John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Another new ally, just as important—though nowhere near as long-lasting—was the disc jockey Bob Wooler, who presided at almost every hall where they played. Portly and dignified, Wooler looked older than his thirty years, but his voice resonated with all the gee-whiz enthusiasm his adolescent public could wish. John mocked him for his red face and senatorial manner, but also respected him as a kind of Alan Freed figure, Merseyside’s very own Moondog, whose encyclopedic knowledge of pop, standards, and even classical music helped the Beatles keep an edge over their competition. It was Wooler, for instance, who suggested they dramatize their opening by playing a few thunderous bars of the William Tell Overture, then striking up their first number before the stage curtains opened to reveal them. He received the same respectful attention even when pointing out what other observers, in Hamburg as well as Liverpool, had already noted: that the group member with the most ardent female following was not John, or even Paul, but Pete Best. On Wooler’s advice, one night they tried moving Pete’s drums from the rear of the stage to the center foreground. The new look was abandoned, however, after screaming girls almost dragged Pete off the stage.

  In mid-January, Stu Sutcliffe finally came back from Hamburg, reluctantly leaving his German fiancée, to enroll for his deferred teacher-training course at the art college. John was overjoyed to see him, as his sister Pauline remembers. “[John] came round and they talked for hours. They went out of the door that night like Siamese twins.”

  The Beatles’ newfound wild popularity made Stu seem even more of a misfit in their ranks. Having not touched a bass for something like six weeks, he had forgotten almost all he’d ever learned, and allowed his fingertips to soften so that pressing the heavy strings down on their frets was as painful as when he was a beginner. Beatle converts up and down Merseyside puzzled over this new lineup of four figures basking in the limelight and a fifth, much smaller one with his back turned in embarrassment. George and Paul began to show active resentment at having to carry a passenger with so many searching Liverpool eyes now trained on them. Only John seemed to notice nothing amiss.

  Stu had been appalled by the “brutality” of the Reeperbahn, but somehow had always led a charmed life there. Back in Liverpool, where Teddy Boys considered an evening without bloodshed an evening wasted, he was not so fortunate. Only a couple of weeks after he rejoined the Beatles, they were playing Lathom Hall, one of the toughest venues on their circuit. After the performance, while the others were loading equipment into Neil Aspinall’s van, a group of Teds cornered Stu backstage and began to wade into him. John and Pete Best came to his rescue, John fighting off the attackers with such reckless fury that he broke the little finger of his right hand. He wore a splint on it for a couple of weeks afterward, but even so it always remained slightly deformed.

  Stu’s mother, Millie, later recalled going to Stu’s bedroom after he came home, and finding blood everywhere. He told her he’d been in a fight and had been kicked in the head, but forbade her to summon medical help—even threatening to walk out of the house if she tried. Next morning, he relented and was examined by the family’s doctor, who reassured Millie that he’d sustained no serious harm and that a day in bed should see him right again.

  While the Beatles were off on their travels, there had also been a radical change to Liverpool’s own musical map. The Cavern club had finally come to its senses.

  Gone—or at least going—was that stronghold of trad jazz zealots where John’s attempt to play rock ’n’ roll with the Quarrymen three years earlier had brought him a stern public warning. Early in 1960, faced with declining receipts, the Cavern’s founder, Alan Sytner, had passed the business to his family’s accountant, a neat, precise man named Ray McFall. Though himself certainly no rock fan, McFall realized which way the winds of youthful obsession were blowing. That August, while the Beatles were touring Scotland with Johnny Gentle, the Cavern presented its first-ever “beat sessions,” featuring Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Gerry and the Pacemakers.

  Anxious at the same time not to cast off his jazz clientele, McFall hit on a way of accommodating both genres so that their respective audiences need not even set eyes on each other. Mathew Street, where the Cavern was located, stood in the very heart of Liverpool’s commercial district, barely a minute’s walk from teeming thoroughfares like North John Street and Whitechapel. The young female office and shop workers who were the beat groups’ main constituency swarmed through the quarter by the hundred each lunchtime, gazing aimlessly into store windows or eating their sandwiches on the steps of Victorian monuments. Ray McFall’s brain wave was to put on lunchtime beat sessions at the Cavern, from one to two p.m.

  Mona Best, as the Beatles’ de facto agent, had recommended them to McFall soon after their return from Hamburg. Early in 1961, when Bob Wooler was hired as the Cavern’s resident emcee, he, too, urged his new employer to book them without delay. The difficulty was that the Cavern beat-music nights still took place only on Wednesdays, when Brian Kelly had the Beatles tied up for weeks to come. The only available slot was the weekday lunchtime sessions.

  Playing at this time of day was tricky for the great majority of groups, whose members had precious nine-to-five jobs in factories or offices. With John, George, Pete, and Stu it was no problem, but for Paul McCartney it brought a moment of truth that could well have left pop music history the poorer. In his zeal to placate his father, Paul had now found work with the electrical coil–winding firm of Massey and Coggins, where, quickly singled out as potential management material, he had been put into the office on a—for then—very healthy wage of £7 per week. Absenting himself for three hours each day (one to set up, one to play, and one to dismantle) could well put this promising career in jeopardy.

  John reacted to Paul’s dilemma with little of the understanding and forbearance he showed to Stu. “I was always saying ‘Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off. He can’t hit you…he’s an old man.’” But Paul fretted on about Massey and Coggins and how playing at the Cavern could ruin his prospects there, until at last John’s patience snapped. “I told him on the phone ‘Either come or you’re out.’ So he had to make a decision between me and his dad, and in the end he chose me.”

  By even the lowest modern standards of health and safety, the Cavern could never have existed. The cellar of a warehouse storing fruit and cheeses in transit to or from the docks, its amenities as a place of entertainment were virtually zero. From a narrow doorway in Mathew Street, seventeen stone steps descended to a space measuring no more than about fifty by thirty feet, lined with close-set red Victorian bricks and divided into three arched bays. It had no heating (at least, not the mechanical kind), no air conditioning, no exhaust fans, no limit on the numbers who could be admitted, no smoke alarms, no sprinkler system, and no emergency exit.

  The stage, situated at the inner end of the central bay, was barely two feet high, its only lighting a crude wooden batten studded with ordinary 60 watt bulbs directly overhead. Behind the stage was a single communal dressing room–tune-up area, from which Bob Wooler (aka Mister Big Beat) announced the various acts over the club’s PA system and played records from his large personal collection during intermissions. Toilet facilities had to be shared with the customers, though these were so unpleasant that most—particularly females—found it more advisable to “go before they came.”

  When the Cavern was full, as it almost always was, the heat in its unventilated brick cockpit became stupefying. Former patrons remember how, as one descended the steps, the sweltering exhalation from below gradually coiled up around one’s legs like a serpent. Within it were multiple odors—the sour vomit aroma of cheese-rind seeping from the warehouse, cigarette smoke, hair lacquer, body odor, disinfectant, mildew, oxtail soup, and rat droppings. The combined heat and vibration caused a constant shower of tiny flakes from the whitewashed ceiling—known as “Cavern dandruff”—to drizzle gently down onto the dancers beneath. Girls regularly fainted, as did boys; in the crush of
bodies, the only way to get them to fresh air was to pass them in supine bundles over everyone else’s heads.

  The Beatles’ first lunchtime appearance at the Cavern took place on Tuesday, February 9, for a collective fee of £5. The result was a smaller-scale, subterranean replay of the hysteria at Litherland Town Hall. There and then, Ray McFall signed them up as the club’s resident lunchtime group, working in alternation with Gerry and the Pacemakers.

  But if John pictured himself storming the jazzers’ sacred citadel in one triumphant bound, he was soon disillusioned. For McFall’s policy was to wean the Cavern’s customers off Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber and onto Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry only by gradual degrees. Therefore, even though they were such a hit at lunchtimes, the Beatles could not immediately play there in the evenings. On weekends, the club was still consecrated to trad; on Tuesdays, the only weeknight other than Wednesday that it opened, McFall featured the Bluegenes, who played a mixture of rock and jazz with an old-fashioned stand-up double bass.

  The first nighttime spot he could offer was not until six weeks later and then only as an opening act in the Bluegenes’ weekly “guest night.” As at noontime, the female cohorts from Litherland, Lathom, and Aintree came pouring in; the Bluegenes’ clever jazz-rock fusion was thrown into total eclipse. Afterward, two of the group gave McFall a furious tongue-lashing for letting their prestige be undermined in such a way.

  With the Cavern’s other resident lunchtime group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, there was no such tense standoff. Their singer Gerry Marsden, a happy-go-lucky eighteen-year-old from the Dingle, had known John since they were both schoolboys with skiffle groups (Gerry’s for a long time always well in the lead). “John was my mate,” he remembers. “We had the same sense of humour. We used to spend hours together reading the Bible backwards, putting in our own made-up words and doing funny voices.”

  When disaster overtook the Beatles in Hamburg, Gerry and his group had been booked to open Peter Eckhorn’s Top Ten Club in their place. The Pacemakers had a very different presentational style, dressing in smart blazers with monogrammed pockets and featuring an electric keyboard, but they played across the same wide musical spectrum as the Beatles, from rock ’n’ roll to ballads, and had much the same irrepressible sense of fun. “We made an agreement with John and Paul not to pinch one another’s numbers,” Gerry says. “We were the deadliest rivals onstage, but the dearest of friends off.”

  Narrow, cobbled, uneventful Mathew Street thus began to lead an unexpected new life in daylight hours. At noon, Mondays to Fridays, a four-abreast line would begin to form at the Cavern’s hatch-like entrance, growing by the minute until it stretched back past the warehouses and delivery trucks and piled-up fruit crates, eighty-odd yards to the junction with Whitechapel. By modern standards, everything was wondrously peaceable and self-disciplined. A single doorman kept order on the outside and was more than adequate for the task; inside, there was no “security” whatever. Admission cost one shilling per person for members, one and sixpence for nonmembers. No alcohol was sold either at lunchtimes or at night, only coffee and soft drinks.

  Gerry Marsden was nicknamed the Human Jukebox for the dozens of songs he knew by heart, but even he struggled to match the variety, ambition—and, often, sheer contrariness—of the Beatles’ Cavern repertoire. With John’s and Paul’s powers of mimicry and George’s skill in decrypting chords, they could almost instantly reproduce the most complex American number: Larry Williams’s “Slow Down,” Carl Perkins’s “Glad All Over,” the lusty call-and-response of Gary U.S. Bonds’s “New Orleans,” and the weird blues harmonica waltz time of James Ray’s “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody.” Audaciously, in that macho culture, they would also play songs by black American female groups, like the Marvelettes’ “Please Mister Postman” or the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”—often not bothering to change the lyrics. There was, for instance, a Shirelles track called “Boys,” which hooked them instantly with its frantic background chorus of “Bop shoowop, bop-bop shoowop”; in all the times that “Boys” rang through the Cavern’s arches, neither they nor their audience ever seemed to notice that they were singing a hymn of adoration to their own sex.

  The veering between tough and tender sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic. At one moment, John could be snarling Barrett Strong’s “Money,” wringing every ounce of shock value from its belligerent materialism: “The best things in life are free, but you can give ’em to the birds and bees…I want money!…” Then the stomping rock beat would fade into a cocktail-lounge samba as Paul put his mouth close to the mike, glanced around the subtropical gloom with huge, sad brown eyes, and sang “Till There Was You,” as recorded by Peggy Lee, from Broadway’s hit show The Music Man. The two could exchange moods as ambidextrously as they did their guitars; without a blink, Paul might be belting out “Kansas City” or John crooning the Teddy Bears’ ballad “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”

  As they poured forth this cornucopia of rock ’n’ roll, pop, R&B, country, blues, standards, and show tunes, it was still only dimly realized that the pair also wrote songs of their own. Bob Wooler later recalled that, out of around a hundred numbers played regularly by the Beatles at the Cavern, only about five were Lennon-McCartney compositions. As Paul McCartney now explains, “We started doing our own fledgling stuff [mainly] in order to have one or two songs that the other bands couldn’t do before we went on.” These tended to be ballads—Paul’s “Like Dreamers Do,” for example—and for a long time were greeted with no more than polite indifference. “The fans weren’t highly impressed, because it wasn’t what they’d come to hear,” Gerry Marsden remembers. To John, in comparison with rock-’n’-roll classics, his and Paul’s handiwork seemed “a bit wet…but we gradually broke that down and decided to try them.”

  Paul still nourished the ambition to compose a stage musical, which had led him to write “When I’m Sixty-four” aged little more than sixteen. According to Neil Aspinall, he made a short attempt to steer John away from rock and into Rodgers and Hammerstein territory. “Paul told me that they went to see some show like Oklahoma together—but after about ten minutes, John just said ‘Fuck it’ and walked out. Guys singing to girls and girls to guys…that just wasn’t his scene.”

  Every major Liverpool group had devoted, even fanatical, female devotees. But from February 1961, when they began appearing daily at the Cavern, the Beatles’ following displayed the characteristics of a fully formed movement. At every show, the first two dozen rows of undersize wooden chairs under the center arch would be packed solid with their beehive hairdos, balloon skirts, and black-daubed eyes, like some restless Sunday school class in Hades. This was a very Liverpool kind of fandom, adoring yet not in the least reverential. Before each show, like all the other Beatles, John would be deluged with phone calls (Aunt Mimi’s number was in the book, still under Uncle George’s name—GATeacre 1696) asking him to play requests. And after each performance, all five had their pick of a human smorgasbord, even more willing than they had known in Hamburg. “I once got into my van after collecting them, but couldn’t get it to start,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “Its front wheels were being lifted right up off the road. When I went and opened up the back door, they had eighteen girls in there with them.”

  But the Beatles at the Cavern were not just a girl thing. Boys who had once furiously resented their inamoratas’ interest in a pop musician on record or the cinema screen, let alone in live performance, now succumbed to an equal if less demonstrative fascination. In an era of growing male fashion consciousness, boys were intrigued by the Beatles’ allover black leather and cowboy boots, and tried to dress like them as far as Liverpool’s menswear shops would allow. Girls might swoon for shy Pete or baby-faced Paul, but the quieter masculine fan worship settled mainly on John, with his turned-up collar, his two-horned Rickenbacker, and the go-to-hell attitude that was so very largely bluff.

  The Beatles in these days were as much a com
edy turn as a beat group. John sang almost as many songs in joke accents—German or French or “Speedy Gonzales” Mexican—as he did straight, and disrupted even the holiest rock-’n’-roll texts with his “cripple” leers, hunched back, and claw hands. While playing, they puffed on cigarettes, swigged soft drinks from the bottle, cracked private jokes with one another, or carried on conversations with friends in the audience. When, as often happened, the strain on the precarious electrical outlets became too much and their amps died into silence, John and Paul would do a Morecambe and Wise comedy routine or a scene from The Goon Show (“Oo, he’s fallen in duh watuh!…”) or sing the TV jingle for Sunblest sliced bread.

  Among John’s most devoted regular followers was Patricia Inder, the tiny blonde girl who’d made his night at Aintree Institute by saying the Beatles would be “bigger than Cliff one day.” A docker’s daughter, Patricia lived above the post office in Granby Street and worked in the fabrics department at Blackler’s store, where bolts of cloth were still cut with giant shears in the Victorian manner. “Everywhere the Beatles went, I used to go,” she recalls. “But it wasn’t just about sex; we were all mates in a gang together. After their gig, we’d collect a few loosies [cigarettes sold singly for halfpence each], a bag of chips and a bottle of cheap wine, and go back to someone’s place and just sit around talking about music. I loved rock ’n’ roll, and being with them was like being around five Eddie Cochrans.”

  Like most of her friends, she was initially attracted to Paul, whom they called “the Legs,” but, to her amazement, gradually realized that John liked her. “He wouldn’t make a move on me, though, because when I first met him I was only fifteen, and especially when he found out that I was still a virgin. He took his cue from George, who used to say, ‘I don’t do virgins.’”