by Bob Spitz
She detected other changes in Paul that proved equally disagreeable. He had an almost stuffy, explosive air of self-importance, with his simple superiority, cool poise, and weatherproof rightness. He scorned any sign of self-confidence in her. And Dot, pricked by love, submitted. As a rule, she did not impose her will on him, certainly never when they were among friends. She would sit quietly and smile tensely for entire evenings at the Jacaranda while Paul and John discussed music. If Paul glared, she would freeze like a rabbit. “We weren’t allowed to open our mouths,” Dot says of her and Cynthia’s attendance at these nightly discussions. “They’d talk all night, and we just listened.”
One day, just before the end of the year, John announced that Stuart Sutcliffe was moving into a spacious student flat near school, where they’d have plenty of room to rehearse. Without delay, everyone decided to meet over there and check it out.
Stuart’s flat was on the first floor of a Georgian-style town house called Hillary Mansions, located directly catercorner to the art college at 3 Gambier Terrace. When the guys walked in, they found a strikingly familiar student layout: a warren of sparsely furnished rooms, two “bohemian” girls—Diz Morris and Margaret Duxburry, who had moved in to help shoulder the “ridiculously expensive” £3-a-week rent—a revolving-door cast of visitors, and enough disarray to reinforce its reputation as a crash pad. But whereas Stuart’s previous flat had been a cramped one-room affair, this place was rambling: a huge high-ceilinged living room warmed by a fireplace faced the front, along with a smaller bedroom, which the two girls quickly claimed. At the end of a long corridor was the kitchen, a bathroom, and an enormous back room with two walk-in closets. “Stuart had the big back room,” said Rod Murray, “and we put all the easels in there.” A gallery of paintings went up on the walls.
John, Paul, and George started playing in the back room almost from the day Stuart moved in. They met there each evening, after Blackler’s closed, and lit into two dozen or more songs culled from an expanding repertoire of current hits. No one remembers them working on originals, although it is likely that a few were sprinkled in the mix. Nevertheless, they touched off a festive atmosphere each night, as friends poured into the flat to listen and dance. To many, it was “like a never-ending party,” but almost immediately “we got complaints from above and below,” Rod Murray recalled.
By then, John had more or less moved into Gambier Terrace, sharing the back room with Stuart, who was happy for the company. Although John had shown little interest in literature while at Quarry Bank, he tore greedily through Stuart’s books, including Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, one of the titles with cachet that Stuart had thrust at him rather daringly one night, with the challenge to “expand his Scouser mind.”
John was doing more than expanding his mind. By the end of 1959, it was evident to him that if the band were to be elevated in any meaningful way, they’d need to make adjustments. Without a bass and drums, it just wasn’t rock ’n roll. They needed to revamp—or forget the whole thing.
Sometime right after Christmas, he and Stuart were meandering through the frost-rimed cemetery in the Anglican cathedral, directly across the street from Gambier Terrace. It was a favorite haunt of theirs; the boys spent hours, sometimes entire afternoons, walking around the windy, saucer-shaped slopes that hemmed the church near the front courtyard. They could see the glinting dome of the Royal Insurance Company Building in the distance, and beyond it the brooding Mersey, with a queue of boats trawling the Narrows channel.
Ordinarily, John loved to peruse the sooty headstones half-buried in the spongy ground. No matter how many he examined, there were untold more to keep him entertained. But this day, he seemed distracted. While Stuart crouched by an overgrown plot, John stared off into the landscape. Finally, haltingly, he said, “Now [that] you’ve got all this money, Stu, you can buy a [bass] and join our group.”
It was a calculated risk in more ways than one. He certainly didn’t want Stuart to feel taken advantage of. And there was a greater harmony to consider. Would he fit in with Paul and George? The fellows all got along well—as friends. That simplified their social lives, but bands had a personality all their own and required communication of an entirely different kind. Painting was one thing, but rhythm? Could Stuart pick up the beat or carry a tune? For that matter, would he be able to learn how to play the instrument? These were all questions that John had no answers to.
But Stuart took only a long moment to mull it over before responding to John’s offer. “Stuart thought it was a wonderful idea,” his sister Pauline remembered. “If anything, it was the image, not the music, that was attractive to him. He liked the whole [concept] of pop and Buddy Holly and Elvis—how they looked.” Years before aesthetics became the cornerstone of rock ’n roll, Stuart knew that image was everything. As for the bass, Stuart decided it’d be relatively easy to learn. His mother had insisted on piano lessons, which he’d taken scrupulously since the age of nine. There was the bugle that he’d played in the Air Training Corps. And his father had “taught him a few chords on [the] guitar.” The hardest part about the bass, he figured, was getting hold of one.
As it turned out, that was the least of his problems. He found a sunburst Hofner President at Hessy’s Music Store that filled the bill nicely. Stories about how he turned over the entire Moores commission in exchange for the bass are legion. According to one version, his father found the guitar while snooping around Stuart’s room and pitched a fit about its price. In fact, using a bit of creative financing, a monthly purchase plan was worked out with Frank Hesselberg so that only a modest £5 deposit snared him the bass.
Stuart may well have been the natural choice, but his decision to play music perplexed his fellow artists. Bill Harry, for one, remembers the irritation he felt when Stuart flashed the new bass as though exhibiting a finished oil painting. “I said to him, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’ ” Harry recalls. “ ‘You’re passionate about art, not music!’ ” Stuart shook off such concern with bemused disregard. To Harry’s objection, he responded soothingly: “No, it’s all right. I think it’s art.” He had decided to dedicate himself to the band with “as much seriousness and intensity” as he approached painting. “And anyway,” Stuart told him, “they’re going to be the greatest. I want to be a part of it.”
Chapter 11 Hit the Road: Jac
[I]
After Stuart joined the group, a proper name seemed more appropriate. One night in February, while sitting around the Gambier Street flat, John and Stuart brainstormed to come up with something that worked better than Johnny and the Moondogs. John later told Hunter Davies that he was “just thinking about what a good name the Crickets [Buddy Holly’s band] would be for an English group, [when] the idea of beetles came into my head.” It may have been no more complicated than that, or as other accounts contend, Stuart might have suggested beetles from the slang term given to biker chicks in The Wild One. In either event, it was John’s idea to change the spelling “to make it look like beat music, just as a joke,” although when they printed it on a card to show the other boys, it became Beatals.
Paul remembers being told of the name the next day, along with George, and immediately liking it. “John and Stuart came out of their flat and said, ‘We’ve just thought of a name!’ ” he recalls, smiling. The Beatals. It had the right sound, its reference a dazzling throwback. The name was bluff and cheeky, sturdy; it possessed an easy, buoyant, ornamental quality. The Beatals. Yes, he thought, it would do, it would do nicely.
But names do not gigs get. Even with a conversation piece like “the Beatals,” the band was still not able to compete for legitimate work. There was still the hitch with the drums, or lack thereof. And while Stuart looked swell with an electric bass slung across his body, there was the matter of actually playing it that needed to be worked out. Instead of the bass notes accenting the beat, as is the purpose, Stuart’s leaden thumb thunked the chunky strings, producing little more than a s
teady but tedious heartbeat. There was no flourish or glide to his phrasing, just that monotonous pulse: thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. Even so, John never grew discouraged. In a reversal of their painting roles, John began to fine-tune Stuart’s technique, working diligently with him each evening to teach him the set of songs. The sole objective now was to get him ready to face an audience; without that, there was no point in holding everything together.
The only gig to speak of was at the end of February 1960, a short spot offered by Jim McCartney’s Labour Club, which only Paul and George attended. This was a world apart from their Quarry Men gigs and certainly any they would ever play as the Beatles. But as a favor to Paul’s dad, the boys pulled up stools and played “Peg o’ My Heart” to the delight of two dozen, middle-aged Scousers.
It wasn’t until March that the Beatals got a shove in the right direction. Early that month news rocketed through the city that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent would headline a show at the Liverpool Empire. The concert was a milestone for local bands, which thronged to the theater like mayflies. Here, live and in person, was confirmation of their calling—and everyone heard an identical call.
The Beatals began by rewiring the sound of the band. “They knew that to get any attention, they needed amplifiers,” Bill Harry recalls. “This really hit home after the Eddie Cochran show.” Up to then, they’d relied on whatever P.A. system, if any, was provided by a hall; otherwise, their increased output was a result of just strumming or singing louder. That method, however, no longer carried any weight with an audience. They wanted it loud; they wanted some juice behind the music.
But how? Amplifiers cost money. The boys were just about getting by on fumes, and everyone was already into “Hessy” for one hire-purchase loan or another. There was no way he’d float them enough for an amplifier. Frustrated and resentful of their situation, John hatched a plan. Weren’t they considered the art college band? The Student Union had a discretionary fund to purchase equipment. Certainly, an amplifier was within its jurisdiction.
Both Bill Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe were members of the Student Union committee. “At the next meeting, in the library,” Harry recalls, “Stuart and I proposed and seconded a motion that we use our funds to buy P.A. equipment for the art college dances.” It sounded like a good idea to the other students. No one raised any opposition. Voilà! The Beatals had amps, and not just a tiny Truvoices, the staple of most Liverpool bands, but a professional getup, with cabinets and eighteen-inch speakers.
To show their appreciation, the band played an art college dance that same month, in the school’s basement auditorium. The place was packed to capacity. Fresh from a series of midterms, students welcomed the opportunity to unwind, but there was also an air of anticipation—and great spectacle—about the musical debut of Stuart Sutcliffe. Everyone showed up, including Arthur Ballard, who told colleagues he was “troubled” by his prize student’s “distraction.”
Ballard had good reason to be concerned. Stuart hadn’t touched a paintbrush in weeks. A usually disciplined worker, now days—even weeks—elapsed between sessions at the easel; visits to life classes, once as routine as breathing, had become increasingly erratic. It seemed to Ballard and others that Stuart had turned his back on that world. And his hands—those delicate instruments through which his expression flowed to the canvas—were in terrible shape. Bill Harry remembers encountering Stuart at the college dance, bent over his guitar in such a way as to conceal wrenching pain. “He told me, ‘Oh, the skin has come off all my fingers,’ ” Harry recalls, having noticed blood on Stuart’s hands. “He hadn’t built up proper calluses. He’d plunged right in, never realizing that conditioning was necessary.” Or if he had realized it, it was with the knowledge that the other boys did not want to slow their stride to wait for him.
The four boys would rehearse for hours at Gambier Terrace, really winding it up, then camp out at the Jacaranda, talking until closing time, well past one in the morning. They’d commandeer a table that would grow like dominoes as each new friend appeared, requiring additional chairs and tables. “Art students were inclined to drop in… and loll around a bit,” says Beryl Williams, whose role fell somewhat precariously between that of den mother and disenchanted bar manager. She loved having students and musicians there, provided that they buy something to eat, which meant putting the squeeze on them every so often. Bill Harry recalls that when flush, they’d order the “student specialty—toast,” which cost fourpence and a penny extra for jam. According to Allan Williams: “They’d go into a great big huddle… and decide if they could afford to have jam or whether it would be best to stick to toast and butter.” Always a premium, jam toast was usually split five ways.
The “sort of musical revolution” Williams discovered unfolding in small local basement clubs was intriguing, inasmuch as it complemented his stake in the Jacaranda. However, it wasn’t until he attended the Gene Vincent–Eddie Cochran show at the Empire that he experienced an epiphany. Sitting ringside, walled in by rows of clearly overwrought teenagers, Williams was flabbergasted. “I began to realise the implications,” he recalled, taking the temperature and doing the math. Everyone was rockin’ and rolling, “and I simply had to get in on it.”
Williams wasted no time attaching himself to the scene. He booked Liverpool Stadium for a night in May, then traveled to London, where he sought out a meeting with no less a figure than megapromoter Larry Parnes.
Before Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood, before the dozens of future British pop moguls who dominated the music business, Larry Parnes ruled the scene. LARRY PARNES PRESENTS toplined every bill featuring a rock ’n roll act in London. Only twenty-four years old, Parnes—or “Flash Larry,” as he was known—was a modern-day Svengali. Cruising the bedrock of London coffee bars, he signed up a stable of good-looking male singers—pretty faces, actually—that he could groom into teen idols, regardless of talent, as he’d done so successfully with Tommy Steele. “In most cases, what attracted Larry was their potential to whip audiences into a frenzy,” says Hal Carter, who served as Parnes’s right-hand man. “But he was gay and loved pretty boys, which became his stock-in-trade.”
By 1960, Parnes had a cluster of glittery stars, each with an outlandish stage name he’d created in the hope of adding that undefinable pizzazz: Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, Nelson Keene, and Johnny Gentle. Recalls Carter: “Larry was on tour in New York and had heard the [Elvis] Presley tune, ‘Fame and Fortune.’ He immediately sent a telegram back to the office that said: CLIVE POWELL NOW GEORGIE FAME.”
His most accomplished creation, however, was turning Ronnie Wycherly, an ex–tugboat hand with a sludgy Scouse accent, into pop sensation Billy Fury. Parnes had discovered the lad backstage at a Marty Wilde show in Birkenhead and “immediately fell in love.” Billy had little in the way of a voice and, if it were at all possible, even less stage presence, but his “high cheekbones and restless eyes” were all Parnes needed to throw the star-making machinery into gear. He swathed the youngster in gold lamé, framed his hair in a mane of wild forelocks, brought him a riot of American hits to cover, and packaged him on the high-powered Cochran-Vincent tour that was crisscrossing the U.K. In no time, Billy Fury was being mentioned in the same heated breath as Cliff Richard.
Insecure and basically uneducated, plagued by a round, pudgy face, Parnes was “a very elegant dresser,” coming, as he did, from what friends described as “a good Jewish family in the shmatte business.” He had bronzed, olive skin and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Williams found his manner to have “much of the smooth persuasiveness of a lawyer” and was delighted that Parnes was amenable to his pitch. For a “fee of about £500,” Williams booked a show he dubbed “the Merseyside and International Beat Show.” It was a rather grandiose name for a rehash of the Cochran-Vincent tour, although Parnes attached another half a dozen artists from his stable, along with local attractions Cass and the Cassanovas and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to give it a homegro
wn touch. The show was scheduled for May 3, and by early April all indications were that it would sell out. Ticket sales were strong—there were six thousand seats available—and it appeared profits would exceed all projections.
Perhaps with luck running in such an unlikely surge, disaster was inevitable. On April 17, a television show Williams was half listening to was interrupted to report “the tragic death of Eddie Cochran.” Cochran and Gene Vincent had been on their way to Heathrow Airport following a concert in Bristol when their speeding car blew a tire and crashed into a lamppost. Cochran died from massive head injuries; Vincent suffered a broken collarbone and was hospitalized, along with Cochran’s girlfriend, Sharon Sheeley, who had been a passenger in the car. Williams couldn’t believe it. “Robbed of [his] two top stars,” there would be no way to recover. He flushed with guilt for even thinking that way, but he couldn’t help himself.
Despondent, Williams called Larry Parnes, who commiserated. Neither man had to say what each was privately thinking: this tragedy was going to cost them a bundle. Indirectly, Parnes suggested that if Vincent were healthy, they might still be able to pull something off, but he couldn’t make any promises. Days went by without word while Williams made arrangements to dissolve his obligations with stadium vendors. Rumors persisted that Vincent’s condition was worse than reported and that he would return to the United States as soon as he was able to travel. Then Parnes called with an update: Vincent was okay and had agreed to do the show. To fill the gaping hole left by Eddie Cochran, they added two more of Parnes’s acts to the bill—Julian X and Dean Webb—as well as local groups Derry and the Seniors, Bob Evans and the Five Shillings, Mal Perry, and Gerry and the Pacemakers. As Bill Harry recalls: “Everyone who was anyone was invited to perform.”