Shout! (17 page)

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.

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

T
he 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.”