The Love You Make (8 page)

The most famous Liverpool band was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Rory was a tall, athletic boy with beautifully coiffed blond hair. Dashingly handsome, he had a pronounced stutter when he spoke but not when he sang rock and roll. He was considered the most dramatic and flamboyant of all the lead singers, and the highlight of his act often included his shimmying acrobatically up the fluted columns that held up the balconies and prosceniums. Next in popularity was Cass and the Casanovas, noted for their loud drummer with a silver-glitter drum kit. Following them was Derry and the Seniors, who specialized in rhythm and blues and had a black singer. Then came Gordon Bell and the Bobby Bell Rockers, Faron and the Flamingos, the Swinging Blue Jeans, Lee Curtis and the All Stars, and on and on and on. Some groups were fortunate enough to land steady jobs at local auditoriums. Other groups had to scramble each week for employment. As the Jacaranda became the vortex of the late-night band scene, Allan Williams got to know the whole spectrum of groups as they passed through the doors. It struck him that there was a potential gold mine somewhere in that plethora of what was being called “pop” music, and he started a booking business. As a sort of a clearing house for groups, he got them jobs at £10 a night. From this, Williams was paid £1 and £1 went to the local bouncer. Johnny and the Moondogs quickly agreed to his services.

Williams had made the acquaintance of a well-known London manager and promoter named Larry Parnes. The mere mention of Larry Parnes’ name summoned up visions of stardom for the multitude of Liverpool groups. Parnes was famous for discovering Tommy Steele, one of Britain’s major teen singing stars, whom he had found singing in a coffee bar on Old Compton Road in London. Since Tommy Steele, Parnes had “discovered” a whole stable of young men, christening each with a distinctive name: Marty Wilde, Dickie Pride, Billy Fury, and Johnny Gentle.

While none of Parnes’ other acts reached the level of stardom of Tommy Steele, they all had recording contracts and worked regularly on a profitable touring circuit of dance halls in small towns around the countryside. Williams had assured Parnes that Liverpool was an untapped lode for pop groups, all of them tailor-made to go on tour with his name acts, eager and reasonably priced. Within a few weeks Williams had won an audition for an assortment of the better known Liverpool groups to go on tour with Billy Fury, among them his personal favorites, Johnny and the Moondogs. For the audition, against the advice of their friends, the band changed their name to the Silver Beatles. The word “beetles” had been suggested by Stu Sutcliffe in response to Buddy Holly’s group, the Crickets. John, who couldn’t resist a pun, suggested “beatles,” as a play on beat music. The “silver” was added to give the name some flash.

Temporarily bereft of a drummer—drummers seemed to come and go every few weeks—they asked Johnny Hutch, the drummer of Cass and the Casanovas, to play for them at their audition with Parnes. Along with a dozen other groups, they set up in the basement of a new club Allan Williams was opening on Seel Street called the Blue Angel and waited their turn. They gave a nervous but spirited performance, save for Johnny Hutch, who intentionally looked very bored and superior. Parnes also couldn’t help but notice that Stu Sutcliffe, the little guy with the big bass guitar, had no idea how to play his instrument. Parnes wanted the Silver Beatles—but minus Stu. John wouldn’t hear of this, which infuriated Paul, but nevertheless he insisted they turn Parnes down if it meant leaving Stu behind. Cass and the Casanovas got the spot. Miraculously, a week later Parnes offered them another booking, although it was a booking that no professional London band would take. They were offered a two-week tour of Scotland, as the backup group for Johnny Gentle. The Silver Beatles were to be paid the grand fee of £18 a week, including on-the-road expenses for the five of them. John had a lettering exam due that week and gave it to Cynthia to copy for him. While he was away, she sat on a wooden crate in Stu’s flat under a sixty-watt bulb and wrote it for him, cheating for the first time in her life. George Harrison, who had already left school at the age of sixteen, was working part-time as an apprentice electrician at Blackler’s Department Store and simply took a holiday to go to Scotland.

The tour of Scotland turned out to be less of an exhilarating experience than the boys had anticipated. Desperate to find a drummer for the tour, they hired twenty-five-year-old Tommy Moore, who worked on a forklift at the Garston Bottle Works. Moore’s musical experience had been limited to playing in big dance bands. Johnny Gentle, a hulking man who had been a merchant seaman before he was discovered by Parnes, didn’t much care for the Silver Beatles or their music. The tour turned out to be a depressing series of one-night stands in decrepit dance halls in backwater towns. Promoters called Larry Parnes to complain about the Silver Beatles’ playing, and the Silver Beatles called to complain about their cold-water lodgings. They lived on a bowl of soup a day, and Tommy Moore couldn’t stand John Lennon. One night the van they were riding in was in a collision, and Tommy Moore was hit on the head with a suitcase. He lost his two front teeth and was taken to a hospital to have his face stitched up. John laughed when he saw him on stage at the show that night. Moore quit when they got back to Liverpool.

In Liverpool Allan Williams opened up a strip club on Upper Parliament Street called the New Cabaret Artists Club with a West Indian bar man called Lord Woodbine because he smoked Woodbine cigarettes. When the Silver Beatles returned to Liverpool, Williams gave them work at the New Cabaret Artists Club backing a stripper named Shirley for a few weeks. On weekends Williams also booked them in town halls all over the city, often in the poorest and roughest sections of town. Some of these jobs turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. The most notoriously violent venues were in the town halls in Bootle, Garston, and Litherland, where the audiences were frequently composed of large gangs of Teddy Boys and their girlfriends, called “Judies.” The boys in these gangs, which had names like “Bath Hall Bloods,” the “Tigers,” and the “Tanks,” were bona fide thugs, not pretenders like the Silver Beatles. These Teds were armed with chains and knives and wore notorious steel-tipped boots with which they could stomp their prey into unconsciousness. Often a good fight was the last event on their dance cards, and the dirtier the brawl the better. At a dance in Neston, a small town across the water in the Wirral, the town hall turned into a battlefield as the Silver Beatles watched a sixteen-year-old boy stomped to death in front of them. The Teds were also an impossible audience to please. If the band was bad, the Teds had it in for them; if the band was good and managed to raise the least bit of admiration from a Judie, they were in for it anyway. The boys were constantly abused and threatened by these audiences, and even John’s shenanigans and Paul’s baby-faced charm did not abate the cries for blood.

Usually, the most petrified member of the entourage was Cynthia Powell, the only girl to tag along. In the rough neighborhoods Cynthia would try to pass herself off as another Judie who had never seen the Silver Beatles before, lest the Teds beat her up with the rest of them. Cynthia’s Hoylake accent was her biggest giveaway, and she practiced perfecting her “scouse.”

Fortunately for Cynthia, she was not with them one night in the summer of 1959 when the band was ambushed by a gang of Teds in the parking lot of Litherland Town Hall. The bigger boys in the band managed to get away, but Stu Sutcliffe, the smallest and most frail, was easily caught. He was thrown to the ground and savagely kicked in the head until he was nearly unconscious. He would have been killed on the spot if it hadn’t been for John, who ran back into the melce to pull his friend off the ground and drag him to safety. When John deposited Stu on the doorstep of his mother’s house that night, he was still bleeding profusely from his head wounds. I lours later, when the bleeding would not seem to stop, Stu’s mother, Millie, insisted on calling the doctor. But Stu wouldn’t hear of it. “Mother, if you touch that phone I go out of this house, and you’ll never see me again.”

That same summer
it appeared a terrible calamity had befallen the Jacaranda. The Royal Caribbean Band with their forty-gallon sawed-off steel drums that had so electrified the atmosphere every night had disappeared. Allan Williams learned they had skipped town for a higher-paying job in Hamburg, West Germany. It seemed that Hamburg’s bustling St. Pauli district, with its hundreds of bars, dance halls, and nightclubs, had become a hungry market for foreign entertainment. The club owners were paying top salaries, and so great was the demand for acts that they were even pleased to book an attraction as esoteric as a West Indian steel band. Williams, surmising he might combine the overflow of Liverpool rock groups with the great thirst of Hamburg, set out for the famous city of decadence himself, armed with a tape of Liverpool groups made on a tape recorder that John had stolen from the art college and for the theft of which Stu was subsequently blamed.

Williams was not disappointed with what he found in Hamburg. The St. Pauli district was a neon-lined nocturnal world of seedy, carnivallike clubs, doorway hookers, tranvestites, and porn and weapons shops. All this served as a colorful backdrop for raging gang wars among the numerous drug and gun runners. The crowning touch, however, was the brothel district, the Herberstrasse, a fenced-in city-within-a-city that did a bustling business with a surfeit of customers from the nearby prosperous ports and American army bases.

It was in a basement club on the Grosse Freiheit called the Kaiserkeller that Allan Williams made the acquaintance of Bruno Koschmider. Koschmider was a memorable-looking man, a short, dwarflike fellow with a large head, putty nose, and a shank of carefully waved blond hair. Koschmider had once been a magician and a circus clown before opening several prosperous businesses in the Reeperbahn. As Reeperbahn business necessitated, Koschmider was suspicious and tough. Williams excitedly explained to Koschmider through an interpreter that Liverpool was a great, untapped well of entertainment and the perfect source for a club like Koschmider’s. The Liverpool “beat sound” would go over big in Hamburg, Williams said, and to prove it he produced a tape recording that had been made before he left Liverpool. The tape turned out to be only electronic static and hum.

Williams returned to Liverpool without any bookings but full of inspiration. He kept pitching Liverpool groups to tour promoters and made frequent trips to London. It was on one of these trips, several months later, that he ran into Koschmider again. Koschmider was in London scouting for bands to play his clubs, and within a few minutes Williams had convinced him to sign what he promised was Liverpool’s finest musical product—Derry and the Seniors.

Back in Liverpool, amidst much local envy, Derry and the Seniors were shipped to Hamburg for what seemed like the big time. When word returned to Liverpool that their engagement was proving successful, a pleased Koschmider wrote to Williams asking for yet another group to come to Hamburg, and this time it was the Silver Beatles’ turn. In the flush of getting a booking in the romantic city of Hamburg and leaving Great Britain for the first time, the band dropped the Silver and became, simply, the Beatles.

The one small problem about the Beatles going off to Hamburg was that they still had no permanent drummer. In desperation more than desire, they asked Pete Best to join them. The Beatles had known Pete Best for years; George Harrison had once introduced him to Paul and John, but it was only recently that he had become a drummer—and not a very good one at that. Pete was nineteen, a dark, handsome, and mysteriously quiet young man whose mother, Mona, ran the Casbah Club. The Casbah was a popular teen club in the residential section of West Derby that Mona Best had opened as a place for Pete’s friends to congregate. It was a crude basement club with wooden benches and a dragon painted on the ceiling. When the Beatles first heard through the grapevine that the Casbah was opening and might be a good place to play, they turned up there en masse, along with Cynthia, to nose around. They liked what they saw so much they stayed to help clean up the place, and it was Cynthia who painted the distinctive spiderwebs on the walls.

It was at the Casbah that they made a new friend who was to become an integral part of the group, as important as any of the members. His name was Neil Aspinall, and he was a tall, handsome young man who lived with the Best family as a boarder. Neil had a rakish sense of humor and a direct, no-nonsense northern kind of charm. He was eighteen years old and had just graduated from the Liverpool Institute. He was training to be an accountant, but as his interest in the bands that played the Casbah increased, his attention to his studies lagged. By the following spring Neil was helping the Beatles load their equipment and was driving them to all their jobs in his battered red and white van with a leaky radiator. He wasn’t called the “road manager” until many years later, when the word was invented, but he was much more than that. He became a friend, aid, and protector. In his own unique way, by the force of his personality, he affected the course of the Beatles as deeply as any of the primary four.

As they had hoped, the Casbah became one of the band’s regular jobs, until the boys had a falling out with Mona Best. It seemed one of their ever-changing band members hadn’t shown up one night, and Mrs. Best had docked his fifteen shilling salary from their pay. The Beatles stormed out of the club and later heard that Pete had taken up the drums and formed a group with the errant guitarist. But the hard feelings between the Best family and the Beatles were short-lived, especially in light of the fact that Pete had recently purchased a shiny new set of professional-looking drums. He had left school and was running the Casbah full time when Paul McCartney rang him up and asked if he’d like to audition with them at the Jacaranda. Later that night they celebrated his inclusion as the drummer of the Beatles.