“In the end the smell got too much for him and he burst in on me, saying, ‘I’ll have you know, woman, I’m starving!’ He wolfed his food down and then he decided it was getting late and that he wanted to stay in his room for the night. It was his way of coming back without admitting he was wrong to leave.” From then on, he made regular trips home to get his washing done and fill up on Mimi’s cooking. But even the most succulent of her steak pies couldn’t lure him back permanently from Gambier Terrace, Rod, Diz, Ducky, and Stu.
The idea had been that Stu would master the bass within a week or so, then take his place as an equal among John’s onstage brotherhood. Unfortunately, it was not as simple as that. Stu’s small hands, so quick and sure while painting, drawing, or sculpting, showed none of the same deftness with his shiny new Hofner President. Even the most basic underlay patterns of rock ’n’ roll were laborious for him to learn and troublesome to execute. He was angered and frustrated by his slow progress and would have given up altogether had not John sat with him for hours in their huge back room at Gambier Terrace, demonstrating the patterns time and again on the bass strings of his own Club 40. Just as Stu had made John believe in himself as an artist, so he was now determined Stu should believe in himself as a musician, whatever the evidence might be to the contrary.
He therefore insisted that Stu should join Paul, George, and him onstage when still all too obviously the rawest of beginners. The principal object was to show off the Hofner President: as George later recalled, “Having a bass player who couldn’t play was better than not having a bass player at all.” To hide his embarrassment, Stu would turn on his James Dean persona, wearing dark glasses and standing with his back half-turned to the audience as if lost in some mystic communion with his fretboard, rather than just lost.
Apart from getting Stu up to standard, the most urgent task was finding a name for the new lineup. Johnny and the Moondogs had been no more than a hasty improvisation for Carroll Levis and was now too much redolent of lost chances and premature homeward trains. Rather than the modish formula of such-and-such and the so-and-so’s, Stu suggested they should revert to another plain collective noun, ideally one with the chirpy unpretentiousness of Buddy Holly’s Crickets. Pursuing this entomological theme, they came up with the Beetles, unaware that it had been Holly’s own original choice. (Contrary to myth, it had nothing to do the Beetles motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, which none of John’s circle had seen.) To avoid an off-putting image of crawly black bugs, John changed it to Beatals—not a pun on “beat” music at this stage, but on beating all competition.
Stu also acted as their manager, insofar as there was anything to manage, and during March drafted a weightily worded and not overly truthful appeal for bookings to an unnamed promoter or club manager. “As it is your policy to present entertainment to the habitues of your establishment, I would like to draw your attention to the Quar [crossed out] ‘Beatals.’ This is a promising group of young musicians who play music for all tastes, preferably rock and roll….” But their gigs remained mostly stuck at the piffling level of student dances and socials, where they were usually known as “the college band.” Stu’s painting tutor, Austin Davis, had them to play at a party he gave at his Huskisson Street flat early in 1959. The event went on for about two days and was so riotous that Davis’s wife, the future novelist and Dame of the British Empire Beryl Bainbridge, had to remove their two young children from the premises. (Later, it would even be cited among the grounds for the couple’s divorce.)
Outside pub hours, John and Stu were generally to be found at a little coffee bar in Slater Street, on the fringes of Chinatown, called the Jacaranda. At night, its basement became a club, attracting crowds from all the surrounding black and Asian quarters, with dancing to a West Indian steel band and liberal consumption of spiked soft drinks and the substance still known, if at all, as Indian hemp. “The Jac” was also a haunt of heavyweight local groups—Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Cass and Cassanovas, and others—who would meet there after their night’s gigs around town.
To John, these were almost godlike figures, with their carefully blow-waved hair, matching Italian suits, flashy guitars, and so-enviable drummers. Each group pumped out its American rock-’n’-roll repertoire with Liverpudlian eccentricity and flamboyance. Ted “Kingsize” Taylor, a brawny apprentice butcher, kiss curled and plaid jacketed, combined the personae of Solomon Burke and the Big Bopper. “Cass,” aka Brian Casser, and his three sidemen wore shawl-collared tuxedos with Chicago gangster–style black shirts and white ties, and hung up their own special banner on the stage behind them. Most extrovert by far was blond, suntanned Rory Storm, aka Alan Caldwell, a mountaineer manqué who during his set would clamber up one side of the stage proscenium, not stopping until he clung precariously forty or more feet above his audience. Even so, he was not selfish with the limelight, granting his drummer Ringo Starr a special solo spot billed as Starr Time.
The star groups’ foot soldiers often proved more approachable than their commanders. At the Jacaranda, John struck up a friendship with the Cassanovas’ bass guitarist, nineteen-year-old John Gustafson, aka Johnny Gus. Generous about sharing bass-playing tips, Gustafson also became a willing accomplice to John’s love of exhibitionistic sick humor. “When we walked round town,” he remembers, “we’d pretend to be two old cripples, helping each other across the road.” One day he went back to the Gambier Terrace flat with John and Stu to hear John play the latest Lennon-McCartney composition, “The One After 909.”
Johnny Gus’s friendliness was counterpointed by the Cassanovas’ hard-man drummer, Johnny Hutch, who intimidated even members of his own group, and made no secret of regarding musicians who were also art students and grammar-school boys as “a bunch of posers.” “John was always terrified of Johnny Hutch,” Gustafson says. It didn’t stop him from going down to the Jacaranda’s basement when Cass and the Cassanovas were setting up, and asking to sit in with them on a couple of numbers. “He played “Ramrod,” the Duane Eddy instrumental,” Gustafson remembers. “And Ray Charles’s “Hallelujah, I Love Her So,” doing the guitar breaks as well as the vocal. We had to admire his nerve.”
The Jacaranda’s owner, Allan Williams, was one of the more colorful figures to be found around Liverpool 8. A stocky Welshman, with curly hair and a piratical black beard, he had worked as a door-to-door salesman and artificial jewelry manufacturer before starting his coffee bar, with his Chinese wife, Beryl, on capital of just £100. At twenty-nine, Williams had no particular interest in teenage music, preferring the Welsh hymns and thirties ballads for whose dramatic tenor rendition he was famous in pubs from Canning Square to Upper Parliament Street. But, like many another small provincial entrepreneur, he was attracted by its increasingly powerful scent of easy money.
John was familiar to Allan Williams as leader of the “right crowd of layabouts” from art college who sat around the Jac, nursing the same frothy coffee or fivepenny (2p) portion of toast and jam for hour after hour of conversation about Kierkegaard or Chuck Berry. To begin with, however, his entrepreneurial eye focused on Stu Sutcliffe’s art rather than John’s music. Among Stu’s recent projects were a series of vivid abstract murals, designed and painted in partnership with Rod Murray, one of which now adorned the front window of Ye Cracke, another the interior of a Territorial Army hall in Norris Green. Williams commissioned the pair to do the same for the Jac’s street window and the walls of its basement club. For the latter, they created a garish voodoo-inspired design, then roped in John and another sometime flatmate, Rod Jones, to help them paint it.
Britain in 1960 had only one nationally known pop manager. This was Larry Parnes, a young Londoner, originally in the dress business, who had helped launch the nation’s first teenage idol, Tommy Steele. Since striking gold with Steele, Parnes had gone about the country seeking out handsome young men and turning them into rock singers under American-flavored pseudonyms that blen
ded the cute with the suggestive: Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride. From among this so-called Larry Parnes Stable, the most successful was Billy Fury, who, as Ron Wycherly, had previously worked as a deckhand on a Liverpool tugboat—though, of course, that unglamorous fact was always played down by his publicists.
As well as manufacturing homegrown teen idols, Parnes was also the principal importer of American rock-’n’-roll stars to their ever-faithful British constituency. That first spring of the brand-new decade, he brought over Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran to costar with indigenous acts in a touring spectacular billed as the Fast-Moving Anglo-American Beat Show. Vincent in the flesh proved a disconcerting figure, weasely and emaciated, though still aged only twenty-five, with one leg in braces following a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Cochran looked much the same glossy young hunk who’d inspired Paul McCartney to sing “Twenty Flight Rock” but was secretly prey to the darkest fears and neuroses. He had been hit hard by the death of his close friend Buddy Holly a year earlier, and now believed himself fated to meet a similarly premature end.
The Fast Moving Anglo-American Beat Show came to the Liverpool Empire for a week in mid-March, playing to rapturous capacity audiences that included John, Cynthia, Paul McCartney—and Allan Williams. Paul would always remember the demented female shriek that went up as the curtains opened to reveal Eddie Cochran with his back turned, nonchalantly running a comb through his hair. John, however, was furious when the screaming drowned out Cochran’s virtuoso playing of his wafer-thin red guitar.
After the show, Williams sought out Larry Parnes and suggested how Liverpool’s evidently fathomless adoration of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran might be exploited still further. Williams’s grandiose idea was a joint promotion between Parnes and himself that would combine the American stars and other Parnes acts with the best of Merseyside’s own rock-’n’-roll talent. Parnes took the bait, agreeing to bring Vincent and Cochran back for a second appearance, supported by other nationally known groups like the Viscounts and Nero and the Gladiators, while Williams supplied local crowd-pullers like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Cass and the Cassanovas. The spectacular would be for one night only at the city’s boxing stadium, behind the Exchange railway station, on May 3.
Thanks to the combined rival attractions of Cynthia and Stu, Paul McCartney had recently felt himself taking “a bit of a back seat” with John. But the Easter vacation of 1960 brought a major rebonding between them. Packing up a few clothes and their guitars, the pair hitchhiked two hundred miles south to stay with Paul’s relatives Mike and Bett Robbins, who were now running a pub, the Fox and Hounds, in Caversham, Berkshire. They spent a week helping out at the pub, sharing a bed in an upstairs room as innocently as children.
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.
Despite 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 detecti
ve 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.”
John Lennon: The Life Page 20