The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Williams was in no mood to throw in with the Beatles right now. As a means of shelving the subject, he introduced John and Pete to Wooler, who happened to be seated at a nearby table, licking his own wounds. Wooler had good reason to be dejected. In a span of a few days, he’d fallen from the lap of a promising future to sudden standing unemployment. Not only had Wooler resigned his “job for life” with British Transport Railways to run the now ashen club, he had tied his entire well-being to a rogue like Allan Williams, whom he suspected of hanky-panky. The earnest, high-principled Wooler had begun “drinking heavily” as a result.

  The role of a pop impresario was a new one for Bob Wooler. He had spent most of his adult life in thrall of Tin Pan Alley. He had even taken a stab at songwriting, assuming the nom de plume Dave Woolander, because he was “convinced that the great songwriters were all Jewish.” After several failed attempts at the craft, Wooler abandoned his dream—temporarily, at least—and turned to artist management, spending evenings promoting a skiffle band from Garston called the Kingstrums. One night at Wilson Hall in Garston, near the end of a set, Wooler overheard one of the jivers say, “The band’s not bad, but—who are they?” Wooler stepped to the mike and “hesitantly and tremblingly” announced the Kingstrums.

  Seemingly older than his twenty-eight years, Wooler looked nothing like the teds and surly scrappers who populated the dance halls. To these teenagers, he was more of a paternal figure, a slight man with a courtly, engaging demeanor, always meticulously groomed in a sport coat and tie. But the kids responded to him; in no time, they actually expected to hear Bob Wooler’s rich, melodic voice whenever a local band went onstage. Even after a long day at British Rail, Wooler spent virtually every night whirling from hall to hall: the Winter Gardens Ballroom in Garston, Holly Oak at Penny Lane, Peel Hall in the Dingle, the Jive Hive and Alexandra Hall in Crosby, Lathom Hall in Seaforth, the Orrell Park Ballroom in Aintree, Blair Hall in Walton, Hambleton Hall in Huyton, the Riverpark Ballroom in Hoylake, the Plaza in St. Helen’s, the Marine Club in Southport, Knotty Ash Village Hall, Litherland Town Hall, the Aintree Institute, Mossway, the David Lewis Theatre. “Long before the Cavern, these venues provided rock ’n roll havens for Liverpool’s teenagers,” recalls Wooler, who either bummed a ride with the bands or caught the bus and train. Usually he spent his entire night out, mixing with the kids and gabbing. When he wasn’t spinning records, he solicited bookings for the groups he liked, even calling from his stodgy office at the Garston Docks. “I had a Jekyll and Hyde existence,” he says, “spending days clerking behind a desk, then at night becoming the Alan Freed of Liverpool.”

  Wooler was also a legendary soft touch, and the Beatles seemed like such decent kids. He couldn’t help himself. Working the phone in the Jacaranda kitchen, he booked them into a gig at Litherland Town Hall.

  There was also the Casbah. Few people had a more unsung role in the Beatles’ young career than Pete’s enterprising mother, Mo. “She was always there to throw us a lifeline,” Pete has said over the years, and this time proved no different. Behind the dominating personality and owlish stare, beyond the keen sense for putting out fires with an appropriately leveled word, lurked a mom with a big, mushy heart. “She gave them the kind of work they couldn’t get at other venues,” says Bob Wooler. “Without her, it remains doubtful they would have held together so ably.”

  The Casbah was exactly what the Beatles needed: it was familiar, intimate, and friendly, a good springboard for diving back into the ’Pool. There was a big, boisterous local crowd, which provided the kind of delirious reaction they’d been hoping for. Of late, Mo had anticipated something special. The Seniors had played there only a week earlier and briefed her about the Beatles’ transformation in Hamburg, but it was nothing she could have envisioned. The band took everyone by complete surprise, including Pete’s dumbstruck mother, who watched them—wordlessly, for a change—from her post behind the refreshment counter. Their look, their sound, their poise—it was “a revelation to behold.”

  Word spread swiftly through Liverpool after the Beatles’ Casbah and Litherland Town Hall shows. All these months, bands had presented themselves as a likely alternative to Cliff Richard and the Shadows, each in neat little suits, with neat little songs. And now this band of black-leather creatures had popped up “and had the nerve to play hard rock ’n roll.” They made no concession to etiquette. “We’d been pussyfooting around… and the Beatles just came straight at you,” said a guitarist with Rikki and the Red Streaks. Look mean, play hard—it was a revolutionary concept and contradicted everything that had gone before it.

  Whatever confidence the Beatles had managed to generate onstage of late was quickly dissipated in uncertainty. Stuart still hadn’t returned from Hamburg. Meanwhile, offers for the band were pouring in.

  What had detained Stuart for so long? Everyone knew he was dazzled by Astrid Kirchherr. He had stolen every opportunity to be with her during the Kaiserkeller gig, courting her between sets and spending nights in Altona. Leaving her seemed out of the question. But everyone was surprised—flabbergasted—when Stuart wrote home that they were engaged.

  No one had seen it coming, least of all his parents, who “were utterly, utterly devastated” by the news. Their hopes were pinned on Stuart, the family’s golden boy, for whom they had sacrificed beyond practical wisdom. This news, as they read it, wrecked everything: his art, his education, his enormous promise. He had written before Christmas to ask for their blessing, but they had a difficult time imparting it. As did George: “He didn’t seem keen on the idea of me getting engaged,” Stuart divulged in a letter to his sister Pauline adding that he hoped everyone would “become used to the idea” in time.

  Of course, he was wrong. Upon his return in early February, Stuart’s mother was still suffering from the shock, anguished that “anybody would be taking her son away” from her. And the Beatles, in their own way, proved no more receptive. They needled Stuart mercilessly about the engagement, “picking on him” for being weak, distracted, foolish, pussy-whipped. At face value, it seems absurd that a band in the grasp of hard-earned recognition should react with such vitriol toward a mate’s personal happiness. There was nothing in the way Stuart presented it to them that was either glib or contentious. Yet they did care, refusing to let up even as he rejoined the Beatles fold.

  Even Stuart must have realized it wasn’t just about Astrid. For several months a rancorous dissension had been sowing over Stuart’s ersatz role in the Beatles. Now it seemed only underscored by their success. They’d felt it sorely since returning to Liverpool, with either Paul or the Blackjacks’ Chas Newby standing in for him. Wrote George: “Come home sooner…. It’s no good with Paul playing bass, we’ve decided, that is if he had some kind of bass and amp to play on!”* But that was so much blather. Friendship aside, everyone knew Stuart was holding them back. Yet no one had the heart or the wherewithal to suggest that he step aside. That responsibility was John’s burden, and he clearly wasn’t ready—or able—to shoulder it.

  Despite this growing dilemma, the Beatles clung to their ambition, working steadily, if not furiously, at the lavish number of dates available each week. They were playing somewhere almost every night, occasionally doubling up gigs and commuting between them at a dizzying, exhilarating pace. “For the first time people were following us around,” George noticed, “coming to see us personally, not just coming to dance.”

  [II]

  Toward the end of 1959, Alan Sytner sold the Cavern to the family accountant, a tidy thirty-two-year-old man named Ray McFall, who, like Sytner, loved jazz and had worked in the club gratis as a means of indulging his passion. Nothing really changed in the transition of ownership. Jazz still ruled supreme—McFall rather brazenly announced his intention to “put Liverpool on the map as the leading jazz center in the country outside London”—but in a gesture to diversity, he hired the Swinging Blue Jeans once a week to help lighten the frowsty atmosphere. The Blue Jeans were an anomaly: not
quite jazz but not quite skiffle, either. Falling somewhere in between, they played a kind of pop-inflected swing that appeased the Cavern purists while catering to disgruntled teenagers. Soon after the Blue Jeans came aboard, McFall arranged for them to take charge of a Tuesday night showcase, when the club was normally dark. Rory Storm, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and the Searchers made initial appearances there, and while the Blue Jeans continued “doing the jazzy-type stuff,” their guest artists played rock ’n roll. Normally, crusader McFall would have pulled the plug, but the accountant in him overruled his heart. Not only was the turnout a phenomenal success, but, as the Blue Jeans’ Ray Ennis reports: “Tuesday’s show became the most popular Cavern night of the week.”

  In fact, attendance for the jazz shows had fallen off to such a degree that “Ray eventually had to make the choice of switching totally over to rock ’n roll or to close the place down,” Ennis recalls. McFall bit the bullet. Henceforth, from May 1960 on, the Cavern presented an array of local beat acts, reserving Thursdays—ordinarily the slowest night of the week—for the last handful of its earnest jazz disciples.

  The Cavern was still a filthy, sweltering, fetid, claustrophobic little firetrap of a club. The walls and ceiling sweated absolute humidity; there was no exit aside from the main entrance, which was located three stories above the cellar and accessible only by an unlighted stone stairway. An ersatz ventilation pipe had been installed as a concession to the public health department, but as it extended only about thirty feet up a shaft between two taller buildings, it was functionally worthless. The plumbing was marginal, Victorian, a disaster. And with eight hundred to a thousand smoking, wasted teenagers sardined into a space fit for six hundred under ideal conditions, it was an accident waiting to happen. Adrian Barber puts it quite plainly when he says, “The Cavern was a shithole—but with soul. No place was more conducive to the spirit of rock ’n roll.”

  Barber had played there in the dying days of trad jazz, intruding on its turgidity with Cass and the Cassanovas. They were the first all-out pop band to invade its yellowed arches, not as a featured attraction with the dignity accorded a jazz outfit but as noontime bait to attract the local office staff on their lunch breaks from neighboring businesses. Ray McFall decided to revive the lunch session with rock ’n roll in the hope that it might generate a new audience.

  Even so, it remained a distasteful venture. “You could see Ray putting his rubber gloves on,” says Barber. “We were what he called toxic. And we were warned: ‘If you make too much noise, you’re out!’ ”

  News had drifted back to Bob Wooler that something special was occurring at the Cavern, and he wandered over there during a lunchtime to see what the fuss was about. As hard as it is to believe, he’d never been there before. The whole oddness of it amused him, especially the setting—three misshapen tunnels, linked by arches, dug out from the core of Liverpool’s mustiest substratum; there was a wee patch of a stage, no curtain, with kids dancing, “kicking up a storm,” in between the chapel chairs that lined a vaulted middle chamber. “At first, it was difficult to breathe down there,” Wooler remembers. And cranking up the heat was the Big Three, whom Wooler knew casually from gigs at the halls he’d emceed.

  He watched them for a while, amazed by the vigorous scene—and despondent that he wasn’t a part of it. The experience with Allan Williams and the star-crossed Top Ten still rankled him, Wooler tending to it with alcohol “because everything was going so awfully.” As the Big Three came offstage, Johnny Hutch thrust a microphone at Wooler and said, “Come on, say something, Bob.” Wooler, momentarily flustered, asked Hutch for a suggestion. “Tell them who’s on tomorrow,” the burly drummer grunted. Wooler hesitated, thinking. He’d overheard Hutch refer to the club as “the cave,” so in inimitable form, Bob crooned, “Remember, all you cave dwellers, that the Cavern is the best of cellars. Tomorrow, it’s Tommy and the Metronomes who will play your lunchtime session. Make sure you don’t miss it.”

  Ray McFall, who was at the other end of the club, talking to the sound system consultants, asked: “Who was that?” “It sounds like Bob Wooler,” said Charlie McBain, who knew Wooler from Wilson Hall. A few days later, on a return visit, Wooler was confronted by McFall and offered a job as the Cavern’s lunchtime deejay. In no time, Wooler and the Cavern became a local institution. But it was more than spinning records and frisky announcing, which he did with great flair; Wooler was the personality the rock ’n roll scene had been waiting for, its spokesman, its guiding star. And unlike the promoters, who were strictly bottom-line men, Wooler genuinely loved the scene and its offbeat components. He wasn’t tough, he wasn’t commanding, but he oozed stature, and that gave him plenty of influence with his audience.

  More than anything, however, Wooler had a wonderful touch. Every song benefited from a splash of his fine, flamboyant patter; every artist got the full star treatment. From noon until 12:30 Wooler played records—on a single turntable, no less, unthinkable by today’s standards—that he personally collected and carried there himself in a handsome, blue wooden case made by a joiner on the Garston Docks. The band performed from 12:30 to 1:10, came off for half an hour, and went on again at 1:40 until 2:15. Wooler provided “time checks” at every interval for those who had to keep an eye on the clock; most everyone there was on a strict lunch break from their jobs, so there was much to-ing and fro-ing throughout the two-hour session.

  The Beatles had gravitated to the Cavern in early February to check it out, although no one had to sell them on its virtues. A daytime gig there would be the perfect complement to their already overbooked evening schedule, but hard as they tried, it seemed impossible to break into the lineup. Mona Best had put the moves on Ray McFall without success. Even Bob Wooler, who sung their praises, got nowhere with his boss. According to Wooler, “McFall was the law unto himself and you had to go easy on him with a new act. I was constantly saying, ‘The Beatles are available for lunch, Ray.’ ‘I’ve never heard of them.’ I knew he had, but I played along. ‘They’re quite marvelous, Ray.’ He’d put on that pained expression of his. Then, one day, he came up with the idea of booking them—all by himself.”

  Following Ray McFall’s initiative, the Beatles debuted at the Cavern on February 21, 1961, playing a lunchtime session to a solidly packed house. Little is known about the particulars of the show aside from the fact that they got £3 for their efforts; in the months and years to come, the band played the club so often that individual details have become blurred in the retelling. But suffice it to say, their performance made an impact on the Cavern regulars that sent the band’s stock soaring smartly. While the Big Three were loud and Rory’s antics entertaining, no band sang with more finesse and more style, or provided more drama in their delivery. What the Beatles had was stage presence, personality that conveyed a real intimacy with the audience. The girls there locked into it right away, and much to emphatic denials, the boys soon followed suit.

  Even Ray McFall caught the vibe, sending word through Bob Wooler that the band was welcome back at the first opportunity. He had to stand in line, however. The day of their Cavern debut, for instance, they played two additional gigs—at the new Casanova Club, across town, and at the scene of their breakout, Litherland Town Hall—a situation known among the musicians as “piggybacking.” Suddenly they were in great demand; work was everywhere. Each great performance led to further offers. For musicians who had been living on handouts, the goodwill of parents, and the occasional £2 gig, they were finally pulling their own financial weight. No doubt, Paul and George were outearning their fathers, and while Mimi continued to hammer John about certain failure, she couldn’t have been too disapproving of his £25-per-week income. The Beatles had never strayed from their game plan to play music for a living and they never blinked in the face of serious money woes, but no one really expected it to materialize in this manner—not in Liverpool, not in such a gratifying way. Becoming a rock ’n roll star, making records, was still the ultimate goal, but fo
r the time being there was plenty of action to groove on.

  Both Dot Rhone and Cynthia Powell had waited enduringly for their boyfriends to return. “It was as if they’d gone off to war,” Dot recalls—except that in this case, only the girls stood a chance of being wounded. During those long, lonely months, Paul and John had written faithfully, John to an almost obsessive degree, often scribbling twelve to twenty pages to Cynthia, the same simplistic pledges of love, over and over and over: “Lovely lovely lovely lovely Cyn Lovely Cyn I love lovely Cynthia Cynthia I love you You are wonderful I adore you I want you I love you I need you…” Of course, the Beatles reported only selective highlights from their Hamburg adventures, leaving out anything that so much as hinted at promiscuity. But the letters served their purpose and kept the relationships intact.

  Presumably, Dot and Cynthia knew the score. Hamburg’s earthly delights were legendary, especially now that so many musicians had returned home. Neither had any illusions about the Beatles’ fidelity. As Cynthia expressed it, “John was a flirt.” But it seems doubtful she understood the full extent of his exploits. “As long as they were happy, we were happy,” Dot says.