But there would be future occasions, because the moment the Beatles hit the Cavern stage, they were incredible, as Ray McFall remembers:
When I first saw them I said to Bob, “How did they get past the door staff?” They were wearing scruffy sweaters and jeans, and I didn’t allow jeans in the Cavern. They indicated the wearer might be up for a fight, as he wouldn’t mind getting them dirty. We kept out the jeans brigade.
However, the Beatles were sensational and I was smitten. Completely. Absolutely. Instantly. I stood at the side, between the pillars, about halfway up the hall, and as soon as they started playing I was captivated by them. My God, what a group! John started, then Paul, then George, and they alternated. Then there’d be a number with two of them—Paul and George or John and Paul—and I couldn’t get over the quality of their music. From that very first day, there was no stopping them. I said to Bob, “What other lunchtimes have they got? We must have them regularly.”35
The Cavern wasn’t packed. These were early days for its lunchtime sessions, and for the most part the Beatles were playing to audiences who didn’t know them. Right in the middle of the city—in the business district and close to the main shopping streets—the club drew its membership from every point of the compass: all the places in and around Liverpool, the Wirral and other areas of Lancashire and Cheshire the Beatles had never been. Cavern reputations grew by word of mouth … and, as usual, the difference between the Beatles and other groups was the lightning speed with which it happened to them.
The Cavern audience was unlike any the Beatles had faced. It was secretaries, clerks, office boys, messengers, telephonists, shop assistants, girls from hairdressing salons and much more. There were no laborers or factory workers because the factories were in the suburbs, and no Teddy Boy drapes because everyone was dressed for work—boys in suits and ties, girls in smart skirts or dresses. It was mostly a working-class and generally intelligent crowd, school achievers rather than dropouts, aged between 15 (the minimum for starting work) and early twenties.
McFall not only kept the Cavern alcohol-free, he provided clubgoers with affordable refreshments. “Members paid a shilling to spend up to two hours watching the Beatles,” he says, “and instead of eating lunch in their office they could eat at the Cavern and get the cheapest meal they could wish for—we sold hot dogs for ninepence, a bowl of soup and a bread roll for the same, and tea for fivepence. It was much less than we could have charged but I didn’t think it was fair to ask the kids for more.”
Among those at the Beatles’ first Cavern performance was 15-year-old Beryl Johnson, who’d already got herself on speaking terms with them at Aintree Institute and was among the first to start following the group around.
I went to Bootle Grammar School, and when I heard they were playing at the Cavern I pretended to have a dentist appointment and rushed down there. (I ended up having loads of “dentist appointments,” much to my mother’s annoyance.) That first lunchtime the place was half empty and I sat on the front row with my feet up on stage and talked to them between songs. Anyone could call out a song request.
I liked them doing “Memphis, Tennessee,” but my favorite of favorites was John singing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” It really touched me. I liked John the best—he had a great sense of humor. Stuart was very nice, a quiet person—I talked to him at Aintree Institute when Astrid was with him. I liked Paul but I wasn’t big on him, George seemed kind and caring, more introvert than extrovert, and Pete was extremely shy. He’d say “Hello” and maybe “How are you?” and that was it.36
Because Mona Best was her Peter’s greatest champion, all the Beatles fell under her broad wing as she hustled and bustled them forward. In her eyes, they weren’t so much the Beatles as “my son’s group,” and on February 17 she became the first—and only—woman rock promoter on Merseyside when she held the first in a monthly series of Casbah Promotions dances at St. John’s church hall in Tuebrook, the adjacent suburb to West Derby. The Beatles starred, one of the occasions when they were advertised by the name Pete liked to use: the Fabulous Beatles Rock Combo. Having fun with the name was something they all seemed to do: a Liverpool Echo ad on February 8 called them the Big Beat Boppin’ Beatles, which Bob Wooler says was their own idea.§
Mrs. Best paid them £7 for St. John’s and the same when they played the Casbah every alternate Sunday night. While they were in Hamburg, alterations had been made to the cellar to create a bigger performing space (though it was still tiny) and Mona had painted a splendid spider-and-web mural across the width of the back wall. The Beatles always played “the spider room”; fifty people made it jam-packed, and when the music didn’t hit you, the heat did. For all the best reasons, the Casbah had a family atmosphere, and because the Beatles were Pete’s group so this extended to them.
Cyn and Dot were often in the Casbah to see their boyfriends play, safer at this venue than any other. This was where Paul and Dot had met and now they were as good as engaged. Dot proudly wore on the third finger of her left hand the gold ring Paul bought for her in Hamburg for 54 marks (about £4 12s). It meant marriage was on the horizon, but it was a distant one—no date was set or, it seems, discussed. Dot was still quiet (“a very nice, simple, shy girl” recalls Mike McCartney, who took some good photos of the couple in this period)37 and Paul provided all the push in the relationship. The Casbah was a good place for meeting girls. Pauline Behan thought the Beatles were great (her favorite song of theirs was Carl Perkins’ “Lend Me Your Comb”), and although initially she was attracted to John, it was George who made a move and the two began a steady relationship, both on the edge of 18.
The Beatles’ three weekly bookings at the start of January had rapidly evolved. In February’s twenty-eight days Pete had only four empty spaces in his diary and they had thirty-six bookings in total, several nights including what they called “the double shuffle”—two different venues. When they played Cavern lunchtimes there could be three shows in a day. This was a good period, one they’d always remember with fondness: a time of laughs, when they were kings but owed nothing to no one and operated free of contracts. Away from the stage, much of this fun was being had by George and John as a twosome. Stu was busy with Astrid, Pete at home and Paul at the factory. Winding coils was causing Paul to miss out on whatever the others were doing with John … so it was inevitable that something had to give.
The Beatles were booked to play another Cavern lunchtime on February 21 and Paul either went over the wall again or phoned the factory and claimed sickness. Whichever it was, he was dicing with dismissal. The following week brought the day of reckoning, the 28th. The Beatles were due on stage at the Cavern at twelve o’clock. If Paul played, it was goodbye Massey & Coggins and hello to the biggest-ever revolt he’d mounted against his dad; if he didn’t play, it was good-bye Beatles. As Neil Aspinall remembered, John made himself crystal clear on the situation: “John said to Paul on the phone, ‘Either fucking turn up today or you’re not in the band anymore.’ And that lunchtime, when Paul bounced in—‘Hi!’—and got up on stage with them, John said to him, ‘Right! You’ve given up your fucking job.’ ”38 John remembered it too: “I told him on the phone, ‘Either come or you’re out.’ So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me. But it was a long trip.”39
The last day of February 1961 was Mantovani’s factory farewell. He wasn’t good at winding coils anyway: “I was hopeless—everybody else used to wind fourteen a day, I’d get through one-and-a-half and mine were the ones that never worked.” A week later, by post, Paul received his final wage packet, his National Insurance card and his P45 form, recording the income tax he’d paid, to be handed on to his next employer. But there wasn’t going to be one. Paul was fully a Beatle, and in his mind would stay one until the group thing flopped or he reached 25.40
In the circumstances, it was highly desirable that they push ahead with their hoped-for second trip to Hamburg. If, straightaway, Paul started l
iving like the others—hanging around the house, sleeping until the afternoons—while his dad was still upset over Massey & Coggins, he would no doubt hear all about it. Better that he clear off out of the way for a month or two. On this same day, February 28, all five Beatles filled out visa applications, obtained from the German Consulate in Liverpool. There seemed no reason why George wouldn’t be allowed back in—he’d turned 18 three days earlier, freeing him to play in nightclubs after the 10PM Ausweiskontrolle—but there remained a legitimate concern that the bar would not be lifted for Paul and Pete. No progress had been made in the fight to overturn the ban on their re-entry, even though Peter Eckhorn was doing what he could in St. Pauli and Allan Williams was working away on their behalf in Liverpool.
The Beatles became notably busier once Paul was free of the factory, as if a handbrake had been released. In addition to all their nightly bookings, they played three Cavern lunchtime sessions the week of March 6 and four the following week. Even at this time of the day, Liverpool presented competition for the rock audience. Close on the heels of opening one club, Sam Leach—as was his way—opened a second, taking over operations at the Iron Door jazz club, a music cellar close to the Cavern, at 13 Temple Street. It was presently functioning as the Liverpool Jazz Society (LJS) but Leach put on Liverpool rock and was never reluctant to move into a rival’s territory.
Ray McFall and Bob Wooler tried to safeguard their prime asset—Echo ads on March 4 and 14 announced that, at lunchtime, the Beatles were exclusive to the Cavern—but this didn’t deter the insurgent. “I had no respect for anybody,” Leach says. “We went down Mathew Street late at night, after the Cavern had closed, and I put up posters right down the street, even over the Cavern door.” He admits also to a friend buying stink bombs from Liverpool magic shop Wizard’s Den and chucking them down the Cavern steps. The place was a reeking hole at the best of times, so it’s possible no one noticed.
On Saturday, March 11, Leach presented his most impressive venture yet: twelve rock groups played a twelve-hour LJS session, 8PM to 8AM, admission 6s 6d for members and 7s 6d for non-members.‖ Unsure whether to name it The First All Night Rock Ball or Rock Around the Clock he’d ended up calling it both, and nothing like this was happening anywhere else in Britain, or even in America. It was the first great gathering of the clans, lads from all parts of Liverpool, friends and rivals, camaraderie and competition, watched by masses of kids squeezed into a filthy steaming cellar with one heavy iron doorway in and out. Leach claims two thousand saw at least part of the action; Johnny Guitar’s diary mentions eight hundred and says the place was packed.
Sam Leach not featuring the Beatles at lunchtime led to appearances by an ad hoc group he called Rory Storm and the Wild Ones. He says this was Rory, Johnny and Ringo from the Hurricanes joined by others including John, Paul and maybe George from the Beatles. As none of the participants ever mentioned it, a question mark remains over precisely what occurred, but there’s no doubt that John, Paul and George were seeing plenty of Ringo again, usually when Pete had taken himself home to West Derby.
While the Beatles were angling to get back to Hamburg, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were fixed on getting a second summer season at Butlin’s. The big date on their horizon was a Butlin’s dance in Garston, south Liverpool, on March 29. If they put in a good show here, another Pwllheli summer was as good as theirs. The paths of the two groups were clearly diverging: the Beatles were musically superior and sensationally scruffy; the Hurricanes, driven by Rory’s tastes, were becoming ever more flash. Ringo had recently been measured for a silver lamé evening jacket.
The only rock group regularly booked into the Cavern in 1959–60, the Hurricanes didn’t play there at all in 1961—some long-forgotten incident or disagreement prevented it—but because they spent lunchtimes in the LJS while the Beatles were in the Cavern, so members of both groups often found themselves at a loose end during the winter afternoons. It was like being back on Grosse Freiheit: Gretel und Alfons toasted in the Grapes. Unlike in Hamburg, British licensing laws meant the pubs chucked them out at 2:30—and in need of something else to do, somewhere else to go to escape the penetrating cold, a popular stop was the Tatler, a tiny cinema at 25 Church Street, in the middle of all the shops. A continuous cycle of films ran here—newsreels, documentaries, Tom and Jerry cartoons, old cowboy prints and shorts starring northern comedians. John, Paul and George loved the eleven-minute comedy The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film and this was where they saw it, several times, enjoying the surreal humor of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and their director Dick Lester. It played frequently at the Tatler, Echo ads proclaiming “brought back by popular demand.”
The Beatles’ blending of “Goon” humor with their own native Liverpool wit was yet another distinction between them and other groups. Though much of what they did and said was for self-amusement, they were rarely not funny to everyone else. Pop stars liked to mumble (as directed) that they hoped to become “all-round entertainers”—by implication, a singing career alone wasn’t enough—but the Beatles achieved it naturally and while remaining true to themselves and their music. They were never anything so specialist as a comedy-rock group (such combinations did exist), they were simply a group who were incredibly funny, before and after shows, between and during numbers, blessed with consummate timing.
Stresses inflicted on the Cavern’s decaying electrical circuits by the PA system, amps, lighting, humidity and sweat often made the fuses blow, plunging the cellar into darkness save for emergency bulbs. When this happened, groups went off to the tiny God-forsaken cubicle that served as the dressing room, and waited to be summoned back when everything was working again. The Beatles stayed on stage. As often as not, George would go around the back to fix the fault while John and Paul entertained the audience. Paul might sit at the Cavern piano and bang out a few old numbers, including the brief and still-untitled melody he wrote when turning 14—the one that would eventually become “When I’m Sixty-Four.” They played all manner of odd things. People remember them doing the theme tune of ITV’s children’s puppet series Torchy, The Battery Boy, and the audience would be embroiled in a rollicking send-up of the long-running BBC people’s entertainment Have A Go, with John brutally satirizing the broad Yorkshireman host Wilfred Pickles—’ow do, ’OW ARE YER? They led community-singing sessions that had people in hysterics; some of these were even themed, like when one “eyes” song led seamlessly into the next—“What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For” into “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” into “Ma! (She’s Making Eyes at Me)”—packed full of ad-lib wordplay and scurrilous but beguiling irreverence. It was so incredibly novel and magical and enjoyable there were always groans when George fixed the fuse … but then they’d start up rocking.
“It sounds corny,” says Bernadette Farrell, a spring 1961 Cavernite, “but they got into your soul. Before the Beatles I’d been a Cliff Richard fan, then suddenly there was this, so wild and different and exciting. They seemed somehow more mature than the other groups.”
We always requested Paul to sing “Long Tall Sally.” He used to say, “I can’t do it because it kills me throat,” but then he would. He’d announce, “I’m doing this one for these two flossies over here,” or something like that. Girls used to say his eyes were like mince pies. He had long eyelashes and would deliberately flutter them, and though you knew he was always aware of himself, he was so friendly to everybody that you couldn’t help but like him.41
One of the flutter numbers was “Over the Rainbow,” guaranteed to go down a storm with the girls. The song from The Wizard of Oz seemed a strange choice, but the Beatles considered it valid because Gene Vincent did it. Paul sang it somewhere between the two versions, pausing impressively after the heightened “Somewhere” and then sweetly rolling down. Cavern girls would get used to the sight: he made his eyes big, turned his face up and slightly at an angle and fixed his gaze above their heads on a brick at the far end of the center tunnel.a
Paul took such behavior from no one but John, but also he gave it back and was strong-minded enough to carry on doing what he wanted, knowing how much the audience liked it. He sang these songs well, and added one more to the portfolio at this time, the Broadway show number “Till There Was You,” as covered in a new version by Peggy Lee—or Peggy Leg, as Paul called her. (He was given her record by his cousin Bett Robbins.) John really had a go at Paul for singing this—but didn’t try to stop him doing it, recognizing there was scope for all kinds of music in this group, to please all kinds of audiences … just so long as no one went near jazz.
Another number added by Paul in this period was “The Hippy Hippy Shake,” by the Montana-born singer Chan Romero. Bob Wooler was given the British pressing of this record in 1959 and occasionally played it in the jive halls, between groups. It was a chugging rocker, sung in a high voice that Wooler felt was ideally suited to Paul’s range. “I played it one lunchtime at the Cavern and Paul said, ‘What’s that?’ After the session he asked me to play it again. I lent it to him and the Beatles started doing it. He bought me a pint in the Grapes for it.” Paul was great with “The Hippy Hippy Shake,” screaming and giving it his all like any of the Little Richard songs, and it would become a long-term audience favorite.
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