Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Best of all are the six Lennon-McCartney Originals, including three that were possibly new and would never surface again, seemingly titled “Some Days,” “You Must Write Every Day” and “You’ll Be Mine.” Paul sings lead on all three and was the main or sole writer. “You’ll Be Mine” is particularly entertaining—Paul sings like Caruso and John like an Ink Spot, dropping into an outlandish rich-brown spoken section that epitomized their collective love of the absurd and his own fondness for wordplay. There’s also the earliest-available recordings of “One After 909,” “I’ll Follow the Sun” and “Hello Little Girl.” “One After 909” is clearly a diamond in the rough, polished by John and Paul’s attractive harmonizing. “I’ll Follow the Sun” is Paul alone, guitar and voice, save for someone (probably John) slapping a guitar case. “Hello Little Girl” is a Nerk Twins treat that sheds welcome light on what John always called his first song, written at 17 when the influence of Buddy Holly was palpable.12

  With their Truvoice amp, tape and regular bookings, the Beatles were beginning to motor, a position they owed entirely to one man. As Rod Murray observes, “None of them had any business sense, and without Allan Williams I don’t think they would have got anywhere.” Williams was the only person getting them work: the other Liverpool promoters didn’t even know of their existence, except for Brian Kelly, who was miffed they hadn’t turned up at Lathom Hall the other week and would take some persuading before trying them again. It was also very handy they were managed by a man who owned his own café and club—it became their second home, their daily hangout, and they played here too, in the coal-hole basement, on occasional Monday nights. Girlfriends could tag along if they obeyed the rules: Dot says she and Cyn were allowed to sit with John and Paul when they talked music but they had to stay silent—“We weren’t allowed to open our mouths.”13

  It was through the Jacaranda that the Beatles found another drummer. Norman Chapman was 22, newly married and working as a picture-frame maker at Jackson’s, the art shop opposite the Jac (scene of many a John Lennon “slap leather” episode since 1957). He also had a £20 drum kit, and—unable to play it at home—had arranged the use of a vacant attic space on the corner of Slater and Seel Streets so he could practice without disturbing anyone. One night, while a Beatle or two were sitting in the Jac wondering how they were ever going to find themselves another fuckindrummer, the sound of Chapman’s percussion drifted in through the doorway. Paul presented himself at Jackson’s the following day and asked if he wanted to play with the Beatles that night, as they had a booking. Chapman did, and stayed.c

  Allan Williams remembers the Beatles’ latest drummer as “one of the best they had, a tall and very friendly man, a bit on the quiet side but a very good player.”14 Chapman joined them in their weekly round of dates at Neston and Liscard, and occasionally at the Jacaranda, and seems to have been closer to them than Tommy Moore ever was, even hanging out a little at Gambier Terrace. (“I went there from time to time. It was something you had to see to believe: ashes in the middle of the floor, cans and bottles, drawings all over the wall.”) As much as he was enjoying himself, though, Chapman already knew his days with the Beatles were numbered. Born in 1937, he was among the penultimate batch of young men called up for National Service. His conscription had been deferred while he worked his five-year frame-making apprenticeship, but now that was over and a manila envelope bearing the words On Her Majesty’s Service was due any day.

  Also dropping into the Gambier Terrace pit was a special guest, Royston Ellis, “King of the Beatniks.” The bearded bard, who featured in TV documentaries and press articles whenever an offbeat teenage angle was needed, was in Liverpool to read his poetry at the university on June 24/25, and he swiftly found himself drawn into the Beatles’ company. The conduit was George, who (with nothing else to do while John, Stu and Paul were in school) was hanging around the Jac when the wandering coffee-bar poet traipsed in, drawn by hip radar to “the happening place.” Avowedly “trying everything,” Ellis was an active bisexual in this period of his life and he took an immediate fancy to George: “He looked fabulous with his long hair and matelot-style striped T-shirt, very modern, which is why I deliberately spoke to him. I was nineteen and he was seventeen and we clicked right away.”15 George took Ellis, his typewriter and his duffel bag back to Gambier Terrace to meet John and Stu. A rapport was quickly established and Ellis was invited to “crash” for a few days—yet another occupant for the filthy back room.

  Born in February 1941, Ellis was younger than John and Stu but had broader life experience, having grooved around the country, appeared on TV and radio, been published as a poet and writer, and experimented with sex and drugs. To the Daily Mirror he was “a weirdie from weirdsville” but to John Lennon he was “England’s answer to Allen Ginsberg,” speaking something like their language.16 He’d said young people not seeking work weren’t layabouts but “prospectors,” and that no self-respecting teenager should marry a virgin. (“That remark alone generated fees to keep me comfortable for a year,” he recalls.) Also, he was friendly with Cliff Richard and, in particular, with Cliff’s backing group the Shadows (formerly the Drifters). They provided a rock soundtrack when Ellis recited his poetry at occasional public readings, sessions he called “Rocketry.”

  His Liverpool University audience didn’t dig him at all. The Beatles were much more his kind of people, and—in an unadvertised appearance down the Jac—they stepped into the Shadows’ shoes and backed him in a spot of Rocketry. Paul really enjoyed the experience but was taken aback by some of the words, like this stanza from the poem “Julian”:

  Easy, easy,

  break me in easy.

  Sure I’m big time,

  cock-sure and brash,

  but easy, easy,

  break me in easy.17

  Surely this was queer sex he was talking about! Paul worried it was about “shagging sailors” while attempting to find the right guitar notes to set it off.18

  Ellis’s bisexuality was an eye-opener for the Beatles, as he remembers: “There was an expression, ‘Do you still love me?,’ and I think I must have said it to John because all the eyebrows went up … ‘What?!’ And then I gave them a lecture about the Soho scene and said they shouldn’t worry, because one in four men were queer although they mightn’t know it.” The remark bit deep. As Paul says, “We looked at each other and wondered which one it was. ‘[It] must be one of us, because there’s four of us … Oh fucking hell, it’s not me, is it?’ ”19

  Most memorably of all, Royston Ellis gave the Beatles their first drugs experience. Not long afterward, he would write of his amazement that they didn’t know of the Benzedrine-impregnated cardboard strip curled inside a Vicks nasal inhaler, and how it produced a high when chewed.20 Several were present in the flat, including John, Stu, George, Paul, Rod Murray and Bill Harry, but the idea of taking something to feel euphoric, or in some way altered, appealed most especially to John. He was the closest to Ellis in outlook: he wanted to try everything life could offer, and maybe, only maybe, ask questions later.d His art school friend Jon Hague vividly remembers a night in the Cracke when John poured pint after pint down his throat and remarked, “If only we didn’t have to drink all this liquid”—in other words, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a quicker way to get out of your head?”21

  John always recalled the Benzedrine event with enthusiasm: “Everybody talked their mouths off for a night and thought, ‘Wow, what’s this?’ ” George was keen too: “We cracked open a Vicks inhaler, ate it and sat up all night until about nine o’clock the next morning, rapping and burping up the taste.” But Paul was reticent. “Probably they didn’t give me that much, probably they kept it for themselves,” he says, indicating he passed up the opportunity … not entirely, but more or less. He was by nature more cautious than George and considerably more so than John, the great experimentalist who always tried everything with complete abandon. (Something’ll happen.) Paul knew a little about drugs becau
se his mum had been a nurse, and again he was also mindful of his age in this company. Ellis, although just sixteen months older, seemed far more mature; Stu was no longer a teenager, having turned 20 the week before; and John was on the cusp. George was never concerned by his youth but Paul was. “I was … thinking ‘I’m really hanging out with a slightly older crowd here.’ So I was always cautious.”22

  The night passed in a blur of banter. Ellis says he developed a particular rapport with John and Stuart and that they discussed poetry, art and London. When he left, they spoke of doing it again sometime: “We were talking about how I wanted a band to come to London and back me on my Rocketry performances, and they were thrilled at the idea.” Art school studies finished the following Friday, July 1, marking the end of Stu’s fourth year and John’s third and last because the college was waving him goodbye. The exam results, when they came through on August 1, were just as expected: John failed and was out, Stuart passed the NDD, for which he received a certificate. The option was there for him to do a fifth year and attain the highest available qualification, the Art Teacher’s Diploma (ATD), akin to a degree and entitling him to become a teacher … but both he and John were pondering a period as prospectors, and doing something again with Ellis was a definite possibility.

  As for Ellis, so much was he enthused by the possibility of appearing with them again that he soon got the Beatles their first mention in a music paper. It was the July 9 edition of Record and Show Mirror, where a supercilious little article about “the bearded sage of the coffee bars” ended “he’s thinking of bringing down to London a Liverpool group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. Name of the group? ‘The Beetles’!”23

  The British summer of 1960 produced endless rain, but that bothered few of Butlin’s six hundred thousand happy campers because much of what they needed was indoors. With military precision, coaches transported up to seven thousand fresh faces to the Pwllheli camp gates every Saturday, to replace a similar number heading home. The Hurricanes played a three-hour session here six nights a week, and also every weekday afternoon for an hour in the Player’s Bachelor Starmaker Contest. This was where they, the professionals, backed amateur singing talent shooting for pop fame in four daily heats and a weekly final.

  It became a nightly feature in the Rock and Calypso for Rory to put aside his gold comb, stop leaping off the piano and announce Starrtime!—at which point the drummer tilted his head toward a microphone angled over his kit, found his singing voice (not brilliant but reasonable and characteristic) and bellowed “Alley Oop” while the band rocked and the jivers called and responded Alley oop, oop, oop, oop-oop!, laughing, clapping and cheering. Because few drummers sang, this was a real novelty for the Hurricanes, and Rory either left the stage or tried to blend into the background (never easy for him). When Ringo fancied a break from “Alley Oop” he sang “Matchbox,” the Carl Perkins record. As Johnny Guitar would reflect, “He had a voice like a steamroller, and it went down well. He was a very good drummer and his personality came over when he was singing.”24

  Ringo, too, was a teenager no more, having turned 20 on July 7, and he’d been drumming three years now.e He was already hot enough to have played in Liverpool’s best two skiffle groups, Eddie Clayton and the Darktown, and been picked by the top rock outfit, Rory’s Hurricanes, and it was here at Butlin’s that he really hit his stride. He wasn’t a technical drummer, he was no Buddy Rich or Gene Krupa, he couldn’t even do a proper roll, but he was a rock guitarist’s dream. Though he projected flash, in his job he wasn’t, he was just solid and reliable, metronomic, dead steady in all the requisite styles, tempos and beats, doing precisely what he was there to do and with the attitude that was pure Richy Starkey.

  All the Hurricanes signed autographs for the holidaymakers. Those who asked for Ringo’s had to be patient. His signature was prefaced with “The Sensational,” then he wrote “Ringo Starr,” then he added the drawing of a little star, then he double-underlined both his names, and then, in the channel between the two lines, to emphasize he was both singer and instrumentalist, he wrote “Vcl” under Ringo and “Drums” under Starr. Finally, to leave the fan in no doubt who’d been signing, he added “Time” after Starr and “Rory Storm & Hurricanes” underneath everything, underlined. This man was the consummate pro.

  Questions about his rings were welcome, questions about his gray streak irritating: Lu Walters would recall him shouting angrily, “It’s natural!”25 Plenty of girls found him fascinating. And Ringo, he just loved them all … or as many as he could manage. A jukebox pumped out records when the Hurricanes took a break and he was easily the best jiver in the group, never short of a dance partner. Margaret Douglas, on holiday here from Liverpool, says, “Ringo was a brilliant rock ’n’ roll dancer. He knew all the moves.”26

  That he did. Butlin’s meant sex, sex and even more sex, week after glorious week for three solid months. The boy who’d lost his virginity in the Sefton Park grass and then had to make out in his hand-painted Standard Vanguard now enjoyed it between sheets. The Hurricanes had quickly ditched their outside digs and moved into the camp chalets, and though unmarried sex was outlawed, plenty were at it. All was fine so long as one of the parties cleared out before the chalet-maids came to clean. Ringo remembers the joys: “A new coachload of girls would arrive every week and we’d be like, ‘Hi, I’m with the band.’ It was paradise for that. There’d be tears at the end of the week, and then a new coach. In a way it was part of the attraction of rock ’n’ roll. I ended up living with a hairdresser in a trailer. It was growing up.”27

  Butlin’s also meant plenty of drinking. The alcohol culture here was strong, and with so many men and quite a number of women legless every night, the entertainers weren’t going to miss out. Rory generally held back, too much of an athlete to find booze appealing, but Ringo drank heavily. As well as beer, he liked Scotch and Coke—a flamboyantly modern combination often queried by companions and barmen.

  The Beatles had no holiday in 1960. Playing every week left no room for one, and this was all they’d ever wanted to do. On June 30, a day or two after Royston Ellis’ departure, Paul got himself a new guitar to go with their expensive new amp. His Zenith was retired after three years’ loving service and in its place came Paul’s first proper electric, a Rosetti Solid 7; it was a standard model for a right-hander, so he had to play it upside down and switch the strings around. The body was painted in what the company’s Melody Maker ad called “smouldering red,” but apart from this and its “American styling!” not much else could be said for the Solid 7—it wasn’t a very good piece. As Paul would say, “Dad instilled in me ‘Never get heavily in debt,’ as a result of which I bought a cheap guitar.” After putting down a small deposit, weekly ten-bob repayments would bring the total price to £21.28

  He was also conscious that the Beatles needed to look better. Their stage clothes had been “off the peg” since the start of the Quarry Men, but now they had something custom-made for the first time. Paul’s next-door neighbor—David Richards, at 22 Forthlin Road—was a tailor, and Paul bought some lilac-colored velvet for him to make into four cool bright jackets. He says John, Stu and George weren’t too keen to begin with, but then came to the house to be measured up.29 The jackets were worn with their usual black “drainies” and either black or white shirts, and new gray winkle-picker shoes that appeared to be made from crocodile skin. They also had something like uniform hair—greased back high on top, long and thick at the back, almost down over their collars—so with all this the Beatles had a definite look … and they weren’t the Hurricanes.

  Such improvements, and more, helped lasso the Beatles their first fan. Pat Moran was an intelligent 16-year-old Catholic girl from Wallasey who went to the Grosvenor most Saturdays. Her mother died when she was nine and she was raised solely by her disciplinarian Irish father. “He wouldn’t let me wear any makeup and I couldn’t wear trousers, only a skirt, and he’d knock hell out of me if I misbehaved
. One time, I came home late from seeing the Beatles and he’d locked me out. He stood in the bathroom above the front door and shouted ‘You’re late’ and wouldn’t let me in.”30 Such was Pat’s passion for the Beatles, it was all worthwhile.

  I loved their music and the way they played it. My favorites were “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Cathy’s Clown” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”—oh and “Red Sails in the Sunset” was beautiful. I can’t say they were great musically because I don’t know—my idea of music at that age was inexperienced—but they were certainly entertaining. They played music we knew, that we’d heard on the radio, but to hear them doing it was different: when John and Paul sang a rock-and-roll song together we’d all be dancing. John was the leader. He used to talk to Paul and then they’d play something, but Paul was also the leader in a way because he was very much part of it. Certainly it was between Paul and John as to who took the lead.

  Paul was my favorite. I can still picture him at the front with his guitar, left-handed. He was on the left side of the stage, then George alongside him, then John, and Stuart on the right.

  Something in the Beatles touched Pat Moran deeply, in a way she’d never experienced or expected. Chatting to Paul at the Grosvenor, she gathered they had hardly any money and spent weekends in John’s flat at Gambier Terrace, not always with much to eat. She had a job and wanted to give something back to them for all the pleasure they gave her, so every Sunday morning after church she took the ferry across the Mersey and the bus up from the Pier Head with a wicker basket of food for them.

  Friends went with me, I wouldn’t have dreamed of going on my own, and we’d arrive about midday. They were always up—we never arrived to find them unclothed—but the flat was horrible. There weren’t even chairs to sit on, so we’d either sit on a bed or stand leaning against the window. We’d just talk for a while, then I’d pick up the empty basket and go home to Wallasey. This happened maybe half a dozen times.