What Paul McCartney, James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt know about Peter Asher

In early 1964, as the fledgling British pop duo of Peter and Gordon were about to enter a recording studio for the very first time, the EMI producer who plucked them out of a London nightclub asked if they had any other songs to consider for a debut single.

As a matter of fact, replied Peter Asher, then 19, they did – though he’d have to ask his sister’s boyfriend if he and Gordon Waller, then 18, could have it.

It wasn’t hard to find Jane’s 21-year-old boyfriend, Paul. He’d been spending so much time at the Asher family home to see Jane, eat meals, and do his laundry that the Asher parents invited him to move in.

And so Paul McCartney shared the top floor of the house with Peter.

“They’d had hits, the first couple of hits,” says Asher, 82, of the Beatles during a recent interview at his Santa Monica office. “They were doing real gigs; we were doing little club gigs and pubs and stuff.

“But it didn’t strike us as remarkable at the time, in a way,” Asher continues in a room that displays his four Grammy Awards and the gold and platinum records he’s earned for the albums he’s produced over the last six decades.

“He was Jane’s boyfriend, and he was a nice guy,” Asher says of McCartney. “I mean, chatting around the fireside, we didn’t do much. We were both busy doing gigs a lot.”

But McCartney had once played a song titled “A World Without Love” for Asher, and mentioned that John Lennon didn’t like it, so the Beatles weren’t going to record it.

“I can’t remember, actually, whether I thought, ‘What about that song Paul played me?’ or whether he might have even suggested it,” Asher says. “But I do remember saying we have a record deal now, we’re looking for songs. Whether he volunteered it or we squeezed it out of him, I don’t know.”

Pop music moved fast in 1964. After McCartney wrote out the lyrics and recorded a rough demo of the song, Peter and Gordon recorded “A World Without Love” on Jan. 21. The single was released Feb. 28, just over two weeks after the Beatles played their debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

By June, when Asher and Waller turned 20 and 19, respectively, they were flying to the United States, where “A World Without Love” had topped both the Billboard and Cash Box singles charts, after reaching No. 1 in the United Kingdom and No. 2 in most of Europe.

Their first U.S. show came at the New York World’s Fair, on a stage surrounded by a water-filled moat, into which screaming teen girls leaped in hopes of a hug or a kiss from their new teen idols.

In November 1964, nine months after their debut single, Peter and Gordon played “The Ed Sullivan Show” just like Asher’s occasional housemate Paul, though by then the Beatles had been on the Sullivan show four times that year.

In “Peter Asher: Everywhere Man,” the new documentary in selected theaters on June 26 from directors Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, that’s but a small part of Asher’s remarkable journey through British and American pop culture from the ’50s to the present.

In 1965, Asher cofounded Indica, a London bookshop and art gallery that attracted the hippest of the hip. It was there that John Lennon met artist Yoko Ono and fell in love.

When the Beatles launched Apple Records, they hired Asher as their head of A&R, a position in which he signed and produced singer-songwriter James Taylor and released his self-titled debut. That album didn’t do much on the charts, but after Asher and Taylor left Apple for Los Angeles, the follow-up “Sweet Baby James,” which Asher, now Taylor’s manager, also produced, launched Taylor into ’70s singer-songwriter stardom.

Not long after, Asher signed Linda Ronstadt as a client, producing her breakthrough album “Heart Like a Wheel.” As with Taylor, Asher managed their careers and produced their records for the next 15 years or so.

“He’ll often talk about happenstance, which is an interesting word or descriptor,” Geller says. “There’s so much happenstance in his life, but part of it is each moment of that happenstance he’s able to do something with it and propel forward.”

Boys and guitars

Pop music isn’t actually where Asher’s story begins.

As children in the 1950s, the three red-headed siblings Peter, Jane and Clare Asher were spotted by a talent agent, which led them into film, television and stage productions.

Jane Asher, the only one of them to stick with acting, met McCartney when a magazine asked the young film star in 1963 to write about the hot new band from Liverpool. McCartney was smitten – all the Beatles were, he says in the film – and they were a couple for the next five years.

Peter Asher left acting behind for school as a teenager, and there he met Waller, the only other boy who carried a guitar everywhere he went.

“Back then, it was no question when you meet someone like that, you find out who their heroes are,” he says of meeting Gordon Waller. “His hero is Elvis, but he also loved Buddy Holly, as I did. We also collectively loved the Everly Brothers, as every duo has to.

“And so you find out what chords he may know that you don’t know and stuff like that,” he says. “You find out what songs they know, and then eventually you try singing together just to see what it sounds like. We kind of went, ‘Oh, it sounds all right,’ which surprised us because our voices are so different.”

At first, they called themselves Gordon and Peter, Asher says.

“Because he was the lead singer, and clearly he was the tall, dark and handsome one, so it seemed logical,” he says. “It wasn’t ’til we got a record deal that EMI came to us and said, ‘We’ve done market research,’ or, ‘We’ve talked to our PR people. Everyone thinks Peter and Gordon sounds better.

“Can’t tell now because when I say Peter and Gordon, it makes me think, oh, that’s right. I think maybe it does sound better. Who was I to complain? I got top billing after all.”

When “A World Without Love” made them stars overnight, Peter and Gordon were quickly sent out on the package tours popular in the ’60s with headliners such as Gene Pitney, Freddie and the Dreamers, and the Rolling Stones, whom Asher already knew from their days on the club circuits.

By 1968, Asher wanted to produce records while Waller decided to make a solo album, so they parted – never formally breaking up, Asher notes – until reuniting in 2005.

“We just drifted apart,” Asher says. “We never said ‘That’s it,’ let alone have a big fight like the Everlys used to, where they tried to kill each other on stage.”

Hidden treasures

Goldfine discovered Asher in 2012 when a former high school boyfriend asked if she wanted to see “Peter Asher: A Musical Memoir of the ’60s and Beyond” at Rrazz Room in San Francisco. Oh, and he’d also be bringing his friend Linda Ronstadt.

“I didn’t know who Peter Asher was. I just wanted to meet Linda Ronstadt,” she says, laughing.

Ten minutes into the show, Goldfine recognized Asher’s potential as a documentary subject. But her excitement to tell Geller what she’d seen quickly faded when she learned another filmmaker had beaten them to Asher.

Still, Goldfine and Geller did end up friends with Ronstadt after that night, and periodically ask her about the other film’s progress. And in 2019, as they worked on a Leonard Cohen documentary, “Hallelujah: A Journey, A Song,” Ronstadt told them other project was dead.

When Asher’s musical memoir returned to San Francisco in 2019, the filmmakers went to the show at Bimbo’s 365 and pitched him. Asher’s response proved that 50 years in L.A. hadn’t affected his modest British reserve.

“I kind of went, ‘Really?’” Asher says that when Goldfine and Geller first pitched him. “I was surprised. I remember telling them I thought it would be a bit boring. But then I said, ‘OK, whatever.”

Asher quickly proved to be a terrific storyteller. His mother, Margaret, who’d given oboe lessons to future Beatles producer George Martin before he ever met the band, added her posthumous voice through the volumes of scrapbooks she’d kept for all three of her children.

“He had just said off the cuff, ‘Well, if we’re going to go to London, I should pull out the scrapbooks my mom had made,” Goldfine says.

“I don’t think Peter really had remembered how much was in those scrapbooks,” Geller says. “All of these newspaper clippings, photographs, family photographs, different bits of memorabilia. It was such a treasure to come across.”

Asher handed them one from 1964, and as they turned the browning pages, they came to a stop, puzzled.

“There’s this old dry-cleaning bag, and we’re like, why would Margaret Asher have stuck an old dry-cleaning bag in here?” Goldfine says. “So we pull it and carefully unfold it, and in green ink, it’s the words to ‘Nobody I Know,’ handwritten by Paul McCartney. And the chord charts.

“And Peter’s like, ‘Whoa,’” she says of the discovery of the song McCartney gave Peter and Gordon for their follow-up single to “A World Without Love.” “Had we not been there, saying let’s open this random 1964 scrapbook, he would have never known.”

A bite of the Apple

Peter and Gordon parted about the same time the Beatles started Apple Records. His closeness to the group led them to offer him the job as the A&R director for the label, in charge of finding and signing new artists.

At Apple Records, there was no such thing as a typical day, Asher says.

“It was a funny mixture because it was the Beatles,” he says. “It was all a bit surreal and weird stuff happened from time to time. The Hell’s Angels showed up, Hare Krishnas showed up, or Ken Kesey showed up. Interesting stuff was happening at the same time there’s the actual business of making records and putting them out.”

Asher had met guitarist Danny Kortchmar on tour in the U.S., where promoters would hire local bands to back Peter and Gordon. They’d become friends, and when Kortchmar’s boyhood friend James Taylor decided to try his luck as a singer-songwriter in London, he told Taylor to look up Asher when he got there.

When Taylor showed up, he played three songs for Asher: “Something in the Way She Moves,” “Something’s Wrong,” and “Knocking Around the Zoo,” Asher says.

“I was astonished when I heard him,” he says. “I mean, he looked like a folk singer. He looked like everybody else in the sense that he’s just another long-haired folk singer. But he wasn’t singing folk songs, and he was an incredibly skilled musician.

“He played guitar like he started classically, which I think he did. But he was also listening to a lot of jazz, stuff with jazzy chords in it, and he combined all of that with the precision of a real guitar player.

“I loved his voice, too, and his phrasing,” Asher says. “He owned more to Sam Cooke and Ray Charles than he did to any folk singer, and yet he still had the spirit of Woody Guthrie in there somewhere, though he sang a lot more soulfully in the musical sense than Woody did.”

Asher made Taylor the first signee to Apple Records, and soon was in the studio with Taylor producing his self-titled debut. He included orchestration on some songs and as musical segues between tracks in order to distinguish Taylor from the rising tide of those long-haired troubadours.

“We ended up making it something that people had to pay attention to, or at least if I had my way,” Asher says. “And they didn’t pay attention, not as much as they should have.

“But eventually I got my way.”

The LA sound

By 1969, Asher and his first wife, Betsy, had moved to Los Angeles, renting a large Spanish Revival estate at 956 S. Longwood Street at the corner of Olympic Boulevard for $450 a month – complete with pool and guesthouse, though barely a stick of furniture.

As Taylor wrote songs for a second album, Asher got together a band that included guitarist Kortchmar and drummer Russ Kunkel, as well as piano player Carole King, who at that point had yet to start playing live shows. They and Taylor gathered in Asher’s living room, empty but for a piano, to rehearse the songs that would become the album “Sweet Baby James.”

“I think one of the ways it influenced the album itself was Russ playing brushes,” Asher says. “We kept that in many cases. [The song] ‘Fire and Rain,’ those famous fills are all brushes.”

They rehearsed the afternoons, going into Sunset Sound to record in the evenings, and quickly finished the album for about $7,000. Or almost finished it.

“He hadn’t quite written enough songs,” Asher says. “But he had three fragments he played me, and I said, ‘They’re all good, just string them together.’ And he did.”

Asher suggested the title – “Suite for 20 G” – “because we were getting $20,000 on delivery of the record, which we sorely needed.”

Listen to the artist

Ronstadt was the first of the stars to sit for an interview, and with her participation and the love that artists still have for Asher as a friend and producer, more quickly followed.

“When we reached out to James and his people said yes, that was like our second feather in our cap,” Goldfine says. “When we reached out to Carole, her daughter [Sherry Goffin Kondor}, who acts as her manager, said, ‘I’ll ask her [but] she just doesn’t do interviews anymore.”

“Then half an hour later we got this lovely email back saying, ‘Guess what, my mom’s going to do it,’” she says. “I really think because it was Peter we got access to so many people that wouldn’t have talked about just anyone.”

Asher’s long connection with Ronstadt almost didn’t happen. When she approached him in the early ’70s to manage her career, he turned her down because he already had a similar artist, Kate Taylor, James Taylor’s sister, signed to a contract. But not long after Kate Taylor’s 1971 debut “Sister Kate,” she decided to step away from music for a spell.

When Ronstadt asked a second time, the answer was yes.

“Heart Like a Wheel,” Ronstadt’s 1974 breakthrough album, was the first full album Asher produced with her. [He’d produced two tracks on the 1973 album “Don’t Cry Now.”

“I didn’t change the principle of it,” Asher says of whether his work with Ronstadt differed from that with Taylor. “I mean, you just sit down with the artist and talk about what we’re trying to accomplish, and what kind of record should we make, and who do you want to go on the road with?

“You ask lots of questions,” he says. “And listen to the artist. It seems logical to me. You’d be getting up to a weird start if you don’t.”

Throughout the ’70s and well into the ’80s, Asher worked consistently with Taylor and Ronstadt. In 1977, he produced Taylor’s “JT” and Ronstadt’s “Simple Dreams,” the top-selling studio albums for both, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone with both, and won the Grammy for producer of the year.

An open-hearted way

Having spent so much time inside Asher’s life, Geller and Goldfine have some theories about how it is that such a remarkable series of happenstance happened to him.

“It does propel him in a certain direction so that something else might cross his path,” Geller says of the moments that led Asher from Point A to Point B to Points X, Y and Z. “It’s in what he says talking with Steve Martin [with whom Asher has produced albums with Edie Brickell and with the Steep Canyon Rangers]. “If there’s something interesting that looks new and it might be fun and he can learn something from it, he’s game.

“I think that attitude and his incredible brilliance went into a very fortunate series of incidents and this life that is of staggering accomplishment, and at the same time, really fun to be witness to in the documentary,” he says.

“It’s such an open-minded, open-hearted way to handle an opportunity that comes at you from left field,” Goldfine says of the way Asher’s curiosity and willingness to try new things struck her. “I think that sort of sums up a lot of why these things not just happened or presented themselves to Peter, but why he followed through and they became real.”

Today, with a discography that goes beyond Taylor and Ronstadt to include artists from Diana Ross, Cher, and Neil Diamond to 10,000 Maniacs, Randy Newman and Susanna Hoffs, Asher remains busy.

He’ll do a version of his musical memoir show at the Grammy Museum on July 19 and later this year will tour with Colin Blunstone of the Zombies and the new wave group the Fixx. He does a weekly SiriusXM show on the Beatles channel called “Peter Asher: From Me to You.”

And he’s producing records, with discussions of soon working with Barbra Streisand on a follow-up to her 2025 release “The Secret of Life,” an album of duets with stars from Bob Dylan, James Taylor and Paul McCartney to Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande and Laufey.

“In Paul’s case, we did that live here in L.A., the Sony soundstage, the Streisand stage as it’s labeled,” Asher says. “She loves to call it ‘my studio’ because it’s named after her.”

McCartney brought in “My Valentine,” a 2011 single he wrote for his wife Nancy Shevell, and seemed “curiously intimidated,” Asher says.

Barbra is intimidating, we agreed.

“Exactly. And he thought, because it was his song, that he’d kind of cruise through it,” Asher says. “But in fact, we’d made quite a few changes to make it the duet, and he had to change key at some point and all this stuff.

“So you could tell he was getting a little bit nervous,” he says. “I know the feeling that you look across at the other microphone and go ‘It’s [bleeping] Barbra Streisand.’ And whether she felt that, I don’t know. She probably did. But he definitely kind of went, ‘Yikes.’”