Paul McCartney (14 page)

Among the onlookers was the Cassanovas’ new bass-player, John Gustafson. ‘They had tinny little amps that hardly made a squeak,’ Gustafson recalls. ‘John and Paul didn’t do any of their own songs that day, just straight rock ‘n’ roll, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Larry Williams. But what sticks in my mind was Paul’s voice. This pretty boy, who all the girls loved, would open his mouth and the most amazing Little Richard-type scream came out.’

They didn’t get the coveted Billy Fury job, but Larry Parnes saw something in those leaping lads in ‘tennis shoes’. Eight days later, through Allan Williams, Parnes offered them a week-long Scottish tour as backing group to another singer from his stable, Johnny Gentle. They’d have to decide quickly since the tour was scheduled to begin in 48 hours.

For the two art students, the electrical apprentice and the forklift truck-driver, there was no problem about seizing the opportunity. But for Paul, it came at the start of the Inny’s summer term, with his A-Level exams just a few weeks ahead. Few fathers would have been likely to sanction such a jaunt, least of all one with a respect for education like Jim McCartney’s.

Nonetheless, when the Silver Beatles caught a train for Scotland two days later, Paul went with them. He’d managed to convince Jim that he had an unexpected week off from school and the tour would be ‘good for his brain’.

In the spirit of Larry Parnes protégés, three of them took stage-names of their own invention. Paul became Paul Ramon, thinking it had an exotic 1920s silent movie sound; George became Carl Harrison in tribute to Carl Perkins; and Stu Sutcliffe became Stuart de Stael after the abstract painter Nicolas de Stael. John and new drummer Tommy Moore didn’t bother, although during the tour–according to Paul–John did once or twice hark back to the Treasure Island theme Brian Casser had proposed for the band and let himself be known as ‘Long John’.

They travelled to Alloa, Clackmannanshire, in the Scottish Central Lowlands, where they met their temporary front man, Johnny Gentle, for the first time. There was then just half an hour to rehearse before they went onstage together at the Town Hall in nearby March Hill.

Twenty-three-year-old Gentle was yet another ‘secret’ Liverpudlian, born John Askew and a carpenter and merchant seaman before moving to London, where Larry Parnes had found and rebranded him. Although only a minor member of Parnes’s stable, he was hugely impressive to the Silver Beatles for having appeared with Eddie Cochran at the Bristol Hippodrome just hours before Cochran’s death on the road back to London.

Gentle was less thrilled to find that of his promised five sidemen, only three were fully functioning musicians. Stu Sutcliffe still palpably struggled on bass guitar and while Tommy Moore was a serviceable enough drummer, his kit was so insecurely put together that a too-enthusiastic bang on the bass drum could detach it from its mounting and send it rolling away across the stage.

In the opening show, their performance was so bad that Parnes’s Scottish co-promoter, a sometime poultry farmer named Duncan McKinnon, popularly known as ‘Drunken Duncan’, wanted to put them on the first train back to Liverpool. But Johnny Gentle insisted that he could work with them, hoping they might improve along the way.

The tour, which had sounded so glamorous, turned out to be a week of purgatory, travelling in a van up Scotland’s bleak north-east coast and into the Highlands, performing in half-empty ballrooms and municipal halls and staying in cheerless small hotels or bed-and-breakfasts. Nor were their paltry audiences even aware of watching the Silver Beatles, still less of their fancy individual stage-names; at each venue, the posters simply advertised ‘Johnny Gentle and his Group’. For their collective fee of £18, they had to work punishingly hard, opening the show with an hour on their own, backing Gentle for 20 minutes of Elvis and Ricky Nelson songs, then doing about another hour on their own, usually beset by disappointed cries for more ‘Johnny!’ The stamina John, Paul and George were forced to develop would serve them well in the months–and years–ahead.

Living at democratically close quarters with his group, Johnny Gentle soon became aware of the tensions within it. The disappointments and discomforts of the journey gave a special edge to John’s acid tongue and malevolent humour, usually at the expense of his two most vulnerable bandmates. He teased Tommy Moore continually about his age, calling him ‘dad’ or ‘grandad’ and playing elaborate practical jokes on him. And Stu’s distance from art college magnified his poor musicianship in John’s eyes and disqualified him from respect, even consideration. In the back of the tour van, there weren’t enough seats for everyone, so John always made Stu perch precariously on one of the metal wheel-arches.

The tour revealed Paul’s ability–one he would keep all his life–to get the most out of even the poorest situation. However remote the venue and minuscule the audience, he always played the role of ‘Paul Ramon’ to the hilt, greeting the Highland girls with an unfailing smile and ever-ready joke Scottish accent, signing his first-ever autographs with euphoric loops of his schoolteachery signature and immediately sending a postcard to his dad about it.

He also took every opportunity to pump the good-natured Gentle about what a pop idol’s life was like. ‘He was inquisitive about everything… how I’d got my start… how you made records… where I thought he and the others in the band should go from here.

‘I told him, “The best thing you can do is get down to London as soon as possible.” In retrospect, of course, that was the very worst advice I could have given. But Paul said, oh no, they were determined to make it in Liverpool first.

‘He was never in any doubt that the band would make it someday. He had this total focus and dedication, but he was realistic as well. He’d looked at the careers of the big rock ‘n’ roll names and knew how short they always were. “When we get to the top,” he told me, “we’ll have a couple of good years if we’re lucky.”’

At one point on the journey, he might easily have gone the way of Eddie Cochran. En route from Inverness to Fraserburgh, the van-driver, Gerry Scott, was incapacitated by a severe hangover so Johnny Gentle took over at the wheel. At a confusing road-fork, he took the wrong turn and hit an approaching car head-on. No one was wearing seat-belts but, miraculously, the only casualty was Tommy Moore, who had two teeth loosened by a flying-guitar case and had to be taken to the local hospital suffering from concussion.

It wasn’t enough to excuse Tommy from his so-necessary duties at that night’s show. While he was still being treated in the casualty department, John barged in, almost frog-marched him to the venue and pushed him onstage, still groggy from painkillers and with a bandage around his head.

Things went rapidly downhill from there. The group had by now spent all of their small subsistence allowance from Larry Parnes but had seen no sign of a promised second instalment that was to have come via Allan Williams. For the last couple of days, they became semi-vagrants, skipping out of hotels and cafés without paying (something which didn’t bother John but mortified Paul) and sleeping in the van. George later recalled that they were ‘like orphans… shoes full of holes, clothes a mess’. When Parnes finally did send some money, it wasn’t enough to pay all their train-fares home, so Stu’s mother had to be asked to make up the difference.

For Paul, it was the unhappiest introduction to a land that would one day give him boundless happiness.

The Scottish tour had promised to lift the Silver Beatles out of obscurity but it left them even worse off than before. Johnny Gentle had seen some sparks of talent in their playing and sent an enthusiastic report to Larry Parnes in London. However, Parnes had decided they were trouble and offered them no further work. Worst of all, the battered Tommy Moore resigned as their drummer to return to his better-paid job driving a forklift truck at Garston Bottle Works. They did their best to win him back, shouting apologies up at the windows of his flat until his girlfriend appeared and told them to fuck off, then pursuing his forklift around the bottle works yard, but on that question Tommy was immovable.

All hope now rested with Allan Williams who, thanks to his connection with Parnes, had become a figure of consequence in Liverpool entertainment circles. Through the summer of 1960, Williams set about trying to get them gigs, handicapped as they were by rhythm still only ‘in the guitars’ and a name that nobody liked or understood. The business cards he had printed called them the Beatles, though they were variously advertised as the Silver Beatles, the Silver Beetles and the Silver Beats.

Few of the venues Williams came up with seemed like any place for a Liverpool Institute boy like Paul. These were mainly ballrooms and municipal halls in Liverpool’s toughest areas, where unreconstructed Teddy boys wanted to hear nothing but original hardcore rock ‘n’ roll, and faithfully kept alive its original spirit of violence and destruction.

What would be innocently billed as a ‘dance’, a ‘hop’ or a ‘jive-session’ almost always turned into a set-piece confrontation between Teds from the district and invaders from a neighbouring suburb. Often, a number from the band would unwittingly cause the ‘bother’; their version of the Olympics’ ‘Hully-Gully’, for example, always started beer-bottles, even whole beer-crates, flying.

One night at the misleadingly posh-sounding Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, a huge Ted leapt onto the stage and grabbed Paul’s puny little Elpico amplifier to use as a missile. His polite protest was answered by a snarl of ‘One move and you’re dead.’

Williams at the time had a business partner, a member of Liverpool’s substantial West Indian community whose vast consumption of the cheapest brand of cigarette had earned him the nickname ‘Lord Woodbine’. In Upper Parliament Street the pair operated a strip club, still illegal in Liverpool and so innocuously named the New Cabaret Artists Club. One evening when the strippers’ regular accompanists failed to show, Williams put the Silver Beatles/Beetles/Beats on instead.

Paul would always remember the rather forbidding stripper named Janice who briefed them on her musical requirements. ‘[She] brought sheet music for us to play all her arrangements. She gave us a bit of Beethoven and the Spanish Fire Dance. We said, “We can’t read music, sorry, but… we can play the Harry Lime Cha Cha, which we’ve arranged ourselves… and you can have Moonglow and September Song… and instead of the Sabre Dance, we’ll give you Ramrod.”

‘Well, we played behind her… the audience looked at her, everybody looked at her just sort of normal. At the end of her act, she would turn round and… well, we were all just young lads, we’d never seen anything like it and we all blushed. Four blushing, red-faced lads.’

The best exposure Williams provided was in the basement club of his coffee bar, the Jacaranda, where, led by Stu Sutcliffe, they’d already painted surrealistic murals and redecorated the ladies’ toilet. They appeared on Mondays, when the club’s usual Jamaican steel band had the evening off, but without any advertisements or even billing outside. The tiny stage did not have stand-microphones, so Paul and John’s girlfriends, Dot and Cynthia, would sit in front of them, each holding up a broom-pole with a hand-mic tied to its end. Bill Harry and his own girlfriend, Virginia, often witnessed this display of selflessness. ‘Then later as we left, we’d see Paul necking with Dot in one doorway and John with Cynthia in another.’

At the Inny, Paul had sat his A-Level exams in two subjects, failing art but passing English literature. Though it was enough to get him to teacher-training college, a mood of unaccustomed sloth had come over him and he was considering marking time for an extra year in the sixth form. The idea had been prompted by one of John’s college acquaintances, still studying art at the advanced age of 24.

‘I thought if he could keep going without getting a job, then so could I.’

This plan was overturned by a sudden opportunity which would see Liverpool’s worst band leap out of the Jacaranda’s basement to West Germany, then back again, almost magically transformed into its very best.

The opportunity came from Hamburg, a port very like Liverpool in its raffish, cosmopolitan nature but with the addition of a sex district named St Pauli that was legendary throughout Europe. There, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider had recently asked Allan Williams to supply a band for one of his establishments, the Kaiserkeller. Williams had sent over Derry and the Seniors, who at that time were Merseyside’s top dance-hall attraction. Such was the German appetite for British rock ‘n’ roll that now Herr Koschmider wanted a second outfit, for a six-week engagement beginning on 17 August.

Williams’s first thought was not of his recent mural-painters and toilet-decorators. He offered the gig to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, who had to turn it down because of a prior commitment at a Butlin’s holiday camp. Next on his list were Gerry and the Pacemakers, but their leader, Gerry Marsden, refused to quit his steady job with British Railways. So, scraping the bottom of the barrel, Williams turned to John, Paul, George and Stu.

Accepting the offer meant turning professional–an easy enough transition for three out of the four. John had no idea what he might do after graduating (or failing to) from art college and rejoiced in confounding his Aunt Mimi’s prophecy by earning a living from his guitar. Stu would not have to turn his back on art, for the college assured its most promising student he could return and complete his diploma anytime he wished. For George, anything was preferable to an electrical apprenticeship at Blacklers.

Paul, on the other hand, seemed to have everything to lose. Becoming a full-time musician–with no prospects after the first six weeks–seemed no kind of substitute for teacher training. He would disappoint his father and, even worse, betray the memory of the mother who’d always so much wanted him to rise socially. On the other hand, he’d be getting £15 per week, a hefty wage for anyone in 1960; more than his dad earned, and most of his teachers too.

Jim McCartney was predictably horrified by the thought of Paul giving up school and, even more, of his taking employment in the country which had bombed Liverpool to ruins only 20 years earlier. And having only just turned 18, he couldn’t go without written parental consent. However, his brother Michael pleaded eloquently on his behalf and Allan Williams visited 20 Forthlin Road with assurances that ‘the lads’ would be well looked after. So Jim put aside his misgivings and signed the necessary paper.