Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  A call from Germany came through to Allan Williams at the Jacaranda around the same moment, Monday, August 8, or thereabouts. Bruno Koschmider (via a translator) told him business at the Kaiserkeller was booming and now he needed a group for the Indra, a second bar he ran on Grosse Freiheit, where he was ceasing transvestite cabaret and switching to rock. He wanted to reopen in not much more than a week, on the 17th, so there was little time. Williams wasn’t the kind to say no. He told the German not to worry, he would supply a group; Koschmider said the booking would be for two months, and because the Jets were a five-piece and the Seniors a five-piece (backing Derry the singer) the incoming group must also be a five. He was a stickler for such details.

  In circumstances identical to their Johnny Gentle tour, the Beatles weren’t first in line but grabbed the gig. The order of approach isn’t known, but Williams went to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas and Gerry and the Pacemakers before turning to the Beatles. They all had drummers. The Cassanovas couldn’t do it because they didn’t want to go, preferred to stay a four-piece, and had some coming engagements in Scotland. Gerry said no because they were a quartet and didn’t want to give up their day jobs, and Rory and the Hurricanes couldn’t do it because of Butlin’s. Had the British holiday season finished in mid-August and not the start of September, or had Koschmider been prepared to wait two more weeks, the Indra booking would have been theirs—but it didn’t, and he wasn’t. He wanted a group for the 17th; again the Beatles landed an opportunity because there were no other takers. Something like £18 a week each was on offer, and they’d probably have done it for nothing.

  So strong was their determination and so bleak their situation, they said yes right away, though they had to be in Hamburg in about seven days and had to be a five-piece. If Koschmider hadn’t been so insistent on this they could have gone as John, Stu, George and Paul; as it was, they had to find a fifth man—a drummer, obviously—and they had to find him now. No drummer, no Hamburg, end of story. So it was with real eagerness that they pounced on an Echo box-number classified ad that chanced to run, in tiny print, on August 10: “DRUMMER, young, free—KP 60 Echo.” They may not have seen it for a day or two (Paul’s reply has an Echo date-stamp of the 12th), but it seemed to be the answer to their prayers. Paul offered the drummer an audition with the Beatles, said he’d need to be “free soon” for a two-month trip to Hamburg, and that he could be reached at the Jacaranda club.

  But that “soon” came too soon. Allan Williams was telling the Beatles he’d personally drive them to Hamburg in his “van,” that three others would be joining them on the journey, and that they’d be leaving on the coming Monday morning, the 15th. By the time the Echo advertiser picked up Paul’s letter and phoned the Jacaranda, it was too late—he was told the group called the Beatles had gone abroad with someone else in what might have been his place.40 In the absence of the mystery drummer’s instant reply, the Beatles made the call that everything suggests they’d been trying to avoid.

  Pete Best hadn’t been doing much since quietly and prematurely quitting school in March. He hadn’t played his kit in four months, not with musicians at any rate. Approaching him meant, among other things, reopening relations with his mother. To John, Paul and George, she was the bossy woman who hadn’t paid them their due at the Casbah seven months previously (they didn’t forget such things), while to her they were the ungrateful wretches who’d walked out on her club after all she’d done for them. Pete they knew only as the boy who kept his head bowed and hardly said a word.

  Paul was so emphatically pragmatic about getting him that John and George said he must make the call. Peter wasn’t home, but Mrs. Best confirmed he still had his drums and wasn’t doing much at the moment. When Paul and Pete finally spoke—later the same day, probably Saturday—Paul said they’d been offered two months in Hamburg at about £18 a week each, that they were leaving on Monday, and if he was interested he should bring his drums into Liverpool and do an audition. Pete said yes, he would.

  At the time, though, Paul was far from certain he’d be able to go to Hamburg himself, as was the case with most or all of them. He was desperate enough—£18 a week was a lot of money, 80 percent more than his dad earned. Also, two months in Germany would make him miss the start of the next school year. For Paul this meant problem solved, for Jim it meant letting go of Mary’s last dreams and aspirations. It was a biggie, so Paul enlisted his brother as an ally. Mike says he got him all shook up with the exciting possibilities—playing abroad! becoming famous! buying him presents!—until he was quite desperate for it to happen. Then Paul said, “But do you think Dad’ll let me go?”41

  Jim was strongly against it, of course, but Paul chipped away and chipped away, he laid it on thick, he spread it thin, he sold it hard, he sold it soft, he got Mike to join in, he listed many pros and very few cons, he even appealed to his dad as a former bandleader. A betting man, Jim knew he was riding a loser. When he told Paul he would meet their manager, to hear him explain it, Paul saw the winning post just ahead. Yes, sure, he would get Allan Williams to come round and give him every reassurance … and in the meantime he asked for his birth certificate, to get a passport.

  None of the Beatles had been abroad before—unless they counted Ireland, where George went once or twice as a child. They all needed passports and were fortunate that Liverpool, as an international seaport, had a Passport Office open to personal callers and able to process applications fast. The provision of a birth certificate was compulsory with every application … and Mimi told John she didn’t know where his was.

  Now he was in trouble. They were leaving Monday morning, the 15th, and when he found this out it was already the 10th or 11th. A passport could be got quickly enough, but if John first had to apply for another birth certificate he mightn’t make it.

  As Cyn has said, Aunt Mimi’s view of John’s future “couldn’t have been blacker.” She was simply desperate he didn’t fritter away his prospects by going off to play silly guitar, and she was furious about his wanton sabotage of the college course she’d encouraged and supported him through. He’d defied her once too often, so when John did his best to fire her up about Hamburg, bragging his guitar would earn him “£100 a week,” she refused to be stirred and said sorry, she just couldn’t find the birth certificate.42 While racing around to get a second copy, John heaped a ton of spice into the mix by suddenly moving back into Mendips. He’s unlikely to have told Mimi of the Gambier Terrace eviction, but Rod Murray knew little of this hasty departure: John left most of his possessions in the flat and several weeks’ rent unpaid—to the tune of about £15. He just scarpered.

  It was much easier for George. He was doing nothing at home and not working, so going to Germany and being handsomely paid for it was just fine. Crucially, he had his mother’s support to overcome whatever opposition his father might put up, but there wasn’t much—Harry had gone abroad himself at 17 and lied about his age to do so; he understood. While Louise worried about George being so far from home (and she’d heard some bad things about Hamburg), she wasn’t going to stand in his way.43 His passport acquisition was plain sailing.

  For Stuart, Hamburg was an entirely different kettle of fish. When he’d joined the Quarrymen in January he’d no real idea what he was in for. He wasn’t musical and they had no bookings. There was no hint they’d be playing abroad just seven months later, so in deciding to go, as part of his artistic/life journey, Stuart set aside his fifth college year, declining the ATD course. His was the most decisive choice of all, and it may have been something he dwelled on just a little longer than the others: his passport was issued by the Liverpool branch office on the Saturday, when it was open “for cases of special emergency only.” He could scarcely have left it later … although John did.

  John managed to get a “short copy” of his birth certificate on the Friday, by which time everything was becoming traumatic at Mendips. What scenes, what noise, what ferocity there must have b
een there that weekend. Written consent of a legal guardian was necessary for the issue of a passport to a minor, but no matter how much John begged or demanded, Mimi wouldn’t give it. After the way he’d treated her, and blown away everything she’d slaved for on his behalf? John now had no idea whether he’d even get a passport, and could only find out on Monday morning, when they were supposed to be leaving. At the moment of deciding to make the guitar his life, was he about to watch helplessly as the group he formed and led went off without him?

  In the meantime, there was a spot of dirty work to be done. They decided they needed three amplifiers for Hamburg: the new Truvoice, Paul’s Elpico, and, if they could get it, the amp (a Watkins Westminster) owned by Sulca, the art school Students’ Union. John got in touch with a committee member—his friend June Harry—and persuaded her to meet him at the college. As she would remember:

  I was the fool who had the key to the cupboard where it was kept. John begged it off me because they were going to Germany. I said I couldn’t give it to him because I’d get into terrible trouble, but he said, “You won’t, Hairy June. I’ll have it back soon enough, before anyone notices.” He could be quite persuasive. And of course he didn’t, and I got kicked off the committee. They said I was “irresponsible.” In fact, I never saw John again. I left Liverpool in 1961 and finished my National Diploma somewhere else.44

  This appropriately undignified postscript to John’s art school years was hard on the woman who—through her love affair with John’s Quarry Bank English master Philip Burnett—had got him there to start with … but relationships were being cracked all over the place in the Beatles’ haste to get to Hamburg. Paul was leaving Dot behind, and John (if he was going) would be leaving Cyn. If Dot hadn’t miscarried she’d have been heavily pregnant by now and Paul could have been married and unable to go; as it was, they parted on promises of regular letters and, perhaps, fidelity.

  John and Cyn would be parting too, probably. They said they’d write every day, and somehow she believed he’d be faithful, though Germany did seem so awfully far away that anything was possible—and, with John, certain. Cyn was staying at art school to do the second year of her NDD course and Lil Powell hoped plainly and simply that a period apart would be the breaking of her daughter’s infatuation with that Liverpool lout, and that she’d never have to see him or hear about him again.45

  Now they had to get the drummer. Pete Best’s “audition” took place on the Saturday evening, August 13, at one of Allan Williams’ clubs, either the Jacaranda basement or the Wyvern (the unfinished Blue Angel-to-be). Williams says he was in charge: “I didn’t know what made a good drummer, so I just asked him to do a drum roll and said, ‘OK, you’re in.’ ”46 Pete says all the Beatles were present except maybe George; Pete’s close mate Neil Aspinall (who wasn’t there) always said Paul ran it, being that he was primarily responsible for getting Pete into the group. Neil would also accept the audition was “an absolute formality—they wanted to go to Hamburg and they needed him.”47 Pete could not have failed if he’d held the sticks between his toes. He was the vital fifth man, the drummer with a kit, a passport and nothing to hang around in Liverpool for. That he was virtually a beginner and very quiet was not going to alter that. As John straightforwardly remarked fifteen years later, “The reason he got in the group was because the only way we could get to Hamburg [was that] we had to have a drummer. We knew of this guy who was living at his mother’s house, who had a club in it, and he had a drum kit and we just grabbed him—[we] auditioned him and he could keep one beat going for long enough, so we took him to Germany.”48

  All that remained was to sort out his stage outfit. John, Stu, Paul and George had their handmade lilac jackets, black shirts, black drainies and crocodile winkle-pickers. What did Pete have that might make him look like one of them? He said he had a black shirt and black drainies, and while he had nothing in lilac he could do them a blue Italian—though he’d never drummed in a jacket before and didn’t know what it would feel like. He didn’t have crocodile shoes but he had other color winkle-pickers and would bring those.49 “Be at the Jacaranda on Monday morning,” they told him, and off they all went.

  Unlike Tommy Moore and Norman Chapman, the drummer they were bringing in this time was a good physical match. Pete Best was 18 (younger than Stu and John, older than Paul and George), he was their height, he bettered their build (slender like them, but stronger), he was bright (one more grammar-school boy made five out of five), he had attitude, he was handsome, he had pose, poise and a Tony Curtis hairstyle … and he was in the Beatles.

  Monday was wet, windy and cool in Liverpool, and just another day.

  On Hope Street, at 3 Gambier Terrace, Rod Murray and his fellow artisans barricaded themselves into their first-floor flat and refused to be evicted.

  In Woolton, at 251 Menlove Avenue, Mimi was on her knees, physically trying to prevent her nephew from leaving the house. Everything she’d fought for—for his sake, for hers—was about to walk out the door. The young man just wriggled free, picked up his bag and his guitar and stormed out, defying her to a new record degree50 … though still wondering whether this inglorious getaway might be followed by an ignominious return. All would become clear after he’d rushed to Water Street, to the fifth-floor Passport Office in India Buildings, and waited as patiently as an impatient young man in a hurry could, praying the “brummercrats” would understand his situation: dead mother, absent father, er, how could he show adult consent?

  In Allerton, at 20 Forthlin Road, Jim Mac ensured his son had enough cod liver oil capsules for two months, and inquired (as he did most mornings) whether the boy’s bowels had moved, then he gave him an Englishman’s pep talk, making him promise to be a good lad, stay out of trouble, eat proper meals and write often.51

  In Speke, at 25 Upton Green, Louise fussed around the boy with the tall hair, made him promise to eat sensibly and write often, and gave him a tin of scones she’d baked for the journey, to be shared among his friends.52 That was always Louise.

  In Huyton, at 22 Sandiway, the strolling minstrel, the brilliant painter with the aloof Dean pose, packed a few art materials, pocketed his shades, grabbed his bass, bade farewell to his sisters and fraught mother, and sauntered off; tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

  And in West Derby, at 8 Hayman’s Green, Mona Best told her eldest boy that Hamburg was a wild place and he was likely to receive an education broader than anything the Collegiate had taught him. As he would reflect, Mo was “a marvelous champion of a woman who let me choose my own path in life and has supported me like a pillar whether times have been good or bad.”53

  Each made his way to the Jacaranda, where Allan Williams had parked what he called his van—the Morris J2 Minibus. It was a tatty old thing, cream-and-green and covered in perishing paper that advertised his Gene Vincent show back in May: he’d “ballsed-up” and used the wrong glue, so the posters were flaking off in their own time. His wife Beryl was also coming along, together with her much younger brother Barry Chang and, for noble company, the calypsonian Lord Woodbine.j Beryl, a domestic science teacher, prepared food and flasks. While they waited for John to arrive—and to find out whether or not he was even coming—Allan advanced the Beatles £15 against their first Hamburg wages, getting Stuart and Paul to sign for it, and he also got their verbal agreement to refund him £10 apiece toward gas, boat fares and food.

  To John’s eternal relief, his passport application was processed once the office opened at 9:30. An official leniently considered the circumstances and granted dispensation without written adult consent, issuing a standard five-year passport but with a restriction that it expire after six months, in February 1961, unless the required document was produced.54 John handed over his photos, signed where applicable, grabbed the precious blue-black document, ran for the lift, broke out onto Water Street, felt higher than that there Liver Building and hared up the hill to Slater Street.

  Williams was aiming to catch the o
vernight ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, and he’d agreed to pick up another passenger in London on the way, so they really had to get going. There was the luggage of nine as well as guitars, drums and amps, and they piled as much as possible on the roof-rack. Williams whipped off his top hat, drove around the block to get the balance of all the gear, then eight jumped in—one in the front, seven in the back, sitting on opposite benches that ran lengthways down the vehicle, with yet more gear stacked between them. Pulled by only a 1,500cc engine, the J2 would be carrying that weight for 625 miles—a thousand kilometers—through three countries. Mona Best was there to wave Peter good-bye, and, unrealized by everyone, Millie Sutcliffe hid in a doorway down the street, watching and crying as her wee Stuart headed off to who-knew-what.

  None of them knew. The Beatles wanted to rock and roll, they hungered to move on and try new things, they all needed a way out, they all wanted to live, and they loved the thought of going abroad … but as the minibus emerged from the Mersey Tunnel and Williams took the long A41 south, no one had the first idea what lay ahead.

  * * *

  * In turn, the “Money” line likely came from the 1927 song “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” a hit for several singers and the title of a 1956 Hollywood biopic about its composers, Lew Brown, Buddy DeSylva and Ray Henderson.

  † The London label always cited the original US source. The Coasters’ “Besame Mucho” was on Atlantic’s imprint Atco (New York), Duane Eddy’s “Shazam!” on Jamie (Philadelphia), Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner” on the Chess imprint Checker (Chicago), Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” on Monument (Nashville) and Eddie Cochran’s “Cut Across Shorty” on Liberty (Hollywood)—all America’s musical hot spots covered in one influential sweep.