decade attempting to record La traviata for EMI. That project was abandoned in 1968 when Aristotle Onassis stopped funding it after leaving Callas for Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

  The War Train, published in 1981, followed American soldiers on a train journey in March 1916. They were heading to Hachita, New Mexico, to cross the border and fight Pancho Villa. Meggs took the story's kernel from his step-grandfather, who had been on that train. He confirmed the facts by studying microfilm records of the cavalry unit. A film adaptation was considered by producer Mace Neufeld but ultimately dropped. One reviewer in the Detroit Free Press praised the book but noted a factual error: Meggs had placed Ty Cobb at shortstop rather than outfield.

  Two Fathers' Justice, which Meggs wrote in 1986, was a television drama about two fathers seeking justice after the deaths of their son and daughter. Meggs co-wrote the sequel, Two Fathers: Justice for the Innocent, which aired in 1994. Alongside his novels, Meggs contributed non-fiction articles throughout his career to magazines including Esquire, True, and McCall's.

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• 6. Roots and Character

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  Charles Winfield Meggs, Brown's father, brought film scripts home from Paramount Pictures to evaluate for art direction purposes. Brown read them eagerly, preferring them to books, and wanted to become a scriptwriter. He attended two private schools: Black-Foxe Military Institute in Hollywood, then St. Luke's in Connecticut. He went on to study at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University, graduating in English. During the Korean War, he served in U.S. Army counterintelligence, stationed for a year in Japan.

  Meggs married Nancy Bates Meachen, a Vassar-educated Boston socialite, on the 16th of June, 1954, at the Old South Church of Boston. The reception was held at the Algonquin Club. The couple drove across the continent for their honeymoon, then settled in Pasadena. By 1956, they had moved to Detroit so Meggs could write industrial film scripts for the Jam Handy Organization. Their son, Brook Meachen Meggs, was born in Detroit on the 9th of October, 1956.

  Meggs had played French horn since his school days. In 1964, he obtained a rare instrument from master builder Herbert Fritz Knopf, an instrument maker in Markneukirchen, Saxony, in East Germany. Knopf operated behind the Iron Curtain. Meggs's contacts with the Soviet label Melodiya helped convey the four-valve, B-flat horn out from under Soviet Union control.

  By 1976, the Meggs family had moved to Pasadena, to a home in the hills west of the Rose Bowl Stadium. The house had been designed by architect Roland Logan Russell in 1961. Its hexagonal plan was organized around a central atrium, and it came to be recognized as an outstanding example of mid-century modern architecture.

  Nancy Meggs died in 1990 of pancreatic cancer. Brown Meggs moved to an apartment in Russian Hill in San Francisco. He died there on the 8th of October, 1997, from a brain hemorrhage. Their son Brook, a singer-songwriter, moved to Sudbury, Massachusetts, where his mother had been raised. In 1999, a 36.5-acre parcel of Meachen family farmland was sold to the city of Sudbury for $3.5 million. Known as the Meachen-Meggs parcel, it is now held in public trust as Poor Farm Meadows Conservation Land. The Pasadena house Roland Logan Russell had designed in 1961 was listed for sale in 2017 at $3.3 million.

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