When They Were Boys (38 page)

The boys perform on February 19, 1963, at the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool, where they would make nearly three hundred appearances.

WHEN

THEY

WERE

BOYS

P
ART
F
OUR:
W
HERE
W
ERE
Y
OU IN '61?

 

S
till lonely, still desolate, but rescuers await. The Prince makes an entrance with the Tower of Power. Climb down the steps to the filthy grit and choking smoke where the Cavern waits, and so does deejay Bob with a bag of tricks. Later, pulverized, the trick's on him. He says, “Can you dig it?” Bill Harry's magic survey is out. Billy Kinsley sees energy through the haze of chaos. Merseyside is alive with everything from Flamingoes and Undertakers to a Terry and a Jay, a Jerry and a Derry, plus Pete, John, George, Paul, and sometimes Stu. As the leaves fell, so did Brian, aka “Eppy,” the man with those silky-soft whispers. He traveled to his “Cellarful of Noise.” He walked in as a skeptic, climbed out in love. And as '61 approached '62, he took the risk of a lifetime—and mind you, his own lifetime was not an ordinary one.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NINETEEN STEPS TO HEAVEN

“It was not the Hollywood Bowl.”

—John Lennon, on the Cavern

“It was hot . . . a horrible odor . . . sweaty . . . I was breathless.”

—Joe Ankrah of the Chants, on his first visit to the Cavern

“It was wild, very much alive!”

—Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats, on the Cavern

I
T WAS LUNCH HOUR ON
F
EBRUARY
9, 1961,
WHEN THE FIVE
B
EATLES
descended the steps for the first time as “the Beatles,” the first of what would be hundreds of lunchtime and other concerts at the Cavern—the storied and gritty home of the Beatles' early exploits.

It almost didn't happen. The Cavern's owner, Ray McFall, had forbidden jeans (or, as they would say in the States at the time, “dungarees”) from the club. McFall had even been
opposed
to rock 'n' roll in the beginning, but Sam Leach's success with the boys at a nearby club had changed all of that. The Prince of Mathew Street's opening of the Iron Door club nearby forced McFall to rethink his format. Once again, Leach paved the way. But the Cavern was still off-limits to jeans of any kind. McFall was just following tradition, a precedent set by the Cavern's original owner. Bill Harry says the Cavern was always concerned about propriety, and image. The truth is that propriety and image always vanish when father time and his powerful force sets the pace. Harry says,

A
LAN
S
YTNER WAS THE MAN WHO CONCEIVED THE
C
AVERN IN
M
ATHEW
S
TREET, AFTER VISITING A
F
RENCH JAZZ CLUB CALLED
L
E
C
AVEAU
F
RANCAIS
. H
E WAS STRICTLY A JAZZ MAN AND WOULDN
'
T ALLOW ROCK
'
N
'
ROLL TO BE PLAYED AT THE CLUB
. H
E BOOKED SKIFFLE GROUPS TO SUPPORT THE JAZZ BAND BILL TOPPERS
. T
HE
Q
UARRYMEN WERE AWARE
THEY WEREN
'
T ALLOWED TO PLAY ROCK MUSIC, BUT WHEN THEY APPEARED THERE AS THE
Q
UARRYMEN ON
7 A
UGUST
1957, J
OHN
L
ENNON COULDN
'
T RESIST AND BURST INTO THE
E
LVIS NUMBERS
“H
OUND
D
OG
”
AND
“B
LUE
S
UEDE
S
HOES
”; A
LAN SENT A MESSAGE UP TO THE STAGE
, “C
UT THE BLOODY ROCK
!”

On the very first day, it was almost a non-story. The no-jeans directive forced doorman Pat Delaney to try to turn away the Beatles because bass guitarist Stu Sutcliffe was wearing jeans. The Beatles were on the bill, but the directive applied to paid entertainers and paying customers alike. Delaney, a former police officer, relented and let them in, but owner McFall wasn't happy, delivering what was described as a “stern” message to the boys in their dressing area. In due time, the Beatles, who would become such a sizzling draw, would never be stopped at the door again. So much for the original bans on rock and denim.

In truth, the Beatles should have arrived in wet suits or fancy bathing attire, or at least something, anything, to keep them dry. The inside of the original Cavern was not environmentally sound.

Sir Ron Watson, the Southport man who saw so many of those concerts as a break from his office job nearby, reminisces about the feel of the club, more pleased about the music than the atmosphere: “It was so hot, Larry, so steamy, and tremendously uncomfortable, but the beat of their music, believe me, made up for all of that. It was the music that kept bringing me back, day after day.”

Joe Ankrah, he of the wonderful collection of singers known as the Chants, remembers feeling all closed in, claustrophobic, even as his group jammed with the boys. It was a sweat-dripping mess, with healthy breathing a rarity.

“My God,” he says. “The cigarette smoke and the moisture created a horrible odor. The walls had drips of moisture on them. The walls had sweat, the people were sweating, the bands were dripping with sweat. Smoke from the cigarettes was forming a moving cloud over the room. You might say I was breathless.”

Ankrah, whose group, facing intense racial barriers, was given an enormous
break by Paul and the boys, will never forget the opportunity, or the impact of the human traffic jam.

“Everybody was so close. Many people were standing. There was little room to stand, or to breathe.”

Mick Jagger first took the Rolling Stones to the Cavern in late 1963. In a brief conversation afterward, he described the in-close excitement: “Was it hot! We almost sweated away. They've had so many big groups at the Cavern that you've got to prove yourself; they asked us back, so they must like us.”

The Merseybeats' Billy Kinsley has spent “nearly a lifetime” at the old Cavern (and the new one), and he says the conditions were much worse than described. “Remember, 130 years ago the building was adjacent to the water, so quite often the toilets in the old building had a problem. . . . Drains in the bathrooms were flooded over the top. . . . It was not pretty. As far as hot, it was hotter than hot. . . . You could walk in and start sweating profusely.”

Famed music historian Spencer Leigh, through his always careful research, says in his book
The Cavern
that the “Beatles walked on water.” He further explains that “when the cavern was excavated in 1982, the builders stumbled upon an old shaft that led to a huge hole . . . a cavern underneath the Cavern, as it were. It was filled with water and, bravely, the architect and the site agent investigated in a rubber dinghy. The lake was one hundred twenty feet deep and seventy feet long . . . they could tell the site was man-made.”

In my conversation with Leigh, the BBC broadcaster and prolific author says, “There was a theory that there was a slave hole there once, but that's unlikely.”

For Leigh, the Cavern is mostly about the Beatles, but also the home base for all of the great Merseyside groups.

“Remember,” he tells me, “although the Quarrymen played there in the fifties, the Beatles' first appearance as the Beatles didn't happen till February of 1961. They were preceded by other bands that could have been headed to greatness, notably Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes. But in the end, it will always be known for the Beatles, and as the most famous club in the world.”

Even in the new location, you can feel the closeness, the intimacy of the Cavern with its small stage and the reverberation of the sound through
the thick walls. But today, unlike 1961, alcoholic beverages are served, and jeans are accepted! Even Julia Baird was dressed in jeans when she met with me recently for a long interview at the Cavern.

Eventually the boys embraced and owned the place, although their first appearance was, according to one witness, not so fine at all.

“When the Beatles first came to the Cavern, I thought [they] were absolutely dreadful, and musically awful,” says Ray Ennis, lead vocalist with the Swinging Blue Jeans. “Stuart was on bass and making a horrendous noise. They were smoking on stage, and Stu was sitting on the piano, facing Pete Best on the drums and not even looking at the audience.”

Stu did have a habit of turning away from the audience, especially in Hamburg, but it seemed to make him all the more intriguing and mysterious.

There was no mystery about the effect of the intimate Cavern on musicians and fans.

Billy Kinsley, whose own band was first called the Mavericks, named affectionately after the popular American TV western, would not have traded the experience for anything. “I was just a wee teenager and there I was with Bob Wooler and all the bands that I idolized. We began working there for about six pounds a night for
all
of us . . . not a lot, mind you, but it was as though they were paying us to have fun, which we did quite intensely.”

For young writer Bill Harry, the descent of nineteen steps into the unknown brought him into several cellar areas that combined to create the Cavern, which for years was a jazz club. Harry's visit was a reunion of sorts of the young art-school students who gathered after school at Ye Cracke, the charming pub where John Lennon, Stu Sutcliffe, Harry, and friends gathered in the “war room” to talk of their role in shaping the future of mankind.

Bill Harry had arrived at the Cavern at the suggestion of Stu, the bass guitarist, who, along with John, was friends and classmates with Harry at the art school. It would be the first of countless visits to the Cavern for Harry, who played a role later in the year in getting Brian Epstein into the club for the first time.

“It was unusual,” says Harry. “Mona Best, who was still developing the allure of the Casbah, and who was doing everything possible to promote
the boys, had talked Cavern owner McFall into booking the group.”

Once again, the forgotten Beatles advocate Mona Best gets the credit for getting them in, not to the biggest, but to the most memorable of all their venues. On that day, in 1961, the modern legend of the Cavern was born, although no one knew it till years later, when it was celebrated, like Hamburg, as the place that drove the Beatles to fame. In reality, it all could be reversed—the Beatles put the Cavern on the map.

In all, the Quarrymen/Beatles played a total of 292 gigs at the Cavern, if you include the Quarrymen's first appearance in 1957. The Beatles' first appearance in February 1961 was supposed to be another big hit, following the Litherland Town Hall surprise success where they were billed as “The Beatles—Direct from Hamburg.”

While not everyone in attendance was impressed, word spread quickly about the simple raw energy of their performance, and in a matter of days the “Fab Five” would be rocking the city.

The group's final appearance was on August 3, 1963, so the record runs at the Cavern spanned a period of six years. But just like Litherland, it was the early appearances that had the most impact.

Young Billy Kinsley remembers the word-of-mouth messages that were spreading through the area: “The Cavern experience was a sudden cultural flash. It wasn't pretty, not comfortable, but being there was the fun, and it was wild and very much alive.”