The concert proceeded on a note of rising pandemonium, at the height of which Rory Storm was sent out with his incapacitating stammer to appeal for calm. The show’s best performance was unanimously felt to be that of Gerry and the Pacemakers, singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. No more inappropriate introduction could have been given to the infirm, black leather–clad figure of Gene Vincent himself, who was at last propelled through the ropes into the boxing ring. As the ringside spectators made a rush to join him, Larry Parnes and Allan Williams trotted round briskly, stamping on their hands.
It was shortly after this memorable night that John Lennon sidled up to Williams at the Jacaranda’s kitchen door and muttered, “Hey, Al, why don’t you do something for us?” John had been there with George and Stu Sutcliffe after the boxing stadium show when Williams brought the great Larry Parnes back to discuss further copromotions. Parnes, impressed by the Liverpool music, had hinted at the possibility of using local groups to back solo singers from his stable when touring brought them northward.
Allan Williams, while thinking no more highly of John’s group than anyone else, felt he owed them a favor in return for the arts ball floats. Though not prepared to offer them to Larry Parnes, he did agree to help Johnny and the Moondogs become better organized. They, in return, would do such small general jobs as Allan Williams required.
Williams further promised to try to find them the drummer they so chronically lacked. From Cass, of Cass and the Casanovas, he heard of a man named Tommy Moore who sometimes sat in on drums at Sam Leach’s club and who, despite owning his own full set, belonged to no group permanently. Within the week, Tommy Moore had been persuaded by Allan Williams to throw in his lot with Johnny and the Moondogs.
The new recruit was a small, worried-looking individual of thirty-six, whose daytime job was driving a forklift truck at the Garston Bottle-making Works. For all that, in his audition at Gambier Terrace, he proved to be a better drummer than any who had ever sat behind Johnny and the Moondogs. When he showed himself able to produce the slow, skipping beat of the Everly Brothers’ song “Cathy’s Clown,” even Paul McCartney seemed satisfied.
Tommy Moore began practicing with them downstairs at the Jacaranda, in preparation for the work that Allan Williams had promised them when they were good enough. Williams, meantime, used them as odd-job men to redecorate the Jac’s primitive ladies’ lavatory. John and Stu Sutcliffe were also encouraged to cover the brick walls of their rehearsal room with voodooish murals.
Tommy soon noticed what peculiar tensions were at work within Johnny and the Moondogs. “John and Paul were always at it, trying to outdo each other. It was them at the front and the rest of us way behind. George used to stand there, not saying a word. And didn’t they used to send up that other lad, Stuart! Oh, they never left off teasing him. They said he couldn’t play his bass—and he couldn’t, though he tried.”
To begin with, Allan Williams would allow them to play to the Jacaranda customers only when his regular attraction, the Royal Caribbean Steel Band, had the night off. Since the cellar had no microphone stands, two girls had to be persuaded to kneel in front of John and Paul, holding up hand mikes attached to a mop handle and broom. “I could have retired on what we used to get for playing at the Jac,’” Tommy Moore said. “A bottle of Coke and a plate of beans on toast.”
The great Larry Parnes, meanwhile, had contacted Allan Williams again about the possibility of using Liverpool musicians as backing groups for the solo singers in his stable. It happened that Mister Parnes Shillings and Pence was experiencing difficulty in finding London bands willing to go on tour in the north and Scotland for the rates of pay he offered. When Parnes contacted Allan Williams again, it was with a request that Williams should marshal some local groups for audition as possible sidemen for Parnes’s biggest male pop star, Billy Fury.
The news caused a particular stir in Liverpool because Billy Fury was himself a Liverpudlian. Born Ronnie Wycherley in the tough Dingle area, he had been a Mersey tugboat hand until two years earlier, when his girlfriend had sent Larry Parnes some of the songs he had written. Parnes had worked the usual transformation with a tempestuous stage name, a brooding persona, and a series of hit records sung in an Elvis-like mumble. Billy Fury, it was further announced, would be coming up to Liverpool with his manager to attend the auditions in person.
Every group that frequented the Jacaranda was agog for what seemed a heaven-sent opportunity. Williams, in the end, narrowed the field down to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Casanovas, Derry Wilkie and the Seniors, and Johnny and the Moondogs. In Allan Williams’s opinion, Johnny and the Moondogs were now ready for something more than decorating the ladies’ lavatory.
One pressing requirement, before Larry Parnes saw them, was for a change of name. What they needed was something spry and catchy, like Buddy Holly’s Crickets. On an empty page in his sketch-book, Stu Sutcliffe wrote “The Beetles.” He was not thinking of small black insects but the motorcycle gang led by Marlon Brando in America’s prototype youth rebellion film, The Wild One. Although The Wild One had been banned by the timorous British film censor, pop culture–vultures like Stu and his circle would undoubtedly have known all about it. Coincidentally, Buddy Holly’s own group had made the same connection a couple of years earlier and almost named themselves the Beetles before deciding on the Crickets.
“Crickets” were one thing, but “Beetles,” even allowing the Brando precedent, were quite another. No group that wished to be taken seriously in the late fifties could possibly identify itself with so lowly and unattractive a form of life. Still, the idea was kicked around, undergoing various barely serious mutations along the way. John, unable to resist any pun, turned it into “Beatles,” as in beat music. Stu himself took to spelling it “Beatals” in the sense of beating all competition. Nonetheless, he is the one who must go down in history as the only true begetter.
However it might be spelled, the name was greeted with the same disbelieving scorn by both their supporters and rivals at the Billy Fury audition. Allan Williams pleaded with them to think of something—anything—else if they didn’t want the great Larry Parnes to laugh them into extinction. This opposition had the predictable effect of making John determined now to go on as the “Beetles,” “Beatles” or “Beat-als.” A more persuasive voice, however, was that of Brian Casser, lead singer with Cass and the Casanovas: If they had to ally themselves with bugs, Casser urged, then at least stick to the conventional formula of such-and-such and the so-and-so’s. Prompted by memories of R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, he suggested “Long John and the Silver Beatles.” Though John jibbed at calling himself Long John, the Silver Beatles won the vote.
The place fixed for the auditions was a small workingmen’s club, the Wyvern, in Seel Street, just round the corner from the Jacaranda. Allan Williams had recently acquired the premises with the object of turning it into a plushy London-style night spot. Punctual to the minute, in through the half-demolished foyer walked Larry Parnes, silk-suited and affable, accompanied by the nervy-looking ex–tugboat hand, currently the biggest name in British pop music, who cared rather less for stardom than for the dog and tortoise he was permitted to keep at his manager’s London flat.
Down in the basement the Silver Beatles viewed the competition with dismay. Every group was locally famous, smartly suited, and luxuriously equipped. Derry and the Seniors had been well known in Liverpool for years as an authentic rhythm-and-blues group featuring a black singer, Derry Wilkie, an electric keyboard, and a real live saxophone. Johnny Hutch of Cass and the Casanovas was already setting up the sequined drum set that he was said to be able to play in his sleep. Rory Storm was there, deeply tanned, with his Italian-suited Hurricanes. Rory’s drummer, the little sad-eyed, bearded one, came from the Dingle also, and had been in Billy Fury’s class at school. Neither John nor Paul in those days much liked the look of Ringo Starr.
Parnes, sitting
with Billy Fury at a small table in the twilight, was impressed by the power and variety of the music. Derry and the Seniors and Rory Storm’s Hurricanes were both marked down as strong contenders for the prize. Parnes also favored Cass and the Casanovas, thanks mainly to their bass player, Johnny Gustafson, a black-haired, extremely good-looking boy. “Johnny Gus,” in fact, was later called down to London to experience the Parnes star-making process on his own.
The Silver Beatles, when their turn came, made rather less of an impression. “They weren’t a bit smart,” Larry Parnes remembered. “They just wore jeans, black sweaters, tennis shoes—and lockets.” There was a delay as well, owing to the nonarrival of Tommy Moore, who had gone in search of some stray pieces of drum equipment at the Casanova Club. At length, when Tommy still had not appeared, Johnny Hutch had to be persuaded to sit in with them.
A snapshot, taken in mid-audition, shows the Silver Beatles exactly as Larry Parnes saw them that day at the Wyvern social club. John and Paul occupy the foreground, back to back madly bucking and crouching over their cheap guitars. To the right stands George, his sole concession to rhythm a slight hanging of the head. Stu Sutcliffe, to the rear with his overburdening bass guitar, turns away as usual to hide his inadequate playing. In the background, Johnny Hutch sits at his magnificent drums, showing a great deal of patterned ankle sock and, very clearly, bored to death.
As to what Larry Parnes thought of them, there are conflicting eyewitness accounts. Allan Williams’s version is that both Parnes and Billy Fury were knocked out by the Silver Beatles, excepting Stu Sutcliffe. Parnes would have signed them at once, at one hundred pounds per week, provided they would agree to drop Stu. It was John Lennon’s curt refusal to betray his friend, so Williams says, that robbed them of their first big chance.
Parnes himself, unfortunately, had no recollection of finding fault with Stu’s bass playing. To Parnes, the eyesore of the group was the worried, rather elderly-looking man who arrived halfway through the audition and took over from Johnny Hutch on drums. Tommy Moore had finally made it across town from Dale Street. “I thought the boys in front were great,” Parnes said. “The lead guitar and the bass, so-so. It was the drummer, I told them, who was wrong.”
What Larry Parnes really wanted, it transpired, were cut-rate musicians to accompany his lesser-known artists on tour to Scotland. Cass and the Casanovas were first to be so engaged, as the backing group for a gravel-voiced Parnes singer named Duffy Power.
The next letter from Larry Parnes to Allan Williams concerned the Silver Beatles. In mid-May, Parnes was sending another of his stable, Johnny Gentle, on a two-week Scottish tour. The Silver Beatles could have the job of backing him, for the same as Cass and the Casanovas had received: eighteen pounds each per week.
The offer sent the Silver Beatles into transports of elation. Since the Wyvern social club audition they had thought they’d lost any chance of finding stardom via Larry Parnes. That Johnny Gentle was the least-known of all Parnes’s singers did not diminish the excitement of being offered their first work as professionals, of going on tour the way the big names did, of performing in real cinemas and theaters and staying in hotels the whole night.
All five immediately set about disentangling themselves from their everyday commitments in mid-May. For Stu and John it was simply a matter of cutting college for two weeks. It was less simple for Tommy Moore, whose girlfriend set great store by his weekly wage packet from Garston bottle works. Tommy pacified her with visions of the wealth he would bring back from across the border.
George Harrison, too, was now a working man. He had left the Institute grammar school at sixteen, without O-levels and, for want of anything better, had applied for a job as a window dresser at Blackler’s department store. That vacancy had been filled, but there was another one for an apprentice electrician. To be an apprentice, as his two elder brothers were, represented both a safe and an honorable course. But the only way he could get time off to go to Scotland was to take his summer holiday early.
The greatest ingenuity was shown, as usual, by Paul McCartney. He had to find a method of extricating himself from the Institute sixth form where, supposedly, he was deep in revision for his forthcoming A-level exams in English and art. His friend Ivan Vaughan told him he would be mad to risk those A-levels for the sake of the Scottish tour. Somehow he managed to convince his father that two weeks off in term time would aid his revision by giving his brain a rest.
Before they set off they decided that to be real pop musicians they must all adopt stage names. Paul took to calling himself Paul Ramon, thinking it had a hothouse 1920-ish sound. George, whose idol was Carl Perkins, called himself Carl Harrison, and Stu became Stu de Stael, after the painter. John Lennon and Tommy Moore decided not to bother.
They embarked by train from Lime Street, wearing the jeans and black sweaters and tennis shoes that were also their stage outfits, and carrying a selection of borrowed amplifiers that Tommy Moore viewed with deep mistrust. “The amps got by—just. George was the sparks if anything went wrong. I’d always stand well back while he was fiddling with the plugs. My drums didn’t have everything they ought to have had either. I hadn’t got a spur to hold the bass drum down. When Paul and John got going in one of their fast Chuck Berry numbers, the bass drum used to go rolling away across the stage.”
The tour struck complications from the start. Duncan McKinnon, Parnes’s Scottish intermediary, did not like the look of the Silver Beatles. They liked even less the look of the small van in which they and Johnny Gentle were expected to travel through the Highlands. Nor was there any time to rehearse with Johnny, a handsome young hunk who not long previously had been a merchant seaman putting into Birkenhead.
This particular member of Parnes’s stable suffered chronically from stage nerves, which he would attempt to calm by drinking large quantities of lager. Even so, he insisted on taking his turn at the driving because that was the most comfortable seat. On about the second day, somewhat the worse for lager, he drove the vehicle, not at all gently, into the rear of a parked Ford Popular car with a couple of old ladies sitting in it. The impact dislodged all the luggage and equipment from the interior suitcase rack and hurled it on top of Tommy Moore.
Tommy was taken away in an ambulance, badly concussed, with his front top and bottom teeth loosened. That night, as he lay in the hospital—it was in Banff, he thought—wearing borrowed night clothes and heavily sedated, the others arrived and hauled him out of bed for the night’s performance. He remembers playing the drums, still groggy, with a bandage round his head.
Tommy Moore, with most of his teeth loose and some pain-killing drugs the hospital had given him, climbed back into the van next morning for the journey onward, to Stirling, Nairn, and Inverness. “I hadn’t much idea where we were. I looked out once and saw the big distillery. That’s how I knew we’d got to the Highlands.”
According to Larry Parnes, the Silver Beatles went down better than any other backing group he had sent to Scotland. Parnes said that Johnny admitted they were getting more applause than he was, and urged his manager to sign them up without delay. Parnes, however, found the management of solo singers strenuous enough. “Maybe it sounds silly, but I just didn’t want the worry of a five-piece group.”
Johnny and the Silver Beatles traveled as far north as Inverness, arriving too early in the morning to go to their hotel. “We had to walk the streets, and all around the harbor next to the fishing boats,” Tommy Moore said. “That was the finish as far as I was concerned. I’d had enough of them all—especially Lennon. And I was hungry.”
Their money did not get through to them until the very end of the fortnight. Tommy Moore remembered that on the train journey back to Liverpool he had a couple of pounds in his pocket. “I went and sat with Stuart on the journey. He was the only one of them I could stand by that time.”
At Lime Street, Tommy said good-bye rapidly and went to his flat in Smithdown Lane where his girlfriend awaited him. “She said,
‘How much have you brought back then?’ I told her, ‘A couple of quid.’ ‘A couple of quid!’ she said. ‘Do you realize how much you could have earned in two weeks at Garston bottle works?’”
For the Silver Beatles the most important consequence of the Scottish tour was that Allan Williams had at last begun to take them seriously as a group. The Welshman, through his company Jacaranda Enterprises, now looked after several bands, booking them out to dance promoters in Liverpool and “over the water” on the Cheshire Wirral. The Silver Beatles were added to the portfolio Williams hawked around, in Birken-head, New Brighton, and Wallasey, using the big Jaguar that was well known to the Mersey Tunnel Police.
The Grosvenor ballroom in Wallasey was run by Les Dodd, a small, brisk stationery retailer with bright blue eyes and a back as straight as a slow foxtrot. Les Dodd had promoted strict tempo ballroom dancing at the Grosvenor since 1936, resisting the successive contagions of swing, bebop, skiffle, and rock ’n’ roll, but by 1960, even he had begun to realize that his customers wanted something more untamed than his regular musicians, The Ernie Hignett Quartet.
For his first reluctant “Big Beat” dance, on June 6, 1960, Les Dodd paid Allan Williams ten pounds for a group whose name—if Mr. Dodd understood aright—was the Silver Beetles. So he advertised them, together with Gerry and the Pacemakers, as “jive and rock specialists.” The same display advertisement carried a reassurance that on Tuesday the Grosvenor’s strict tempo night would take place as usual.
Not long after Les Dodd began booking them, Tommy Moore decided he had had enough. He had continued as drummer after the Scottish tour, despite the loss of his front teeth, existing on a weekly share-out that, as his girlfriend constantly reminded him, could be bettered by almost any type of laboring work. One evening, when the Silver Beatles met before crossing the river to Wallasey, Tommy Moore was not among them. He had gone back to his former, more lucrative occupation of driving a forklift truck.
Shout! Page 12
