Not much has been written about Dexter and the Beatles (though it’s likely Lewisohn will have more to say about the matter in the next volume of his mammoth Beatles biography, Tune In only covering their history through the end of 1962). Mills, one of the British artists who was issued on Capitol Records at a time when the Beatles’ early British hits were being rejected by the label for American release. After finding sudden TV fame late in 1961, she was signed to Parlophone by Norman Newell, but while her debut single was a hit, the follow-ups weren’t-and it was one of these failures that Dex decided America needed.” Gladys Mills was that most British of discoveries, an ample, 43-year-old, heavy-wattled housewife who chopped out party singalong numbers on a saloon-bar-like piano. Though he rejected the Beatles, the Shadows, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Helen Shapiro and Matt Monro, he did issue ‘Bobbikins,’ a piano instrumental by Mrs. Dexter had no love for the British and a neat way of showing it. “The fact Vee Jay was having a huge hit with a harmonica record Dex had nixed a couple of months earlier prompted no circumspection, and neither did the success Capitol was having with another self-contained vocal-instrumental group, the Beach Boys. I didn’t care for the harmonica because I had grown up listening to the old blues records and blues harmonica players, and I simply didn’t…I nixed the record instantly.”Īs Mark Lewisohn wrote in the extended edition of The Beatles Tune In:

I didn’t want any part of the Beatles.” (Probably the record was “Love Me Do,” though Dexter could not remember the title in this conversation.) In a mid-1980s interview for the radio documentary From Britain With Love, he elaborated, “I didn’t care for it at all because of the harmonica sound. Remembering the first time he heard the Beatles in a 1988 interview with Chuck Haddix, Dexter groused, “When I heard Lennon playing the harmonica on this record, I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard.

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