The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Ritchie was drawn to Harry the moment he laid eyes on him. “He was a really sweet guy,” Ringo remembered, ruggedly handsome, with elfin eyes and an easy, engaging smile that hid a pent-up melancholy. As a painter at the American army base in nearby Burtonwood, Harry had access to all the luxuries that captivated poor Scouser boys brought up on wartime rationing: comic books and American magazines, exotic chewing gum, toys, and, every Valentine’s Day, big red hearts stuffed with rare, scrumptious candy. Best of all, music was an essential part of his makeup. Having grown up around London, where he ferreted out live music, Harry had acquired a consuming passion for big bands and their vocalists—Dinah Shore, Sarah Vaughan, and Billy Daniels, among his favorites—whose records he collected and played incessantly for Ritchie.

  Much like Paul’s father, Harry helped introduce Ritchie to the intricacies of popular music, pointing out how the classic stylists expressed themselves and why their music had the power to touch listeners. The new wave of lowbrow pop singers such as Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, and Eddie Fisher had not yet managed to claim the airwaves, though they were clearly on the horizon. In the meantime, Harry taught Ritchie to appreciate the old crooners and the relationship between their voices and the instruments. In countless interviews after the Beatles became famous, Ringo would always insist he had had no formal musical training, but the shaping of his ear—this introduction to sophisticated syncopated rhythms, along with the ability to identify a scattering of tempos—provided a root foundation that forged his talent in ways no formal training could duplicate.

  Harry was also the perfect answer for an emotionally needy adolescent who’d somehow coasted through a broken home and two life-threatening illnesses. As a role model, he was a world apart from the absentee Richard Sr., exuding understanding, reassurance, and unerring commitment to the strictures of a conventional family life. Harry bent over backward to connect with Elsie’s son, and Ritchie quickly succumbed to the favor of his “great gentleness.” Whatever misgivings he may have had about his mother’s remarriage, in April 1954, they were quickly erased by Harry’s abiding—some might say blind—support for Ritchie’s scattered pursuits.

  Indeed, from the day he quit school until his break with Rory Storm, Ritchie Starkey’s experience in the workforce was an unfolding disaster. Having grown up free of any real discipline or accountability, he had learned indifference, not ambition. He took a job at British Rail for the uniform, “because they give you suits.” Unable to pass the physical, Ritchie was eventually laid off and forced onto the dole until he signed on as a waiter, serving drinks on a day boat from Liverpool to North Wales. It was light, agreeable work that appealed to his happy-go-lucky nature and ostensibly served as an apprenticeship, a jumping-off point to his dream job, working at sea on a succession of international luxury liners. Unfortunately, reality got in the way. With the effects of war still prominent on every street, it was the responsibility of all able-bodied British men, if called, to do active duty in the armed forces. Ritchie, fresh from a hospital lie-in, was unnaturally “terrified” that he’d be drafted. Had he stopped to consider his pathology, of course, he’d have known there was no way the army would induct such a run-down specimen. Nevertheless, he immediately set about ensuring that the possibility would not occur. For starters, that meant quitting his job on the day boat. If he was fit for seafaring work, he believed, it remained likely that before very long he’d attract the navy’s interest. Instead, he cast about for some kind of engineering work, based on a rumor that the armed services weren’t taking apprentices that year.

  Fortunately, Harry had a contact at Henry Hunt & Sons, a gymnastic-equipment company in the south end of Liverpool, and in the summer of 1956 Ritchie began working there as an apprentice fitter. It was steady, if unstimulating, work, just a short daily commute from Admiral Grove. At first, Ritchie was “the altar boy,” dispatched “to fill the glue pots and to fetch chips during the breaks.” There wasn’t much else for him to do all day long. “But it was a great gang of people,” recalls Roy Trafford, a gangly dropout from Toxteth, who worked side by side with Ritchie as an apprentice joiner and, in no time, became his closest friend. “Eventually, we were taught to finish the wooden parts—all the balancing beams for the gymnasium bars. There was only thirty-eight and six in our pay packets—no more than a handout—but at the time the money was secondary. We were learning a trade, which was more than most guys in our situation, and as we well knew, it was considered a job for life.”

  It wasn’t long before the boys discovered a shared love of music. The two of them would spend dinner breaks at Hunt’s in the downstairs shaving shed, earnestly talking about trad jazz and blues while their coworkers rummaged through brown-bag lunches. Trafford’s conversation was filled with the snappy jargon of skiffle, which he’d gravitated to via weekly guitar lessons. Stirred by the spontaneity and directness of it, Ritchie became an ardent fan, and before long they began “working some songs in the cellar” during lunch. “I played guitar, and [Ritchie] just made a noise on a box,” Trafford recalls. “Sometimes, he just slapped a biscuit tin with some keys, or banged on the backs of chairs.” It was a strictly rudimentary but joyous affair. Eventually, Ritch invited his neighbor and workmate, Eddie Miles, to sit in, and a little band began to take shape.

  Eddie, with his bird’s-eye maple Hofner cutaway and its homemade pickups, was something of a guitar dynamo in Liverpool. He had a vigorous, impatient way of strumming that went wildly astray; strings snapped like rubber bands as he picked at simple leads. When, instead of polishing off phrases, he bulldozed straight through mistakes, it gave songs a loose but heated energy that was like nothing else they’d ever heard. A twelve-bar break would become a tangle of chords and flourishes. A traditional folk song would be transformed into a jazzy Big Bill Broonzy–like interplay of whoops and hollers. Eddie impressed the boys with his flamboyant ability, to say nothing of his enthusiasm, and over the next few months they developed a band around him.

  What began as the Eddie Miles Band soon evolved into Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares, named after a landmark in downtown Liverpool. It had a revolving-door cast of anywhere from five to seven musicians, all of whom (aside from Eddie, of course) were interchangeable. At Ritchie’s insistence, they featured him on percussion. When the accompaniment kicked in behind Eddie, Ritchie tucked an old washboard under his arm, leaned back at a slight angle, and raked thimbles across the bevels—slashing at them, really—to produce a driving, clattering sound. On skiffle standards such as “Walking Cane” and “Rock Island Line,” he could rap out a beat at a reasonably steady clip. It was still fairly unsophisticated, but he didn’t care—and neither did anybody else. He was in his element.

  When they put down their instruments (never for long), it was usually to dance. “We really loved the whole idea of dancing and wanted to learn properly,” remembers Trafford, who, on more than one occasion, dragged Ritchie to Skellen’s Dance School on the corner of Lark Lane for lessons. Later, they tried another dance school on Aigburth Road, where Ritchie was partnered with a policeman—“a bloody big fella, about six-two”—resolved to teach him the waltz. It was a short-lived disaster, but enough of an introduction to the basics for them to eventually end up dancing rather capably at the Winter Gardens, the Rialto, and Wilson Hall.

  Every Friday they would “meander around town,” beginning at the pub where Elsie worked “for a couple of freebies, a few large whites to give us the glow.” After that, they stopped at the Lisbon Pub on Victoria Street to meet friends, retank the engines, and then head over to the Cavern, where trad jazz still ruled. “We loved trad jazz,” says Trafford, “almost as much as we loved to dress up.” The boys always went out “immaculately groomed.” Like twins, they wore matching outfits purchased at Yaffe’s: black-and-gray-striped jackets, crepe trousers with red-and-black half-inch stripes, a red-and-black-striped shirt, studded belts, and string ties from the haberdashery counter at Woolworth’s. Their overcoats came
from Eric’s, the Quarry Men’s local tailor. “I got a black one and Ritch’s was blue,” recalls Trafford. “We thought we were the bee’s knees.” To complete the effect, they plastered down their hair with gobs of brilliantine, which melted in their hands, then “went hard like a helmet” in the cold night air.

  That Christmas of 1957, Harry presented Ritchie with a secondhand drum set he’d found in a shop near his old home in Romford. It was just a snare with plastic heads and a big old bass, “like a Salvation Army drum,” that bore the marks of past ownership. There was also a cymbal, a big garbage can lid with nicks and dings on it, that made a clangorous sound. At the time, it was merely something durable, something that he could pound on to keep him engaged, but the gift enthralled Ritchie—and changed his life.

  Before, they had only played at being a band, but now with a drummer, the Eddie Clayton group powered its way into the world of small-time show business. Drums set them apart from the hundreds of other amateur bands vying for precious stage time. The boys, having sharpened their act, began hustling for gigs on the skiffle circuit and, in no time, won a number of impressive bookings that gave them a definite glow. The pay was pitifully small—“just buttons”—but they kept regularly engaged.

  Nevertheless, before too long skiffle ran out of steam. Unable to compete with the visceral kick of rock ’n roll, its practitioners defected en masse, trading in their washboards and tea chests for instruments that sizzled with electricity. Ritchie continued to play behind Eddie Clayton but moonlighted with other bands as well. One of the best-known local skiffle groups making the transition to rock was Al Caldwell’s Texans, who were desperate to snag a sideman with his own drum kit. “We knew him pretty well. He’d gotten a snare drum, a high hat, and a cymbal by then,” Johnny Byrne recalls. “When we told him we were going into rock ’n roll full-tilt, he said he was interested.” With Ritchie keeping the beat, they reemerged in the clubs in November 1958 as the Raging Texans, and shortly thereafter as Jet Storm and the Raging Texans, and finally Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a name that might easily have rolled off the Larry Parnes assembly line of stars. Ritchie borrowed £46 from his grandfather to buy an Ajax drum kit with “lapped” pigskin instead of plastic heads, designed to resemble the pricey Ludwigs favored by professional drummers.

  Formerly a diehard blues fan (he even considered emigrating to Texas so he could “live with Lightnin’ Hopkins”), Ritchie was lit up by rock ’n roll. He spent all his spare time gorging on it, listening to Radio Luxembourg’s staticky broadcasts, and on Sundays religiously tuning in to Alan Freed. As a drummer, he played along with whatever came over the airwaves, beating time to one song after the next, even running through the commercial breaks.

  Almost immediately, the simple rat-a-tat-tat patterns evolved into ever more complicated, exuberant wrist work. This would eventually help set him apart from drummers like Pete Best and Johnny Hutch. Everyone else at the time was emulating the bangers who relied on bruising upper-arm strength to power an arrangement, but Ritchie developed a discipline for playing shuffle rhythms that made the drums a more integral part of songs. He could punctuate what the other instruments were doing musically instead of just keeping strict time. Largely unschooled as a drummer—he claimed he “had about three lessons” as a beginner—he only knew how to play by ear. But however he approached the drums, no matter how reflexive or improvisational, the patterns he played were distinguished by an overriding degree of control. Perhaps, barring other explanation, this was an outgrowth of his unusually broad musical tastes. Whereas other teenagers jumped right into bands from a steady diet of uptempo pop, Ritchie was influenced by exacting country artists and modern jazz exponents such as Chico Hamilton and Yusef Lateef, who relied heavily on their knowledge of composition. Intuitively—and beyond explanation—he captured an energy and ease of expression that eluded other young drummers trying to find the right groove.

  Alone in the Dingle, Ritchie had been a distant, almost maddeningly backward introvert. As part of the Hurricanes, he developed “a bubble of personality.” Playing with the band seemed to invest him with confidence, the attention and exposure acting like a spark plug, stimulating an ego and identity that, up to then, had gone largely uncultivated. Onstage, he located a hidden charm—grinning earnestly at girls; casting enigmatic, brooding stares into the dark distance, playing with his eyes closed and head tilted to one side, trancelike, as though listening to the drum’s inner beat; making lunges and parries at the cymbals. Ritchie savored the glow, and Rory, “who liked to take care of the other guys in the band,” made sure he shared the spotlight. Now, under Rory’s tutelage, he began creating a role for himself that reached beyond the act. Ritchie had experimented with images that he used to offset his inadequacies; now he streaked his hair silver and dressed up in a long duster and cowboy hat. The teddy boy outfit he had shared with Roy Trafford disappeared for good late that year, but he began wearing rings, not just one but many, simultaneously, an affectation that arose from his mother’s passion for flashy jewelry. Elsie bought him several tawdry costume pieces studded with cut-glass “gems,” which he wore along with a man’s signet ring that had belonged to Grandpa Starkey. “He always loved his rings,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford. “It was a kind of attention-getter—something flashy to offset the idea that he was sickly and not well educated, perhaps distancing him from the Dingle.”

  Inspired by his popularity with the Hurricanes, Ritchie immersed himself in the company of adoring young women who began following bands from gig to gig. Illness had wreaked havoc on Ritchie’s shaky self-confidence, but the band offset all that and, before long, he had two serious girlfriends, Pat Davies, a schoolmate of Cilla Black’s, and later a Jacaranda waitress named Geraldine McGovern, to whom he eventually became engaged. But a band was no place to nurture a relationship. Besides, Gerri was Catholic—a fact that never sat well with Elsie, who “was nominally of the Orange lodge” and, with a few drinks under her belt, would break into “The Sash My Father Wore” as a swipe at her “sworn enemy.”

  Ultimately, Ritchie carved out a niche as a free agent. Like many teenagers who grow up in a ghetto, he was in a terrible rush to move onward—and upward. Dingle boys were drilled to place security above all else. The Ritchie Starkey who had never amounted to much at school and seemed doomed to the family fate of being yet another in a long line of menial laborers and soldiers was determined “to say [he] was actually something,” a professional, as opposed to a working stiff. Working at Hunt’s, with its boisterous crew, rustling of machinery, and long silences interrupted occasionally by the camaraderie of Roy Trafford and Eddie Miles, was deathly dull, but it provided both security and self-esteem.

  Still, Ritchie wanted more—he wanted fulfillment—and the only way to get it was through music. And a choice would have to be made.

  Sometime that spring of 1962, Rory and the Hurricanes learned they’d been hired for the summer residency at Butlins in Wales. Throughout April and May, Ritchie remained undecided whether to accept, furiously turning over in his mind the impact of such a move. “It was a difficult decision for him,” recalls Johnny Byrne, who himself reluctantly ditched a good job as an invoice clerk at the Cotton Exchange to go. “Ringo never counted on music interrupting his apprenticeship, but Rory painted a picture of it that was impossible to ignore.”

  One can only imagine how tempting he made it sound. Ritchie accepted the offer and announced his decision shortly thereafter at a family gathering. To his aunts and uncles, he was foolishly risking a solid future on such an ill-considered scheme. But playing with the Hurricanes had shown him that nothing—and no one—could compete with the thrill of the stage. Even his mother’s objections fell on deaf ears.

  Somehow, decisions like this one always proved clear-cut for Ringo. He never doubted that leaving Hunt’s and joining Rory Storm and the Hurricanes was a worthwhile opportunity, just as he later left Rory in 1962 to play in Hamburg with Tony Sheridan, and just as, later t
hat year, he rejected Kingsize Taylor’s offer to become a member of an outstanding outfit like the Dominoes. When the Beatles made their play, Ringo hesitated only long enough to discuss it with Roy Trafford, who encouraged him to move on—and up—with a better band. “Why not?” Roy recalls telling his mate. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  For the Beatles, the significance of a first-class drummer was essential to their survival. “Our career was on the line,” Paul recalled, and the band knew that the only surefire way of taking it to the next level was by adding a world-beater to the mix. It was evident they’d found their man from the moment that Ringo took over the beat. Immediately they recaptured a spark that had eluded them for so long. The energy, the cleverness, the right groove—the magic—breezed back into their overall sound. At last, after six years, stardom seemed possible to the Beatles.

  Chapter 19 A Touch of the Barnum & Bailey

  [I]

  Ringo’s Liverpool debut on August 19, 1962, did nothing to tickle the ears of the pop music world or rocket the Beatles to stardom. Only later, in retrospect, would it achieve mythic status. No one was affected by the situation more than Ringo. He’d heard the fan outcry in the days leading up to the Cavern gig. The dance halls and cafés had been full of it—and the schools, too, where there was a wave of adulation for Pete. Even in the record shops there was constant debate and grumbling. An hour before going on, Ringo ducked into the White Star for a remedial pint and collapsed at a table with the Blue Jeans. They knew he was “petrified.” Even his appearance—a little goatee and straight, slicked-back hair—bespoke an uneasiness, like someone who was one step ahead of the law. “We felt sorry for him because he was so nervous,” Ray Ennis recalls.