Sixty years ago, I saw the Fab Four take the stage on the Ed Sullivan Show and was hooked on those lads from Liverpool … total transparency demands I confess that I still am! I was looking at the One Longfellow Square website and discovered that a Beatles tribute act — Studio Two — was coming there on the 27th of this month so I requested contact information so I could pursue an interview.

I was given the name and number for Stephen Murray (who plays “John” in the group and is joined by Al Francis as “Paul,” Robert Murray as “George” and Richard Rampino as “Ringo”). I called him to set up a phoner for the 8th — at the given time on that given day, I reached out and caught him in his car parked at his favorite coffee shop in Danvers, Massachusetts. I began our chat by asking him if Studio Two had played at that popular Portland venue before.
Murray: This will be our sixth time there.

Q: Wow, I guess it’s a good venue for you if you keep coming back there.
Murray: Yeah, we love it because it’s intimate, you can see the people’s faces and you feel like you’re playing in a living room-type setting. I just love the feeling there. There’s always good sound, always good reception from the audience — we just love the atmosphere there. In fact, in 2023 I saw three other shows there because I wanted to experience it as a member of the audience, and it was just absolutely amazing.

Q: Now, as far as your show goes, why did you choose the time span of the early years of the Beatles career — pre-Sgt. Pepper era — that your band performs?
Murray: Going back to my teenage years, my brother and I became obsessed with the Beatles and I went through all of their albums from beginning to the end; but I was never really drawn to the later years. I wasn’t really connected to that as much as I was the early rock ’n’ roll stuff … every time I would go to “Let It Be” or “Abbey Road,” I would instantly go back to “Please Please Me” or “With The Beatles” or “Meet The Beatles”; so when we finally became a band we knew that we were only going to do the rock ’n’ roll stuff. I said to my brother, who plays George in the group, “If we’re really going to do this, we’re going to do it because we love it, we’re not going to do it because there’s money … we’re going to do it because we love it.” So that’s just how it started.

Q: When you’re putting a show together, do you play the songs in chronological order or just randomly?
Murray: It depends, we have a couple of different formats that we do. I don’t know what we’ll do for One Longfellow, it may be just our normal show which is like a miss-mash. There are some chronologically ordered songs, like we start with “She Loves You” and by the middle of the show we get to “Hard Day’s Night,” and then the second set we’re diving into “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver,” “Beatles VI” and “Help!”; but toward the end of the show we always throw in some rock ’n’ roll songs to keep the energy up. So there’s not really any rhyme or reason, it’s just whatever fits really well with the flow of the show.

Q: What determines that flow?
Murray: It’s a combination of the key of the song, the tempo, and how it fits between other songs around it. The (show) that we’ve come up with right now seems to flow really nicely and people seem to be reacting nicely to it. I have thought about doing the second half of the show with four songs from “Help!,” “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” — that type of thing — but we haven’t gotten to that part yet.

Q: How long have you been doing this?
Murray: This will be our 12th year doing it — it doesn’t feel like that (chuckle), but the years seem to go by faster and faster.

Q: Just out of curiosity, do you perform the songs the way they are on the albums?
Murray: Ah, not usually; we tend to recreate what they did live — the arrangements that they did live are the ones that we play. Sometimes for private events when the venue is really small, we’ll do album version because most of the time Ringo was a little more tame in the studio, but when he played live he really smashed on those drums. We have groomed our drummer into a live Ringo drummer: everything’s louder, the fills are a little more aggressive. Ringo had a couple of lessons when he was younger and his teacher was a big band drummer, so all his fills are oriented from a big band state of mind … that was very unique for any rock ’n’ roll drummer at that point. In the early days he was really the driver of the band so we try to emulate that in the show.

Q: That’s something I didn’t know, thanks for the enlightenment. Now this might seem to be a silly question but what can folks expect from your show at One Longfellow Square?
Murray: (Laughter) Hey, no worries! What can they expect? Well, four guys in matching suits, Beatle boots, period-correct instruments — we’re going to refer to each other as John, Paul, George and Ringo. We may not make references to modern times because we try to take the audience back in time, hopefully, and if they lived during that period or whatever memories they have of the Beatles we try to recreate that for them with this show. They will get to hear songs from the first six albums along with the rock ’n’ roll songs they covered, like Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins and Buck Owens. The first four albums had a lot of covers on them so we’ll do all those plus some that were never released on official albums.

Q: Well, that’s cool. Do you happen to have any other shows up here in Maine in the future?
Murray: We are going to be in Maine quite a bit this year — we’re actually going to be in Maine on Sunday the 28th at the Waldo Theater in Waldoboro.

Q: Have you played there before?
Murray: No, it’s our first time, and it’s a matinee show, a 2-4 p.m. event, and between spring and summer we have a lot of shows in Maine. Maine has become the most popular state for us, too. In fact, the biggest crowds are in Maine and the best audiences are in Maine.

Q: Studio Two, where did the name of your band come from?
Murray: Oh, that’s a good question, yes, because a lot of people don’t know that. Studio Two is the recording studio inside Abbey Road Studio/EMI where the Beatles recorded 90% of their material. There are a lot of Beatle bands around with names like Rubber Soul and Revolver and In My Life — there are all these song references and album references, there’s even a band called The McCartney Lennons … but I didn’t want to be a song or an album because it’s so easy for someone else to take your name — I wanted something that was totally different.

And Studio Two is exactly that: They are doing a show that transports audiences back to the beginning of the Beatles and their rise to become, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest bands in the history of rock. It is a group that features graduates from Berklee College and all four members are experienced musicians devoted to keeping the memory and the appeal of the Fab Four alive and well with meticulous care and attention to detail in their presentation of the Beatles timeless music … more power to them. If you are a fan, do yourself a favor and check them out whenever you can — you won’t be sorry, I’m sure!

 

Lucky Clark, a 2018 “Keeping the Blues Alive” Award winner, has spent more than 50 years writing about good music and the people who make it. He can be reached at luckyc@myfairpoint.net if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

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