Paul McCartney (17 page)

As a result, their engagements diary through Christmas and into the 1961 New Year looked thin. Most local dance promoters they’d previously worked for didn’t recognise them under the name of the Beatles and weren’t willing to take a chance on anyone sounding so peculiar. In addition, British pop group fashion had changed radically during their three-month absence. Every aspiring band now played dramatic-sounding instrumentals, wore matching shiny suits and performed synchronised dance-routines and high kicks like Cliff Richard’s Shadows.

Even to a parent as easy-going and supportive as Jim McCartney, the Beatles seemed to have no future and with unusual sternness Jim ordered Paul to find proper employment or get out of the house. Compliant as ever, he took a temporary job on a parcel delivery-truck at £7 per week, then got himself hired by the maritime cable-winding firm of Massey & Coggins. He started at the bottom, sweeping the factory yard, but was soon marked down as potential management material.

John later claimed credit for aborting this career as a dockland white-collar worker. ‘I was always saying, “Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off, he can’t hit you.”’ It was the advice of someone who’d grown up without a dad, which Paul was the least likely boy in the world to follow. But a blunt ultimatum from John did make him defy Jim for the first time ever. ‘I told [Paul] on the phone, “Either come or you’re out,”’ John recalled. ‘So he had to make a decision between me and his dad, and in the end he chose me.’

One, at least, of the band’s old haunts remained open to them. Pete Best’s mother, Mona, was still running the Casbah coffee club in Hayman’s Green, where Paul, John and George had originally played as the Quarrymen, and John’s and Paul’s art still adorned the wall and ceiling. Mrs Best needed little persuasion to book her son’s band (as she thought of it) and to plaster the neighbourhood with posters advertising ‘the Beatles–direct from Hamburg’.

As Stu Sutcliffe still hadn’t returned home, Paul might have been expected to continue playing bass, but instead the gap was filled by a friend of Pete Best’s named Chas Newby, coincidentally also a left-handed player. The Bests, Pete and Mona, now effectively managed the band: the Casbah was their base camp as well as an ever-open venue and its doorman, Frank Garner, drove them to and from the outside gigs that were slowly building up again.

Lodging with the Best family was a young trainee accountant named Neil Aspinall who’d attended Liverpool Institute High School with Paul and George and was a close friend of Pete and his brother, Rory. Neil owned an old red and white van and to keep Frank Garner on door-duty at the Casbah he took over the job of driving the Beatles for a couple of pounds a night, somehow fitting it in with studying for his accountancy exams.

On the snowy night of 27 December 1960, Neil drove them to what seemed a routine booking at Litherland Town Hall; a 30-minute spot among well-regarded local bands like the Del Renas and the Deltones. Their billing was the same as Mona Best had given them: ‘Direct from Hamburg–the Beatles.’ Since they were virtually unknown by that name in their home city, most of the audience thought they must be German.

Among the audience that night was William Faron Ruffley, whose band, Faron’s Flamingos, had a huge local following and were arch-practitioners of the slick, well-tailored Shadows style. Faron, aka ‘the Panda-footed Prince of Prance’, was resplendent in his trademark white suit and surrounded by his usual coterie of adoring girls.

As the stage-curtains parted to reveal the supposedly German group, there was a moment of palpable surprise and–just for an instant–disappointment. For here was not the expected line of ersatz Shadows, dancing the neat, synchronised two-step which, up to that moment, had been the height of performing cool. Here were defiantly asymmetric figures dressed all in black, like their Hamburg exi friends, but with none of the neatness or sleekness black usually creates. ‘They were a right mess,’ Faron remembers. ‘Paul had a red guitar with three strings on it and it wasn’t even plugged in… John hit his amp with a hammer to get it going.’

Since the earliest rock ‘n’ roll era–and the Swing era before that–dance-hall practice had never changed: the band played while its audience danced. But as Paul started ‘Long Tall Sally’ in his best Little Richard scream–

Gonna tell Aunt Mary ’bout Uncle John

He said he had the misery but he had a lotta fun…

–the entire crowd rushed to the stage-front and just stood there, gazing and gaping upwards in the first recorded outbreak of Beatlemania. Turning round, Faron saw that even his personal harem had forsaken him.

Liverpool’s Cavern club long ago surpassed Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry as the most famous popular music venue of all time. Nor did the home of country music ever exert such a hold on the collective imagination as this far homelier home of the pre-Brian Epstein Beatles. Even for those who haven’t seen its modern facsimile, the Cavern is as visible and tangible as anything in real life: they can almost believe they’ve descended its 18 stone steps… felt its heat and smelt its mingling odours… sat on one of its undersized wooden chairs with Paul, John and George on its tiny stage, close enough to reach out and touch.

By now, it’s hardly necessary to add that the Cavern was located in Mathew Street, a cobbled lane through central Liverpool’s warehouse district; that it was a former wine-storage cellar consisting of three connected brick tunnels with arches rather like those of Victorian sewers; and that its facilities or, rather, lack of them made the Reeperbahn’s music clubs seem the height of luxury by comparison. Less well-known is the McCartney family connection with the Cavern just prior to its Beatle heyday. Paul’s cousin, Ian Harris–son of his Auntie Gin–was a joiner who’d helped refurbish the club, installing a new floor and upgrading the toilets. By 1961, however, few of its clientele would have believed any refurbishment had taken place in their lifetime.

Paul had just missed appearing at the Cavern, back when he’d joined the Quarrymen and the club was still ferociously dedicated to traditional jazz. Since then, the anti-rock zealotry of its owner, Ray McFall, had weakened, thanks partly to the decline in jazz audiences and partly to the success of Mona Best’s Casbah, whose membership now stood at over 3000. During the Beatles’ absence in Germany, rock bands had been let into the Cavern, albeit as gradually and reluctantly as tradespeople into Ascot’s Royal Enclosure. In their post-Hamburg hiatus, it was Mrs Best–still working tirelessly on behalf of ‘Pete’s group’, as she saw it–who persuaded Ray McFall to try them out.

McFall had had the bright idea of lunch-time live music sessions to attract the young female office employees who commuted into central Liverpool each day. The Beatles’ debut was at such a session on 9 February 1961, with Stu Sutcliffe (who’d returned home in January) back playing bass.

A touch of the Ascot Royal Enclosure still lingered. Ray McFall was scandalised by the Beatles’ lack of matching suits, collars and ties, and threatened not to allow them onstage. He relented when the Cavern deejay, Bob Wooler, pointed out their great advantage over other musicians, who had regular jobs during the day. Being all unemployed, they were permanently available to play at lunch-time. Wooler dubbed them ‘a rock ‘n’ dole group’.

At the Cavern, they were required to perform for only an hour at a time–a mere finger-snap after their marathon sets at the Indra and Kaiserkeller. ‘Mach Schau’-ing to the limit for 60 minutes still left a huge overdrive of energy, manifested in clowning, repartee with the audience or among themselves, and mimicking other pop performers. Paul’s speciality was taking off the Shadows’ trouble-prone bass-player, Jet Harris, who in a recent Cavern appearance had managed to fall off the stage.

‘Everyone smoked in those days, and the Beatles all used to be dragging on ciggies during their set,’ remembers Cavern habitué Frieda Kelly, who was then 19. ‘George would put one behind his ear for later, or wedge it in the head of his guitar. Paul smoked as much as the others, but we knew he used to buy his cigarettes at George Henry Lee, the department store, where they had a kiosk. That used to seem so much more sophisticated than going to an ordinary tobacconist’s.’

To begin with, the Beatles weren’t stars of the Cavern, just one in a rota of bands covering much the same American rock ‘n’ roll and R&B material, including Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the Big Three (formerly Cass and the Cassanovas) and Gerry and the Pacemakers, who’d replaced them at the Hamburg Top Ten club. They stood out from the competition by the eclecticism of their material, playing the little-known B-sides of familiar A-sides, or songs associated with female performers–like the Shirelles’ ‘Boys’–or standards and show tunes never attempted by a rock band before.

Paul was always at the forefront of this experimentation, both its hard and soft side. On the one hand, he begged Bob Wooler to lend him–and him alone–Chan Romero’s raucous ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’, the pièce-de-résistance of Wooler’s import singles collection, so that he could replicate its joyous mindlessness. On the other, he carefully studied and copied two records by jazz diva Peggy Lee, borrowed from his cousin Bett: ‘Fever’ and ‘Till There Was You’, the latter a misty-eyed ballad from a hit Broadway show, The Music Man. But as yet few Lennon-McCartney compositions were included in their act, lest the Liverpool crowd objected to their wasting time that could have been filled by Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins.

For its former members, and millions of modern proxy ones, the Cavern needs no prose poem to recreate its purgatorial Paradise: the health and safety nightmare of an unventilated cellar packed full of chain-smokers and rife with dodgy electrical plugs, yet with no sprinkler system or even emergency exit; the men’s toilet where one stood on a plank over a permanent foetid lake; the women’s toilet where audacious rats sometimes rode atop swinging doors; the constant shower of flakes from the white-distempered ceiling, known as ‘Cavern dandruff’; the energy and euphoria which–so unlike Hamburg–were fuelled by nothing stronger than coffee and Coca-Cola; the body-heat that rose up the 18 steps and sent clouds of steam billowing into Mathew Street; the mingled scents of sweat, mould, cheese-rind, rotting vegetables, mouse-droppings and disinfectant that impregnated clothes beyond the help of any dry cleaner.

‘You could be on a bus, with two girls right at the other end,’ Frieda Kelly remembers, ‘and you’d know straight away they’d been to the Cavern.’

Frieda herself preferred the Beatles’ lunch-time sessions, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, when the place was less crowded, the atmosphere more relaxed and the audience overwhelmingly female. The band played two sets: from 12 to 1 p.m. and 1.15 to 2.15. ‘I used to time my lunch hour so I could see the second set. One of them might turn up late–usually George–so the first set wouldn’t be a full hour. And by the second one, they’d really have warmed up.’

The central tunnel containing the stage was so narrow that, even on their kiddy-size wooden chairs, the girls could sit only seven abreast, like a bouffanted, mascara-ed kindergarten. Everyone had their allotted place, or ‘spec’, so there was little pushing or quarrelling. Those at the front always looked their very best for their idols, dressing up to the nines and arriving with just-washed hair in thickets of rollers which they didn’t remove until the last seconds before their idols came on.

Frieda Kelly’s spec was standing next to the left-hand wall, facing the door to the tiny backstage room where the bands changed and tuned up and Bob Wooler made his famously punning PA announcements (‘Hi, all you Cavern-dwellers! Welcome to the best of cellars!’) and played records from his own private collection during intermissions. ‘It meant standing up for an hour, but that never bothered me. It always seemed to go by in about five minutes.’

Frieda, whose life was to be closely intertwined with the Beatles’, remembers this as the time when Paul and John seemed closest. ‘While they were playing, it was as if they could read each other’s minds. One of them only had to play a note or say a word, or just nod, and the other knew what he wanted him to do. John, of course, was as blind as a bat, but never went onstage wearing glasses. When someone handed him a written request, he couldn’t ever see it, so he’d hand it to Paul to read out.’

Many of the girls were so near that they made requests verbally, without shouting or even raising their voices. Paul still remembers a pair named Chris and Val who always asked for the same Coasters’ song in thick Scouse. ‘Sing “Searchin’”, Paul,’ they’d plead softly in unison, pronouncing it ‘sea-urchin’.

The first Jim McCartney knew of the Cavern was finding Paul’s shirts so drenched with sweat that they had to be wrung out over the kitchen sink. Jim’s workplace at the Cotton Exchange was only a few minutes’ walk from Mathew Street and at the first opportunity he dropped by the club during his own lunch hour. But the crowd in front of the stage was so large that he couldn’t attract his son’s attention.

John’s Aunt Mimi saw the Beatles at the Cavern just once, then vowed never to set foot in it again. But Jim, who worked only a few streets away, often popped in at lunch-time. If he was cooking supper at 20 Forthlin Road that night, he’d drop off some chops or a pound of sausages for Paul to take home after the show and put into the fridge.

The Reeperbahn’s door had not slammed on the Beatles irrevocably. Their engagement at the Top Ten club was still open, if some way could be found of lifting the one-year ban imposed on Paul and Pete Best as a result of the Bambi ‘arson’ episode. Paul therefore drafted a contrite letter to the West German foreign office on his and Pete’s behalf. It was, as usual, literate and persuasive, but told rather a large white lie (that neither of them drank alcohol) to support his plea that a vengeful Bruno Koschmider had wildly exaggerated a stupid but harmless prank:

We both swear that we had no intention whatsoever of burning the cinema or maliciously damaging its property. The whole incident had no motive to prompt it, in fact there was no reason at all behind the burning. It was just a stupid trick which we feel we ought to have been punished for in a less drastic manner.