John Lennon: The Life (22 page)
Their reward for unstinted bottle stacking and glass washing was to be allowed to perform for the Fox and Hounds’ customers over the weekend prior to their return home. Mike Robbins watched them rehearse and offered hints on presentation—for instance, that they shouldn’t tear straight into “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” as they planned, but build up to it with an instrumental number, Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” They gave their show seated on barstools in the pub lounge, billing themselves with a touch of Goonery as the Nerk Twins.
Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent had by now reached the West Country, playing to yet another sold-out house at Bristol Hippodrome on the Saturday night of April 16. Before returning to Liverpool in three weeks, both had arranged to make a brief trip home to America. En route to catch a flight from Heathrow Airport right after the Bristol show, their rental car went out of control and smashed into a concrete lamppost. Cochran, Vincent, and Cochran’s girlfriend, the songwriter Sharon Sheeley, all suffered serious multiple injuries and were rushed to a hospital in nearby Bath. Cochran died two days later, fulfilling his own prophecy that he’d “be seeing Buddy soon.”
On hearing what had befallen the two headliners of his copromotion with Larry Parnes, Allan Williams understandably thought the show would have to be canceled. Parnes, however, insisted that it should go ahead as planned on May 3 and that the hospitalized Gene Vincent would be fit enough to take part. In compensation for Cochran’s absence, Parnes provided extra acts from his London roster while Williams rounded up further local groups, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers, Bob Evans and His Five Shillings, and the Connaughts.
The Beatals did not even try to get on the show, knowing they were automatically disqualified by their lack of a drummer. They could only watch from the audience as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, and Gerry and the Pacemakers in turn pulled out all the stops to impress Larry Parnes. A photograph
of the packed ringside crowd picked up John standing near the front, his face half-hidden among a thicket of hysterical girls. From a distance of thirty-odd feet, you can still see the envy and longing in his eyes.
D
espite its organizational shortcomings, the event gave Allan Williams instant huge prestige as Larry Parnes’s ambassador on Merseyside. Even John was sufficiently awed to forget his usual fierce independence where his music was concerned and beg help of this seeming miracle-worker. A few days after the concert, he buttonholed Williams at the Jacaranda’s kitchen door with a muttered plea to “do something” for the Beatals.
From the local talent on show at the boxing stadium, Parnes had singled out only one potential addition to his stable. John Gustafson, the darkly handsome bass player with Cass and the Cassanovas, was invited to accompany Parnes back to London afterward and be groomed for stardom in his inimitable fashion.
To the rest, the opportunity Parnes offered was not to become pampered thoroughbreds so much as all-purpose workhorses. He was currently in urgent need of musicians to back his solo vocalists on the extensive tours through Britain that were their most lucrative market. Billy Fury himself, the stable’s premier attraction, was about to begin a string of nationwide appearances, but as yet had no group to accompany him. Hiring local sidemen to play on shows in the north and Scotland was an attractively cheaper option for Parnes than paying to transport them all the way up from London.
He therefore detailed Allan Williams to assemble the best performers at the boxing stadium along with other deserving candidates for a mass audition–cum–talent contest. The winners would get the job of touring with Billy Fury, while the runners-up would be assigned to lesser Parnes protégés like Duffy Power and Dickie Pride. Parnes would conduct the audition in person, returning in a week and bringing Fury with him to assist in the selection process. Under pressure from John, Williams agreed to overlook the Beatals’ minor league status and let them take part. There was one essential precondition, however. A star from the Larry Parnes stable could
not conceivably take the stage backed by musicians whose rhythm was “in the guitars.” They had less than a week to solve the problem that had defeated them for more than a year and find themselves a drummer.
A bout of frantic asking around the groups at the Jacaranda turned up only one even remote possibility. From Brian Casser, the singer with Cass and the Cassanovas, they heard of someone named Tommy Moore, who occasionally sat in on drums at the Cassanovas’ own ad hoc club above the Temple Restaurant in Dale Street. Moore proved to be a forklift driver at Garston’s bottle factory, diminutive in size, nervous in manner, and at age thirty-six, in their eyes, practically an old-age pensioner. On the overwhelming credit side, he possessed his own full drum kit, could whack out a serviceable rock-’n’-roll beat, and, best of all, did not collapse with laughter at the idea of joining up with them. After the briefest audition in John and Stu’s room at Gambier Terrace, Tommy Moore was in.
The second pressing need was for yet another new name. “The Beatals” had never really worked, either visually or aurally, and had led to much teasing from the acts who nightly beat them all over Liverpool. After further brainstorming by John and Stu, it was decided to become the Silver Beetles: not so much crawly live insects now as ornamental scarabs in some 1920s detective story. From rival musicians, the response was yet again an array of downturned thumbs. Style-conscious Brian Casser in particular urged them to follow the accepted formula—for instance, putting the silver and John’s name together for a Treasure Island effect, Long John and Silvermen, or Pieces of Silver, or Johnny Silver and the Pieces of Eight. But the scarabs had made their decision, and would not budge from it.
The audition took place on May 10 at the Wyvern Social Club, a run-down premises in Seel Street that Allan Williams planned to convert into an upscale nightclub named the Blue Angel. Here the Silver Beetles found all the usual crushing competition with their right-on names: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (featuring Ringo Starr’s “Starr Time”), Derry and the Seniors, Cass and the Cassanovas. Slim chance though the Silver Beetles stood of being chosen to back Billy Fury, there was at least the thrill of meeting the star
himself as he sat at a table with Larry Parnes, rather like adjudicators in a school music festival. He was in every way the antithesis of his name: a shy, polite Wavertree lad, permanently coated in orange makeup, who cared less for girls than for his pet tortoise and already suffered from the heart trouble that would eventually kill him at forty-one. To create the necessary camouflage of his Liverpool origins, he spoke with a vaguely American accent but otherwise was refreshingly unpretentious, treating the Silver Beetles like potential sidemen as plausible as any others and signing an autograph when John nervously approached him on the others’ behalf.
These pleasant preliminaries quickly turned into nightmare. The Silver Beetles’ new drummer, Tommy Moore, was supposed to rendezvous with them at the Wyvern after collecting some stray equipment from the Cassanovas’ club room in Dale Street. When their turn came to play, Tommy still had not arrived. To fill in for him, Allan Williams deputed Johnny Hutch from Cass and the Cassanovas, the intimidating tough guy who always so loudly dismissed John and his group as “a bunch of posers” and “not worth a carrot.” “Johnny hated having to sit in with them,” John Gustafson remembers. “He only did it because Allan told him to.”
A local freelance photographer was on hand to capture them apparently blowing their big moment in agonizing detail. For once, they were wearing uniforms of a sort—dark shirts, matching jeans with patch pockets oddly outlined in white, and cheap two-tone Italian shoes that Parnes, in the half-light, mistook for “tennis shoes.” John and Paul had decided that the way to catch the great man’s eye, and distract his attention from the flawed lineup, was to leap and jump around like Elvis at his most hyperactive. In painful contrast to these joined-at-the-hip ravers, self-conscious George barely moved at all, while Stu, as usual, was too ashamed of his poor bass playing even to face his front. Behind this mismatched ménage sat their temporary drummer, Johnny Hutch, in ordinary street clothes, making his feelings clear with every passionless roll and perfunctory cymbal smash.
The audition, as expected, proved to be a carve-up among Merseyside’s heavy hitters. The plum job of backing Billy Fury went to Cass
and the Cassanovas, while Derry and the Seniors were hired for Fury’s stablemate, Duffy Power. But, despite the Silver Beetles’ lack of luster, something about them appealed to Larry Parnes. It so happened that Parnes also needed backing musicians for another of his artists, Johnny Gentle, who was booked for a Scottish tour from May 20 to 28. The Silver Beetles, to their astonishment, were offered the job at a fee of £18 each.
Though its dates fell smack in the middle of college and school term time, there was no question of anyone turning it down. George had by now left Liverpool Institute to become an apprentice electrician and, like Tommy Moore, could take the time as holiday. Paul, theoretically cramming for his GCE A-levels, persuaded his father that a spell of traveling around Scotland would give his brain a rest. Stu and John simply cut college classes for a week, a decision that horrified Stu’s teachers—and his mother Millie—because he was just about to take his finals. John did not tell Mimi about the tour, knowing too well what a storm of protest it would unleash. A week was about the maximum time he could disappear off her radar screen without making her wonder what he was up to.
There was a general feeling that, as employees of Parnes, however junior and temporary, they should adopt stage names after his own well-tried principle. So Paul became Paul Ramon, thinking it had a sultry, tango-dancing feel; George became Carl Harrison in homage to Carl Perkins, the writer of “Blue Suede Shoes”; and Stu became Stu de Stael after the Russian abstract painter Nicolas de Stael. In later years, John would deny with some annoyance that he did follow Cass’s advice after all and identify himself with the peg-legged sea cook of
Treasure Island
. “I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver,” he wrote to music journalist Roy Carr more than a decade later, “I always preferred my own name…. There was one occasion when a guy [Cass?] introduced me as Long John and the Silvermen…in the days of old when they didn’t like the word Beatle!! I’m actually serious about this…it gets on my TIT!” But according to Paul, “He was Long John throughout that Scottish tour…and he was quite happy to be Long John.”
Johnny Gentle was, in fact, yet another fellow Liverpudlian, a
former merchant seaman named John Askew who had first found his voice by singing to fellow crewmen and passengers (although, of course, no one wanted to know about any of that). Aged twenty-four, he was the usual mix of brawny good looks and big hair from the Parnes cookie cutter. But despite extensive promotion as a gentler alternative to Fury and Power, he had not yet made any impact on the UK record charts.
He did not meet his new backing group until they came off the train at Alloa, a small town on the River Forth. There was time for only half an hour’s rehearsal before they went onstage together at the Town Hall in nearby Marshill. This first show was so bad that Parnes’s Scottish copromoter, a sometime poultry farmer named Duncan McKinnon, almost sent the Silver Beetles back to Liverpool on the next train. But Gentle liked them and managed to convince McKinnon they would improve with practice.
Any illusions about the glamour of rock-’n’-roll touring melted away quicker than a Scotch mist. The six remaining gigs were not in big cities like Glasgow or Edinburgh but remote towns scattered up the northeast coast and deep into the Highlands: Inverness, Fraserburgh, Keith, Forres, Nairn, and Peterhead. The venues were ballrooms, municipal buildings, or agricultural halls, with Gentle heading a bill otherwise composed of local singers and groups. He and his five sidemen traveled together with their equipment in one small van, driven by a McKinnon employee named Gerry Scott. “We were playing to nobody in little halls,” George remembered, “until the pubs cleared out, when about five Scottish Teds would come in and look at us.”
While Gentle, as the star, was accommodated in hotels, the sidemen had to make do with shared rooms in grim Highland boardinghouses and bed-and-breakfasts, where Calvinist texts decorated the walls and light and heat were measured out by coin meter. Thanks to their rock-bottom allowance from Parnes, they could afford to eat only in the cheapest workmen’s caffs and fish-and-chip shops. John’s cold comfort holidays at his Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, away to the west, seemed luxurious by comparison.
As things turned out, few Scottish teenagers even realized they
were watching “Long John” Lennon, Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison, and Stu de Stael—or even the Silver Beetles, for that matter. Press advertisements and posters billed them simply as “Johnny Gentle and his group.” There had apparently been some loss of nerve over the new name: a gig at Lathom Hall on May 14 saw them truncated to the Silver Beats, and, according to Johnny Gentle, they had reverted to calling themselves the Beatals by the time they reached Alloa.
Fortunately for them, the star was a through-and-through Scouser whose life in the Parnes stable had not made the least swollen-headed. So John, Paul, and George put themselves out for Johnny, conscientiously learning his Ricky Nelson ballad repertoire, goosing it up with livelier Presley numbers like “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.” He in turn did what he could to make them more like a conventional, uniformed backing group. “They’d come without any proper stage clothes,” he remembers. “George had a black shirt and I had one, too, that I didn’t wear. So I let them have that, and we scraped up enough money between us to buy another one so that at least their three front men would look roughly the same.”
On their van journeys through the Highlands, John took the lead in quizzing Gentle about life as a teen idol and the quickest route to achieving it. “He was inquisitive about everything…what was Billy like…what was Marty like…should he and the others go to London and try to get discovered…where would they stay? He was going places, and he knew it even then. At one place after we played, he and the others got pushed aside by some girls crowding round to get my autograph. John shouted out ‘That’ll be us some day, Johnny.’”
