When They Were Boys (39 page)

And cheap. Admission was a shilling; in those days, that was worth a few American pennies. For the lunchtime crowd, cheese rolls and Coke were available. But liquor was not served, in contrast to the new Cavern, a replica of the original, which was demolished in the seventies.

Chances are the young women and men, dressed to the hilt, would have paid more to be there for the group's heralded arrival. In the end, most of them walked out in a “trance,” according to Bill Harry, who was just a few years older than most of them, and only a year older than John. So when you read the quote of what the music did to
him
, remember that these are the thoughts of a twenty-one-year-old, not the mature writer-legend of Merseyside and beyond. With flair, and his eyes wide open, his head thrust
forward almost like a TV news anchor who wants to get his message across with strong body language, the Bill Harry of the twenty-first century explodes with emotion as he recalls the scene.

“What I remember the most, Larry, about the lunchtime gig, was the startling and quite savage blast of sound. There is no exaggeration when I say that the moment they started playing, the hair on my neck stood up. [What I] recall most about that Thursday lunchtime performance is how the hair on my neck stood up.”

In a commemorative column written on the anniversary of that first Beatles concert for the
Daily Express
, pen pal Harry confirmed an earlier story that some “borrowed equipment from the art school played a significant role in the group's history.”

Harry explains, “We had used students' union funds to buy PA equipment that the band could borrow, but somehow it had never been returned and I noted that the group was using it at this gig.”

And about the drama he had witnessed, he says, “What became apparent from the moment the band took the stage was how they had been transformed by the experience in Germany between August and December 1960, when they had played night after night in a Hamburg
bierkeller
and honed their act.”

At the time, the curious young reporter knew very little about the despair, accusations of criminal activity, and the wild life of Hamburg. In time, he would be the first to report on the grimy life in Hamburg, but on that chilly February day, Bill Harry was all smiles and proud of his art-school compatriots.

Quietly, he thought to himself, “Is this the way we were destined to change the world?”

A Cellarful of Noise
was Brian Epstein's 1965 memoir on his beginnings with the Beatles. Coauthored by Derek Taylor, the book recalled Brian's experience at the Cavern in a different manner than the screams and “hair-raising” experiences of most of the kids who were ten years his junior, but with similar emotional investment.

Three years after he first set eyes on the boys, “in a haze of smoke,”
Epstein, in his always fine-tuned English, said to me, “To say I was impressed was an understatement. Obviously the real discoverers of the Beatles were the intuitive young people of Liverpool who found them quite a long time before my awareness . . . but it was in the cellar . . . the Cavern, where I saw all things coming together . . . the music, the noise, the facial expressions of the customers. It was quite impressive.”

Over the years, until it was closed down in 1973 to make way for a rail line, the original Cavern saw the likes of Gene Vincent, Billy Kinsley, the Big Three, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and His Pacemakers, the Rolling Stones, Billy J. Kramer, Epstein's find Cilla Black, and so many others.

But the spark that became a raging inferno, a steady flame of sound, the real transition from the jazz age to the rock age, began nineteen steps below Mathew Street.

“What was the Cavern like?” I asked John Lennon during the North American tour.

“You would have liked it. Little light, lots of people, very noisy, hot, like me [laughs] . . . but it was not the Hollywood Bowl. It was, for all of us, at the time, pure heaven.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE PRINCE OF MATHEW STREET

“I remember ‘Pike the Mad Axman' . . . curious eyeballs looking ready to pop out of the sockets. . . . Pike used to walk around with [a] meat cleaver and whack people out.”

—Tony Bramwell, on one of the violent “Teddy Boys”

“January 25, 1961. I needed a new band for the new club that was opening, the Casanova Club. So I picked the five Beatles. Yes, the original five. Not a bad choice, eh?”

—Sam Leach, the “Prince of Mathew Street”

T
HE GHOSTS OF
J
OHN AND
G
EORGE ARE PROBABLY SITTING ACROSS FROM HIM, HOLDING A RUM AND
C
OKE
—
or in John's case, a touch of Brandy Alexander—watching the Prince with great glee, and maybe a touch of empathetic laughter thrown in.

The Prince arranges his hair, still wavy with silver shine, and he smiles that toothy smile that made him a teen idol in those heart-gushing early days, when girls became young lovers and boys didn't have to search far for undying affection.

He sits in the corner at the usual table at The Grapes, a small, cluttered, and charming bar, with a stream of live entertainment, located in the heart of Mathew Street, the quaint and sometimes grim-looking walkway that sits adjacent to the new Cavern, as well as the spot of the original Cavern, which was unceremoniously destroyed by the city fathers of Liverpool in the seventies. The Prince is there every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, remembering the many afternoons he spent with the boys, drinking and talking about their favorite subjects: melodies and maidens, not necessarily in that order. His contemporary companions are a cold beer, a bag full of books, and the tourists in Liverpool, never far away and always eager to hear the legacy of his most unusual life. The Prince is a storyteller. He tells his stories with
gracious panache, that stirring Liverpool drawl, the spectacular pauses, so touched by the Irish impact that remains so much a part of the fabric of England's third-largest city.

Yet there were warnings about the veracity of these stories. Warnings are a way of life among the memoirists, the group of the living who claim a piece of the Beatles' legend. In many cases, owning a chapter of the folklore surrounding the boys becomes more important than the accuracy of the story. There is joy in Liverpool, but the surviving storytellers warn that only
their
story is the true story. This author has experienced this more than once, but when it comes to the Prince, there are no warnings, just a heavy dose of affection, and sadness—affection for his dreamlike vision for the boys, sadness that he was preempted by another young dreamer, Brian Epstein.

“Remember his last name, just remember,” said a close friend of three of the Beatles.

I do remember. His name is Leach, Sam Leach, and although like many others he profits from his place in time and history, he doesn't deserve the moniker of the last name. Not at all. Despite the fading memories of time, he was definitely there, and to have been there, to have assembled the memories, and to be equipped with the talent of a superlative storyteller makes Sam Leach one of the premier voices of those left behind.

The Prince offers a selfless view of the beginning, and his history is filled with that greatest of all Liverpudlian requisites for great storytelling: irony with a touch of fate, not just for the boys but for the thousands of teenagers enraptured in the ascension from skiffle music to rock 'n' roll. In his early days as a renegade promoter, the Prince fought off the assault of Teddy Boys, a peculiarly English brand of what fab-fifties Americans would call “juvenile delinquents.” The Beatles would have their fill of Teddy Boys, but the fast-punching Leach would be a pioneer in the fight for good and justice in the small and cheap nightclubs of rock and sock in Liverpool.

The Teddy Boys, unlike their dungaree-clad American counterparts, were thugs dressed as dandies, Brylcreem helping to place a shine on their hair, draped coats hiding their weapons of destruction, mainly a well-developed muscle group and a spare knife thrown in, but used cautiously. Teds didn't
want to kill, because once put away, they were rendered useless by society in their ability to destroy. Like most anarchists, they had no real cause to fight except the ultimate litmus test of nihilists: conformity. They were perhaps the best-dressed rioters in contemporary history, with Edwardian frills in their shirts and “winkle-creeper” shoes; dangerous in their creeping silence, they made life miserable for random victims who dared dress routinely or demurely. With their sometimes-ruffled high collars, the Teds looked elegant; their message was not. The Teds were somewhat attractive to young John Lennon, not for the fisticuffs but because of their tight trousers and “winkle-picker” shoes, also called “wrinkle pickers.” At first he was enamored of the fashion. Alan White, he of the immortal rock band Yes, and the drummer on John Lennon's track “Imagine,” remembers that the Teds even spiked fashion interests throughout Britain.

“I remember wearing those kind of shoes when I was a teenager; they were called wrinkle pickers because you could pick wrinkles out of clothes with a pointed toe. The soles of the shoes were lined with crepe, and were famously known as ‘brothel creepers,' because that was the recommended footwear, the legend said, when you crept into brothels, or so they said.”

For all their style issues, many of which were romanticized by the teenagers of England, the Teds were truly and masochistically violent. Beatle buddy and promotional icon Tony Bramwell laughs out loud when he speaks about the Teds, but there is no question that, back in the day, he was terrified.

“I remember ‘Pike the Mad Axman,'” Bramwell says, curious eyeballs looking ready to pop out of their sockets. “Pike used to walk around with [a] meat cleaver and whack people out.

“Ray Sutherland. Now there was a danger. He had razor blades hidden in the lapels of his jacket and if you grabbed him, well, you would, well, cut, pretty bad.”

The Teddy Boys fought often. Prince Sam Leach, the deejay and later publicity manager of the Blue Diamonds Club, fought back, in 1958 and 1959. Prince Leach also was eyewitness to history, even though he rejected an opportunity both in 1957 and 1958 to book a well-regarded group, known as the Quarrymen. It was a colossal misstep, but after all, the Prince was
riding a thrill-a-minute roller coaster, except, that is, when the Teddy Boys arrived on the scene, one of them on a motorbike, in 1958. That was the night the Teddy invasion forced Barbara Burroughs through a plate-glass window and into the body of a policeman a floor below. The policeman survived. But fate would have its day, wouldn't it.

Sitting in the semicircle booth of a waterfront restaurant, slamming Sam, sipping a Guinness draft, erupts in laughter.

“Barbara,” he says. “Barbara was daft for the Blue Diamonds. Years later, she married the Diamonds' chief guitarist, Frank Campbell. I've always said that the night of the Teddy attack [when she smashed through the window] was the night Barbara ‘fell' for Frank.”

While Derek Taylor developed his writing skills, Brian Epstein shaped the bottom line, and Tony Bramwell looked in adoration at the wild mini-club scene and stole free rides from George Harrison's bus-driver father, and high schooler Bill Harry carefully chronicled his friend John Lennon with the future newspaper already in his head, Sam Leach began adoring his role as a young Colonel Parker, a novice P. T. Barnum, and above all, a charmer with a fantastic smile and the passion to back it up.

It was with that backdrop that the Prince plotted day and night to find venues for the boys, bigger and financially more attractive. Frankly, he knew that the Beatles had not yet matched in their hometown their early successes in Hamburg.

Leach gleefully remembers:

J
ANUARY 25, 1961
. I
NEEDED A NEW BAND FOR THE NEW CLUB THAT WAS OPENING, THE
C
ASANOVA
C
LUB
. S
O
I
PICKED THE FIVE
B
EATLES
. Y
ES, THE ORIGINAL FIVE
. N
OT A BAD CHOICE, EH
? I
MET THEM AT
H
AMILTON
H
ALL, A HORRIBLE CLUB, A REAL DIVE WHERE THERE WAS ALWAYS LOTS OF FIGHTING
. T
HEIR DRESSING ROOM WAS A CONVERTED LADIES' TOILET
. S
O WHEN
I
CAME IN, EVERYONE WAS FIGHTING, AND WHEN THE BAND CAME ON
, I
NOTICED ALL THE FIGHTING STOPPED AND ALL EYES WERE FOCUSED ON THE BAND
. . . . Y
ES, THEY ALL STOPPED FIGHTING TO WATCH THE
B
EATLES
. T
HAT IS HOW GOOD THEY WERE
. F
IRST TIME
I
EVER SAW THAT HAPPEN
. I
KNEW
I
HAD TO HAVE THEM FOR THE OPENING OF THE
C
ASANOVA
C
LUB
.

So the Prince went looking, and what he found was several venues, like the Hamilton Club and the big one, the Tower Ballroom, that helped secure their future, even at a time in 1961 when the band members were arguing and, at different times, talking about splitting up. As Leach found bigger venues, the internal issues were escalating. There were simmering disputes between John and Paul, even months after Stuart Sutcliffe left the band, John still upset that Paul's disappointment in Stuart's music may have accelerated the bass guitarist's departure, even though Stuart
did
leave on his own to study art full-time. Money was always a point of contention, and Paul was quietly beating the drums to replace Pete, even as Mona Best continued playing a major role in the boys' lives.