The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  [IV]

  It began with a baby step.

  Sometime after daybreak on May 20, John, Paul, George, Stuart, and Tommy assembled on a platform outside Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, where the glossy black Midland “locos” sat huffing, steam rising in plumes against the sharp morning chill. The platform was a confusion of commuters, businessmen, sightseers, porters, conductors, and freight handlers in whose midst the boys stood, slightly bewildered by their role. Their gear was sprawled around them in a circle of fluent disarray. In consensus, the band had decided to travel light; few personal items infiltrated the tangle of incidental clothes jammed into old satchels. John and Stuart had brought along sketch pads, Paul a couple of books.

  Before they boarded the train, the subject of names arose. Names: there was never any question that the band would be known as anything but the Silver Beetles; however, that did not limit them, as musicians, from adopting temporary personal stage names. Most likely the idea originated with Stuart Sutcliffe, who had a penchant for affectation and image. He decided to call himself Stuart de Stael, after his painting idol, the Russian abstract classicist. John had already rejected using a pseudonym, as did Tommy, but Paul and George were game. The two mates from Speke, stepping out, called themselves Paul Ramon and Carl Harrison (after Carl Perkins), respectively.

  The train was insufferably hot and depressing, the stale air not only bone-dry but hard to breathe. There were none of the modern conveniences that cushioned rail travel between cities such as Liverpool and London. The boys surrendered to an inherent restlessness as the last ripples of civilization flattened into grim, barren tundra. Hundreds of lonely miles rolled by between Carlisle, Queensberry, Broughton, and Lanark. Only John was used to the long, desolate route that stretched for hours into the countryside, having made a similar trip each summer to visit his cousin Stanley in Edinburgh.

  They landed in Glasgow a rude ten hours after leaving home, then transferred to a rugged little local line and transferred again in Central Fife as the train snaked slowly up the east coast of Scotland, past the villages and one-street towns that skirted the veiny river Clyde. Alloa was provincial, the sticks, a stagnant little industrial town at the crook of the Firth of Forth, the inlet from the North Sea that fed into Edinburgh. The tired, sallow streets, lined with thin, half-timbered houses, had been starved by the more colorful urban centers farther west that beckoned to young families. More than half of the fourteen thousand Alloans served the fringe of hosiery mills that huddled along the riverbanks; the rest, like good Scots everywhere, distilled whiskey or fished.

  Parnes broke in all his acts on the Scottish dance-hall circuit, where there were more than six thousand such small venues for bands to play. It provided steady work and an opportunity to develop an act away from London’s unforgiving stare. You could go on the road for months, playing one-nighters in outposts like Newcastleton, Musselburgh, Sunderland, Melrose, Stirling, and Dundee, hopscotching across the whole of northeastern Scotland, and never have to repeat a stop. For Johnny Gentle, by no means yet a star, Parnes had scheduled a seven-city tour of “border dances,” social gatherings in little halls that held 200 to 300 kids who could shuttle between upstairs rooms featuring a rock ’n roll show and a downstairs auditorium where traditional bands played the Scottish reel.

  Arriving in Alloa late that afternoon, weary from the trip, there was no time for the band to get acclimated to the alien surroundings. They went right to work, transferring directly to the local town hall, where they were scheduled to go on within an hour.

  Gentle (born John Askew) was waiting for them in a canteen behind the stage. With his velvety black hair, eyes and cheekbones sculpted in flawless proportion, a sleepy, inviting smile, and, of course, personality on the order of Cliff Richard, he was the very model of a Larry Parnes artist.

  A Liverpool dropout, he had apprenticed as a ship’s carpenter on the Rindel Pacifico, a plush passenger steamer on the Britain–South America run, and took to entertaining folks on deck in his spare time. Parnes discovered Johnny during a layover in London in 1958 and signed him to a modest record deal with the Philips label. He made two records in quick succession—“Wendy” and “Milk from the Coconut”—and though neither struck gold, they’d mined a respectable enough audience to hold Parnes’s interest.

  Johnny and the Silver Beetles had half an hour to hammer out an agreeable set of songs and work out arrangements. They needed enough material for two one-hour shows, and even though the Silver Beetles had practiced Johnny’s repertoire in advance, there were copious all-important details about the performance yet to solve. Johnny relied on a sleepy mix of rock ’n roll and country standards that included Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go,” “(I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do,” popularized by Clarence “Frogman” Henry, and the current Presley release, “I Need Your Love Tonight.” A die-hard Ricky Nelson fan, he proposed they do “Be-Bop Baby” and “I Got a Feeling” but couldn’t get a decent enough take of “Poor Little Fool” in time for the performance, substituting Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” which had, at one time, been a trusty Quarry Men number. As the band worked furiously to get up to speed, a squad of stiff-backed women made haggis pies to serve during the interval.

  The first set went remarkably well for an act that had just met. “The crowd was lovely,” remembers Askew. “They knew who I was. And the Beatles [sic] sounded as good as any group that was thrown at me by Parnes.” That said, it came as something of a surprise when, a day later, he got a phone call from a rather disgruntled Larry Parnes. “I’m thinking of sending the Beatles [sic] back to Liverpool and getting you another group up there,” Askew recalls being told. “[The promoter] is not happy with them and doesn’t think they’re an outfit, he feels they’re not together.”

  “They weren’t the normal bunch of kids he was used to having up there,” says Hal Carter. “They were flippant, cheeky northern kids who could be quite rude at times, which didn’t go down [well].”

  Askew practically begged Parnes to buy them more time. “They are good lads, the enthusiasm’s there,” he argued in their defense. “Leave it be and we’ll get it right.”

  He was right. Soon the tour found real artistic balance. The Silver Beetles, dressed in matching black shirts, paired effortlessly with Johnny Gentle, his slick, earnest crooning and their raw, high-charged accompaniment an ideal match. The opening numbers, giving Johnny his brief star turn, were stronger than anything he’d done in the past—energetically or artistically. But once he finished and Paul rushed the mike, winding out the nearly incomprehensible opening of “Long Tall Sally,” the pretense fell away: Johnny had entertained, but now it was time to rock ’n roll.

  Inside those dinky, dilapidated halls, the Silver Beetles “pulled out all the stops.” They pummeled those Scottish kids with forty minutes of kick-ass music that never let up for a beat. One after the next, the songs built to a furious, undisciplined pitch, rumbling, wailing, like a train through a tunnel. The kids at each show were undone by the music, practically throwing themselves around the floor. “Those two boys operated on a different frequency,” Askew says of Paul and John. “I used to watch them work the crowd as though they’d been doing it all their lives—and without any effort other than their amazing talent. I’d never seen anything like it. They were so tapped into what the other was doing and could sense their partner’s next move, they just read each other like a book.” It was uncanny, he thought, how well they knew each other. “It was always Lennon and McCartney, even then. Lennon and McCartney. They wouldn’t even look at George or Stu to determine where things were going. Everything was designed around the two of them—and the others had to catch up on their own.”

  Incredibly enough, the rest of the Silver Beetles never flinched. George maneuvered like a master in their long shadows to keep the rhythm more interesting than the mere slap-slap-slapping of chords. He worked intently, embroidering their strums with a plait of textured riffs and intonation
s that, while simple in structure, served to string the songs with bits of glorious color. “[And] Tommy Moore,” says Askew, “made just enough noise to distract attention from Stuart, [who] was inept—and not needed.” Almost in spite of themselves, the Silver Beetles rose mightily to steal the whole show. And the stronger they played, the more girls they attracted; the more girls they attracted, the stronger they played. Askew remembers watching a litter of sweet young “birds homing in on the stage” each night, lying in wait for the boys, as they finished their performance. “There were plenty to choose from after the gigs,” he says. “They’d take them back to the hotels for all-night parties and have so much fun that I’d find them stretched out, asleep, on the stairways around dawn.”

  With all the tomcatting, it’s a wonder they got out of some of those towns alive. The crowds that border dances attracted were notoriously tough. “All farm lads,” says Hal Carter, “who’d get pissed and have a punch-up at the drop of a hat”—or the drop of a hem. “Often, if the [local] boys suspected some kind of attraction going on, they’d start a fight onstage and stop the show. However, if they were feeling charitable, they’d just whip glass ashtrays at the band to send a message.”

  A battered skull wasn’t the only danger. In no time, the Silver Beetles learned one of the profession’s dirtiest little secrets: beyond the lights and the applause, beyond the hotels and the girls, no one ever makes money on the road. Four days into the tour, in godforsaken Fraserburgh, the last scrap of land on the gusty northeast coast, their pockets were empty. John Askew had to plead with Parnes to advance them some money, which eventually arrived by courier. “But the lads were so in debt by then,” he says, “they’d just spent it.” Because of the penny-wise sleeping arrangements—musicians were doubled up in most cases—eager couples had to wait their turn in the hall or steal off to a dark corner. Usually, no one got to sleep before dawn, when they would simply pass out on a bed or, as Askew already observed, in a deserted stairwell.

  The next day could be even rougher. One morning, after determining the roadie “was out of it,” Askew loaded the band into the van and took off through the maze of rutted Highland roads. John Lennon was slumped in the navigator’s seat, and not much use to Askew. “The lads were still shattered from a gig [that lasted until] one in the morning, and of course there was the bird scene afterwards that ran to five or six.” Piloting on intuition, Askew panicked at a crossroads just outside Banff and, realizing—a hair too late—that he should have gone left instead of right, caromed “straight across the junction and into a little old couple” in their modest Ford.

  The van took “such a smack” that John Lennon ended up crumpled under the dashboard. Tommy Moore, who was sitting behind him, flipped over the front seat and landed on top of John. Anguished by the apparent damage he caused, Askew bounded out of the car to assist the people he’d hit. “Don’t worry about us,” the woman said adamantly. “Take care of that boy over there.”

  Askew wheeled around and nearly fainted. Tommy’s face was a garish mask of blood. “[It] was everywhere,” Askew recalls, “mostly streaming from the drummer’s mouth.”

  A detour to the hospital provided more encouraging news: Tommy was okay. He’d lost a tooth, with several others knocked loose, but “there was no concussion.” At the worst, he was extremely shaken up. He’d never been in an accident before, and the strain of it had unnerved him. “I don’t think I can play tonight,” he told John Lennon, who returned to the hospital later that afternoon to collect his drummer. John did not reply for a long moment while a black rage crept across his face. “You listen to me, mate,” he eventually growled. “You’re bloody playing! Understand? What do you got—a bloody loose tooth?” He bent menacingly over Tommy, his lips twisted in a snarl, and Askew, worried that John was about to haul Tommy out of the bed by his hospital gown, edged closer in case it was necessary for him to intervene. “We need a drummer, and you’re it! Now, let’s go.”

  When it came to the band, you didn’t demur. There was no halfway about commitment. If there was a future to playing music together, it had to start somewhere. The only way to find out was to begin playing with some consistency. And Tommy, who was fifteen years older than John, melted obediently under his smoldering glare. Wordlessly, he peeled back the covers, slipped out of bed, and got dressed for the gig.

  [V]

  Courtesy of the well-oiled Scottish pipeline, Allan Williams knew that this unheralded local band had held their own—and then some—with a figure like Johnny Gentle. That struck him as fortunate inasmuch as he’d brokered their inaugural appearance, and hoping to cash in on his run of luck, he swooped in with another bid of timely offers that bound band and Williams in an informal but deliberate management situation.

  The most promising proposal came via Larry Parnes, who dangled the prospect of another Scottish tour, this time with one of his top dogs, Dickie Pride. It was a giant step up the same ladder that held the houndlike Johnny Gentle. But somewhere in the early stages of discussion, negotiations foundered. In rebounding from the setback, Williams stumbled into the honeypot. He managed to book the Silver Beetles for a string of dances that ran through the summer, across the Mersey, on the Wirral. The gigs, which would help establish them locally, were steady, well attended, and paid an awesome £10 per night. But they were in the worst hellholes this side of the equator—the Grosvenor Ballroom and the Neston Institute. Punch-ups were strictly kid stuff where these crowds were concerned; for dances here, you came fully armed. This was combat duty. As the Quarry Men, they had played in similarly dangerous situations, but on the Wirral they’d graduated to the big time. Come Saturday night, the Bootle teds and the Garston teds would go at it, with “flying crates and beer bottles and glasses.” All it took was one misinterpreted look and—bam!—while the band whipped through a version of “Hully Gully.” After one show, awakened by a disturbance in the middle of the night, Pauline Sutcliffe crept nervously into the bathroom, where she found her mother, Millie, laboring over Stuart’s scrawny body, stretched out awkwardly in the tub. “He was injured,” recalled Pauline, who stood speechless in the doorframe. “He said he’d been beaten up—‘Well, you know how rough these clubs [are]. There’s a lot of jealousy’—the implication being that it was some girl’s boyfriend. He’d been kicked… and badly beaten. He had bruising on his face.” Fortunately, there were no broken bones. It was reported that at another show a boy was almost kicked to death as the band continued to play.

  The violence, however, seemed the least of their immediate worries. In early June the momentum of the Silver Beetles’ progress was snapped by the defection of Tommy Moore, who left the band “in the lurch” following a raucous gig at the Neston Institute. It took them by complete surprise when he failed to show up for a ride they’d arranged to their next scheduled date. Four weeks of working with a capable drummer had lulled them into an unrealistic sense of security. Of course, no one imagined for a moment that Tommy was a Silver Beetle at heart. Indeed, by the end of the Johnny Gentle tour, he was barely on speaking terms with anyone. His ability, however, was undeniable. Desperate to keep the band intact, they tracked Tommy to the Garston bottling plant where he worked, in an effort to beg him to reconsider, but it was no use. The excuse he lamely offered was an unexpected transfer to the factory’s night shift, but the truth was he’d just had it.

  The boys were devastated. Unable to play the Wirral dances without a drummer, they agreed to provide background music at a couple of unlicensed cootch joints run by Allan Williams and Lord Woodbine. John, Paul, and George had not thought it possible to sink much lower. They’d done their share of oddball engagements in the pursuit of an appreciative audience: golf clubs, bus depots, cellars, and socials. But this was another world entirely. Where other gigs had been raucous and exhilarating, the shabeens were decadent and corrupt. There was an “anything goes” quality about them, where the very fringe of society collected like sludge in a rain puddle. They were generally sma
ll and filthy rooms, just big enough for ten or twenty men to congregate for the express purpose of drinking themselves blind. Many of the patrons were drunks, nothing more; they turned up there not out of congeniality but because the pubs were closed and there was no place else to satisfy their addiction. One of the tenements, the New Cabaret Artistes, was nothing but a cover for a grungy strip club in one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. Nothing in their experience had prepared them for the likes of this. Their mission was to back “an exotic dancer” while she wound up a small crowd of randy middle-aged men. Miserable, embarrassing, presumably pathetic, and depressing—an indication of how badly their dreams had stalled.

  The band tried to keep up appearances. John continued to call rehearsals at the Gambier Terrace flat and work on scraps of songs with Paul. They even retained a new drummer named Norman Chapman, whose bruising backbeat seemed tailor-made for their style of music. Only twenty, he was young enough to fit in socially, enthusiastic, and reliable, with a healthy passion for rock ’n roll. But following three promising gigs together at the volatile Grosvenor Ballroom, the band’s lousy luck intervened. Chapman, to his own great surprise, was suddenly called for national service and dispatched to Africa for two years.

  The sense of impotence—of being cut off from the action again—was devastating. From the weekend section of the Liverpool Echo, now about three pages strong, it was possible to see dozens of ads for local jive dances, and at each hall, the names, band after band—an elite corps of groups bundled together, who were cashing in on all the action. And always the same names—Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cass and the Cassanovas, Derry and the Seniors, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes—playing in every conceivable combination. Running one’s finger down each column, there was no mention of the Silver Beetles. Nothing. As far as anyone knew, they’d disbanded, they didn’t exist.