Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  The Hurricanes were certainly the busiest group on Merseyside, playing several nights a week in the different halls, and so was born “Rory Storm”—the personality, the hair, the stunts, and the stutter that miraculously disappeared when singing in a hokey American voice. Six-foot-two and eyes of blue, Rory was irrepressible, startling bandmates and audiences alike with extraordinary feats of stage athleticism: jumping off pianos and shinning up pipes or poles and then leaping back down again, still singing. It was all show with the Hurricanes and they never missed a trick, whether Rory was jacking his leg up on Johnny’s arched back during guitar solos, or Johnny was sticking his head under Ringo’s cymbal while he gave it both sticks. Rory liked the slow numbers, when he’d sit on a reversed chair and run a gold comb through his long blond quiff while serenading the girls, but Johnny suffered through them, much preferring rock and roll.

  Their set rarely changed. The opening number was Vince Taylor’s “Brand New Cadillac,” after which they played a whole lotta Jerry Lee, Elvis, Johnny Otis, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty and the Everly Brothers. A good forty-eight-minute recording survives of one of their Jive Hive bookings in March 1960, but though its very existence and preservation is remarkable, and the naturalness of the show is charming, the performance is no great shakes. Like so much about the early period of rock and roll, in Britain especially, Rory’s act was a smoke screen of style over substance, personality over panache. The good looks, gold comb and bustling energy mask a merely adequate singing voice: his phrasing is erratic, he drifts in and out of both time and tune, and his American accent grates. Rock was new in 1960, and everything was primitive, but this performance is surprisingly basic given that Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were “Liverpool’s best group.” Surely they couldn’t always be so.§

  Through Rory’s sister Iris, the Hurricanes auditioned for a Butlin’s summer season; she’d applied for one herself, as a dancer, and then made inquiries for her brother’s group. So keen were they to find a holiday camp booking, they’d already applied to a place on the Isle of Man, and to Middleton Tower in Morecambe (where Alf Lennon had spent several summers washing up), before the Butlin’s audition took place. This was at the Grafton Ballroom in Liverpool on February 16, 1960, and seven days later they heard they’d passed: they were offered a full summer season at the Pwllheli camp, from the beginning of June to the start of September, £100 a week between the five of them, less £20 for accommodation. Three months of rock, birds, beer and sunbathing, on great pay, it was a dream booking … but a problem for Richy. He had a fiancée who moaned about how often he played drums, and even more vitally he was four years into his five-year apprenticeship at Hunt’s. Being at Butlin’s would mean giving it up, maybe giving them both up. As soon as the Hurricanes heard they’d got the nod, he said to Johnny Guitar, “I don’t know whether I want to go.”16

  The notion that these guys could actually earn a living from playing was something none had considered before, yet as the handful of promoters continued to stage dances in clubs and halls across Merseyside, and it became possible to play more than a couple of nights a week, so the idea took hold. For Johnny Gustafson, 17-year-old bass player with Cass and the Cassanovas, it hit him square between the eyes on the first day of 1960—an appropriate date to signify the moment when the Liverpool rock scene slipped into a higher gear: “One of our first gigs was New Year’s Day at the Tower Ballroom, New Brighton. I was working in a jeweler’s, Bagshaw’s, as a packer and gofer, earning £2 10s a week, but at the Tower I got £2 for playing an hour. Within three months I was making more money than my tradesman brother, who indentured. And I was having fun, getting girls, spending all day doing nothing, and I didn’t have to say ‘Yes-sir-no-sir’ to anyone.”17

  None of the groups had management, but the Jacaranda’s live-wire proprietor Allan Williams was beginning to take an interest. He let Cass and the Cassanovas play in the basement on Mondays, when Lord Woodbine’s steel band had a night off, and they also figured on a list of acts he loosely represented as agent. The list covered all types of music, and if he got them work he took 10 percent of whatever fee could be had.

  This was just one of several interests Williams was suddenly running in parallel with the thriving day-night scene that was the Jacaranda. Approaching his thirtieth birthday, he’d been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and was chaotically branching out in several directions at once. He had his eye on an empty club on Seel Street, which he was thinking of turning into Liverpool’s first modern nightclub, and he was also about to become the silent partner in the Cabaret Artists Social Club, a striptease venue being opened by Lord Woodbine in a dingy basement among all the shebeens on Upper Parliament Street. Allan Williams loved clubs. If anything fired his imagination more than looking around clubs and sizing up why some worked and others failed, it was looking around empty premises and considering what kind of a club they could become. And it was with all this in mind that he and the honorable Woodbine picked up on an advertisement for a “businessman’s” long weekend to Amsterdam, January 29 to 31. It was an all-in deal: ten guineas return including hotel, flying from Speke in an old Dakota. “See Continental nightlife” the ad suggestively suggested—and see it they certainly would.18

  Not only were they going to enjoy Amsterdam’s nightlife, the pair had a plan all their own: instead of returning with the group, they would push on into Germany and come home later. The reason, Williams recalls, is that a few guys from the steel band had upped and gone from the Jacaranda one day without word, only to send him a postcard from Hamburg saying what a great time they were having, playing in a club by the Alster lake. It seems that a German had come into the Jac one night, taken a shine to the West Indians and offered them work back home. Williams hoped to find them in Hamburg—but mostly he wanted to see the city’s clubs. His unfettered mind working overtime again, he wondered if he could strike up an arrangement to send other Liverpool entertainers there. If they wanted one act, why not two? With this in view, he got a chap with a Ferrograph reel-to-reel tape recorder to go down the Jac and record some of the acts he notionally represented. Cass and the Cassanovas were one; there was also the Leon Sait Dance Orchestra, singer Hal Graham, and others no longer remembered.

  The trip was predictably eventful. Both Williams and Woodbine enjoyed a drink and they spent most of their time in Amsterdam riotously inebriated and making a public spectacle of themselves. Williams was small (5ft 3in), but this could be disguised by his wearing of a black top hat; he’d started doing this in the Jacaranda as a joke, but now he was rarely seen without it, and the effect was given symmetrical vigor by a heavy black beard he’d recently sprouted. It was only after some lively episodes that the pair reached Hamburg by train, taking a room at the Hotel Stein, on the Reeperbahn. They were in the heart of St. Pauli, the long-established “haven of pleasure” for sailors docked in northwest Germany’s great port city.

  For the keen clubman, St. Pauli was heaven on earth. There were places all around, catering for every kind of entertainment. Nothing like this existed in Britain, not even in Soho—London’s den of iniquity—which was a children’s playground by comparison. Williams acquainted himself with it thoroughly, and branched off the Reeperbahn into the narrower Grosse Freiheit, illuminated by one alluring place after another. Literally speaking, this wasn’t the red-light area—all the prostitutes sat in windows on Herbertstrasse, off the other side of the Reeperbahn—but Grosse Freiheit had the ancillary venues: the strip joints, transvestite bars, hostess clubs and music bars. The sound of music drew Williams down some steps and into the Kaiserkeller (Emperor’s cellar), a street corner basement that, judging by its nautical decor, was clearly a sailors’ bar. He sat at a table, ordered a drink and kept his eyes open.

  A live group was on stage, and to Williams’ eyes and ears they merely played parrot-fashion what they’d learned from records. Patrons who wanted to dance remained seated and only got to their feet (some of them) during the inte
rval, when records played on the Musikbox (jukebox). Grabbing his moment, Williams motioned to a waiter that he would like to see the manager, and was ushered into the office of the Kaiserkeller’s owner. He shook hands with Bruno Koschmider, a man of about his height and of a similar age—33, though he seemed so much older. He was, through an Englishman’s eyes, a caricature German, with a square potato head, bulbous nose and a Klumpfuss (clubfoot) that caused him to walk with a heavy gait: a war wound, it seemed. He spoke no English, and as Williams spoke no German a waiter was brought in to interpret a little. Williams remembers:

  I introduced myself and said I was an entertainment agent from England and had he ever considered employing English rock and roll groups? He said he hadn’t and I said how great they were and that he could have them for £100 a week, plus £10 commission for me. That was really asking a lot but he didn’t blink, so I said, “I’ve got a spool of tape here, if you want to listen to it maybe we can talk business.” I was doing a really good selling job, but when he put the tape on his lovely big Grundig machine all we heard was gibberish. Somebody had taped over it or something, I don’t know, but it was a balls-up. I said the machine must be kaput but he put on one of his own tapes and it was fine. It was such a disappointment and I felt I’d blown it.19

  There wasn’t much more to be said, but before Williams rose to leave he witnessed another vital aspect of St. Pauli club life, one that made him shudder. “While I was in Herr Koschmider’s office a fight broke out in the club. Hearing the commotion, he pulled a big truncheon from his desk drawer, hobbled out into the club and started knocking shite out of some poor seaman who was already down and out. Then he came back, wiped his truncheon clean, stuck it back in his desk and carried on talking to me as if nothing had happened.”

  Through sheer ill fortune, Williams’ hopes of brokering a Liverpool-Hamburg clubs alliance had come to nothing. But so be it—he went home, turned his mind to other incredible ventures and gave Hamburg no further thought.

  Paul McCartney was now in the decisive phase of his thirteen-year schooling, and all was far from well. He was sitting his A-Levels in June, and yet, despite his talent for Art—enough to win the school prize the previous term—he was losing focus. His English Literature remained on track, thanks to Dusty Durband, but Paul’s attitude had shifted again. Distractions beyond the school wall weren’t helping. There was Dot’s pregnancy, and there was Stu. As Stu’s rival for John’s attention, putting his school days entirely behind him seemed pretty appealing to Paul. He somehow failed to notice that it was necessary to apply now for a course at university, or teacher training college, to begin in September. His contemporaries were doing it and discussing it, but Paul would claim not to have realized.20

  Paul lined up for a Liverpool Institute panoramic school photograph for the final time in March. Where once had been a child of 11 now stood a young man coming up 18, his quiff flopped in the wind. From February 17 to 20, he’d appeared in an Institute play for the only time: Shaw’s Saint Joan. Mr. Durband, its director, didn’t think him a good enough actor for a speaking part, but he was one of the assessors, a Dominican monk nodding and murmuring assent to Joan of Arc’s prosecution. With little to do, and six long performances to do it in, Paul got bored, and Durband caught him smoking behind a pillar. His monkish appearance was also undercut by his long hair, causing some untimely titters from the gallery.21

  It was to John and Stu’s credit that they had no problem with Paul and George attaching themselves to their social life—a generosity that gave the younger ones knowledge and experiences beyond their years. They went now to their first all-night parties, designed in advance to last that long, so that, in addition to a bottle of wine, guests took a breakfast egg. One such event was at 22 Huskisson Street, at the house of art school lecturer Austin Davies.‖ This was a two-in-one party, musicians from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra relaxing upstairs in full evening dress after a concert, while the scruffy students did their thing downstairs. Tony Carricker insistently played Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” both sides one after another for hours, which George thought was fantastic. George was also becoming very, very bevvied. He came close to an altercation when the two parties temporarily mixed and he called over to flautist Fritz Spiegl, “Hey, Geraldo—got any Elvis?” This was probably just before he mumbled to Cynthia, “I wish I had a nice girl like you,” and threw up.22

  Paul was acutely aware of himself mixing in a social group beyond his years—“We were trying to hang in there and pretend we knew what was going on”—so he projected a particular image at these parties, one he hoped would encourage some bright twenty-something woman to take an interest in this 17-year-old schoolboy. He chose to pose as a French troubadour, a mysterious muso in a black turtleneck sweater, a Jacques Brel figure deposited in Liverpool 8, strumming his guitar and mumbling a romantic chanson. “It was me trying to be enigmatic,” he would recall, “to make girls think ‘Who’s that very interesting French guy over in the corner?’ I would literally use it as that, and John knew this was one of my ploys.” Despite the effort, Paul never once “pulled” as a Frenchman … but the tune he picked out on his Zenith was interesting, in the style of Chet Atkins’ “Trambone” but original and memorable. It had no words, and Paul (not having studied French at school) didn’t know any, so he just murmured Gallic-accented rhubarbe to carry it along. It joined his little canon of party pieces and hung around for years.23

  Some Friday nights and many Saturdays, Paul and George stayed over with John and Stu, bedding down where space could be found amid the detritus. It was rough, but part of growing up. In later years, whenever Paul referred to student life, or things being “studenty,” he specifically tuned in to these memories. “We used to go around to John’s flat and stay the night. We thought it was very wild (though it was very innocent) … I don’t think we got an awful lot of sleep, but I remember waking up in the morning, freezing cold, in a chair somewhere, with the eyes burning, and John leaning out of his bed to his Dansette record player and putting on Johnny Burnette.”24

  Johnny Burnette and the Rock ’n Roll Trio, a 1957 ten-inch LP on the Coral label that John had somehow acquired, became a most important and influential record for the group and was one of very few albums John could abide all the way through without growing restless. The situation was part of it—music triggers memories, and the Nashville reverb sound of Johnny Burnette would always stir up thoughts of sleepovers at Gambier Terrace—but the tracks were magical in their own right too, a combination of out-and-out rock, like the opening “Honey Hush,” with distorted guitar, and the Sun-flavored rockabilly “Lonesome Tears in My Eyes.” Beyond the mad cries of “Hi-yo, hi-yo, Silver!” (the call of the cowboy hero Lone Ranger to his horse), “Honey Hush” was a truly misogynistic number, a man bossing his woman about, that confirmed all their northern chauvinist attitudes and validated the way John and Paul treated Cyn and Dot: “Come on into this house, stop all that yakety yak,” “Turn off the waterworks baby, they don’t move me no more,” and the frightening “Don’t make me nervous, I’m holding a baseball bat.”

  A second LP also burned deep into John, Paul and George’s psyche at this same time: Dance Album, the first British long-player by Carl Perkins, which came out just before Christmas 1959. They’d all admired his original recording of “Blue Suede Shoes,” which competed with Elvis’s cover in 1956, but the rate of his British record releases had slowed before Dance Album appeared. From his 45s they knew “Honey Don’t,” “Your True Love,” “Matchbox,” “Glad All Over” and “Lend Me Your Comb,” and from this LP they were bowled over by “Movie Magg,” “Sure to Fall,” “Tennessee,” “Gone Gone Gone,” “Wrong Yo Yo,” “Boppin’ the Blues” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby.” This was country music with a backbeat, the genuine slapback Sun sound from Memphis, right up their collective alley. For George in particular here was a whole new bunch of guitar solos to cherish and master, to study note by gloriou
s note.

  American rock and roll, the real McCoy, was suddenly all around them, and with ideal synchronicity. They all loved (and Paul bought) Eddie Cochran’s “Hallelujah, I Love Her So,” a rock number so good that even the pro-jazz Melody Maker had to admit, “This is hit stuff from the first bar and stands out from the dreary sameness of pop releases.”25 In fact, Eddie wasn’t only cool, he was here. The record’s release coincided with his first visit across the Atlantic: Jack Good put him on his latest TV show, Boy Meets Girls, and Larry Parnes added this second great name from The Girl Can’t Help It to the Gene Vincent tour he was promoting—the first 100 percent rock and roll tour staged in Britain.

  It was an eventful one, to say the least. Mindful of Buddy Holly’s plane crash not a year earlier, Cochran was reluctant to do it at all, and only relented when his manager assured him that, apart from flying across the Atlantic, the traveling would only be by rail or road. From March 14 to 19 it played six nights (twelve houses) at Liverpool Empire, and so irresistible was this that even John Lennon went along. He’d sat in the Empire for pantomimes but it was his first rock show. George had attended a fair number and Paul a few, but seeing an artist live never appealed to John, not before or after this experience—he was always, as he put it, “a record man.”