Beatles (24 page)

Not only had the Beatles changed, there had been important changes in Britain while they’d been away. Every group was now trying like mad to be like the Shadows.

Cliff Richard’s success had led the Shadows, his backing group of Jet Harris, Tony Meehan, Bruce Welch and Hank Marvin, to go on to become successes in their own right. Their instrumental record, ‘Apache’, had swept the country. Every group was copying their sober, terribly neat stage dress of grey suits, matching ties and highly polished shoes. They did little dance steps, three one way and three the other. In their appearance as well as in their music, everything was neat, polished and restrained.

The Beatles, on the other hand, played loud and wild, and looked scruffy and disorganized, like some aboriginal throwback. They had continued in the rock and roll style, which had been the fashion when they left Liverpool but was now dying out. If anything, they’d become even more rock and rollish, adding extra pounding, volume and wild ‘mak showing’ on stage. They had created in effect their own new sound. A sound which was light years away from the discreet Shadows. A sound which you had to run away and hide your ears from, or go as wild and ecstatic as the people producing it.

‘It was Hamburg that had done it,’ says John. ‘That’s where we’d really developed. To get the Germans going and keep it up for twelve hours at a time, we’d really had to hammer. We would
never have developed as much if we’d stayed at home. We had to try anything that came into our heads in Hamburg. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best. The Germans liked it, as long as it was loud.

‘But it was only back in Liverpool that we realized the difference and saw what had happened to us while everyone else was playing Cliff Richard shit.’

Their own passion and personalities, which were contagious and affected the audience, also helped. They had a new sound but it was being made by people who were like the Liverpool audiences, natural, unaffected, unsmooth, untarted up, unshow business.

Bob Wooler, who soon moved on from being the Litherland DJ to the Cavern DJ, was one of the first to rush into print with his analysis of the Beatles. This appeared just six months later in the summer of 1961 in a local Merseyside beat newspaper. He is summing up in this early 1961 period, when they first hit Liverpool after the Litherland Town Hall, long before they had any publicity or promotion of any sort:

‘
Why do you think the Beatles are so popular? They resurrected original rock’n’roll music, the origins of which are to be found in American Negro singers. They hit the scene when it had been emasculated by figures like Cliff Richard. Gone was the drive that inflamed emotions. The Beatles exploded on a jaded scene. The Beatles were the stuff that screams were made of. Here was the excitement, both physical and aural, that symbolized the rebellion of youth
.

‘
Essentially a vocal act, hardly ever instrumental, they were independently minded, playing what they liked for kicks, kudos and cash. Privileged in having gained prestige and experience in Hamburg. Musically authoritative and physically magnetic, example the mean, moody magnificence of drummer, Pete Best – a sort of teenage Jeff Chandler. A remarkable variety of talented voices but when speaking, possess the same naivety of tone. Rhythmic
revolutionaries. An act which from beginning to end is a succession of climaxes. A personality cult. Seemingly unambitious, yet fluctuating between self-assured and the vulnerable. Truly a phenomenon – and also a predicament to promoters! Such are the fantastic Beatles. I don’t think anything like them will happen again
.’

In the New Year of 1961, other large ballroom dates followed their Litherland Town Hall success. In most places it ended in riots, especially when Paul sang ‘Long Tall Sally’, a standard rock number, but done with tremendous beat and excitement. They were beginning to realize the effect they could have on an audience, and often made the most of it, until things got out of hand. Paul says that some of the early ballrooms were terrifying. ‘At the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, there would be 100 Wallasey lads all ready to fight 100 lads from Seacombe when things got going. They started one night before I realized what was happening and I tried to save my amp. An El Pico amp, it was my pride and joy at the time. One Ted grabbed me and said don’t move, son, or you’re fucking dead. The Hambledon Hall was another place there was often fights. They used fire extinguishers on each other one night there. When we played “Hully Gully”, that used to be one of the tunes which ended in fighting.’

Most of the ballrooms hired large numbers of bouncers to stop that sort of trouble. The bouncers also began to be used for another purpose.

‘I remember one hall we were at,’ says John. ‘There were so many people that we told each other that there must be other managers around and we’d get a lot of work out of it. What we didn’t know was that the management had laid on lots of bouncers to stop the other promoters getting near us. So nobody came to us, except this bloke from the management who said he liked us and would give us a long series of dates at £8 a night. It was a couple of quid more than we were getting anyway, so we were pleased.’

They could have made a lot more money from 1961 onwards because they were in demand and very gradually catching up on Rory Storm (Mr Showmaker, as they called him) as Liverpool’s leading group. But they didn’t have a manager and they didn’t really appreciate themselves what was happening to them. ‘It took us a while to realize how much better we’d become than the other groups,’ says George. ‘Then we began to see that we were getting big crowds everywhere. People were following us round, coming to see us personally, not just coming to dance.’

They were still picking on Stu and Pete Best, but there were no serious fights the way there had been in Hamburg. They used to argue instead over the best seat in the van after a show, or fight for food. There was often an argument about who should drive, because it was thought that the driver always had the best seat, instead of being crammed in with all the gear.

‘This sort of bickering was usually between me and George,’ says Paul, ‘as we were about the same age. John was older and the natural leader. George and I were very bitchy, arguing about who would drive. Later on when we had our own van, I’d rush to get the keys and get in the driving seat first. George would get in and say, “Heh, I thought I was driving. You drove last night.” I would say, “Well, you’re not, are you?”’

Their successes at the various ballrooms around Merseyside naturally led to them being offered their own place, where they could be the resident group, where their fans would always know where to expect them. This, thanks to Bob Wooler, was the Cavern Club. They’d outgrown the Casbah coffee club, which was away from the main centre of Liverpool and very much a small local club.

The Cavern had for a long time been the main club for live music in the centre of Liverpool, but it had been purely for jazz. Even at the time of that article by Bob Wooler quoted above, written in the summer of 1961, the Cavern was still being advertised on another page of the same issue as a jazz club, although by then it had become dominated by beat groups, particularly the Beatles.

The Cavern is at Number 8, Mathew Street. This is a narrow lane in the centre of Liverpool, just round the corner from Whitechapel where NEMS, the leading record store, is situated. It’s a couple of blocks away from the
Liverpool Echo
building and not far from the Pier Head.

Most of the buildings in Mathew Street are fruit warehouses. The street is always littered and untidy and smells of lurking fruit and hidden vegetables. Throughout the day and early morning there are lorries unloading. You go down 17 steps to the Cavern. It’s the basement of what was once a wine cellar. It still looks very much like a cellar, dark and poky, with high vaulted pillars. There appears to be no ventilation of any sort, even today when it has all been tarted up into a restaurant-nightclub.

Ray McFall, an ex-accountant, had taken over the Cavern in 1959 and ran it as a jazz club. Johnny Dankworth, Humphrey Lyttleton, Acker Bilk, Chris Barber all played there. But more and more sessions began to be given over to the growing beat groups.

From January 1961, after the Beatles returned from Hamburg, they played regularly at the Cavern, alternating at first with the Swinging Bluejeans, who’d been the resident semi-jazz group before them.

‘From January 1961 to February 1962 I introduced the Beatles at the Cavern Club 292 times,’ says Bob Wooler. ‘For that first lunchtime session they got £5. For the last one they got £300.’

This not only shows how much Bob Wooler must have been impressed by them, to bother to count up the exact times, but also how hard they were working.

‘We probably loved the Cavern best of anything,’ says George. ‘It was fantastic. We never lost our identification with the audience all the time. We never rehearsed anything, not like the other groups, who kept on copying the Shadows. We were playing to our own fans who were just like us. They would come in their lunchtimes to hear us and bring their sandwiches to eat. We would do the same, eating our lunch while we played. It was just spontaneous. Everything just happened.’

‘It was really a dump,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘There was no air at all. The sweat used to drip off them or off the walls and onto the amps and fuse them. But they’d just carry on all the same, singing on their own. John used to shout out things at the audience. They all did. They’d tell them to shut up. But George never used to say anything or smile. Girls were always asking me why he looked so serious. He used to say, “I’m the lead guitar. If the others make mistakes through larking around, no one notices, but I can’t make mistakes.” He was always very serious about his music, and the money. He always wanted to know how much they were getting.’

Mrs Harrison, as ever, was one of their most devoted fans. Not just following them, but taking relations and friends along as well. She was at the Cavern that time, before they went to Hamburg, when John’s Aunt Mimi had stormed in, determined to pull John out by his ear.

‘I saw her on the way out,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘“Aren’t they great,” I shouted at her. She turned to me and said she was glad someone thought so.

‘I met Mimi a few times after that. She always used to say, we’d all have had lovely peaceful lives but for you encouraging them.’

Everyone who saw them in their Cavern days remembers most of all their impromptu performances. The Shadows had not only influenced how other groups played, but how they got themselves on and off stage and how they introduced their numbers. The Beatles just did what they felt like doing. When anything went wrong, other groups rushed to the wings, doing the big show business bit, till someone mended the fuse. What the Beatles did was get everyone to sing ‘Coming Round the Mountains’ or some such corny song.

Mrs Harrison approved of it all. Mimi didn’t. But Jim McCartney was beginning to learn how to live with it.

He used to spend his lunch hours in the same sort of area as the Cavern, hanging around the Cotton Exchange pubs and cafés, chatting up prospective buyers. This makes his job sound grander than it was. He was still an ordinary cotton salesman,
earning under £10 a week and finding it difficult to make ends meet. Michael, Paul’s brother, was by this time working, but not doing very well. He’d failed to get into the Art College, and after a series of dead-end jobs was training to be a hairdresser.

‘I often used to pop into the Cavern at lunchtime,’ says Jim. ‘They should have paid you danger money to go down there. It reeked of perspiration. When Paul used to come home from the Cavern I would wring his shirt out in the sink and the sweat would pour out.

‘The kids would be in a terrible state as well, fighting with each other to get near the front, or fainting with the excitement and the atmosphere. I’d see Paul and the others on the stage, looking like something the cat brought home. I’d try to fight my way through the kids, but never make it. So I used to go to their little dressing-room place and wait for them to come off stage.’

He wasn’t waiting for their autograph, but because he wanted to see Paul. As Paul and Michael’s only parent, cook, cleaner and bottle washer, he had to spend his lunch hour doing the shopping for the evening meal.

‘I had to go to the Cavern to give Paul the sausages or chops or whatever it was. I’d be in a terrible rush and I’d just have time to fight off the fans and give Paul the meat.

‘“Now don’t forget, son,” I’d say. “Put this on Regulo 450 on the electric oven when you get home.”’

Their success as a local phenomenon was assured, once the Cavern days arrived. After almost five years of messing around, they had at last built up an individual act and had acquired a devoted following in Liverpool.

But for the next year, throughout most of 1961, nothing really dramatic happened. They improved all the time and their local following grew and became more fanatical. They visited Hamburg again, the first of several return visits, and their success there continued. But they now entered a trough of local success. They seemed destined to play forever in Liverpool or Hamburg. No one else was interested in them.

Their second Hamburg trip began in April 1961, by which time George had become 18. Peter Eckhorn, manager of the Top Ten Club, and Astrid helped to get all the right work permits. Peter Eckhorn still has the contract. It said they would play every night from seven until two in the morning, except Saturdays when they would play till three. ‘After each hour of play there will be no less than a break of 15 minutes.’

The Top Ten was bigger and not as rough as the two other clubs they’d played in. It had better accommodation, décor and
audiences. There were even more exis in the audience shouting for them now, many of them photographers who would lie down in front, trying to get unusual angles of the Beatles on stage, and shouting ‘more sveat, pleese, more sveat’.

Astrid met them off the train – they were doing it in a bit more style this time – and was wearing a complete leather trouser suit. Previously she’d worn a leather jacket, which they’d all copied, although they’d worn them with their jeans and cowboy boots. Stu was very impressed and got her to make a complete leather suit for him. The others wanted one as well, but they got them done so cheaply that they split almost as soon as they put them on.