Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  There was one instrument Boyle didn’t carry. Around late July, George upgraded his guitar for the first time since getting the Futurama in 1959. He’d long set his heart on buying a Gretsch—as featured on the sleeves of his Chet Atkins LPs, and played by the late Eddie Cochran—even though, despite the lifting of Britain’s trade embargo, they remained almost impossible to obtain. Then George heard about a secondhand one being sold by a merchant seaman, and he rushed over to see it.28

  It was beautiful. The real McCoy—a black Gretsch Duo Jet with a warm sound and easy action, unlike the Futurama, which looked good but was tough to play. The seller, Ivan Hayward, had bought the guitar in New York in 1957 for around $200, and now he wanted £90 for it. He was surprised this 18-year-old lad had the funds, but, as George would recall, “I saved up for years and years to get a guitar [like this]. I got £70 and felt I was gonna get murdered if anybody knew I had it in me pocket.” Hayward allowed George to take the guitar away after writing an IOU for the remaining £20; it was signed in pencil on the back of the customs bill incurred when Hayward first brought the instrument home. He has it still, because George never returned to settle the debt.29

  John and George both had American guitars now, and American amps to go with them—maximum male appeal—and George clearly adored his new instrument. Fans started to call him “George Gretsch,” and Bernie Boyle remembers how inseparable he was from it. “George never had a case for his Duo Jet, just a soft bag, and he used to carry it everywhere. We’d go to the Kardomah for a coffee and George would carry the guitar. If we went to a pub he’d have the beer in his right hand and the guitar under his left arm. He took it wherever he went and never left it for a moment.”§

  George’s big news didn’t make Mersey Beat, but its second issue broke ground by publishing a local rock group photo for the first time—and it was the Beatles. Astrid’s shot from the Hamburger Dom fairground first appeared in print here, adjacent to the front-page headline BEATLE’S SIGN RECORDING CONTRACT!30 A report of their deal with Bert Kaempfert concluded with news that Stuart Sutcliffe had stayed behind in Germany and the group were continuing as a quartet. Paul supplied Bill Harry with both the news and the photograph, so it was unfortunate he was captioned as “Paul MacArthy.” John had called him McArtrey in the first Mersey Beat, and later in this second issue he merited a further mention in Virginia’s column (“Howie of ‘Derry and the Seniors’ says that Paul MacArtrey of the Beatles is a better singer than Cliff Richard”) which meant he suffered three different misspellings in just two issues. This wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by John.

  Nems took its twelve dozen copies, and Brian Epstein must have liked it because he invited Bill Harry back up to Nems, talked about it at length, and offered to write a record review column to begin with issue three, which Harry gladly accepted.

  On July 25, as they stirred from their slumbers for a Cavern midday session, John, Paul, George and Pete received an identical letter in the morning post, a small envelope franked with the name Silverman, Livermore & Co., well-known solicitors in Liverpool. The Beatles were involved in their first legal situation.

  Allan Williams didn’t report them to the Agents’ Association for blocking his Hamburg commission, but he believed he was owed £104 and was prepared to see them in court for it. (This was £26 each, £2 a week for the thirteen-week season; it seems Stuart received no such demand, because he’d sent Williams money from Hamburg.)

  The Beatles don’t appear to have been unduly bothered by it—and certainly weren’t going to capitulate. Ray McFall advised them to retain a solicitor, suggesting Charles D. Munro, and Paul set up a Thursday appointment as he’d be in town anyway for the Cavern. His leather suit must have shocked in such conservative surroundings, but while Munro’s dress code was strictly pinstripe, he still agreed to represent them. And it wasn’t necessary for all the Beatles to fight Williams: one would do. The role fell naturally to Paul, and—after gathering relevant documents from the others—he returned to Munro’s office on Saturday the 29th to do his bit.

  “I am a member of the Jazz Group known as the Beatles,” their first-ever legal statement began, Munro judging it unwise to mount a robust character defense with the words “rock” or “rock ’n’ roll” in the first line. Paul said that although Williams had his and Pete’s post-deportation appeals typed, to appear more presentable, “no mention of being paid was ever made”; and he emphasized that when Peter Eckhorn refused to give the Beatles more than 35 marks a night at the Top Ten, they then “absolutely refused to pay” Williams’ commission. The document ended equally boldly: “If necessary we are quite prepared to defend these proceedings [and] we are not afraid of any bad publicity Mr. Williams may give us.”

  Which side Munro believed isn’t recorded, but he did ask for, and receive in cash, £10 to cover his costs in advance. He then wrote a brisk letter informing Silverman, Livermore that Williams’ claim for commission was being rejected on the basis of there being “no contract between our respective clients.”

  There was no acknowledgment of what Allan Williams had done for the Beatles, just a stiff swatting-away of his claim. The Beatles weren’t sentimental types. When, for example, they decided someone was taking advantage of them, their response could be uncompromising. This same weekend, they abruptly curtailed their relationship with the promoter Wally Hill. He was the man who’d stolen a march on his rivals by booking the Beatles every Saturday and Sunday for months ahead—paying what, to him, was a steep £15 for Blair Hall and £12 for Holyoake Hall. This was the agreement he’d made by letter with Pete while the Beatles were in Hamburg. Now that they were home—confident they could get other dates if they lost these, and irritated they’d been sold for £12 on Sundays when they could be getting £15—they let trouble foment and handled it in their own sweet way. As Neil Aspinall remembered, the previous Sunday at Blair Hall “we were late turning up, five minutes or half an hour, whatever it was. When we finished the last number the curtains stayed open and the promoter said we had to play more, because we’d gone on late. We played another number and he still wouldn’t close them, so it was ‘Fuck you! We’ll never fucking play for you again, you cunt.’ He was saying ‘If you don’t turn up you’ll never work in Liverpool again’ and all that shit, but we just got in my van and pissed off.”31

  “Neil’s one of those people that clicked as soon as you meet him,” John said in 1964, talking about the Beatles’ first and original full-time assistant.32 He and Neil Aspinall got along very well very quickly; so too did George with his old smokers’ corner pal from the Institute; and also Paul, though to a lesser extent. They mostly called him Nell—his nickname since childhood—and the degree to which he fitted into the Beatles’ framework is evident from his description of the group as “we.” He didn’t play, but was rapidly indispensable to them, best friend of the quiet one but as tenacious as John, Paul and George. To them, he became one of us, and John made sure Neil was man enough to stand up to him. He wasn’t just their driver and he wasn’t only their roadie, he was their mate and their protector.‖ They shared plenty of characteristics—they were sharp, blunt, mentally strong, bright, funny, opinionated, mouthy, loyal, honest and addicted to nicotine. They paid him about £7 a week to begin with, shared between the four.

  The three never had much to say to Pete, but Neil became an effective bridge, and it’s quite possible his employment helped extend Pete’s time in the group when their inclination had been (in John’s words) “to dump him.” Even more than before, the Beatles were clamped to the Bests: Pete and Mona ran their bookings, Neil drove the van bought for him by Mona (their relationship continued), and their amps and bits and pieces were kept in the entrance hall at 8 Hayman’s Green—the house where still, when diary vacancies allowed, the Beatles played in the cellar Casbah and had many good times.

  Insofar as the Beatles thought of tomorrow, Neil’s van was to be their mode of transport for the foreseeable future, a place for fun, games, s
houting, eating and sex with girls after gigs. It cost £65 and the hire-purchase agreement was in Mona’s name because the garage was unwilling to make a contract with Neil, who was 19 (he was a year younger than John, a month older than Pete and a shade over eight months older than Paul—the same difference as between Paul and George). Because all the Beatles’ bookings were in town or north of it, John, Paul and George still made their way by bus, but Neil would run them home afterward or wherever else they wanted to go. There’d be a dash and a squabble to get the adjacent front seat; behind this was a bench-seat for the other three, and after that—as Bernie Boyle remembers—an empty space. “That was where they kept all the gear. There was no seat for me but I would wriggle my way into the back and lie on top of the amps. Nothing was strapped down, and when Neil took a corner everything would fly all over the place, me included. The guitars and Pete’s kit were in cases but the amps weren’t, they were just banging about.”

  Good times … and yet, in the Beatles’ minds, it was all becoming a little too easy. They were toppermost but bored, John and Paul especially. The local halls were called “a circuit,” and so it seemed: they were going round and round the same places on the same nights, week in and week out. This was fine enough for other groups but not for the Beatles. And though Neil stood up to them, no one else did. They’d demanded £15 a night, knowing they mightn’t get it, but the promoters paid up—and, as Bob Wooler would recall, the Beatles, paradoxically, weren’t overly impressed by this. When obstacles did come along, like Wally Hill, they simply obliterated them. Wooler saw the Beatles two or three lunchtimes/afternoons a week, and most evenings, and he’d always be clear and adamant that the Beatles “nearly split up in the summer of 1961, because they felt they were getting nowhere.” It’s an extraordinary statement.33

  Paul said they needed some publicity, and it’s no coincidence that the Beatles’ first Liverpool Echo mention (beyond the classifieds) came now, on August 10, 1961. The daily column Over the Mersey Wall, a roundup of folksy news and views, quoted Paul explaining a nice story: a cloakroom girl at the LJS had asked him to buy a doll in Hamburg for a hospitalized, crippled infant; he had, but he’d lost the address and didn’t know where to send it. It was true, and a publicity grab … and also the springboard to Paul’s best wheeze. The column’s main story this same day—headlined YES, THEY DID SWIM THE MERSEY—explained why nobody had swum from one side of the river to the other since 1923: it was considered too dangerous on account of its shipping and strong tidal current. Paul reckoned that if the forty-year absence of an attempt could make the news, they’d score maximum coverage by actually doing it. As remembered years later, it was never specified whether he or John was going to be the brave, wet Beatle, but Paul did like the idea of a publicity stunt. “We were trying to think of ’em, because we didn’t have a manager, so we’d just sit around, thinking of ones we could do. We were going to get one of us to jump in the Mersey, and swim it …”34

  We didn’t have a manager. Here was the nub of it. They were rudderless, in need of someone to get them beyond where they were, to open up new opportunities to conquer—for while the Beatles lacked direction, they were never short of belief. As John would say on numerous occasions, they felt they’d the beating of anyone, given the chance. “We were always thinking we were better than whoever was famous, so why shouldn’t we be up there?… In the back of me mind I thought ‘I’m gonna make it,’ but I couldn’t lay it on the line when and how, I just knew we had something … You always hope somebody will come along—we were always waiting for the big man with a cigar.”35

  The cigar men were in London, and none saw any need to travel two hundred miles to look for talent … when they gave Liverpool a thought at all. Locally, such men just didn’t exist: there were no potential managers scouting Merseyside for groups to represent. No group had one. Anyway, a think-local man would have been pointless for the Beatles. They were already at their maximum earnings potential, taking home about £25 a week each; there seemed no way promoters could be persuaded to pay them more. Also, the managers the Beatles had heard about—Larry Parnes and his ilk—were known to take up to 50 percent.

  Bob Wooler summarized their problem like this:

  They needed someone to channel their energies, their ideas. It called for somebody who was prepared to put up with the Beatles, and they were such a handful because they were strong willed. They had their own ideas. Whoever took on the Beatles had to knuckle down to the Beatles—and the breed of person who will submit to that sort of control is rare.

  The Beatles wanted someone who could further their career in a very positive way: they wanted somebody with nous, somebody with clout, somebody with cash, and somebody who drove a car.36

  Wooler had “a bit of nous, no clout outside Liverpool, no cash and no car.” The Beatles liked his humor and erudition, but if he was their manager they’d never have put up with his pedantry; and he, sensitive and easily hurt, would have been sorely bruised by John and Paul.

  There were other contenders, as he would relate:

  Ray McFall, Bill Harry and Sam Leach all toyed with the idea of managing them. Ray knew they needed someone, but his personality was very different from theirs and he wouldn’t have tolerated their behavior. I remember him saying to me, “The Beatles really need a manager,” and I thought, “Then you’ll find out how awkward the sods can be.” Bill Harry was too preoccupied with Mersey Beat and I think they would have fallen out with Sam.37

  There might also have been talk of Brian Kelly, but he was too busy with his jive dances and electronics business to manage the Beatles, and it’s hard to imagine the Beatles wanting him.

  Then there was Mrs. Best. In the summer of 1960, Peter had suddenly abandoned his education and was a quiet boy at home, not doing anything; one year on, he was a quiet boy with the hottest group in Liverpool, and—in Mona’s adoring eyes—largely responsible for it. By doing everything humanly possible for her eldest son, as she always would, she accomplished more for the Beatles at this time than any of the other parents combined. But did she want to manage them? Pete says she didn’t, and Wooler was not alone in expressing certainty that John, Paul and George would never have allowed it.38

  Brian Epstein’s first Mersey Beat column appeared at the start of August. He commented on stage and jazz records as well as pops (everyone still called it this), noting the “good potential” of a forthcoming single by Chubby Checker called “Let’s Twist Again.” He also anticipated big sales for the Parlophone LP Beyond the Fringe. Elsewhere in the issue, the Beatles were congratulated for their “continued success at home and abroad” and for securing a recording contract, and were named in a prominent front-page ad for the Cavern’s all-night session on Saturday, August 5.

  No matter the talk of boredom and depression, the Beatles still had some wild times. Cavern all-nighters were real occasions, sweltering, rowdy, six-act, ten-hour parties for musicians and audience alike. Behind the snack bar, Thelma Wilkinson was sluicing away sweat, watching out for rats, shouting above the incredibly loud music, brewing endless pots of tea and cooking pan after pan of scouse—onions, carrots, potatoes and meat—to be carried hazardously to a minuscule bandroom jam-packed with musicians. The toilets were overflowing, the ceilings and walls pouring, the fuses blowing, and the musicians lugging their gear—drums, guitars, amps, everything—right through the packed crowd (only the one entrance and exit). Inevitably, the audience parted more reluctantly for heroes, so the Beatles always had a tough time, being kissed and backslapped and questioned and handed requests as they pushed through the throng.

  Jazz and rock both featured, and national trad star Kenny Ball was the main attraction. “You only picked up the trumpet to get the crumpet,” John Lennon told him, needling.39 At least two of the Hurricanes—Ringo and Lu “Wally” Walters—were there as spectators, taking advantage of their Butlin’s day off to return to Liverpool again. A photo of them flanking George Harrison, who has an arm on their s
houlders, appeared in the fourth Mersey Beat—the first known occasion Ringo was pictured with a Beatle. An atmospheric action shot of the Beatles in mid-performance—John giving his all at the mike—ran on the front page.

  A Riverboat Shuffle, staged by Ray McFall three weeks later, was also memorable. These occasional summer soirées were meant to be jazz only, but such was McFall’s sway to the beat they too became a combination of jazz and rock. The Cavern was closed on August 25 and everyone decamped to the Pier Head to board the MV Royal Iris for a momentous night on the Mersey, more than three hours of music, dancing and mayhem on the muddy water. The Beatles supported star act Mr. Acker Bilk, trad’s biggest name, about to score his third top ten hit. His trademark was the bowler hat and he gave one to each of the Beatles, which they wore as they worked their way through the crates of brown ale.

  A great cream- and green-colored ferryboat, the Royal Iris had a ballroom said to be bigger than the liner Queen Elizabeth’s, plus several bars all doing a roaring trade, and a food saloon that provided its Liverpool nickname, “the fish and chip boat.” Sailings could always be a bit choppy, and this night the boat was buffeted by strong winds. The sailing wasn’t too bad going upriver but as the captain steered beyond New Brighton the open pull of Liverpool Bay made it start to roll. Microphones swayed, dancers staggered, then there was a rush for the sides and many of the revelers threw up. Bernie Boyle paints an evocative image: “The Beatles rocked the boat that night. You couldn’t squeeze a ten-bob note on there—it was fucking heaving—and you were sweating your balls off in the crush. People were drinking and smoking and eating fish and chips and puking—it was an unbelievable night.”