chapter fifteen
A skifflesploitation flick, The Silver Disc, retitled for American release and made to look like a rock & roll movie. It wasn’t.
(The Michael Barson Collection)
The way American rock & roll finally got to British teenagers was thanks to Mantovani. This will seem odd to people who know the music of Annunzio Mantovani, who used his last name as a kind of trademark for album after album where he conducted string orchestras playing pop songs in semi-classical arrangements (specializing in his “cascading strings” gimmick), as well as light classics like Strauss waltzes. Mantovani was living in England, and his records, which were very well recorded, were huge hits during the early years of high fidelity, since you could pop them on and have twenty or so minutes of background music in your home. On Decca in England, he had his albums released by an American subsidiary, London (British Decca had lost the rights to the Decca name in America), where they did very well indeed. With this money flowing in, Decca decided that the trick might work in reverse and formed the London American label in England and appointed a woman named Mimi Trepel in New York to acquire American records to lease for Britain. She began studying the charts and welcoming offers from record companies, mostly independents because the majors already had overseas branches. It turned out that she had a great nose for a popular record; among the records London American released in 1956, its first year, were “Rip It Up” by Little Richard, “See You Later, Alligator” by Bobby Charles, “One Night” by Smiley Lewis, “Honey Don’t” by Carl Perkins, and less-well-known efforts by Chuck Berry (“Down Bound Train”), the Drifters (“Soldier of Fortune”), the Clovers (“From the Bottom of My Heart”), Big Joe Turner (“The Chicken and the Hawk”), and Willie Dixon and the All-Stars (“Walking the Blues”). There were also American pop records, including a version of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” that wasn’t the American hit version, and records by Kay Starr, Jim Reeves, the Fontane Sisters, and Cathy Carr. The next year saw “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis, “Keep a-Knockin’” by Little Richard, “I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash, and “You Can’t Catch Me” by Chuck Berry, among many others. They were careful to include songs featured in films like The Girl Can’t Help It and Rock Rock Rock!, and soon British teenagers were alert to the blue-and-silver label with the three-pointed spindle adapter pressed into the record, and were bringing some of them home. Not all the American hits became British hits, of course, and there was only one radio station, which gave very little needle time to popular music. And sales didn’t count as much as airplay did, although just like anywhere else, airplay helped sales.
Of course, there was a bit more rock & roll becoming available; RCA had Elvis, Decca already had rights to Buddy Holly and Bill Haley, and somebody was putting out Frankie Lymon’s records, because he did several tours and recorded a live album at the London Palladium. But Atlantic, Chess, Sun, Mercury, and Liberty had no such representation, and gladly licensed the records Ms. Trepel wanted. And these records were giving British kids ideas. Just how to implement them in a time when Tommy Steele was the epitome of British rock & roll (and he was saying he didn’t need a “rock and roll crutch” for his intended career as an all-round entertainer) was something of a problem, but skiffle was both helping and hurting there. The fact of a do-it-yourself music, provided you could come up with a couple of guitars or a banjo, was irresistible, and despite not having much of a presence on the radio, skiffle spread like crazy during 1957 in England. Although London, and specifically Soho’s Denmark Street, was the nexus of it, its essential amateurism was contagious, and it quickly spread outside of London.
In 1957, just as he was announcing his retirement from skiffle, John Hasted, a scientist, antiwar activist, and folk song fan who’d championed the earliest skiffle groups, said in a magazine column, “When skiffle dies down, it will split in two directions: rock ’n’ roll and folk music.” Early evidence of this was already cropping up in London; Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies were an established country blues duet, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott had reappeared and summoned a banjo-playing friend from the United States, Derroll Adams, to come over and spread folk music with him, and a certain kind of teenager was showing up at the 2 I’s coffee bar in Soho, banging away on guitars, and attempting to duplicate the records on the joint’s mostly rock-and-roll jukebox.
And they kept getting discovered there. Terry Williams came in from the suburbs with a friend to see what was happening, took a look around, and returned with his guitar, asking for an audition. He passed, a manager type showed up, and suddenly he was Britain’s newest rock sensation, Terry Dene. Alex Wharton and Michael “Mickie” Hayes worked the upstairs and downstairs bars at the 2 I’s and became very much a part of the place, Hayes standing out because of his outrageous jive vocabulary (or what he thought was jive, anyway), calling everything “the most.” He soon became known as Mickie Most. Eventually he and Wharton sat in with the house band, Les Hobeaux, as the Most Brothers, and got themselves a manager. Late in 1957, BBC Television’s The 6.5 Special did a live show from the 2 I’s, featuring a lot of its current talent, and the entire country was suddenly made aware that London was rocking—and skiffling. 1958 saw more stars; Colin Hicks, Tommy Steele’s little brother, was signed to a management deal, and so was Reg Smith, who changed his name to Reg Patterson after he moved to London, but after signing with Larry Parnes, the hottest agent in town, he became Marty Wilde. Terence Nelhams confessed to a member of the Vipers that he was about to chuck it in; he’d been playing spots at the 2 I’s for three months and hadn’t been signed yet! He changed his stage name to Terry Denver, but that didn’t help, but he and his group, the Worried Men, worked their way up to house band for a summer so the Vipers could go on tour, and soon television producer Jack Good came and saw them. They recorded backing up a couple of singers (with Mickie Most adding some guitar), and finally Terry walked to go solo under Good’s guidance and changed his name again, this time to Adam Faith. Then there was Larry Page, who had the distinction of cutting a British version of the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day.” Of course, when British youth heard the original version, they left Page in the dust, but his career had begun, a tour beckoned, and he needed a band. So, of course, he went to the 2 I’s, and there was Ian McLean, a guitarist looking for a gig. Page told him to show up at a rehearsal hall to try out for the Page Boys, which included bassist Jet Harris and drummer Ray Taylor.
Rock & roll was slowly leaking into Britain, but for the most part it was deep underground; the British musical establishment insisted that the American records be strictly controlled for content and rationed because of their country of origin. The Director General of the BBC wanted “the creation of a market and a taste for songs and music which are British not only in the sense of being written by British composers, but British in sound and idiom and capable of performance in a British way.” The Controller of Sound Entertainment added, “We should look at existing programmes with an eye to the ultimate possibility of removing the American element and replacing it with something un-American, if we can find it, which will do the same job.” And they quoted the BBC’s first Director General, Lord Reith, who had said, “It is not autocracy, but wisdom, that suggests a policy of broadcasting on the basis of giving people what they should like and will come to like.” Add to this strict controls on lyrics, not only for matters of sex, but also religion (no mention whatever, in any context, of “the Lord,” “God,” or even bending one’s knees in supplication) and commercialism (forget any Chuck Berry song about cars, which invariably named the make and model, let alone references to soft drinks or items of dress). Yet in the middle of all of this, little Larry London, a child singer from East London, managed to have a hit in England and America with an old Negro spiritual, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” which cleverly never specified who “He” might be. But thank him or whoever for the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, from which Radio Luxembourg, a powerful AM station with English language programming—a powerful commercial AM station at that—blasted anything they wanted over a directional signal aimed at the United Kingdom and Ireland. They handily shut out the BBC with their own chart-countdown show, with records the BBC didn’t or wouldn’t play: ten times the listenership, so horrifying that the BBC offered Tommy Steele the job of hosting their countdown show, even when his manager, Larry Parnes, held them up at the last minute for a per-show fee that was many times what the rank-and-file DJs there earned. He didn’t last long.
Down at the 2 I’s, there was a new group coming up, the Railroaders, a duet of Bruce Welch and Brian Rankin, the latter one of the most talented guitarists the scene had tossed up in a long while, both of whom were from Newcastle. Rankin called himself Hank Rankin for the sake of the group, and the two of them studied Everly Brothers records like they were scripture—which, to a rock & roll–inclined British kid, they were. The Railroaders played with whatever rhythm section they could find, although Jet Harris was a favorite bassist, and the more they played, the better they got. When Les Hobeaux, the Most Brothers, Wee Willie Harris, and a few other proto-rockers came off a thirty-date tour of England, they went down to the club to see what was shaking, and as Alex Wharton, the Most Brother who wasn’t Mickie, reported, “They were amazing, everything we weren’t.” Now Hank Rankin was calling himself Hank Marvin, after the part-Cherokee American country star Marvin Rainwater. Hank’s virtuosity stood out; he was a serious scholar of American country-style records and knew who the players were, and he would play records over and over until he figured out how to play like them. He and Brian also worked out duo arrangements, so that one would back the other and then they’d switch. Skifflers just tended to whack away at chords. Inevitably, Hank was lured away from the 2 I’s by an older group, in this case the Vipers, who were going for a more modern sound, and he went with them for a week’s engagement in Birmingham, where they tried to augment their normal skiffle fare with the likes of “Johnny B. Goode,” to the utter indifference of their audience. At the end of the week, Marvin quit and went back to working with Bruce at the 2 I’s, while the remaining Vipers slunk back to London and dissolved.
Then, in March 1958, Buddy Holly and the Crickets came for a twenty-one-date tour. This was the real thing, close up. They were loud. They were cheerful. And they rocked. Nobody had seen a Fender Stratocaster before—so that’s why American records sounded like that!—and everyone wished Britain could produce a star like Buddy. Perhaps you had to actually be American—something in the water. And then pow! An American rock & roller, clad in black leather, turned up at the 2 I’s! Vince Taylor, he said his name was, and much of the rest of him was shrouded in a self-created mystery. It was said that in California, where he’d come from, he was a star; that he’d gone to Hollywood High School; that he had a pilot’s license. The part about Hollywood High School was true, but he’d been born Maurice Brian Holden, in Middlesex, and had moved to America with his family when he was very young. Eventually his family moved to California, where his oldest sister married Joe Barbera, of the Hanna-Barbera animation studio, and Holden began playing clubs at the beach. Somehow he managed to hear a Tommy Steele record and told himself that if that’s what passed for rock & roll in England, he’d show ’em. So he, his sister, a guitarist friend named Bob Frieberg, and a manager, Joe Singer, arrived in London in the summer of 1958, and Brian became Vince Taylor. He assembled a band from the talent at the 2 I’s, and once he started playing, everyone agreed: he had the looks, he had the moves, he had the taste in songs to cover. Oh, and he couldn’t sing. Still, he didn’t seem like a degenerate, like Jerry Lee Lewis, who’d just come and gone from England.
Backstage at Jerry Lee’s first British gig, a bunch of fans had waylaid him long enough to have their pictures taken with him. One of them had noticeably darker skin than the others; Harry Webb’s grandmother was Spanish, and he’d grown up in India, son of a diplomat who’d been forced out during the post-independence riots with the rest of his family. Young Harry joined a skiffle group, and they played the 2 I’s, but truthfully, his heart wasn’t in it. He finally quit and formed a trio called the Drifters and worked up some Elvis numbers. On the Drifters’ second gig, one of the other guys from the backstage photo appeared and asked if they’d like a lead guitarist, so Ian Samwell was suddenly a Drifter. A gig in the north beckoned, and the promoter thought that a two-part name would work better than just the Drifters, and he also thought that Harry Webb wasn’t very inspiring, so Harry was re-christened Cliff Richard, and off they went. When they came back, they booted their other guitarist and signed with George Ganjou, a former vaudevillian who listened carefully to a couple of songs and then asked them if they’d rather be on Decca or Columbia. The group chose Columbia, and at the end of July they went into the studio to cut the song the record company had chosen, “Schoolboy Crush,” which Columbia was so certain was a hit that they let the band knock off one of their own tunes, “Move It,” for the B side. Then they pressed it up, and Aberbach Music, who published “Schoolboy Crush,” sent their record plugger around to try to generate sales. One of his stops was Jack Good’s office, and Good was about to ask the guy to leave, having listened to “Schoolboy Crush” and having hated it, and then, for some reason, he turned the record over. He got very excited, broke out in a sweat, and asked where he could see the Drifters. He had to get them on Oh Boy!, his television show on the new ITV network, before anyone else knew about them. He played “Move It” for Marty Wilde, who said, “Yes, it’s marvelous, but, of course, you could never get a sound like that on this side of the Atlantic.”
“He’s from Hertfordshire, his name’s Cliff Richard, and I’ve just booked him for Oh Boy!,” was Good’s reply.
By the end of 1958, Cliff had a top-ten single with “Move It” and was about to head out on a package tour with the latest edition of the Drifters: Ian Samwell, now on bass; Terry Smart on drums; Bruce Welch on rhythm guitar; and Hank Marvin on lead. Two more tweaks lay ahead. Samwell was asked if he’d mind stepping down and letting Jet Harris play bass. Samwell knew that Harris was a much better bassist than he was, so he acquiesced. And early in 1959, Cliff’s new manager fired Terry Smart and installed Tony Meehan. Britain had its first serious rock & roll band.
The summer of 1958 saw skiffle totally evaporate in London, symbolized by the Vipers’ breakup. Everybody wanted to be a rock & roll singer instead, inspired by the young men managed by Larry Parnes who kept popping up on the scene: Vince Eager, Marty Wilde, Tony Sheridan, and Tommy Steele. Some might not have wanted to put up with some of Parnes’s antics—both Wilde and Sheridan have told of having to rebuff his sexual advances on several occasions—but they all admired his power to create stars. But the word that skiffle was out didn’t penetrate very far outside London, so the square teens in the provinces were still keen on it. On July 6, 1957, a skiffle group was playing at a church fete in Woolton, a neighborhood of Liverpool. The Quarry Men were mostly students at Quarry Bank High School, and in the audience was a kid who wanted nothing more than to be a musician. Paul McCartney was already playing the trumpet, but a neighbor kid, George Harrison, sometimes joined him on a guitar his father had given him. They both sought out those blue-and-silver London American records, as well as anything else that sounded good, hanging out at NEMS (Northern England Music Services), Liverpool’s big furniture and radio store, which had the best-stocked record department in town, and which, like many record stores in those days, had listening booths where you could check out a prospective purchase. On this particular day, Paul’s friend Ivan Vaughan had told him that an old friend of his had this band, the Quarry Men, that would be at the Woolton church fete, so the two of them biked across town to see it. When they got there, Paul could see what the excitement was about; the kid who was obviously the leader exuded attitude, although he wasn’t such a great guitar player. The band struck up the Dell Vikings’ hit “Come Go with Me,” and it slowly dawned on Paul that this guy was making the lyrics up as he went along—clever lyrics, at that. After the band quit, Ivan took Paul over to meet the leader, John Lennon, his childhood friend. They were wary toward each other, but Paul was fascinated, so he and Ivan stayed for the Quarry Men’s second set and then went with them to another gig they had at the church’s assembly hall, opening for a small dance band. While they were hanging around waiting for the hall to get set up, Paul asked if he could borrow John’s guitar and noticed it was tuned like a banjo. He asked if he could re-tune it, and after he did, he launched into Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” a song from the soundtrack of The Girl Can’t Help It. John was very impressed; the song has a lot of fast-paced lyrics, and Paul was nailing them. Seeing that everyone was enjoying his playing, he slipped into “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” and a couple of other tunes, after which he took off the guitar, sat down at the piano, and played “Long Tall Sally.” The guys hung out until about ten o’clock and then went to a pub to see if they could pass for old enough for a drink (McCartney was fifteen, Lennon almost seventeen). Eventually they went their separate ways, and John, walking home with a friend, asked him if he should ask Paul to join the Quarry Men. He was so much better than the other guys that there might be hard feelings. But John Lennon wasn’t one to let hard feelings get in the way of his ambition.
Not long afterward Paul went down to a local music store and traded in the trumpet his father had bought him for a guitar. Jim McCartney, who played music professionally, wasn’t offended; he saw that that’s what the boy wanted. As soon as school was out, the Quarry Men discovered that they were eligible for a skiffle competition at the Cavern, a coffee bar in a space that had been a vegetable warehouse for the Liverpool docks—a dank, often odorous place that was a big hit with the kids. The Quarry Men didn’t win that night, and Paul McCartney was off at Boy Scout camp with his brother, Mike, for another Quarry Men gig there in August. With the fall came school again, with Lennon enrolled in art college and McCartney still in high school and still hanging out with George Harrison. McCartney was still a Quarry Man, although gigs were few, and he was hanging out more and more with John, much to Jim McCartney’s displeasure. “He’ll get you into trouble, son,” he warned Paul. Not only that, he’d get young George Harrison in trouble, too; Paul invited him to a Quarry Men gig early in 1958, and another of the bands on the bill was the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, whose drummer was a young man named Richy Starkey. Starkey was the hot young drummer on the scene, which was what he was doing with the hot local skiffle band, who were getting lots of gigs, far out of the league of the Quarry Men. Lennon was getting to know Harrison, and although he was embarrassed to be playing with a young kid like McCartney, there was no doubt that Harrison, an even better player (and the only one of the three of them with an actual professional-level guitar), was a catch, even though he was even younger than McCartney. At some point in early 1958, he joined the band. Not that there was a lot of work: they managed to get booked into the Cavern again but were banned for playing rock & roll on what had been billed as a skiffle show. John and Paul settled for playing guitars with George over at his house, which Mrs. Harrison encouraged. And John and Paul were writing songs, singly and together. Somewhere along the line, they pooled some money and cut a record: an acetate demo of Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” on one side and a Paul McCartney composition, “In Spite of All the Danger,” on the other.
Lennon was going into his last year in art college and had no plans for the future, although he’d been living with his mother’s sister, Mimi, because his mother, Julia, couldn’t handle him (his father had vanished years ago), and her rather bohemian lifestyle wasn’t conducive to raising a teenager. Mimi was strict, but fair, a single woman with a good job and a nice house, and taking care of John meant that her sister was a frequent visitor. Mimi usually walked her partway to the bus stop at the end of one of her visits, but on July 15, Nigel Walley, a friend of John’s, showed up looking for him, and Julia asked him to walk with her instead. Walley had no sooner parted with her to head back to his house when he heard a screech of brakes and a thump: Julia had been hit by a car and died on the spot. His mother’s sudden and random death pulled John into a deep depression, which manifested itself in some of his less likeable personality traits surfacing: he picked on people, was sarcastic and cruel toward people who were different and passed it off as humor. In a student pub, though, he met a new friend, Stuart Sutcliffe, an art school student a year younger than he was and opposite him in every way—he was serious about painting and art and had enormous talent and was very easy to get along with—and yet they still became friends. Stu was someone John could talk art with, and he was in awe of his new friend’s work. And it was a good thing John had art to occupy him, because the group, who were now calling themselves Johnny and the Moondogs, weren’t getting a lot of work. They did audition for a TV program called Star Search, and passed the audition and played the first half of the show in Manchester, but they never found out if they won the prize (the chance to maybe appear on a television show) or not; the last train to Liverpool left before the show ended. There went one possibility. Then Larry Parnes came to town and signed Ronnie Wycherly, who immediately became Billy Fury. Then “Move It” by Cliff Richard and the Drifters exploded onto the radio, and the Moondogs—who were already trying to change their name again—knew they were on the right track.
Cliff Richard and the Drifters finished off 1959 in grand style; he was all over television and radio and had a film in the works, Serious Charge, for which they’d recorded four songs. They knew they should get Decca to release one of them to promote the film, but they’d lately come under the influence of Ricky Nelson’s records, which Decca was releasing, and knew the best song from the film was “Living Doll,” and they’d botched it on the soundtrack. They convinced Decca to let them re-record it, and they slowed it down a bit and let Hank play a languorous James Burton–inspired solo, and it was a hit. Because they were suddenly rich, Hank Marvin actually went about importing a flamingo-pink Fender Stratocaster into Britain. American guitars were not allowed to be sold in Britain (although German makes like Framus were), and going to the expense of messing around with customs and dealing personally with Fender was the only way to get one. The only guitar in Britain that even came close belonged to Jim Sullivan of Marty Wilde’s band, who owned a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop that Marty had bought from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a guitar-playing evangelist from the 1940s who had toured Europe on a folk-blues tour, and given to Sullivan for his contribution to Wilde’s success. But Cliff outdid Marty on one matter. “Living Doll” was shaping up to be a hit in the United States, and he and the Drifters—oops, the Shadows—since “There Goes My Baby” by an American group called the Drifters, who’d been around a lot longer and were insistent on no competition for the name, had just become a hit—were off on an American tour, which ended when the record only went to #30. The Shadows, however, had taken the opportunity to hit New York’s Forty-Eighth Street and its legendary music stores and got themselves some instruments. Somewhere in there, Cliff also made his best film, Expresso Bongo, which was the cinematic version of a hit play that had been packing them in since 1958 in London’s West End. It’s the story of a young man, Bongo Herbert, and his rise in showbiz through the sleazy scene in Soho, aided by his shady manager, and caused immense controversy when it was released. Cliff apologized to his fans and promised a more wholesome film next time, a promise he’s still honoring.
None of which had much to do with what was happening in Liverpool, where Japage 3, the supremely awful name Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison were currently using (John And Paul And GEorge) were still juggling school (and art college), had so few gigs that George took a position with the Les Stewart Quartet, another band that wasn’t working much, although they sure did rehearse a lot. They were going to be the house band in a new space a woman named Mona Best was going to open, but meanwhile, George was also doing construction work, as was John Lennon, while Paul had a job in a department store with a record department. One weekend George and Paul went off hitchhiking and for some reason were very late in getting back to Liverpool, which wouldn’t have made any difference except that George had stood up Les Stewart for a gig (as had another band member, leaving him to perform as the Les Stewart Duo), and, infuriated, Stewart broke up the band and told Mrs. Best that she’d have to find another group for her club—two weeks before it was due to open. George had an idea and told her that he knew a couple of guys he’d been playing with who might want to do it, and, after a four-month layoff, Japage 3 had a steady gig. Not only that, they pitched in on getting the club ready. Paul painted the ceiling, and at the end of August, the Casbah opened in the basement of the Best home. Entertainment was by … well, they’d added a guy named Ken Brown, so the old name didn’t make sense. Meanwhile, Paul was back in school, as was John, who seemed to be knuckling down to study under the influence of his friend Stu Sutcliffe and his new girlfriend, Cynthia Powell. George took a job in the maintenance department of a big store downtown, learning a trade while being paid for it. He celebrated by buying a new guitar, a Czech Delizia Futurama, which at least looked snazzy.
The Casbah featured two group nights a week and the Quarrymen—yes, they were back to that name, but one word now—played Saturdays and a succession of other bands Sundays. At the end of November 1959, Jett Storm and the Hurricanes got a gig there and featured their new drummer, easily the best in town. Richy Starkey had been given the nickname “Rings” because he was wearing three rings on his hands, one his grandfather’s wedding ring, which he intended to give to his girlfriend one of these days. The entire group had a fascination with cowboys, and guitarist Johnny Byrne became Johnny Guitar shortly after the leader became Rory Storm, after Western actor Rory Calhoun. Rings Starkey didn’t fit that pattern, so after tossing around a couple of other possibilities, Richy became known as Ringo Starr.
The Hurricanes were a notch or two above the Japage/Quarrymen, and not only because they had a drummer and bassist, which Lennon and his group didn’t. Nor were they going to depend on places like the Casbah for exposure; the Cavern had just been sold after it became evident that jazz and occasional skiffle—which had even died away in far-off Liverpool by this time—wasn’t paying the bills. Just the place for the local gigs, although they were also getting bookings all over the country: New Year’s Eve was spent in Fife, way up in Scotland. The Quarrymen didn’t have a gig that night.
But one of them had something amazing happen right after 1960 had started. Stu Sutcliffe had a painting in an annual competition exhibition at the local Walker Gallery, and the sponsor of the exhibition, John Moores, a local industrialist, liked it enough to buy it for £90. Stu had no sooner deposited the check than John was on him to join his group. He could choose either drums or bass—they needed both—and he wouldn’t even have to dent his prize money too badly. John was relentless, and Stu was tempted. Well, not drums—they required more effort than he was willing to put in—but the bass? It wasn’t a pressing problem, though; the Quarrymen had somehow lost their regular Saturday-night slot at the Casbah and argued with Mrs. Best, while at the same time letting Ken Brown go.
Across town, Allan Williams, who was as close as Liverpool had to a beatnik at that point, was running a room called the Jacaranda along with his wife, Beryl, and a mysterious black West Indian who was known to one and all as Lord Woodbine, after the cigarettes he smoked, which often contained tobacco. Woodbine also fronted a steel band and ran a couple of illegal clubs around town. At the end of January, Williams and Woodbine saw a flyer for a cheap long weekend in Amsterdam, which certainly appealed to them, so they signed on. But they also had another plan: instead of returning with the rest of the package tour, they were going to head to Germany. One night a German guy had come into the Jacaranda and convinced a few of the steel band guys to go home with him, and they’d sent the club a postcard saying what fun they were having in Hamburg. Hamburg? A club scene to investigate? The intrepid Liverpudlians decided to check it out. If it was Liverpool musical talent the Germans wanted, they didn’t have to sneak into clubs and steal musicians: Williams could make them a deal for talent he already managed, like Cass and the Cassanovas. He carefully assembled a tape of some of his clients playing live and packed it in his luggage. When the duo arrived in Hamburg, they were amazed: not only was there a thriving red-light district near their hotel, but the Reeperbahn, the main street, had side streets like Grosse Freiheit that had any kind of bar or club that you could imagine. It made London’s Soho look like a tawdry few blocks in a repressed city. Williams walked around and located a club, the Kaiserkeller, that had a live band that was playing rock & roll, so he went in, ordered a beer, and was suitably appalled by the band, who were doing phonetic approximations of records they’d heard and not exactly moving the audience, which only danced to the jukebox during the interval. Okay, Williams knew he could beat that, so he asked the waiter if he could talk to the boss and was soon face-to-face with Bruno Koschmider, a hulking man with a clubfoot and not a word of English—the waiter had to be found to translate. Williams told Koschmider that he was a noted British agent and had bands that could wipe the floor with the one currently playing, and that he could have one of them for £100 a week plus £10 commission for him. Look, he said, pulling out the tape, check these groups out. Koschmider cued up the tape and pressed the button and … well, whatever was on the tape wasn’t what Williams had put there. Before he could stammer out an apology, the noise of a fight came from the club, and Koschmider reached into his desk, came out with a truncheon, and waded into the melee. When all was calm, he came back into the office, cleaned off the truncheon, and put it back in his desk. Williams, knowing he’d blown it but good, slunk into the night.
Williams was hardly finished, though. Jack Good had been presenting Gene Vincent, long washed up at home, on his latest TV show, Boy Meets Girls, and now he’d convinced Eddie Cochran to come over by telling Eddie, who was scared to fly after Buddy Holly’s death, that all the transportation on the British tour he and Larry Parnes were building up around Gene Vincent would be by road and rail. When the tour reached Liverpool, John and Stu went, as did George, on his own. So did Allan Williams, who on the spur of the moment and thinking, This is the future,called Parnes up the next morning to see if there were still dates open on the tour for which he could supply opening bands. Parnes said there were, because Vincent and Cochran were coming back after a break at home in mid-April, and he could have them on May 3. Williams sent him £475 to nail down the date and started thinking of Liverpool acts to pad the bottom of the bill.
The Quarrymen were looking for work, and both Paul and Stu sent off letters hoping to get something at one of Britain’s many summer camps, where families would go for a week or two and there was a lot of musical entertainment for dances. Of course, it was much too late to get hired, but they didn’t know this (although Rory Storm and the Hurricanes did: they’d been hired by Butlin’s, the top name in the business, for the 1960 season). A draft of a letter Stu wrote has surfaced, and it captures a moment. “I would like to draw your attention,” it reads, “to a band to the Quar‘Beatals.’” It was John, of course, who’d come up with the name; he was inspired by the Crickets, of course, but he also liked that it didn’t fit the Somebody and the Somethings template all the other groups seemed to have. (He spelled the name right, too: Beatles.) Nobody knows who Stu’s note was aimed to, but one thing’s for certain: they weren’t getting work, and the few gigs they played during the first half of 1960 were at the Liverpool College of Art, which actually owned an amplifier they could use. They still didn’t have a drummer, either. And on April 16, what could have been their introduction to the wider world evaporated when, trying to reach Heathrow for the long-needed break before resuming their tour, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Eddie’s girlfriend, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, were involved in a high-speed collision with a lamppost in Chippenham. Gene and Sharon were badly injured, but Eddie had massive head injuries and died a couple of hours later in the hospital. (And, as with bookings at Butlin’s, the pros were ahead of the Beatles: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes had already been added to the resumption of the tour along with Cass and the Cassanovas.) Still, the show must go on, and go on it did at Liverpool Stadium on May 3 with Gene Vincent the sole American headliner, and Stu and George the only Beatles in attendance, in the audience, of course. After the show, everyone repaired to the Jacaranda, where Parnes and Williams huddled over how they could further work together. Parnes had two acts that would be working the north of England, Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle, and he needed reliable backing acts for them. Williams had brought together a dozen of them for the stadium show, so he was obviously the man to talk to. A couple of days later, Parnes’s office called back with another request: he needed a backing group for Billy Fury, too. Williams agreed to have musicians ready that Tuesday the tenth.
Not long after the stadium show, John Lennon was in the Jacaranda and walked up to Williams and said, “Allan, why don’t you do something for us?” He then had to explain that “us” was the band he and Stuart had together, so Williams added them to the audition schedule and, hearing that they didn’t have a drummer, he offered to get them one, and Cass found twenty-nine-year-old Tommy Moore, who worked in a warehouse. The day of the audition, though, he was having trouble getting out of work, and as the Beatles pleaded to play later and later, eventually they had to do something, so one of the other groups’ drummers stood in, and Moore arrived in time to play the last couple of numbers. Ringo Starr and Johnny Guitar showed up to check out the action but were totally unimpressed. So, apparently, was Parnes. But then an emergency came up: Johnny Gentle’s appearance in Scotland had changed from a one-nighter to a nine-day tour, and he needed a group. The Cassanovas had been ready to help, but they had a regular Saturday-night gig at the New Brighton Pier, and couldn’t very well blow that, and on one of the other dates they had a gig opening for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes at the Cavern’s first Rock Night. Williams quickly called Stu and asked if his group could do it; there was a fat £75 fee for the week but they had to have a drummer. Tommy Moore, fortunately, liked the money, so he took the job. The other Beatles were going to miss out on one of the last weeks of the school year—in Paul’s, Stu’s, and John’s case—or a week of work in George’s, and devised various schemes to cover for that.
It was quite a week. Most of the band took fake names—Paul Ramon, Stuart de Stael, Carl Harrison—and yet they and Johnny Gentle got the girls screaming although they were barely rehearsed. Seven gigs in eight days, one moment when Johnny Gentle and Lennon were hanging out and John showed him how to write a song—one he subsequently recorded without crediting him—and innocent encounters with fans, one of whom mended a shirt of Lennon’s that some fans had ripped. Ten days later, they were back in Liverpool, having seen for themselves what life as the backing band of a third-level Parnes star was like. The only one of the group who’d had trouble on his return was George, who’d been fired from his job. Tommy Moore kept on with them for a little while, but eventually his girlfriend told him that a steady wage was something she wanted her man to have, so one day he just didn’t show up for a gig, and nothing Allan Williams or the others could say could change his mind. Various drummers sat in, and one, Norman Chapman, might have worked out but for being drafted. But the basic fact was that Allan Williams had gotten them professional work and taken a percentage for himself: he was now the Beatles’ manager. That’s why, on August 8, when he got a call from Koschmider saying he was opening another club, the Indra, and needed a band in just over a week, he offered the Beatles. One thing he didn’t tell him: they needed a drummer. That was when someone reminded them of Mrs. Best’s son Pete. He’d played with a band and then given up, his drums stored upstairs from the club she ran. It was too good to be true, and he’d just been mooching around the house, so that when Williams and the Beatles showed up, he was easily dragooned into joining the expedition. On August 15, they squeezed into a van, and George and Paul revived a joke the band had had going for a while: “Where are we going, Johnny?” they’d chant, and Lennon would reply, “To the toppermost of the poppermost!”
Well, not quite. They—Williams, his wife, her brother Barry Chang, Lord Woodbine, and the five Beatles—stopped in London to pick up another passenger, thought to be a bilingual waiter named Steiner to whom Koschmider had offered a job. London to Harwich, ferry to Hook of Holland, and then off they went. In Koschmider’s office, they were informed of their duties: Tuesday to Friday, four and a half hours, 8:00 P.M.–2:00 A.M.; Saturday, six hours, 7:00 P.M.–3:00 A.M.; Sunday, six hours, 5:00 P.M.–1:30 A.M. Half-hour breaks were scattered in there, and it was assumed they had enough material to fill all that time. Sign here, please, and here. Oh, and here: the notice for the police that they were here. Notably absent were work permits, although the boys knew nothing of that. Williams also signed a paper making him Koschmider’s exclusive source for British bands—there was already one, Derry and the Seniors, who were none too happy to see another Liverpool band arrive, at the Kaiserkeller. And for a place to crash, there were some small rooms in back of a cinema, the Bambi, across the street from the Indra. The Beatles took the stage of the Indra on the twentieth anniversary of the German bombing of Liverpool, August 17, 1960.
They were all teenagers and, thus, indestructible, and nobody in their audience knew much about rock & roll, anyway; they were mostly in the bar to get drunk. But the Beatles were getting better at performing; at one point, one of Derry and the Seniors looked in to scoff at them and admitted that they’d gotten really good in a very short time. There was a problem, though: an old lady who lived above the Indra, who protested the noise the group was making. This finally reached the courts, and Koschmider was served with an order to cut out the music at the Indra, so he told the boys (and Williams) that he was extending their contract and sending Derry and the Seniors home at the end of theirs, and that from October 4 they’d be alternating sets at the Kaiserkeller with Rory and the Hurricanes. And so it happened, the two bands egging each other on in fierce competition, the audience getting the benefit. Then, one night in late October, an art student had an argument with his girlfriend and went on a long, moody walk by the Hamburg harbor. On his way back home, he cut down Grosser Freiheit and, as he walked by the Kaiserkeller, he heard some live rock & roll, the first he’d ever heard. He found the courage to go in—this was no student hangout—and was amazed by Rory and the Hurricanes’ Butlin’s-perfected stage act, with antics and choreography. It was the end of their set, though, so he sat awhile, and then this other group came on, and Klaus Voormann’s world changed forever. Totally disoriented by what he’d seen, he left after their set and went back to his girlfriend’s house, woke her up, and said, “You’ve got to see this.” And the next night, Klaus, Astrid Kirchherr, and their friend Jürgen Vollmer went down to the Kaiserkeller to see what Klaus was raving about. Terrified of the audience, they sat in a corner and applauded each number, and during the break approached the band shyly—none of them spoke particularly good English, Astrid none at all—and tried talking to the boys. They were shunted off on Stu, who chatted amiably with them and, somewhat surprised, agreed to sit for a photo session the striking blond girl wanted to conduct. Of course he did; it had been love at first sight, something Klaus wound up accepting after it became obvious that it was fate.
As was what happened next: Koschmider gave the Beatles thirty days’ notice to leave, after saying he’d gotten a notice from the police that they’d discovered that Herr Harrison was only seventeen and ineligible to hold a work permit. Of course, they didn’t have work permits because he’d never gotten them for them, so a notice from the police was unlikely, and Koschmider was probably acting in reaction to a blowup he’d had with Williams, who’d booked Liverpudlians Gerry and the Pacemakers into his hated rival Peter Eckhorn’s Top Ten Club. This was in violation of their agreement, and soon enough Williams served notice that it was null and void. Meanwhile, the boys had been down to the Top Ten to see former Larry Parnes client Tony Sheridan, who’d pretty much moved to Hamburg and was drawing fans, and signed a piece of paper with Eckhorn that they’d play the club in April 1961. Now that Koschmider had fired them, they tacked some condoms to the wall of their miserable room at the Bambi and lit them on fire. No damage was done, but the police arrested Paul, Pete, and John, and Stu, accompanied by Astrid (to whom he’d just become engaged), turned himself in. No charges were pressed, and Paul and Pete were deported in handcuffs at the airport and banned from Germany unless they filed an appeal within thirty days. George was already on his way out at the Hook of Holland. John hung out for a few more days with Stu, who was the only one who was staying on legally. What a mess. They could hardly wait to do it again.