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Page 35
Staring at a dead end, George flirted with emigration. First he tried to persuade his parents to consider a family move to Australia, which they rejected. Then he thought of emigrating alone, a 16-year-old planning to live in Malta (he’d seen it in some travel brochures) or Canada. He went as far as requesting the application forms but lost heart when he saw parental authority was needed. He didn’t even bother asking.30
When he could charm a bob or two from his mum and dad, George continued to take himself into Liverpool. On several afternoons, John and Cyn emerged from art school in the hope of a quiet time to themselves only to be hailed or whistled at by George as they walked down the street. He would catch them up and say, “Where you two off to?” and “Can I come?” Neither had the heart to tell him to push off, and so, much to Cyn’s disappointment and annoyance, he’d trail around with them. As John would remember, “George’d be following us down the street, two hundred yards away, and she’d be saying, ‘What does he want?’ I said, ‘He just wants to hang out. Should we take him with us?’ She’d say, ‘Oh, OK, we’ll take him to the bloody movies.’ And we used to allow him to come to the movies with us and things like that.”31
• • •
This was an active period for Richy Starkey, still drumming with both the Darktown and Texans, and trying the patience of his fiancée, who didn’t appreciate having his divided attention. As Elsie and Harry had no home phone, Richy’s bandmates could only reach him by calling Mr. Jones, the newsagent on High Park Street for whom he’d briefly worked; Len Jones would send someone to knock on Richy’s door and he’d scurry round from Admiral Grove to the back of the shop to take the call and get the latest news on where he was wanted … and what new name Al Caldwell had cooked up for his group.
Possibly inspired by US group Johnny and the Hurricanes—not yet big in Britain but having hits in America—the Texans had just become Al Storm and his Hurricanes, and the switch coincided with a sudden upswing in activity, when Richy Starkey found himself in Liverpool’s busiest rock and roll group. Any lingering note of skiffle or an acoustic sound was done, gone, finito: Johnny Byrne had bought himself a new Antoria electric guitar, which would become his trademark, so now it was rock all the way; and while Al certainly wasn’t the greatest singer around, such was his flash and flair they could impress in spite of it.‖ On Saturday, September 5, when yet another new club opened on Merseyside—“The Jive Hive” at St. Luke’s Hall in Crosby—Al Storm and his Hurricanes got the residency.
The other Hurricanes lived in the Broad Green/Old Swan area, so the group mostly played north of the city, a bus ride away and always at least two for Richy. Afterward, if the last bus had gone, pretty Iris Caldwell would thumb a lift while the lads hid in bushes, waiting with their gear for a car to stop. Despite the risk of attack by Teddy Boy gangs, Richy carried his full kit now and it was always a sod to transport. The worst part was getting a bus home: even if people helped him aboard they weren’t with him when he reached his destination. He would recall: “One miserable night when I got off at my stop—it was half a mile to the house and I had four cases. I had to run twenty yards with two cases, keeping my eye on the other two left behind, then go back, pick them up and run forty yards with those, drop those, go back, and so on. It was the most miserable thing and all I thought was, ‘Shit, I need a car.’ ”32
The last thing Richy needed now was his studies. The third year of his part-time college course at Riversdale Tech was evenings only, no longer day-release, and he drew the line. That’s enough of that. Abandoning it meant, in the fourth of his five years, jeopardizing his apprenticeship. And just at the time all this was going on, he suffered a tragedy: his beloved Grandad Starkey passed away on October 3, dying from a chronic peptic ulcer while in care at Sefton General Hospital, and it all happened fast. Johnny Parkin Starkey had filled the place of his absent son, who’d left his child at three; he’d always been there for his Lazarus, his bloody Noddler, the boy who’d just finished paying back the money borrowed for his drum kit.
Richy would describe it as one of the saddest moments of his life. He held himself together until the burial, four days later at Allerton Cemetery, but as he watched his grandad being lowered into the ground he broke down, sobbing beyond consolation. Soon afterward, widowed Granny Annie gave him a precious keepsake, Johnny’s wedding ring. Richy was going to need it when he married Gerry. Such was his love for Grandad, and his passion for rings, he slipped the broad gold band on his finger right away and said he’d never remove it.
He now wore three rings. Wearing two hadn’t been all that unusual, but three caught the eye. Every ring told a story, and he was happy to tell it when people asked—“this one’s from me mum I got when I was 16, this one’s an engagement ring from me girlfriend, and this one’s me grandad’s wedding ring I got when he died.” Three was a collection, and people started to call him “Rings.”
Rings Starkey played his last booking with the Darktown on October 16, at the Cavern. It was the usual story: the other guys drifted off to be fitters or mechanics or to get married, leaving their youth behind. He now gave all his playing energy to Al Storm and his Hurricanes. Unable to get in at the Casbah because a group called the Quarrymen had the residency, they played a few Sunday sessions at Lowlands. They also took part in the return to Liverpool of Carroll Levis’s TV Star Search, passing the Empire audition and then going through the usual rigmarole, a winning spot during the week earning them a place in Saturday’s finale. The Hurricanes came very close to securing the great prize, a TV appearance, finishing overall runners-up.
There’s no explanation for why the Quarrymen didn’t enter Levis’s contest this time. Twelve months earlier, when the group was in limbo, John, Paul and George went to great lengths to take part, twice going to Manchester as Johnny and the Moondogs. Now it was back on their home turf, they were playing together every week with an improved repertoire and better equipment, and they let it pass. Others didn’t. As well as Al Storm and his Hurricanes, another local rock group, Derry and the Seniors, entered and impressed. They had a beefy Little Richard sound, fronted by a dynamic young black singer from Toxteth, Derry Wilkie, and with a large individual named Howard “Howie” Casey on sax. Their name was a spin on Danny and the Juniors, the white vocal group from Philadelphia, PA, who scored a great hit in 1958 with “At the Hop.”
The rise of the Liverpool rock group was now evident, and it was happening in complete contrast to the national scene. Almost every hit on the British charts in 1959 was by a solo singer, and rock’s apparent decline was noted when Disc ran a feature looking at the diminishing success of beat and rock package shows in British theaters. Among those quoted was Neil Brooks, manager of the Liverpool Empire, who observed how “rock is growing less and less popular.”33 At his high end of the market it may have been, but at grassroots level the Empire was becoming encircled by clubs and halls just bursting with urban working-class rock and roll. The promoter Wally Hill, with his sage MC Bob Wooler, opened for business at a second Co-Op venue, Blair Hall in Walton Road, where (the Echo ad announced) Gerry Marsden’s Pacemakers would be playing. Another hot new group was Cass and the Cassanovas—singer Brian Cassar and some big lads from Liverpool 8 who could take care of themselves as well as their music. They rented the Temple jazz club on Sunday afternoons and turned it into a rock venue—the city center’s first.
Change was also in the air at that bastion of jazz the Cavern Club. It had been open two and a half years when the man who’d made it all possible, Alan Sytner, went down to London to work for the National Jazz Federation and didn’t come back. The Cavern was no longer doing so well: he’d taken his eye off the ball and his crowds were evaporating. He left it in the hands of his father, Dr. Joseph Sytner, who in turn came to rely on a man at the accountancy firm balancing the club’s books, Andrew Raymond McFall, known to all as Ray McFall. At the age of 32, McFall had some money and fancied a career break; he offered to buy the Cavern outright, and a deal
was done for £2,750. From Saturday, October 3, 1959, the club operated under new ownership. Though there was no obvious change of musical policy, bookings for rock groups became more frequent, especially for Al Storm and his Hurricanes who played here eight times in the last three months of the year, not quite able to rock and roll but venturing close.
After a further lengthy period, and under his dad’s pointed prompting—“Don’t you think you’d better get a job?”—George Harrison finally bowed to the inevitable and did. An officer from the Juvenile Employment Bureau flicked through some cards and informed him of a vacancy for a window dresser at Blackler’s, the department store extending along Great Charlotte Street. George wasn’t enthused but knew it would put a few pounds in his pocket and get Dad off his back.
When George arrived at Blackler’s he found the window-dressing job gone but there was another vacancy, for an apprentice electrician in the maintenance department—the very kind of job Harry was hoping his son would get. Forms had to be signed, and George seems to have committed to a five-year program, to be completed at Christmas 1964, starting on £3 10s a week and with (at most) two weeks’ holiday a year.a All apprentices and trainees were paid on Fridays, called forward individually and handed cash and a payslip inside a sealed envelope. From about the first week of November 1959, then, George Harrison was a working man.
In the light of all that followed, George rarely spoke much about his only real job outside music. “I enjoyed it,” he said in 1967. “It was better than school, and with the winter coming on it was nice to be in a big warm shop. We used to play darts most of the time.” Ten years later, he added, “Occasionally we broke the lifts so we could have a skive in the lift-shaft … I also learned how to drink fourteen pints of beer and three rum and blackcurrants and eat two Wimpys [burgers] all in one session.”34
The boy who snagged the window-dressing job before George could get there, Peter Cottenden, became his best pal at Blackler’s. He was just a year older than George and their friendship was rooted in a quickly discovered mutual love of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. “George was a nice lad, really a very nice lad, and we got on well. He had to wear a gray boiler-suit all day and every day. I remember one job he did: he had a bucket of water, a rag, a paintbrush and a stepladder, and he had to clean out the fluorescent lights. It wasn’t exactly electrical, but it was where an apprentice began.”
Almost the first thing George did after joining Blackler’s was nip around to Hessy’s on Whitechapel to buy another guitar. It was payday, November 20, and he picked out a solid-body electric made in Czechoslovakia by the Delicia company, a guitar given the space-age name Futurama by the company that imported them into Britain, Selmer. The instrument sold on the strength of its visual similarity to the Fender Stratocaster; the heavenly Strat—used by Buddy Holly and featured in so many of George’s dreams and drawings—couldn’t be had, but the Futurama was anyone’s for 55 guineas (£57 15s). George also bought a case, and by the time hire-purchase interest was added he was staring at a bill totaling £74 6s—more than half his annual take-home pay. He put £10 “down”—probably a combination of his own money and some from his ever-supportive mum—and committed to a weekly sixteen-shillings repayment plan that stretched ahead to summer 1961.b
Thirty-five years later, George described how Paul was with him at Hessy’s when he chose the instrument. Paul plugged it into an amp and turned it up high, and when George pressed one of the instrument’s three piano-like rocker switches, a great booming sound sent other guitars crashing down from the wall.35 Paul says he first laid eyes on the Futurama in Mrs. Best’s house the next evening: “I remember George, upstairs in the front parlor, opening up the guitar case and there it was, like the Holy Grail … It was like heaven; it was nirvana time when a new guitar arrived in its case.”36 Rory Best didn’t play guitar but raved about George’s beautiful Futurama so much that Mona went out and bought him one, just in case he felt like playing. He never did, but he was able to loan it to George when George’s broke. Arthur Kelly, too, was most impressed with his best friend’s greatest acquisition yet.
Everyone else at the Casbah had to queue up to get into the cellar but we’d always go in through the house. The front room was like the bandroom. I remember going there with George when he first had his Futurama. John was sitting there picking his nose—he was always picking his nose—and then George produced his new guitar out of the case. It was the closest he could get to a Strat, simply amazing. He put on the whammy bar [the tremolo arm, to change the pitch and add a vibrato effect] and when someone asked what it was for, George—for some strange reason—said, “It’s a wigwam to wind up the sun.”37
This was George’s fourth guitar, which contrasted sharply with Paul, still playing his first—the inexpensive Zenith acoustic he’d got in summer 1957, to which he’d added a pickup. John bought his Club Footy because George had one, so now they had different guitars again.c
The Futurama gave the Quarrymen another change of sound, which probably caused some shift in their repertoire. Playing together every week for the first time, they were surely improving, but while much is known about their Casbah appearances there’s nothing to gauge how good they were. The strong likelihood is that their instrumental technique wasn’t as accomplished as their singing. Paul sang Elvis and Little Richard so well he almost touched the untouchables, John did great Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, George did a nice Carl Perkins, and there were always some highly effective harmonies. At its best, the Quarrymen’s Casbah sound was probably four electric guitars lightly strumming while John, Paul and George weaved their way through “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” or the tricky three-part “To Know Her Is to Love Her.”
It’s unlikely they sang any Lennon-McCartney Originals here. John and Paul had little belief in them and felt sure audiences only wanted to hear what they knew. But they did do arrangements. One Quarrymen specialty was to modernize old songs—all their rock heroes did it, so it was far from unusual. In early 1960, when Paul wrote a letter hoping to get them a booking, he mentioned as staples of their act “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Moonglow,” “You Were Meant for Me,” “Home,” and “You Are My Sunshine.” This being so, they must have played them at the Casbah, because there were no other performances in between.
The Quarrymen played through autumn 1959 as a four-guitar group, always lacking bass and drums. No contender stepped forward for either position—no one at the Casbah had a drum kit or bass and volunteered himself. Jon Hague says that John invited him to be their drummer. “In art school one day he said, ‘Get some drums and join us,’ but I think he said it to everybody at the time. I couldn’t do it—I was totally non-musical.”38
John, Paul and George’s desire to add a bassman to the lineup now stretched back eighteen months, since they’d tried to coerce Eric Griffiths into buying one. They weren’t going to play it: bass is an unsexy position in a group, almost as “Leppo” as drums. They never suggested Ken Brown swap his guitar for one, but Tony Carricker says John asked him to buy a bass and join them. “I thought it was absurd. It was beyond me. There were those who wanted to make the sounds and those who just wanted to listen to them, and I was one of those who wanted to listen.”39 Arthur Kelly was also approached. “George said to me, ‘Why don’t you get a bass?’ I was earning £4 a week at Cunard and the bass cost about £60, even more with an amp, and I just couldn’t afford it. Besides which, my uncle had pulled some strings to get me the job and I didn’t want to let him down. I’d already let down my family with my schooling and wasn’t going to do it again.”40
How many others were asked will never be known, but probably the strangest invitations were issued to Stuart Sutcliffe and Rod Murray, when John, Paul and George were hanging out with them one day at 9 Percy Street. Rod wasn’t into rock and couldn’t play guitar but fancied having a go; without money, and keen on woodwork, he told them he’d make a bass in the college workshop. It wasn’t likely to take long. Stuart had an acoustic
guitar but couldn’t really play it, nor did he have the money for a bass, but he always supported them, going occasionally to the Casbah. And through his relationship with John he was getting ever more interested in rock. As Cyn has noted, “The influence John had over Stuart was very strong and the urge to communicate with John on every level was important to him at that time.”41
Stuart was also occupied with his art. This was the “sending-in” period for The John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 2, to be held at the Walker Art Gallery for two months from November 17; Rod and Stuart both submitted pieces, Stuart’s being a vast abstract work, a mosaic of angular shapes and colors painted on two boards totaling eight feet square. He called it Summer Painting and its influence was the Parisian abstract artist Serge Polia-koff. The work was accepted, though just one of his two painted boards was used. As Rod Murray remembers, “We carried half of Stuart’s painting down the hill to Jackson’s, opposite the Jacaranda—the shop was a holding agent for the exhibition: people took their work there and they forwarded it to the gallery. On our way back to collect the second half we stopped in the Cracke and, well, we never made it back to Jackson’s.”42
Offering unrivaled prize money, and reviewed by the national press and BBC radio, Moores’ exhibition was the biggest of its type in Britain. Five rooms at the Walker housed 157 pieces of art from canvases to sculptures, whittled down from two thousand submissions. Only 10 percent of the artists were from Merseyside and Stuart Sutcliffe was the sole student, his work appearing alongside pieces by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Victor Pasmore. More than fifteen thousand were expected to see the exhibition during its two-month run, and this number included John Lennon and Aunt Mimi. So great was John’s pride, Mimi would recall his instruction that she “look nice” when they went—a rich remark considering she always did and he lived scruffy.