“Can we keep it until tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yeah, but don’t give it to anyone else,” George said, “or John’ll kill me.”
I was so in love with it that I played it over and over until Mum was fed up. I took it back to George and it was passed around the circle again like a well-thumbed library book until it was worn out. They never did get a deejay to play it and eventually Paul kept it and put it away. (A few years later he had some personal copies made at EMI. though the quality was very poor. They were eventually issued as part of the first Beatles Anthology compilation. To this day he still has the original and the copies locked away among his possessions.)
But on February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly was dead in a plane crash, the legendary “day the music died.” This tragedy made a huge impression on me, because I was the boy who had met Buddy Holly—and we all went into mourning. He was the best. Our reaction was, “Oh God, it can’t be true.”
He looked like an ordinary person—he was real. Unlike other big American performers, he didn’t wear gold lamé or flashy clothes, which many of the groups in Liverpool copied. They dressed in horrible gold Lurex or lamé (like Rory Storm), Day-Glo pink or in white tuxedos that they thought were oh so cool but which cost the earth to dry-clean, so consequently were always pretty grubby.
The pre-Beatles, while starting out in long drape jackets and bootlace ties like most of the other skifflers (and they all went to the same shoe store to buy identical black-and-white two-tone loafers that all the bands wore), developed into Brando-type scruffs in leather jackets and skintight jeans, standing out a mile from what was expected from stage performers. When John started at art school he got all Left Bank poetical for a while and he influenced his bandmates to don black polo sweaters and black or charcoal gray cords with Norfolk-style tweed jackets with patch pockets. Uniquely, John also had dark green cords. Our footwear was winklepickers with Cuban heels until after Hamburg, when the Beatles returned with cowboy boots with decorative tops that they’d tuck their jeans into. (When John and Paul passed through London on their way back from Hamburg in 1961, they saw Chelsea boots in Annello and Davide in Drury Lane and were smitten. There were two versions, one with a Cuban heel, which became the famous Beatle boots; the other a kind of Shakespearean theatrical style—like Tom Jones’s Spanish flamencos and P. J. Proby’s big buckle variation.)
In contrast to all this stagy flamboyance was Buddy Holly. We all respected him because he looked modest. He wore ordinary suits and had big glasses, like John. He was a regular guy and yet he had all these wonderful songs and he played a guitar. This might sound obvious, but until he came along, most singers just sang, backed by a cabaret type of band. He had the best records, the best songs. Hell, he was one of us, he belonged to us. We had seen him in the flesh. I had met him! I only wish he had lived to meet the Beatles in 1963 or 1964.
John decided to rename the Quarrymen the Beetles, in honor of Buddy Holly’s backing band, the Crickets. When he announced this after a gig, George—who I was closest to at the time—and I were agog, though we tried to act cool. It was a fitting tribute and everyone nodded solemnly. In any case, they’d grown away from being the Quarrymen, high school kids, and most of the original members were gone. I remember turning my hand over and looking at my palm in awe. This was the hand that had shaken Buddy Holly’s. Sadly, I’d washed it a thousand times since then, but it had still been in direct contact. It was all connected—we were all connected.
However, along the route to their metamorphosis as the Beatles, the lads tried out many names, meanwhile still often being called the Quarrymen by longstanding fans. First John went for “Long John Silver and the Beetles,” a combination of John’s name and Long John Silver of the book, Treasure Island. John liked it, but a couple of the others thought it made him too important. However, John got his own way, as John usually did at the time. It was compressed to the Silver Beetles, the name they used for some months until they met Royston Ellis, a young English beat poet. In one of those plays on words that John and Paul liked so much, they invented the Beatals, as in “beat alls”. According to Royston Ellis this was his idea. But in an era when a lot can happen in a day, especially in a young man’s mind, I don’t think it was long before they were dithering again between names.
Without being aware of it, we were all natural street poets, goofing off with invented words and using figures of speech that were exclusively Liverpudlian. John and Paul’s interest in word plays and doubles entrendres was focused when Royston Ellis gave a recital at Liverpool University. John, who was into new, different and bizarre, wasn’t backward in getting to know the off-the-wall poet. They were the same age and recognized in each other a kindred spirit. They went back to some sleazy student flat where they spent the night doing some kind of drugs and “sharing” a willing girl named Pam. According to John, for some strange and perhaps kinky reason, she was wrapped in polythene, unusual night attire that piqued his curiosity so much that he wrote a song about her: “Polythene Pam.” That same night Royston Ellis showed John how to get high by deep breathing the Benzedrine-soaked strips taken from inside a Vick’s inhaler and it quickly went around the scene that this was a cheap and easy way of getting a buzz.
Pot wasn’t all that cool. A few people smoked the occasional joint but it was purple hearts and black bombers that were mostly eaten to keep you awake and dancing. They were about sixpence each if bought singly, or a hundred for a pound in those golden days when there were 240 of those big round brass pennies to a pound. Purple hearts and black bombers (Durophet) and the like were mostly slimming pills that had a stimulating effect—a big one! They came from British Drug Houses, a local factory on the outskirts of Speke, where people were always breaking in and stealing sacks of the things, enough to keep you going for months. With a name like that, it was a bit of a magnet. We used to joke that they handed maps out around the pubs and gigs. I still have my old address book dating from my late teens and there, in black and white, is the address (but not the phone number) of the dealer everyone used—the one I went to for the Beatles when they were on the road and had to keep going: a guy we called Tex. By appointment, supplier of purple hearts, Benzedrine, black bombers and prellies to the Liverpool music scene. The lack of a telephone number wasn’t unusual. Phone lines were like gold dust and were often shared. They were called “party lines” and in Tex’s case, this would have been true.
I remember the gossip at school when George, Paul and John, having dropped the Beatals and reverted back to the Silver Beetles, were booked by a brash young impresario named Larry Parnes and disappeared up to Scotland to back Johnny Gentle in a rough dance hall where night after night they were pelted with beer bottles by Neanderthals on the old electric soup, who fell out of the balconies and despite broken limbs, continued to fight. Paul had bunked off just before he had been due to sit his “O levels” by telling his dad that he had two weeks off school to revise for his exams. When the news got out where he really was, our parents served it up as a warning about how important exams were and how Paul McCartney’s future prospects were ruined. It looked like our mums and dads were finally proved right over all their dire predictions when John stunned us all by getting his photograph into the Sunday People, a lurid national newspaper, with the caption: “The Beatnik Horror, for though they don’t know it they are on the road to hell.”
The scandal—which John laughed hysterically over—came about because their first manager, bearded Allan Williams, who wore a top hat and ran the Jacaranda coffee bar in town, decided to open a strip club that he called the New Cabaret Artists Club. For his opening act he hired a stripper called Janice and sent some photographs of her backing band, the Silver Beetles, to the nationals as publicity. These photos showed John and Stuart Sutcliffe in their incredibly messy student flat. When it came to the actual performance, Janice, it seemed, could only strip to esoteric music like Beethoven and the Spanish Fire Dance. She handed John her sheet music, which he peer
ed at short-sightedly and dismissed. Instead, dressed in poncy little lilac jackets, they played their own contorted arrangement of “The Harry Lime Theme” while Janice struggled to strip in time to it, front stage. At the end of the act, she turned around all out of breath, in all her naked full-frontal glory, while the boys, especially seventeen-year-old George, turned pink, then red, then grinned in unison. The bartender, a West Indian named Lord Woodbine, roared with laughter and rattled the ice in the cocktail shaker.
Allan tried anything that was different, including putting in an incredible, shiny, all-chrome, genuine Rock-Ola jukebox full of real American records! We gazed in awe then almost swooned when Little Richard then Chuck and Fats belted out. Crikey! This was magic. We loved American records because English records were such crap. We were snobbish about Cliff and Marty Wilde, Mark Wynter and Malcolm Earl, a dire balladeer who sang songs like “St. Teresa of the Roses” (his son started the Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood). From the bottom of our boots up we felt that American music was the genuine article. It was as if the U.S. was our spiritual home.
When everyone else was listening to skiffle or jazz, Allan installed a Jamaican steel band in his cellar. He didn’t seem bothered about making money and let kids sit about all day with a cup of cold coffee. He even turned a blind eye when they topped up the coffee with spirits. Then from a German sailor who dropped by the Jacaranda Allan heard about the hot music scene in Hamburg. He also heard that a drummer named Ringo Starr—whom we had seen around, and whose real name was Richard Starkey—had zoomed off to France with Rory. Allan went to Hamburg himself and talked to a few people, including Bruno Koschmeider, who owned the Kaiserkeller. He found that Bruno wasn’t interested at first in any group from Liverpool, a place he had never heard of, and Allan returned home, down but not defeated. He knew something was going on, but unfortunately, by now everyone was hanging out at another cellar club that had been up and running since August 29, 1959, where the Beatles played on the opening night, and on every Saturday until October 10.
The Casbah had been set up initially as a den for her sons by Mona Best in the big basement of their rambling Victorian house on the far side of Liverpool. The house looked mysterious, like something out of a gothic novel, surrounded as it was by a thick stone wall and hidden away behind a high hedge of overgrown rhododendrons. It looked nothing like a teenage hangout that really rocked seven nights a week. It was considered really cool that Mona had bought the huge, nine-bedroom house from her winnings on the Grand National. She had pawned her jewelry from India and put the lot on a horse that had romped home.
Everyone loved Mo, who was a right bundle of fun and supercharged energy. When she saw how fast the news traveled about the ad hoc club in her basement, she decided to make it more commercial. It would be a place where groups could play and teenagers hang out. You went down a few steps from the outside to the cellar, which was about the size of two average living rooms—about twenty feet by twenty feet, barely room for fifty or sixty people. We all pitched in and painted the brick walls black, and then I think John came up with the idea of purple luminous paint. Inspired, we slapped it on, on top of the black. The walls glowed eerily, as if we were in a space ship floating through the galaxy with a couple of naked ultraviolet lights that dangled down on twisted electrical cord. Of course, Lennon loved it.
There was no stage, no real furniture. Mo went out to a sale with Neil Aspinall and returned in the van with some benches, the kind you might have in a park or school, with plain backs. There were a couple of chairs and a space in the middle where people shuffled about. The space was so small there was no room for gyrations. To this day, I remember the smell. It stank of sweat and old coal dust and of the girls’ Nuit de Paris perfume and most of all, of Woodbines, cheap tarry cigarettes that came in a light green packet with swirly brown writing and the illustration of bindweed. You could even buy five Woodbines in a soft packet identical to the ones that held ten or twenty, but made of paper instead of card. Even cheaper were Dominos, which you could buy singly, in those little white paper bags that loose candy was sold in by the ounce from jars at the sweet shop. We drank warm Coca-Cola and dined on crusty cheddar cheese rolls with slices of raw onion that were made in the kitchen upstairs—and cleared your sinuses like film cleaner. No pot was allowed nor alcohol. Mo could sniff both out a mile away and she strictly enforced the rules.
The sound was swamping. It was loud and all around us and seemed to vibrate with Lennon’s glowing purple walls, making them pulse in a psychedelic way. Some groups still played skiffle, but the Silver Beetles rocked with all their favorite standards from the States, big hits like Buddy Holly’s “Rave On” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and “Come on Everybody,” and Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” and “One Night.” No one did songs like the Silver Beetles. They were fab and—to coin a phrase—they started to attract a following.
We were all out by 10:30 though, in time to catch the last number 81 buses home toward Bootle or Speke. If we missed the bus it was a seven- or eight-mile walk. For some reason, those who had motorbikes didn’t ride them to gigs, simply because you couldn’t dress stylishly or hang out afterward and girls didn’t want to go on them in case they were thought of as Judies. Another important consideration was that you might arrive smelling of oil and with your hair blown to pieces, when your quiff took ages to do. We’d slather on Brylcreem or Trugel, then comb it through and spend hours shaping it just so in a DA at the back, teasing the highest peak possible at the front before it flopped over and looked silly. Our hero was Kookie in 77 Sunset Strip—“Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb.”
So there would be this natural curfew of 10:30, starting with a scramble to help the band pack up their gear, and we would all make a rush for the bus stops on opposite sides of the road, depending on which direction you were going. We would laugh and talk, still high on adrenaline and unrequited passion. It was fabulous.
But even though I was constantly around him, I felt I hardly knew Pete Best, although I used to go to a lot of gigs that his mother organized. He got a reputation as being mysterious, but he was probably just surly and introspective, or perhaps he was permanently depressed. Some people give out energy, others suck it in like a black hole. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but Pete was the latter. He had a steady girlfriend from when he was young and never really mixed with anyone, never came out much. You could say I knew his mother better; everyone did. She had quite a little circuit of venues, all local clubs and halls, such as the Casbah Club, Knotty Ash Village Hall and Hambleton Hall. All of them were run by Pete’s delightful mum.
I never wonder if I could have had a bash at all that fame and glory. I’d never bothered to pick up a guitar because I had lost part of one finger in a freak accident with my own mailbox (although if someone had told me that losing a couple of fingers hadn’t affected Django Rheinhardt I’d have probably given it a whirl). I was still nuts about music and was now old enough to be allowed out at night. The music scene in Liverpool was incredible at the time. It was unique, though it was probably much the same across the country, but to a lesser extent, in the days when there was no television as such. In fact, once upon a time, TV started at six P.M. and ended at nine because sets had to be switched off to let them cool down. Falling asleep in front of the TV could be as dangerous as smoking in bed. It was even joked that it was probably the reason why they played “God Save the Queen” after the last program—so you’d have to stand up.
Entertainment outside the home was important. However, I still think Liverpool had more buzz, more energy—more happening—than other towns. Perhaps it was because there were lots of Americans, because it was a seaport, and there was a postwar explosion of baby boomers. Live bands and groups played in clubs, ballrooms, village halls and working men’s clubs. Every single Burton shop (stores that sold mass-market men’s clothing) had a ballroom upstairs on the first floor. The back rooms of most pubs were v
enues for live music and there were hundreds of cabaret clubs which put on jazz, swing and comedy acts.
It is said that there were some three hundred bands and groups in Liverpool alone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there had been more. You couldn’t walk down a street in any part of town without hearing music coming out from somewhere or the ground vibrating from frantic drumming and even more frantic dancing. Illegally using my school bus pass, I started to go to all the little ballrooms to watch the local groups. Among dozens, I often went to listen to the Alligators, the Delcardos, the Dominators, Ricky and the Red Streaks (not a great band, though Paul later borrowed their name as a joke pseudonym for Wings when he was doing his Back-to-Basics tour). There were Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the (Swinging) Blue Jeans, and Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four. The Remo Four were the best group to see because they could do all the Shadows’ music, as well as Johnny doing all the country songs, which I thought was a really good combination. (The Shadows were like the Ventures, an American instrumental group.) The Remo Four’s lead guitarist, Colin Manley, was the only one in Liverpool with a proper £150 worth of red Fender Stratocaster. There were no girls at all in the groups. There were only Cilla and Beryl Marsden, who used to just get up and sing. Sometimes they were invited to do guest spots. Not until Beryl went to London and joined Shotgun Express with Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry did she get taken seriously, while Cilla’s eventual path to fame as Cilla Black was being discovered by Brian Epstein.
I got to know quite a few of the guys in the bands and, being a broke kid, wasn’t always able to come up with the half a crown or three shillings entry fee. I would meet up with them after school or wherever and ask if I could carry their guitars in or help with their amps.
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