The Silver Beatles, knowing too well the disgrace of being drummerless, tried hard to win back their elderly colleague. En route for Wallasey they called at the Garston bottle works, found Tommy in the yard on night shift, and pleaded with him not to quit. Tommy Moore’s only reply was to swivel his forklift away in the opposite direction. Another night, when Tommy was at home, they went to his flat on Smithdown Road and shouted up at his window. His girlfriend, resentful of what had been done to her loved one’s income and teeth, requested the Silver Beatles to fuck off.
Though Tommy Moore had gone, his drums remained behind. Each week, when they set out for the Grosvenor or for Neston Institute, the drum set would be taken along. Before the first number John Lennon would announce half-facetiously that anyone in the audience who fancied himself as a drummer was welcome to come up and have a try. The joke misfired badly one night at the Grosvenor when a huge Wallasey Ted named Ronnie accepted the invitation, sat in on Tommy’s drums, and produced a din that would have been no worse if he had thrown the set from the top of a high building. An SOS call brought Allan Williams to the Grosvenor just in time to dissuade the beaming tough from electing himself to permanent membership.
Williams was now booking them into Liverpool halls where gang warfare—between girls no less than boys—was considered essential to a full night’s entertainment. At Hambledon Hall or Aintree Institute there always came a point in the evening, just after the pubs had closed, when up to fifty Teds would come in at once and pass along the jivers, slit-eyed with beer and hope of “bother.” Most notorious of all were Garston Swimming Baths, known locally as “the Blood Baths,” so violent and gory were the battles fought over the floor that concealed the pool. The gangs, which bore tribal names such as The Tiger or The Tank, would sometimes forget their enmities in a common assault on the no less frightening squads of bouncers, equipped with bloodlust and weapons to rival theirs. One legendary bouncer was of such size that he never needed to use his fists. A single jog from his stomach could send an assailant flying. Another, more imaginative promoter employed no stewards other than one little old lady to issue tickets. If a Ted cut up rough the little old lady would shriek at him, “You stop that or I’ll tell your mum.” These were words to cow the most ruthless Teddy Boy.
Musicians were not immune from attack, particularly if they hailed from a part of Liverpool held in local disfavor, if they played Chuck Berry when the gang preferred Little Richard, or if one of them, however unwittingly, attracted the attention of a local patron’s “judy.” Guitars and drums were frequently smashed and microphone stands turned into clubs and lances if the stage seemed likely to be carried by storm.
The Silver Beatles witnessed their share of violence. At the Grosvenor in Wallasey a regular uproar took place as local Teds clashed with invading cohorts from New Brighton or Birkenhead. At Neston Institute one night a sixteen-year-old boy was booted to death during one of their performances. Even John, who fancied himself as a fighter, now cared more for protecting his guitar when the chairs and beer bottles began to fly or girls rolled into view on the dance floor, scratching and spitting.
Their luck held until one night in June or July, when Williams had sent them to Litherland Town Hall, a low-lying municipal building in the north of Liverpool. During or after their performance something was said or implied that upset a faction in the audience. An ambush was laid for the Silver Beatles as they made their way through the car park back to their van. In the ensuing scuffle, Stu Sutcliffe went down and received a kick in the head.
Millie Sutcliffe had waited up for Stu that night. She found him in his room with blood still pouring from the gash in his head. He told her it had happened after the Litherland dance and that John and Pete Best had come to his rescue, John “mixing it” so ferociously with the attackers that he broke one of his own fingers.
“There was blood all over the rug—everywhere,” Mrs. Sutcliffe said. “I was going to get the doctor but Stuart wouldn’t allow me to do it. He was so terribly adamant. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘if you touch that phone, I go out of this house and you’ll never see me again.’”
FIVE
THE GREAT FREEDOM
The Silver Beatles hit their lowest point in the summer of 1960. Still drummerless, they had given up trying to persuade dance promoters like Les Dodd and Sam Leach to book them. Their only regular engagement was at a strip club part-owned by Allan Williams, off Liverpool’s Upper Parliament Street. Williams paid them ten shillings each to strum their guitars while a stripper named Janice grimly shed her clothes. At Janice’s request, the musicians stuck to standards such as “Moonglow” and the “Harry Lime Theme,” and they even gamely attempted “The Gipsy Fire Dance” from sheet music.
The New Cabaret Artistes Club was run for Williams by a West Indian named Lord Woodbine. Born in Trinidad, Woody earned a varied living as a builder and decorator, steel band musician, and freelance barman. His ennoblement—after the fashion of calypso singers—derived from a certain self-possessed grandeur as much as from the Woodbine cigarette permanently hinged on his lower lip.
Lord Woodbine ran his own club, the New Colony, in the attic and basement of a semiderelict house in Berkeley Street. The Silver Beatles played there, too, sometimes in the afternoons, while merchant seamen danced against hard-faced whores, and occasional troublemakers were pacified by the sight of the cutlass that Lord Woodbine kept under the bar.
Williams promised he would make something better happen for them soon. And Williams, by a sequence of cosmic blunders into 1,000-to-1 chances, did exactly that.
It all started when Williams returned to his coffee bar, the Jacaranda, one night and heard silence when he expected to hear the Royal Caribbean Steel Band. The entire band, he was told, had been lured away by a German theatrical agent to appear at a club in Hamburg. Down in the basement, set about by Stu Sutcliffe’s voodoo murals, not a single 40-gallon steel drum remained.
To Williams, as to most Englishmen of that era, Hamburg, more than London or even Paris, was a city of breathtaking wickedness. British soldiers stationed after World War II in Germany brought back extraordinary tales of entertainments purveyed by the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s legendary cabaret district—of women wrestling in mud and sex displays involving pythons, donkeys, and other animal associates. Such things could only be whispered about in a Britain where the two-piece bathing suit was still considered rather daring.
Evidently, along with everything else, there were music clubs along the Reeperbahn. Williams’s curiosity was further aroused by letters from various members of the Royal Caribbean Steel Band, showing no remorse at their sudden disappearance but telling Williams guilelessly what a great place Hamburg was and urging him to come across with some of his Liverpool beat groups to share it.
His first idea was to take the Silver Beatles with him to Hamburg on an exploratory trip, but chronic shortage of cash prevented this. Instead, he got them to make a tape recording of their music, in company with Cass and the Casanovas and a local trad jazz band, the Noel Lewis Stompers, to be played to the Hamburg impresarios.
The journey that Williams made was in every sense characteristic. Wearing a top hat and accompanied by Lord Woodbine, he took a cheap charter flight to Amsterdam, intending to proceed to West Germany by train. In one eventful night in the Dutch capital, he succeeded in drinking champagne from a chorus girl’s shoe; passing Lord Woodbine off as a genuine English aristocrat; and being thrown into the street after making matador passes at a flamenco dancer with his coat.
The next evening found him in a similar state, temporarily parted from Lord Woodbine and dazzled by the overarching lights of the Grosse Freiheit, that small but crowded tributary of the Hamburg Reeperbahn, whose name in English means “The Great Freedom.”
Halfway down the Grosse Freiheit, opposite a Roman Catholic church, Williams stumbled into a downstairs club called the Kaiserkeller. He found it to be decorated in confusedly nautical style, with booths like lifeboats,
barrels for tables, and a mural depicting life in the South Sea Isles. On a tiny central space several hundred people danced while an Indonesian group performed Elvis Presley songs in German.
Williams demanded to speak to the proprietor and, after some delay, was shown into the presence of a short, broad-chested man with a quiff of sandy hair, a turned-up nose, and a disabled leg that little inhibited his movements. Before the conversation had progressed far a waiter came in to report a disturbance in the club area. Williams, through the open door, saw a squad of waiters systematically working over a solitary customer. Snatching from his desk drawer a long ebony cosh, the proprietor left the room with an agile, hopping gait, to lend them a hand.
The talk then resumed on amiable lines. Allan Williams introduced himself as the manager of the world’s best rock ’n’ roll groups. The Kaiserkeller’s owner, whose name was Bruno Koschmider, inquired if they were as good as Tommy Steele. Williams assured him they were better than Elvis Presley. For proof he brought out the tape he had made of the Silver Beatles and others. But when it was played on Herr Koschmider’s tape recorder, nothing could be heard but scrabble and screech. Somebody back in Liverpool had blundered.
Having failed, as he thought, to convert Hamburg’s Reeperbahn to Liverpool beat music, Allan Williams returned to being a functionary of the great Larry Parnes. The Silver Beatles—or plain Beatles, as they now defiantly called themselves—receded somewhat in Williams’s mind. His chief property was the rhythm-and-blues group Derry and the Seniors, which Parnes had promised work in a summer show at Blackpool. The entire band, in expectation of this, gave up their jobs to turn professional. Then, at the last minute, a letter arrived on elaborately crested Parnes notepaper canceling the engagement.
An enraged deputation led by Howie Casey, the Seniors’ sax player, confronted Williams at his Blue Angel Club in Seel Street. Casey was a youth of powerful build, and Williams promised hastily to find them some alternative work. In sheer desperation, he packed the entire five-piece group and their equipment into his Jaguar and headed for the only place he could think of where work for a rock ’n’ roll band might magically exist. He was taking them, he said, to the famous 2i’s coffee bar in London. There, in the home of skiffle, where Tommy Steele had first been discovered, something or other must surely turn up.
Fortune now smiled upon the agitated Welshman to the ludicrous, implausible extent that Fortune sometimes does. Upon entering the 2i’s, whom should he see first but a small, barrel-chested West German gentleman with a quiff of sandy hair, a turned-up nose, and a disabled leg not at the moment noticeable. It was Herr Bruno Koschmider, proprietor of the Kaiserkeller club in Grosse Freiheit, Hamburg.
Koschmider, it transpired, had been deeply impressed by Williams’s visit to his establishment, playing unintelligible tapes and boasting of rock ’n’ roll groups better than Elvis. Not long after Williams’s dispirited return to Liverpool, Herr Koschmider had decided to visit England and hear these wonderful groups for himself. Naturally, however, it was not Liverpool he visited, but London, and the famous 2i’s coffee bar.
He had already paid one visit to the 2i’s and had signed up a solo singer, Tony Sheridan, to appear at the Kaiserkeller. Sheridan in fact was a gifted performer, temporarily down on his luck. At the Kaiserkeller, he had been such a sensation that Bruno Koschmider had decided to sack his Indonesian Elvis impersonators and go over completely to English rock ’n’ roll. He was thus at the 2i’s a second time, hoping to hire another English group. He had not yet done so when Derry and the Seniors walked in.
It was the work of a few minutes for Williams to get Derry and the Seniors up and playing on the 2i’s stage. Despite having had nothing to eat but some stale cake, they performed so well that Bruno Koschmider booked them for his Kaiserkeller club on the spot. They would receive thirty marks each per day—about twenty pounds a week—with travel expenses and accommodation found. A contract was drafted with the help of a German waiter from the adjacent Heaven and Hell coffee bar.
Derry and the Seniors set off by train from Liverpool to Hamburg with five pounds between them and no work permits. If challenged, Allan Williams said, the four tough-looking Liverpool boys and their black lead singer should pretend to be students on vacation. The story did not convince German frontier officials, and at Osnabruck the entire group was ordered off the train and held in custody until Bruno Koschmider could be contacted to vouch for them.
The next news to reach Williams was a great deal better. Derry and the Seniors, together with Tony Sheridan and his band, were a hit at Herr Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller. Together with rapturous postcards from various musicians, a letter arrived from Koschmider himself, asking Williams to send across a third group to play in another of Koschmider’s clubs, the Indra.
The group Williams wanted to send was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They, however, were already committed to a summer season at Butlin’s Skegness holiday camp. Gerry and the Pacemakers, his second choice, did not fancy going abroad. So Allan Williams, rather reluctantly, wrote to Bruno Koschmider, telling him to expect a group called the Beatles.
Shortly afterward, a letter of protest arrived from the Seniors’ lead singer, Derry Wilkie. It would spoil things for everyone, Derry said, if Allan Williams sent over “a bum group like the Beatles.”
The offer came when John Lennon’s art college career was approaching the point of collapse. He had recently sat—or rather half-sat—the exam by which his past three years’ work would be assessed. The test paper in lettering, his weakest subject, was supposed to have been completed in May, while the Beatles were touring Scotland with Johnny Gentle. Cynthia, John’s girlfriend, had risked her own college career by doing the paper for him, racked by pains from a grumbling appendix, under a single lightbulb at the Gambier Terrace flat.
And yet, for all John’s inexhaustible laziness, there were still glimpses of brilliance, in his cartoons and poster designs, which made Arthur Ballard, his tutor, think him worth defending. In Ballard’s view, the only logical place for John was the newly opened faculty of design: unfortunately, however, he could not convince the relevant department head. “I had a row with the fellow in the end,” Ballard says. “I told him if he couldn’t accept an eccentric like John, he ought to be teaching in Sunday school. Then I heard from Cyn that it didn’t matter because John was going to Hamburg. He’d told everyone he’d be getting a hundred pounds a week.”
For Stu Sutcliffe the break with college was more serious, coming as it did at the start of a year’s postgraduate teacher training. Stu at first turned down the Hamburg trip; then John and the others talked him into it. The college subsequently indicated it was willing to accept him on the teaching course as a late entrant.
Paul McCartney obtained his father’s consent with typical diplomacy and circuitousness. With A-level exams now past, he technically had no further school commitments. His English teacher, Dusty Durband, was in fact one of the first to hear of the Hamburg offer, just before the Institute broke up for the summer. Mr. Durband was skeptical. “As far as I knew, Paul was going on, as his father wished, to teacher-training college. When he told me about Hamburg, I said, ‘Just who do you want to be, Paul? Tommy Steele?’ He just grinned and said, ‘No, but I feel like giving it a try.’”
Jim McCartney, when told the big news at last, faced a united front consisting of Paul, his brother Michael, and Allan Williams, who came up to Forthlin Road to assure him the arrangements were all aboveboard. Though full of misgivings, Jim felt that if Paul were allowed this one jaunt he might the sooner return to his senses, and to college. He let Paul go at the price of only a minimal pep talk about being careful and eating regular meals.
George Harrison, though even now only just seventeen, encountered the least opposition from his family. With his father and elder brothers he had achieved the status of working man, and was as such entitled to command of his own affairs. The quiet, hardworking Harrison family, besides, had produced its share of trav
elers. As well as Harry and his sea voyages, there was Louise, George’s grown-up sister, now married to an American and living in St. Louis. Germany, by contrast, seemed not too distant; if the Harrisons knew of the Reeperbahn’s reputation, they were prepared to trust in George’s level head. His mother made him promise to write, and baked him a tin of homemade scones for the journey.
One big worry spoiled the collective excitement. It was the same old plaguing worry—they still had no drummer. What would do as backing for a stripper in Upper Parliament Street would not do, Allan Williams told them forcefully, for a big-time, luxurious Hamburg nightspot like the Indra Club. The contract with Herr Koschmider specified a full instrumental complement. If the Beatles could not provide one, the gig must be given to someone else.
They had been searching, in fact, ever since Tommy Moore had deserted them to return to his forklift truck at Garston bottle works. The only replacement they had been able to find was a boy called Norman Chapman whom they had overheard one night, practicing on Slater Street in a room above the National Cash Register Company. Norman played a few dates with them, happily enough, but then had to join one of the last batches of young Britons drafted into the Army.
Lately, for want of anything better, the Beatles had gone back to playing at the Casbah, Mona Best’s cellar club in Hayman’s Green. They had not been there since they were called the Quarry Men and had walked out over the docking of fifteen shillings from their night’s fee.
To their surprise, they found the Casbah thriving. Ken Browne, the bespectacled ex–Quarry Man, now led his own group, the Black Jacks, with Mrs. Best’s son, Peter, on drums. The Black Jacks were among the most popular groups in that district, drawing even larger crowds to the Casbah than did big names like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
Shout! Page 13
