It was a beast to carry, a burden especially dreaded by whoever had to get it into the Cavern. This was usually Neil and Pete—who huffed, puffed and cussed it down the slippery steps, scraping knuckles as they shuffled it around the tight corner at the bottom. The coffin was loud everywhere but never more than here, where the pounding sound broke loose the Cavern bricks’ calcium deposits, which then sprinkled on the heads of the audience. The Beatles called it “Liverpool dandruff.”49 Paul sometimes turned the coffin to the back wall, away from the audience, which seemed to make it even louder. A Liverpool College of Art student, Peter Mackey, soon to form a group himself, saw a Cavern lunchtime session and was shaken by the experience.
The combination of Pete’s bass drum and Paul’s bass guitar, with the bass speaker facing the back wall, smacked me hard in the chest. That had never happened to me before. And their charisma! At nights, a buzz used to go around the Cavern when the Beatles were arriving—“They’re here, they’re here”—and we all used to turn around to see them come in. They’d walk through, all in black. I was a complete and utter Beatles fan right from the start. If I hadn’t seen and heard the Beatles at the Cavern my life would have gone a different way. I wouldn’t have “chased the dream.”50
So much was Mackey knocked out, he allowed the purpose of his initial Cavern visit to capsize. He went there as president of Sulca, the art school Students’ Union, to reclaim the amplifier provided to the Beatles eighteen months earlier, the amp John took to Hamburg … and never brought back. Mackey intended to demand its return, but then he found himself face-to-face with John Lennon. “I ventured into the bandroom, introduced myself and said, ‘We’d like our equipment back.’ He said, ‘Oh, we hocked it in Germany …’ and that was it. I didn’t ask for reparation, I just let it go.”
Much had happened in a short time. The amp was bought by Sulca because Stuart was in the “college band”; a year on, he was living and studying in Hamburg and, but for correspondence, removed from Liverpool life. John and Stu wrote often to each other. John told him the Beatles had a fan club, and he expressed frustration that nothing was happening for them—“It’s all a shitty deal. Something is going to happen, but where is it?” There were letters as long as twenty-one pages, with drawings—one showed Christ on the cross with a pair of slippers underneath—and the rawest of raw text, much of it stream-of-consciousness scribble. “I’ve got one ciggie till Thursday, so what about that, twat face?” Swinging from prose to poetry, the scrappy pages revealed a troubling insight into the mind of John Lennon:
I can’t remember anything
without a sadness
so deep that it hardly
becomes known to me,
so deep that its tears
leave me a spectator
of my own STUPIDITY.
& so I go rambling on
With a hey nonny nonny nonny no.51
Stuart was making great progress in his studies at the Hochschule, working under Eduardo Paolozzi. The course didn’t only involve sculpture and painting: he was also making experimental films. (He’s thought to have made two; few details are known, they haven’t been seen and are presumed lost.) Paolozzi never doubted Stuart’s talent, dedication or capacity for intense work, but, increasingly, these studies were being interrupted by failing health.
Mersey Beat printed a letter from a girl asking if it was true that this member of the Beatles had been killed in a car crash. But while rumors of Stuart’s demise were happily premature, his health was evidently deteriorating at an alarming rate, especially for a young man of 21. A hospital examination in Hamburg revealed gastritis, the grumbling appendix, a shadow on the entrance to his lungs, and swollen glands; he was also moody, neurotic and a nervous wreck.52
Most worryingly, nothing took away Stuart’s headaches. They were so excruciating that he collapsed at the Hochschule one day and had to be taken home. Klaus Voormann remembers the pain being so severe that Stu created terrible scenes in Nielsa and Astrid’s house, throwing food about the room and shouting. When Stu announced he was planning a brief return to Liverpool, to have his appendix removed free on the National Health Service, his mother arranged for him to be analyzed with recourse to a whole new set of X-rays. In the end, nothing was done—the NHS wouldn’t operate on his appendix without first establishing it was necessary, then Stuart failed to turn up for the X-ray appointment. The consultant surgeon at Sefton General Hospital, who met Stuart on one occasion, wrote to Millie saying the German X-rays showed his condition “was within the limits of normal,” and he added, “my impression was that most of his symptoms were nervous in origin.”53
It isn’t known if Stu saw the Beatles during this brief trip home, though it’s likely he and John got together, given that they wrote so often. Astrid accompanied Stuart and they had another tetchy time with Millie, which seems to have prompted an early departure back to Hamburg. Before doing so, he discussed the possibility of a Liverpool exhibition of his paintings, which Allan Williams was hoping to mount at the Blue Angel.
As for Williams’ legal complaint against the Beatles, all had gone quiet. Charles Munro had to chase a response from Williams’ solicitors, and when it came, on August 16, it was merely to report that their client had been in London and couldn’t be contacted. Munro wrote to Paul saying “it may be a little time before I can let you have a report of any substance”—and this silence extended right through September. John included a little dig at Williams in the sixth Mersey Beat, the September 14 issue, when he parodied the listings entry that read “Jacaranda—members only” as “The Jackarandy—Membrains only.”
John called Mersey Beat itself Mersy Boat and said it was “selling another three copies to some go home foreigners who went home.” Brian Epstein also adapted the paper’s name in his column, referring to its readers as “Merseybeaters.” And over the page (again adjacent to a Nems ad), Bob Wooler was expressing some important thoughts. As far as anyone knew, Mersey Beat wasn’t being read in London, but Wooler used his column to implore talent-spotters to visit Liverpool, saying, “We have the genuine article on Merseyside. We only want the genuine people to discover, groom and promote them for potential stardom. Is that asking too much?”
Mrs. Best was still doing what she could. Paying a visit to Hayman’s Green, Jennifer Dawes of the fan club witnessed Mona in a determined mood: “She was standing with her back to the fire one night, saying how the Beatles had to be moved up to a better scale: more money, better prospects. We couldn’t do anything better. We had the impression she wanted to manage the Beatles and that the other three wouldn’t go along with her.”
Mona had good ideas. One was to get the Beatles on TV for the first time, but her letter to Granada, pitching them for the local news show People and Places, met with a non-committal response.54 Had the reply been positive, however, offering the Beatles an audition or broadcast, a postponement might have been necessary, because the same September 14 Mersey Beat also included an important news-line: “John Lennon and Paul MacArtney of the ‘Beatles’ will be off to Spain for a holiday toward the end of September.”b
John’s 21st birthday was a month away, and he knew he was getting money—£100, cash, more than he or Paul had ever seen in their lives. It was a coming-of-age gift from his Aunt Elizabeth in Edinburgh, and his idea was to go away with Paul and enjoy it. Bob Wooler was party to their planning, and fought with them:
They were bored, and decided they would go away for a month. I thought this was disastrous because they would be away from the scene too long and lose their fans. Fans were very capricious: they moved from one group to another. And anyway, what about the other two members, George Harrison and Pete Best? What about them, what do they do? We argued a lot about this—we argued in the back room of the Grapes pub to a large extent—and they said, “Well, we’ll go away for a fortnight only.”55
Wooler secured for the Cavern a definite undertaking that they would return, which would be advertised in their
absence. Nonetheless, John later identified this moment as “another time when the group was in debate, about whether it would exist or not.”56
It was nine months after his previous deliberation, when he’d returned from Hamburg and thought hard about whether or not he wanted to continue. This boredom, felt by Paul and particularly by John, was quite a problem now. It was getting to be make-or-break time for the Beatles, and it could be that Wooler’s insistence they consider their fans as well as George and Pete helped swing the decision to carry on. Bookings for October 15 and dates beyond were not canceled, so it was clear when John and Paul were expected back, but all bookings from September 30 to October 14 had to be broken—an unpleasant job for Pete; he and George had to accept losing up to £50 apiece, as well as being left behind. John said George “was furious because he needed the money,” and it’s unlikely Paul extended George much sympathy, subsequently conceding how he “tended to talk down to him … all the way through the Beatle years.”57
Equally, the promoters who paid the Beatles over-the-odds to present them every week had to “lump it.” Ray McFall was forced to find other entertainment for two Wednesday nights and five lunchtimes in the Cavern, Brian Kelly for two Thursdays at Litherland and probably two Saturdays at Aintree, Vic Anton one Sunday at Hambleton Hall, and Mrs. Best one Sunday at the Casbah and two Fridays at Knotty Ash Village Hall, her latest enterprise. To a man, and woman, they were incensed by it—but John and Paul hadn’t a care. They didn’t mean to be rude about it, but basically it was tough shit.
It was tough too on Dot and Cyn. Dot simply had to accept the situation, but Cyn had a greater case for grievance. John was heading off without her when he could so easily have waited for the art school holidays. He had money in his pocket, a trip inside his head, and she didn’t figure. And she would surely have welcomed the diversion, because life at Mendips had become so intolerable that she’d moved out. Mimi had discovered the bundle of love-letters John sent from Hamburg, correspondence he himself would describe as “the sexiest letters this side of Henry Miller, forty pages long some of them.” Mimi considered them pornographic, and there was a great scene. Cyn was out within hours, moving in with an aunt on the other side of Liverpool.58
That John was taking Paul, no one else, accentuates the renewed closeness since Stu quit the Beatles. They were the Beatles’ force, an unstoppable and authentically powerful pair. “Lennon [had] attitude,” said Bob Wooler, “and, taking his lead from Lennon, McCartney could be similar. At times, they reminded me of those well-to-do Chicago lads Leopold and Loeb, who killed someone because they felt superior to him. Lennon and McCartney were ‘superior human beings.’ ”59
“You’d always see them together, in the pub or walking along the street,” says Johnny Gustafson of the Big Three. “They were a duo, and seemed each other’s equal.” Bernie Boyle, the young lad hanging around with them at every opportunity (and they made him suffer for it), says, “They were like brothers, with John as the elder, Paul’s mentor. They were so tight it was like there was a telepathy between them: on stage, they’d look at each other and know instinctively what the other was thinking.”
They were brothers. They were the Nerk Twins, and now they were taking a break from the Beatles and going off to Spain. En route, they’d stop a day or two in Paris, to size up the Brigittes, check out the kind of clothes Jürgen Vollmer wore, and perhaps see Jürgen himself, if he was around.
Gustafson happened to bump into them the day they left, Saturday, September 30. “They both had bowler hats on, with the usual leather jackets and jeans. They said they were off to Paris, so I walked down to Lime Street station with them and watched them go. They were an incredible pair: always great fun, irreverent, and so close.”
* * *
* He also got a fifth ring, from a girl. He wore this too, in place of his first, the signet Elsie gave him at 16. He didn’t wear more than four, two on each hand.
† Inevitably, the record had been rejected by Capitol; it was issued instead on the Warwick label.
‡ An early Beatles follower at the Cavern, Ann Sheridan, describes their neckerchiefs as “like a square scarf halved and tied at the back, worn on the outside of their leathers. These scarves were very popular with girls—Brigitte Bardot wore them—and the Beatles had theirs cowboy-style, pale pink, with the triangle coming down the front. No other boys wore pink then.”
§ The Beatles got their American music from shops, not ships.
While the so-called Cunard Yanks, the Scouse merchant sailors who plied the Atlantic route, have a vital and fascinating history, and played their part in shaping local lives, they had little or none of the influence on the Beatles’ music that commentators have always suggested. George’s Gretsch guitar is the best of a few examples of how the circumstances worked in their favor … but, as this book demonstrates, the music the Beatles played, while it came from America, reached them from records licensed by British companies, pressed in Britain and sold in shops like Nems. Ringo Starr had access to the transatlantic supply line, which enriched his collection of country and blues records otherwise unavailable in Britain, but the Beatles didn’t, and this fact also applies to many (but not all) of the other Liverpool groups. Bob Wooler was finger-proddingly emphatic on the point, saying, “There is no evidence—I repeat, no evidence—that the beat groups were performing songs brought over from America by the Cunard Yanks.” Paul McCartney has also said Cunard Yanks had nothing to do with the Beatles knowing American records.
‖ Neil never thought of himself as the Beatles’ road manager until the label was thrust on him toward the end of 1962.
a Joe’s Restaurant, usually called Joe’s café, was at 139 Duke Street, up the hill from town toward the Anglican Cathedral. It was run by the middle-aged Joe Davey, a cheery Liverpool mine host, balding, bearded, and with a moustache twiddled to an upward point on both sides. He and the groups got along fine. In a questionnaire for the NME in February 1963, John Lennon gave his favorite foods as “curry and jelly” and both were specialties chez Joe. The suggestion is of a constantly verbal young man speeding, slurping and smoking his way through the menu while Liverpool slumbered.
b The running total was now six spellings from six issues of Mersey Beat: McArtrey, MacArthy, McCartney, MacArtrey, McArtney and MacArtney.
TWENTY-ONE
OCTOBER 1–14, 1961
LES NERK TWINS À PARIS
They meant to hitchhike, hence the bowler hats. Acker Bilk’s freebies would catch the eye of drivers as John and Paul thumbed a ride. But John had £100 in his pocket, so they took the train to London and beyond to Dover, then caught the last ferry to Dunkirk and the first morning train straight to the French capital. They emerged at la Gare du Nord with hope in their hearts and a skip in their step, for nowhere on Earth to the postwar Englishman was ever as exotic, sexy and risqué as Paris.1
Jürgen Vollmer was lodging in a little place on the Left Bank, the Hôtel de Beaune. Still seeking a job as a photographer’s assistant, he’d quickly settled in a metropolis where, with his clean, combed-down hair and à la mode fashion, he blended in as the chic young Frenchman he longed to be. Though not at his hotel when John and Paul bustled along, the parties managed to find each other later in the day, in front of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. And then it hit home: this reserved and cultured young German had on his hands two boisterous English tourists expecting to be shown where it was all happening.
They hoped to stay somewhere cheap, perhaps the same hotel—but it was full, and so too, it seems, were the other inexpensive pensions in the district. When Jürgen tried to sneak them up to his room, where they could crash on the floor, the concierge appeared in her nightgown and began screaming at them, and as Jürgen protested his innocence, John made fun of him.
Their best chance of finding a room was in Montmartre, where there were cheap hotels used by the area’s prostitutes. Jürgen hailed a taxi, told the driver where to take them, and they disappeare
d off down the street. The Spanish O-Level graduate Paul would do all the speaking in Spain, the French O-Level failure John would do all the parlez in Paris … so they struggled, and were reduced to wandering around exhausted in the early hours, asking prostitutes, “Avez-vous un hôtel pour la nuit?” As Paul would remember, “We thought we were so young and beautiful that one of these women would take us back to her hotel pour la nuit, but I’m afraid they didn’t. We had to find a little flea-bitten hotel, and we got bitten.”2
They decided to stay a second day, which then became a third and a fourth. Spain could wait because this place was full of femmes exotiques whose every utterance aroused the two Liverpool lads. While Jürgen showed them Paris, pointing out the interesting places, John and Paul ogled the birds. They went to the Latin Quarter and drank banana milk shakes on la rue des Anglais; they sipped wine in les Deux Magots, the famous café on the Left Bank, former haunt of Hemingway and Sartre; they went to the Eiffel Tower, but didn’t go up because it cost too much; they goggled at the pissoir right there in the street; they laughed at the sight of the Kardomah café by the Louvre, their Liverpool tea company having got here before them; and when Jürgen showed them L’Opéra Garnier they burst into flamboyant song, lifted up their guide and carried him across le Boulevard de la Madeleine—while he, painfully shy, yelled at them in broken English to put him down.
Tune In Page 72
