by Bob Spitz
“Immediately, he started a metamorphosis on her,” says Helen Anderson, who watched the makeover with fascination. All of John’s canvases, she says, were depictions of smoky nightclub scenes, with a ripe-figured Brigitte Bardot character planted prominently on a barstool. “She was his dream girl,” and that was how he molded Cynthia. She started getting blonder, her hair grew longer, and finally she put it up, like Brigitte Bardot. All of a sudden Cynthia became very glamorous—and sexy! Cynthia wasn’t totally comfortable with her new guise. A friend recalls how she would duck into “the ladies’ loo before lunch, get tarted up, then wait for somebody—anybody she knew—to follow into the canteen.” She “didn’t have a clue” about how to carry off the new image. But John wanted it that way, and she complied without argument.
As 1959 unfolded, an exhilarating burst of rock ’n roll releases made it impossible for John to ignore the stubborn, intoxicating pull of pop music. Hits of the day—now golden classics—surfaced faster than stores could stock them:* “La Bamba,” “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “C’mon Everybody,” “Sea of Love,” “There Goes My Baby,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Sleep Walk,” “Rockin’ Robin,” “Dream Lover,” “Lonely Teardrops,” “Sea Cruise,” “Little Star,” “It’s Only Make Believe,” “Back in the U.S.A.” (the flip side was “Memphis”), and an extraordinary Ray Charles record that would emerge in the early 1960s as a trusty Beatles showstopper, “What’d I Say.” Week after week the racks were filled with new offerings by Ricky Nelson, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Del Shannon, the Coasters, Connie Francis, Dee Clark, Lloyd Price, and Bobby Darin, to say nothing of another half a dozen hits courtesy of the irrepressible Elvis Presley.
And by mid-1959, England had its first true homegrown star in the genre. Cliff Richard, with his malt-shop features, perfect haircut, and gleaming smile, was Britain’s answer to the likes of Elvis and Holly. He had been discovered performing at pubs around Hertfordshire and signed to EMI Records, which in August 1958 released an innocuous and stiff little single called “Schoolboy Crush.” During a promotional television appearance Richard ditched his single in favor of its much hotter B-side, “Move It,” which featured some furious guitar playing. A week later the record was a runaway smash.
With his band, the Shadows, Richard cast a Presley-like shadow on the landscape of British rock ’n roll. British teenagers embraced him as an identifiable voice, if not a cultural icon—proof that the empire could strike back musically when and if it wished. But in Liverpool, especially, there was a backlash against Richard’s squeaky-clean appeal. Scousers considered him too much of a lightweight, his music too mainstream, too derivative. And yet, dazzled by his success, most Liverpool bands imitated Richard’s every move. They put on matching suits, practiced the rhythmic little dance steps he popularized, and cooked up an act that used guitars in its choreography, much the way the Shadows did.
From the start, John, Paul, and George were determined to distinguish themselves among the army of Shadows imitators who thronged the dance halls. They were turned off by Cliff’s whole image, the way he pandered to audiences with an airbrushed suggestiveness, defusing the power of rock ’n roll. And their fiery reaction to Richard’s sugarcoated pop and the lemming-like behavior of their fellow Liverpool musicians energized John, Paul, and George, reviving their desire to perform.
Liverpool’s coffee-bar culture had grown up around the university and the art college as early as 1957, but it wasn’t until 1959 that these places shifted into full swing. For the longest time, students frequented Streates, the Kardomah, or the Marlborough, the latter of which had special rooms set aside where they could drink on the sly and sing bawdy songs. But it was a coffee bar next door to the Marlborough, called the Jacaranda, that attracted John, Paul, and George.
The Jacaranda was the largest room of its kind, a Dickensian soot-blackened storefront set near the corner of Slater and Bold Streets, so close to the schools that one of the university clubs proposed making it an annex. Inside, the café was all studied unpretentiousness: a cluster of mismatched wooden tables surrounded by metal-legged chairs, bare brick walls painted a glossy white, and a shelf warped from the weight of the copper kettles displayed on it.
“It was like all the places we’d hung out in,” recalls Beryl Williams, who with her husband, Allan, had opened the Jacaranda coffee bar in the former premises of a watch-repair shop in September 1958. Like many of Liverpool’s young, working artsy set, the Williamses had spent the fifties in thrall of jazz—and bohemian culture. Hitchhiking across the Continent, they’d “lived in the cafés of France and Holland,” until at the age of twenty-six, they opted to join the wave of offbeat hipsters determined to bring the counterculture to Liverpool.
Initially, the Jacaranda drew Liverpool university students, but eventually Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon gravitated there to discuss their work and dreams. The two would sit for hours in one of the corner booths near the window, talking earnestly about art and philosophy, while a mini–soap opera unfolded around them. It wasn’t long before John brought Paul and George with him to check out the music scene downstairs. The Jac’s tiny cellar had been converted from coal storage into a crude sort of cabaret, with barely enough space for a small group to perform in a corner. To create the right atmosphere, Allan Williams had booked a ragtag West Indian outfit—called, rather optimistically, the Royal Caribbean Steel Band—he’d first heard “in a Greek joint” near the art college. Almost immediately they attracted a devoted following. Jac regulars loved the metallic warble of “the big tubs” and the catchy calypsos that were de rigueur, but their awe was reserved for the band’s hugely dynamic leader, a spindly, gap-toothed Trinidadian named Harold Phillips, who knew how to work a crowd.
Over the next decade, Phillips became an almost legendary figure on the streets of Liverpool. Known to everyone as Lord Woodbine, or Woody, after the cheap cigarette always pasted to his lower lip, he was a man of immense charisma, with a rich, dulcet singing voice and a talent for wielding maracas like signal flags. He worked at the American air base in nearby Burtonwood but also ran a strip club and a number of illegal honky-tonks called shabeens, the most notable of which was the Berkeley, where John Lennon occasionally slept on a cot.
Allan Williams had passed the word that local groups were welcome to play at the Jacaranda on the steel band’s night off. Aside from extremely informal shindigs at the art college, John, Paul, and George had never performed as a trio, and it was unlikely they could stage a show on such little practice. Besides, even with Cynthia, John was still too troubled to give the band more time. There were days when he would stay in bed or sit forlornly at a table in one of the coffee bars, tortured by “feelings of remorse.”
The inertia caught up with John in June, as another college term drew to a close. Second-year students were required to take the intermediates, a series of exams that gauged individual progress, assessed skills, and determined whether they’d graduate to another two-year program, leading to a National Diploma in Design. Everyone was required to “submit for his certificate,” which meant you wrestled a folder of your work together, then sent it to a review board at the Ministry of Education for evaluation. Despite benefiting from several drawings Ann Mason offered to him, John still didn’t have enough to make a folder. According to Rod Murray, “everybody chipped bits of paintings and drawings in, and they made up a folder for him.”
Things only got worse when news came that he failed the lettering portion of his intermediates and would have to “resit” the course again. Naturally: the one subject he absolutely detested. It seemed like more punishment. John was clearly overwhelmed by a strong sense of failure, and his anger turned to despair. But just when it seemed that he couldn’t find any outlet for his anxieties, one found him.
Chapter 10 Moondogs and Englishmen
[I]
Over the years, John and Cynthia told many stories about George Harrison, the flap-eared little “whacker” with the slow
hand and fast mouth. To George, they seemed the perfect pair, a symbol of independence. During summer vacation, he would determine their whereabouts and lock in on them like anti-aircraft artillery. “Cyn and I would be going to a coffee shop or a movie,” John told an interviewer, “and George would follow us down the street two hundred yards behind.” At first, they pretended not to see him. Cynthia, who was circumspect and too sweet-tempered to execute a “push-off,” would mumble a tremulous appeal to John on the fifteen-year-old’s behalf. “[George] would hurriedly catch up to us,” she recalled, “and [ask], ‘Where are you two off to? Can I come?’ ” More often than not, the lovebirds had plans for a movie that included some steamy necking in the dark theater—now rudely preempted. “So we would spend the lost afternoon as a jolly threesome, wondering what on earth we were going to do with ourselves.”
What on earth, indeed. At the time, it never occurred to them that George would soon jump-start the band’s stalled career.
It is doubtful that George even told John he was playing with anyone else. Besides, the Les Stewart Quartet was nothing to brag about. As musicians, they “didn’t hold a candle to John and Paul.” The upside, however, was their access to a generous rehearsal space at the Lowlands, along with an aura that netted George his first steady girlfriend, Ruth Morrison.
Unlikely as it seems, it was Ruth Morrison who brought the keys to the kingdom. One evening during a rather dispiriting coffee break at the Lowlands, she disclosed that a new coffee bar was opening farther down and across the street, in Hayman’s Green, which promised to make a considerable splash. It was located in the basement of a cavernous private home that could hold more than three hundred kids, and from what Ruth had heard, there was going to be live music. Bands knew from experience that new coffee-bar owners usually gave residencies to the first group that walked in the door—self-promotion, not quality, being the foremost criterion. Without waiting for more details, the Les Stewart outfit dispatched their most presentable representative, a guitarist named Ken Brown, to make his best pitch.
The house at 8 Hayman’s Green was a mini-mansion, a handsome gray Victorian structure of fifteen rooms set back from the road in a grove of tall trees. Ken was more than familiar with “the Best place,” as it was known, inasmuch as the owners’ son Pete was in his class at Collegiate Grammar School. It had been Pete who first proposed the idea of a club in the family’s unfinished cellar and instantly won the approval of his mother, Mona, a gregarious Indian-born diva for whom drama of this type was an essential fuel. And the club would provide a suitable distraction to her faltering marriage to Johnny Best, a flamboyant Liverpool fight promoter sidelined with a heart condition.
“I went round to see her,” Brown recalled, “and we helped her get the coffee bar ready, installing lighting, covering the walls with hardboard to prevent condensation, painting the place orange and black. In return Mrs. Best promised that we could play [there] when it finally opened.”
In the weeks before the club opened, a steady buzz built unlike anything the West Derby Village neighborhood had ever experienced. Kids came to gape at all the work being done: lights were put in, walls were lined with timber paneling, a dark alcove was converted into a snack bar. Finally, membership cards were printed, revealing the club’s alluring name: the Casbah.
The club was set to open on a Saturday night: August 29, 1959. For the Les Stewart Quartet the date was a milestone in their brief, relatively obscure existence. More than three hundred teenagers had already purchased membership cards in anticipation of the event, and the attention would catapult them into the limelight. But on the verge of celebrity, Les Stewart misinterpreted Ken Brown’s hands-on role at the Casbah as a power play. The insult, as Stewart perceived it, ignited an argument between the two boys just a week or so before their debut, culminating in Stewart’s refusing to play. The band folded prematurely, while George joined Ken Brown to give Mona Best the bad news.
On their way over to the club, Brown asked George if there was any way they could salvage the residency. “He said he had two mates,” Brown recalled, “and went off on a bus to fetch them.”
From the instant it opened, the Casbah was a runaway success. The kids who turned up couldn’t believe their eyes. It was dazzling, hot, loud, smoky, young, private—rocking—pulsing with just the right atmosphere. Mo Best offered up “the perfect house,” and the Quarry Men—John, Paul, George, and Ken Brown—brought that house down. Even without a drummer—or a P.A. system—they knocked out the rapturous crowd. Kids, standing “shoulder to shoulder,” swarmed around the band, which was pressed back into a corner that had once functioned as the coal bin. It seemed inconceivable they’d ever disbanded; there wasn’t so much as a wrinkle in their performance.
“Among the songs we performed [that] night,” Ken Brown recalled, “were ‘Long Tall Sally’… and ‘Three Cool Cats,’ which John sang rolling his eyes.” The rest glided by in a fantastic blur, but it was infinitely gratifying. To be performing again, in front of such a great crowd, was so satisfying—and such a relief. Even Mo Best got more than she expected, transferring to the boys the agreed-upon Les Stewart residency that guaranteed them a princely £3 every Saturday night.
More than the music and refreshments, it was the idea of the Casbah that vitalized its members. There was an exclusivity about it, not in the class-restrictive rivalries that isolated—and divided—the British empire but in a celebration of togetherness. Here, belonging was really a function of age, not class or breeding or religion or wealth. Kids came to dance, to talk, and to get away from the enervating grind that had been bequeathed to them by their mostly distant parents. “None of us dreamed that we’d ever have much of anything in our lives,” says Colin Manley, whose band, the Remo Four, later played at the club. “We may have still been in school at that point, but we were already in the System, our lives were pretty well preordained, which for most Liverpool kids meant no diploma, a dead-end job, a loveless marriage, too many kids, never enough money, and lots of beer to drown the burden. So a place like the Casbah was something else entirely. It was outside the System—and it was ours.”
As the Quarry Men enjoyed their run, the Casbah membership spiraled into the thousands. The club became so crowded that after a while you could “just about hear the band.” To cure that, John talked a short, slight guitar player named Harry into “opening for them,” which was nothing more than a ruse, really, amounting to a brief two-song spot in exchange for the use of Harry’s amplifier. “It was a good idea that nearly backfired,” recalls George’s friend Arthur Kelly. “The kid was a disaster. His party piece was a cringe-worthy version of ‘Apple Blossom Time’ that nearly always caused a lynching.” Fortunately, before there was any time for violence, the band plugged in and shook things up with “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Johnny B. Goode” crackling through the cellar on forty watts of juice.
When the boys weren’t performing, they wandered through the crowd, chatting with friends and flirting. “Girls were the main reason you joined a band,” Paul says, citing a condition known to every schoolboy who ever picked up a guitar, and from the start there was never a shortage of them around. Of the many attractive girls who hung around the Casbah, one in particular caught John’s eye. She was an elfin blonde with a tense, wounded look, whom he nicknamed Bubbles, for lack of a proper introduction and because it so unsuited her. In fact, all the guys had noticed her watching them. While not a beautiful girl, she was catlike and intense, in a mysterious kind of way. She also was eager to meet them. “It must have been all over my face that I fancied John,” recalls Bubbles, whose real name is Dot Rhone, “but once it became clear he had a girlfriend, I lost interest.” Instead, she approached Paul with game determination, pretending to be faint in order to get him outside, where they could be by themselves.
Once alone, an “immediate attraction” developed between them. Paul discovered in Dot a person who hardly fit the profile of the other girls at the Casbah. She had grown
up in a better section of Liverpool called Childwall, around the corner from Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ future manager. But “it might have been two different worlds,” Dot says, her humble situation being anything unlike Epstein’s glaringly “posh” circumstances. “I didn’t have a normal childhood. My dad was an alcoholic; he never hung on to any money. And the only reason we lived in that neighborhood was because a sickly aunt left the house to my mother.” A year younger than Paul, Dot had gone to Liverpool Institute High School, “the girls’ school across the road from the Inny,” but had left in June, taking a clerk’s job at the Dale Street branch of District Bank in order to support her family. Paul, she believes, was attracted by how needy and impressionable she was, which put her under his sway; she found him “adorably handsome, opinionated,” and loaded with confidence. “He came from the first family I’d ever known that cared about each other so much,” Dot says. “Everyone would gather round the piano, while Jim played songs like ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,’ and sometimes [he] would sing with Paul and Mike.” At a deeper level, they undoubtedly recognized the loneliness in each other’s lives, each absent a parent—in her case because of addiction.
Within days Paul and Dot were an item. A nearly exclusive togetherness during the week quickly became the norm, but Saturdays were reserved for the Casbah, where Dot now joined Cynthia in her new role as inconspicuous cheerleader. “It was amazing how popular the band had become—and how fast,” Dot says, recalling those nights from a vaunted perspective. “Watching them, you could see how effortlessly they engaged the crowd. It was a full-blown mutual admiration society.” Perhaps nobody appreciated it as much as Mona Best, who couldn’t print Casbah membership cards fast enough to satisfy the demand. She was thrilled by “the fantastic scenes outside the house”—interminable queues that snaked across her front lawn, along the drive, and down Hayman’s Green—to say nothing of the club fees and five-pence admission that accrued beyond her wildest expectations. On word of mouth alone, she could pack in four hundred kids before conditions reached a critical stage, when tempers flared and the crowd became uncontrollable, and with the nonstop turnover, as many as 1,300 kids passed through the club on any given Saturday night. Despite the constant crush, parents drifted unobtrusively downstairs to check out the goings-on; policemen on the beat stopped by for a Coke. And everyone had a good word for the house band, whose residency seemed destined to stretch on indefinitely.