When They Were Boys

by Larry Kane

  On the very first day, it was almost a non-story. The no-jeans directive forced doorman Pat Delaney to try to turn away the Beatles because bass guitarist Stu Sutcliffe was wearing jeans. The Beatles were on the bill, but the directive applied to paid entertainers and paying customers alike. Delaney, a former police officer, relented and let them in, but owner McFall wasn’t happy, delivering what was described as a “stern” message to the boys in their dressing area. In due time, the Beatles, who would become such a sizzling draw, would never be stopped at the door again. So much for the original bans on rock and denim.

  In truth, the Beatles should have arrived in wet suits or fancy bathing attire, or at least something, anything, to keep them dry. The inside of the original Cavern was not environmentally sound.

  Sir Ron Watson, the Southport man who saw so many of those concerts as a break from his office job nearby, reminisces about the feel of the club, more pleased about the music than the atmosphere: “It was so hot, Larry, so steamy, and tremendously uncomfortable, but the beat of their music, believe me, made up for all of that. It was the music that kept bringing me back, day after day.”

  Joe Ankrah, he of the wonderful collection of singers known as the Chants, remembers feeling all closed in, claustrophobic, even as his group jammed with the boys. It was a sweat-dripping mess, with healthy breathing a rarity.

  “My God,” he says. “The cigarette smoke and the moisture created a horrible odor. The walls had drips of moisture on them. The walls had sweat, the people were sweating, the bands were dripping with sweat. Smoke from the cigarettes was forming a moving cloud over the room. You might say I was breathless.”

  Ankrah, whose group, facing intense racial barriers, was given an enormous break by Paul and the boys, will never forget the opportunity, or the impact of the human traffic jam.

  “Everybody was so close. Many people were standing. There was little room to stand, or to breathe.”

  Mick Jagger first took the Rolling Stones to the Cavern in late 1963. In a brief conversation afterward, he described the in-close excitement: “Was it hot! We almost sweated away. They’ve had so many big groups at the Cavern that you’ve got to prove yourself; they asked us back, so they must like us.”

  The Merseybeats’ Billy Kinsley has spent “nearly a lifetime” at the old Cavern (and the new one), and he says the conditions were much worse than described. “Remember, 130 years ago the building was adjacent to the water, so quite often the toilets in the old building had a problem. . . . Drains in the bathrooms were flooded over the top. . . . It was not pretty. As far as hot, it was hotter than hot. . . . You could walk in and start sweating profusely.”

  Famed music historian Spencer Leigh, through his always careful research, says in his book The Cavern that the “Beatles walked on water.” He further explains that “when the cavern was excavated in 1982, the builders stumbled upon an old shaft that led to a huge hole . . . a cavern underneath the Cavern, as it were. It was filled with water and, bravely, the architect and the site agent investigated in a rubber dinghy. The lake was one hundred twenty feet deep and seventy feet long . . . they could tell the site was man-made.”

  In my conversation with Leigh, the BBC broadcaster and prolific author says, “There was a theory that there was a slave hole there once, but that’s unlikely.”

  For Leigh, the Cavern is mostly about the Beatles, but also the home base for all of the great Merseyside groups.

  “Remember,” he tells me, “although the Quarrymen played there in the fifties, the Beatles’ first appearance as the Beatles didn’t happen till February of 1961. They were preceded by other bands that could have been headed to greatness, notably Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes. But in the end, it will always be known for the Beatles, and as the most famous club in the world.”

  Even in the new location, you can feel the closeness, the intimacy of the Cavern with its small stage and the reverberation of the sound through the thick walls. But today, unlike 1961, alcoholic beverages are served, and jeans are accepted! Even Julia Baird was dressed in jeans when she met with me recently for a long interview at the Cavern.

  Eventually the boys embraced and owned the place, although their first appearance was, according to one witness, not so fine at all.

  “When the Beatles first came to the Cavern, I thought [they] were absolutely dreadful, and musically awful,” says Ray Ennis, lead vocalist with the Swinging Blue Jeans. “Stuart was on bass and making a horrendous noise. They were smoking on stage, and Stu was sitting on the piano, facing Pete Best on the drums and not even looking at the audience.”

  Stu did have a habit of turning away from the audience, especially in Hamburg, but it seemed to make him all the more intriguing and mysterious.

  There was no mystery about the effect of the intimate Cavern on musicians and fans.

  Billy Kinsley, whose own band was first called the Mavericks, named affectionately after the popular American TV western, would not have traded the experience for anything. “I was just a wee teenager and there I was with Bob Wooler and all the bands that I idolized. We began working there for about six pounds a night for all of us . . . not a lot, mind you, but it was as though they were paying us to have fun, which we did quite intensely.”

  For young writer Bill Harry, the descent of nineteen steps into the unknown brought him into several cellar areas that combined to create the Cavern, which for years was a jazz club. Harry’s visit was a reunion of sorts of the young art-school students who gathered after school at Ye Cracke, the charming pub where John Lennon, Stu Sutcliffe, Harry, and friends gathered in the “war room” to talk of their role in shaping the future of mankind.

  Bill Harry had arrived at the Cavern at the suggestion of Stu, the bass guitarist, who, along with John, was friends and classmates with Harry at the art school. It would be the first of countless visits to the Cavern for Harry, who played a role later in the year in getting Brian Epstein into the club for the first time.

  “It was unusual,” says Harry. “Mona Best, who was still developing the allure of the Casbah, and who was doing everything possible to promote the boys, had talked Cavern owner McFall into booking the group.”

  Once again, the forgotten Beatles advocate Mona Best gets the credit for getting them in, not to the biggest, but to the most memorable of all their venues. On that day, in 1961, the modern legend of the Cavern was born, although no one knew it till years later, when it was celebrated, like Hamburg, as the place that drove the Beatles to fame. In reality, it all could be reversed—the Beatles put the Cavern on the map.

  In all, the Quarrymen/Beatles played a total of 292 gigs at the Cavern, if you include the Quarrymen’s first appearance in 1957. The Beatles’ first appearance in February 1961 was supposed to be another big hit, following the Litherland Town Hall surprise success where they were billed as “The Beatles—Direct from Hamburg.”

  While not everyone in attendance was impressed, word spread quickly about the simple raw energy of their performance, and in a matter of days the “Fab Five” would be rocking the city.

  The group’s final appearance was on August 3, 1963, so the record runs at the Cavern spanned a period of six years. But just like Litherland, it was the early appearances that had the most impact.

  Young Billy Kinsley remembers the word-of-mouth messages that were spreading through the area: “The Cavern experience was a sudden cultural flash. It wasn’t pretty, not comfortable, but being there was the fun, and it was wild and very much alive.”

  And cheap. Admission was a shilling; in those days, that was worth a few American pennies. For the lunchtime crowd, cheese rolls and Coke were available. But liquor was not served, in contrast to the new Cavern, a replica of the original, which was demolished in the seventies.

  Chances are the young women and men, dressed to the hilt, would have paid more to be there for the group’s heralded arrival. In the end, most of them walked out in a “trance,” according to Bill Harry, who was just a few
years older than most of them, and only a year older than John. So when you read the quote of what the music did to him, remember that these are the thoughts of a twenty-one-year-old, not the mature writer-legend of Merseyside and beyond. With flair, and his eyes wide open, his head thrust forward almost like a TV news anchor who wants to get his message across with strong body language, the Bill Harry of the twenty-first century explodes with emotion as he recalls the scene.

  “What I remember the most, Larry, about the lunchtime gig, was the startling and quite savage blast of sound. There is no exaggeration when I say that the moment they started playing, the hair on my neck stood up. [What I] recall most about that Thursday lunchtime performance is how the hair on my neck stood up.”

  In a commemorative column written on the anniversary of that first Beatles concert for the Daily Express, pen pal Harry confirmed an earlier story that some “borrowed equipment from the art school played a significant role in the group’s history.”

  Harry explains, “We had used students’ union funds to buy PA equipment that the band could borrow, but somehow it had never been returned and I noted that the group was using it at this gig.”

  And about the drama he had witnessed, he says, “What became apparent from the moment the band took the stage was how they had been transformed by the experience in Germany between August and December 1960, when they had played night after night in a Hamburg bierkeller and honed their act.”

  At the time, the curious young reporter knew very little about the despair, accusations of criminal activity, and the wild life of Hamburg. In time, he would be the first to report on the grimy life in Hamburg, but on that chilly February day, Bill Harry was all smiles and proud of his art-school compatriots.

  Quietly, he thought to himself, “Is this the way we were destined to change the world?”

  A Cellarful of Noise was Brian Epstein’s 1965 memoir on his beginnings with the Beatles. Coauthored by Derek Taylor, the book recalled Brian’s experience at the Cavern in a different manner than the screams and “hair-raising” experiences of most of the kids who were ten years his junior, but with similar emotional investment.

  Three years after he first set eyes on the boys, “in a haze of smoke,” Epstein, in his always fine-tuned English, said to me, “To say I was impressed was an understatement. Obviously the real discoverers of the Beatles were the intuitive young people of Liverpool who found them quite a long time before my awareness . . . but it was in the cellar . . . the Cavern, where I saw all things coming together . . . the music, the noise, the facial expressions of the customers. It was quite impressive.”

  Over the years, until it was closed down in 1973 to make way for a rail line, the original Cavern saw the likes of Gene Vincent, Billy Kinsley, the Big Three, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and His Pacemakers, the Rolling Stones, Billy J. Kramer, Epstein’s find Cilla Black, and so many others.

  But the spark that became a raging inferno, a steady flame of sound, the real transition from the jazz age to the rock age, began nineteen steps below Mathew Street.

  “What was the Cavern like?” I asked John Lennon during the North American tour.

  “You would have liked it. Little light, lots of people, very noisy, hot, like me [laughs] . . . but it was not the Hollywood Bowl. It was, for all of us, at the time, pure heaven.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE PRINCE OF MATHEW STREET

  “I remember ‘Pike the Mad Axman’ . . . curious eyeballs looking ready to pop out of the sockets. . . . Pike used to walk around with [a] meat cleaver and whack people out.”

  —Tony Bramwell, on one of the violent “Teddy Boys”

  “January 25, 1961. I needed a new band for the new club that was opening, the Casanova Club. So I picked the five Beatles. Yes, the original five. Not a bad choice, eh?”

  —Sam Leach, the “Prince of Mathew Street”

  THE GHOSTS OF JOHN AND GEORGE ARE PROBABLY SITTING ACROSS FROM HIM, HOLDING A RUM AND COKE—or in John’s case, a touch of Brandy Alexander—watching the Prince with great glee, and maybe a touch of empathetic laughter thrown in.

  The Prince arranges his hair, still wavy with silver shine, and he smiles that toothy smile that made him a teen idol in those heart-gushing early days, when girls became young lovers and boys didn’t have to search far for undying affection.

  He sits in the corner at the usual table at The Grapes, a small, cluttered, and charming bar, with a stream of live entertainment, located in the heart of Mathew Street, the quaint and sometimes grim-looking walkway that sits adjacent to the new Cavern, as well as the spot of the original Cavern, which was unceremoniously destroyed by the city fathers of Liverpool in the seventies. The Prince is there every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, remembering the many afternoons he spent with the boys, drinking and talking about their favorite subjects: melodies and maidens, not necessarily in that order. His contemporary companions are a cold beer, a bag full of books, and the tourists in Liverpool, never far away and always eager to hear the legacy of his most unusual life. The Prince is a storyteller. He tells his stories with gracious panache, that stirring Liverpool drawl, the spectacular pauses, so touched by the Irish impact that remains so much a part of the fabric of England’s third-largest city.

  Yet there were warnings about the veracity of these stories. Warnings are a way of life among the memoirists, the group of the living who claim a piece of the Beatles’ legend. In many cases, owning a chapter of the folklore surrounding the boys becomes more important than the accuracy of the story. There is joy in Liverpool, but the surviving storytellers warn that only their story is the true story. This author has experienced this more than once, but when it comes to the Prince, there are no warnings, just a heavy dose of affection, and sadness—affection for his dreamlike vision for the boys, sadness that he was preempted by another young dreamer, Brian Epstein.

  “Remember his last name, just remember,” said a close friend of three of the Beatles.

  I do remember. His name is Leach, Sam Leach, and although like many others he profits from his place in time and history, he doesn’t deserve the moniker of the last name. Not at all. Despite the fading memories of time, he was definitely there, and to have been there, to have assembled the memories, and to be equipped with the talent of a superlative storyteller makes Sam Leach one of the premier voices of those left behind.

  The Prince offers a selfless view of the beginning, and his history is filled with that greatest of all Liverpudlian requisites for great storytelling: irony with a touch of fate, not just for the boys but for the thousands of teenagers enraptured in the ascension from skiffle music to rock ’n’ roll. In his early days as a renegade promoter, the Prince fought off the assault of Teddy Boys, a peculiarly English brand of what fab-fifties Americans would call “juvenile delinquents.” The Beatles would have their fill of Teddy Boys, but the fast-punching Leach would be a pioneer in the fight for good and justice in the small and cheap nightclubs of rock and sock in Liverpool.

  The Teddy Boys, unlike their dungaree-clad American counterparts, were thugs dressed as dandies, Brylcreem helping to place a shine on their hair, draped coats hiding their weapons of destruction, mainly a well-developed muscle group and a spare knife thrown in, but used cautiously. Teds didn’t want to kill, because once put away, they were rendered useless by society in their ability to destroy. Like most anarchists, they had no real cause to fight except the ultimate litmus test of nihilists: conformity. They were perhaps the best-dressed rioters in contemporary history, with Edwardian frills in their shirts and “winkle-creeper” shoes; dangerous in their creeping silence, they made life miserable for random victims who dared dress routinely or demurely. With their sometimes-ruffled high collars, the Teds looked elegant; their message was not. The Teds were somewhat attractive to young John Lennon, not for the fisticuffs but because of their tight trousers and “winkle-picker” shoes, also called “wrinkle pickers.” At first he was enamored of the fashion. Ala
n White, he of the immortal rock band Yes, and the drummer on John Lennon’s track “Imagine,” remembers that the Teds even spiked fashion interests throughout Britain.

  “I remember wearing those kind of shoes when I was a teenager; they were called wrinkle pickers because you could pick wrinkles out of clothes with a pointed toe. The soles of the shoes were lined with crepe, and were famously known as ‘brothel creepers,’ because that was the recommended footwear, the legend said, when you crept into brothels, or so they said.”

  For all their style issues, many of which were romanticized by the teenagers of England, the Teds were truly and masochistically violent. Beatle buddy and promotional icon Tony Bramwell laughs out loud when he speaks about the Teds, but there is no question that, back in the day, he was terrified.

  “I remember ‘Pike the Mad Axman,’” Bramwell says, curious eyeballs looking ready to pop out of their sockets. “Pike used to walk around with [a] meat cleaver and whack people out.

  “Ray Sutherland. Now there was a danger. He had razor blades hidden in the lapels of his jacket and if you grabbed him, well, you would, well, cut, pretty bad.”

  The Teddy Boys fought often. Prince Sam Leach, the deejay and later publicity manager of the Blue Diamonds Club, fought back, in 1958 and 1959. Prince Leach also was eyewitness to history, even though he rejected an opportunity both in 1957 and 1958 to book a well-regarded group, known as the Quarrymen. It was a colossal misstep, but after all, the Prince was riding a thrill-a-minute roller coaster, except, that is, when the Teddy Boys arrived on the scene, one of them on a motorbike, in 1958. That was the night the Teddy invasion forced Barbara Burroughs through a plate-glass window and into the body of a policeman a floor below. The policeman survived. But fate would have its day, wouldn’t it.