Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  George’s desire to play guitar in every moment prompted him to begin what he later called “freelancing”—and in spring 1959 he joined another group, the Les Stewart Quartet.4 He didn’t leave John and Paul, he just joined Stewart’s outfit at the same time, replacing another lad to become their fourth member. Stewart was the lead guitarist* and George played rhythm; there was also another guitarist—a guy with glasses called Ken Brown—and a drummer, Ray Skinner. George was just turning 16 and the youngest of the four, but Stewart (coming up to 18) says it hardly mattered. “I never thought about George being younger, he was just a neat guy. I liked him a lot, and he was a pretty decent guitarist: he used to practice and practice and practice until he got things note-perfect. This was something I never did—I just used to wing it all the time and didn’t have much patience.”5

  The position had come George’s way through a Saturday job he’d taken to pay for his Hofner President. He was a butcher’s delivery boy, cycling around Hunt’s Cross and Speke with bleeding white paper parcels. Because he was always talking music, George learned that another lad there had a Dobro resonator guitar, the first one George ever saw. As Les remembers it, this other chap, Tommy Askew, went to Old Swan Technical College with him, and this is how the link was established. Les lived at 32 Ballantyne Road, between Tuebrook and West Derby in the north end of Liverpool, so George had a multiple bus journey every time he rehearsed or played with the Quartet. This didn’t stop him. Just like his dad, when George’s mind was set on something nothing could ever shift it.

  Looking back on this period thirty-five years later, George recalled only the odd booking with the Les Stewart Quartet. In fact, they played regularly at a British Legion club, and every Sunday night in a West Derby club called Lowlands. Like the Morgue in Broad Green, Lowlands opened in March 1958 and occupied the cellar of a substantial detached Victorian house, this one situated in quiet residential Hayman’s Green. But while the Morgue had operated outside the law and was quickly shut down, Lowlands was the HQ of West Derby Community Association, bastion of a good neighborhood. Its weekly teenage music sessions were in a low-ceilinged cellar named the Pillar Club, complete with its own integral coffee bar; committee-organized with efficiency and imagination, it was an established success for several years.

  George’s second group played different music. Of course they did Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent, but they were also one of the very few Merseyside groups to play real blues—the music of Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. With only a little knowledge of the blues, George had to work hard to keep pace, learning all the time. The group’s dedicated and only follower, Shelagh Maguire—Les Stewart’s girlfriend, and from 1961 his wife—says their star number was a bluesy working of “You Are My Sunshine,” and remembers that George added one or two Carl Perkins songs to the set, which he sang.

  George often took John with him to Lowlands or to the group’s regular rehearsals at Les’s house, and sometimes he took Paul. Les has a crystal-clear memory of John joining the group on the little Lowlands stage—at least once, he says. No further details are remembered, and there’s also, unfortunately, no known photograph of George playing with the group. The period, though, was most likely February/March 1959.

  George hammered the final nail into his schooling at this time. He’d just taken his “mock” O-Levels and fared dismally, failing everything but Art; in English Language his mark was 2 percent. The headmaster, The Baz, let it be known that, unofficially, he and the school were washing their hands of him, and if George, who hardly came in anyway, didn’t bother to turn up during the summer term, that was fine. A stiffer fate befell Arthur Kelly. He’d been expecting for a long time to go straight into art school, like John, but then discovered late in the day that the college was implementing new admission rules, requiring three GCE passes. His only chance was to cheat in the exams—he did so, and was caught. Summoned to The Baz’s chamber, it was made quite clear to Kelly that he should leave grammar school and not return. “I wasn’t expelled as such but I left at Easter 1959. Not long afterward a relative pulled some strings and got me a four-pound-a-week office job at Cunard.”6

  Knowing he’d be leaving in July, and now without the company of his best mate, George simply sagged off the entire time, not going into school for three months from April. He had no idea what he’d do with the rest of his life, and didn’t care. Something would turn up. Knowing his dad would be furious at this latest turn of events, George felt it better not to tell his parents. He just pocketed the dinner money Louise gave him and went off on the bus every morning as usual, but instead of going into school he hung around Liverpool as a deserter. He spent a lot of time with his sister-in-law Irene at the flat she and Harry were renting as newlyweds. George would urge her, “Don’t tell me mum,” and Irene—who loved Louise and Harry—kept his secret uncomfortably but kept it all the same. Sometimes George would ask her, “Where are you going today?” and when Irene reached wherever it was, there he’d be, to hang around with her some more.7

  John and Thelma had been going out about six months when their relationship fell apart. The art school held a regular dance in the canteen, usually on the third Saturday of each month, and although they didn’t always go, they went to one held around Easter. During the course of this, John leaned over to Thel and asked if she fancied “going for a five-mile run.” She agreed, and they slipped upstairs to the Art History room, assuming it would be free. “It was dark but we could tell there were other couples in there, probably having a five-mile run of their own, or trying to,” Thelma recalls. “I told John I was uneasy about doing it in a place like that, especially with other people there, and he wasn’t happy with my attitude. When I insisted on going, and got up to leave, he became rough and whacked me one—his fist connected somewhere between my shoulder and my head, around my neck.”8

  Thelma stormed off, and decided that was the end of their relationship. She did her best to avoid John through the following week, and when this wasn’t possible she simply ignored him. He started to mock her but she resisted his gibes, and this went on for several days until reaching its culmination in the Cracke. “He was still mocking me, in front of others, and then he called me ‘an edge of the bed virgin.’ That really pissed me off because we both knew it wasn’t true. He was just being sarcastic and wounding because he was pissed off with me, and I got so enraged I shouted back, ‘Don’t blame me just because your mother’s dead!’ It was a cruel remark, but he knew all about those. It just seemed the easiest way to get back at him.”

  John and Thelma had reached the end of the line, though they’d remain friends and keep in touch for several years. In an interview in 1980, John reflected on his teenage behavior: “Hitting females is something I’m always ashamed of and still can’t talk about—I’ll have to be a lot older before I can face that in public, about how I treated women as a youngster.”9 Except that he was talking about it, and with the sort of candor customary even when it was to his own detriment. In 1967, John mentioned it within a song lyric and spoke about it to his biographer Hunter Davies. “I was in a blind rage for two years,” he said. “I was either drunk or fighting. There was something the matter with me.”10

  This was also, of course, the way it was in many other relationships, and had been for a long time and would be in the future, especially in the north of England. It wasn’t excusable but nor was it unusual, and such attitudes were reinforced constantly in receptive minds by the silver screen. “Not only did we dress like James Dean and walk around like that,” John later remarked, “but we acted out those cinematic charades. The he-man was supposed to smack a girl across the face, make her succumb in tears and then make love. Most of the guys I knew in Liverpool thought that’s how you do it.”11

  In terms of dress, John continued to interchange between college scarf and Teddy Boy drape, though being a Ted was always more a state of m
ind for him.12 The persona remained very much part of his attraction to Paul and George, however—as Paul says, “We looked up to him as a sort of violent Teddy Boy, which was attractive at the time. He got drunk a lot and once he kicked the telephone-box in … [and] what might have been construed as good old-fashioned rudeness I always had to put down to ballsiness.”13

  In turn, Tony Carricker remembers how he and John used to watch Stuart Sutcliffe with admiration. “He looked aloof, cool, very self-contained. He didn’t have a good complexion or good skin but he created a very good impression and had a great James Dean haircut.” John’s friendship with Stuart was strong now. Paul and George also got to know him, and George took a particular shine, admiring not only Stuart’s obvious artistic talent but also his personality. “I liked Stuart a lot; he was always very gentle. John had a slight superiority complex at times but Stuart didn’t discriminate against Paul and me because we weren’t from the art school.”14 Stuart enjoyed hearing John, Paul and George play music together and enthused about them at a time when few others were doing so. He fixed it for them to play a party or two, and went along to encourage.

  The Liverpool rock and roll scene remained far beyond their reach. Sam Leach was still active in Croxteth, and interest was picking up in other suburbs too. A Crosby man called Brian Kelly, who ran an audio hire company called Alpha Sound, used the name Beekay to promote “jive dances” in ballrooms in the north end, including Lathom Hall in Seaforth and Litherland Town Hall. Troubled places. And in the south end a young man named Wally Hill was taking his first steps as an independent promoter at the bloodshed that was the Winter Gardens in Garston, and also at Holyoake Hall, a Co-Op ballroom close to Penny Lane bus depot.

  Hill’s enterprise swiftly attracted a like-minded soul, when Garston man Bob Wooler offered his services as disc jockey and MC (master of ceremonies). He would soon become known as the “Daddy-O” of Merseyside rock and roll DJs, the city’s very own Alan Freed … or not: Wooler was quietly spoken, soberly suited, pedantic and punctual, but nonetheless a man blessed with clarity of thought and expression, a great wit, a fine grasp of English and clear diction. He was a born communicator, a wizard with words, and a pun-merchant beyond restraint. By day he was a railways clerk at Garston Docks, by night he became the soul of Liverpool rock and roll, the dean of the scene, organizing all aspects of promotions and doing everything he could to advise and encourage the musicians. Born in 1926, Wooler was a secretive bachelor in his thirties who loved playing records and watching live music, so he lopped off six years and said he was born in 1932. That was already old enough. As he said, he didn’t want Daddy-O to become Grandaddy-O.15

  As the various halls opened up, so came the groups to play in them. In spring 1959, the Liverpool Echo’s “Jazz” classifieds started to sprout new names, the first members of the first generation of Liverpool rock groups: Duke Duval’s Rockers, the Rocking Rhythm Coasters, the Remo Quartet, the Swinging Bluegenes and the Raving Texans.† Al Caldwell and Johnny Byrne were going strong with their four-piece group, now all-electric; Caldwell’s skill for self-promotion was second to none in Liverpool, undercut only by his peculiar habit of changing the group’s name every five minutes. Still, he managed to get a good profile of “the Texans” published in the new national paper Disc—a first—and at just about this time the drummer named in that article left and inquiries were made with a certain young man from the Dingle.16

  It has proved impossible to determine dates or even the exact sequence of events for Richy Starkey in 1959. What’s clear is that the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group had broken up by the spring. Skiffle had gone, and with it some momentum; on top of that, Clayton—Eddie Myles—was engaged and planning to marry by the end of the year. Relationships put paid to many a musical career in Liverpool, as elsewhere: it was time for young men to “stop messing about,” “get serious” and “settle down,” to do away with raving and start saving. Rare was the girlfriend whose idea of a good night out was to stand at the side of a stage, watch other women eyeing up her man and maybe feel a few raked fingernails for her trouble. So, Eddie’s boys went their separate ways.

  This could have been the end for Richy and music, except he was fully committed to pressing on. So resolute and strong-minded was he that when there seemed no prospect of joining another group, he formed his own. “I had my own band when I was 18, for three weeks. We had a clarinet player who could only play in B-flat, a pianist who could only play in C, a guitarist who was quite good, a tea-chest bass, and a trumpeter who could only play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ The band folded after two rehearsals, but it was a good try.”17

  Some identities can be applied to—Roy Trafford was the “quite good” guitarist, Jimmy Roughley was on clarinet and Johnny Mooney on trumpet, with Richy on drums, of course—and the rehearsals took place in a small hall down High Park Street.18 The group didn’t have a name and their musical direction was never really explored because they could only ever play “The Saints.” They seem so motley a collection as to be almost avant-garde, and it was strange for a tea-chest to be used again—the death of skiffle had otherwise banished them back to garden sheds. Roy retired from the scene when Richy’s short-lived band ground to a halt. Having been with the Eddie Clayton group for two years and this new one for two rehearsals, he put down his guitar and only picked it up again at parties. But he would remain Richy’s lifelong close mate.

  It could be that Richy’s combo ended because he suddenly got a call to join the Darktown. They were, as John Lennon once noted, “the biggest group in Liverpool.”19 Not only had they had the most copious local newspaper coverage throughout 1957 and ’58, they’d twice been to London to appear on BBC-tv’s Six-Five Special. It’s a barometer of Richy’s already solid reputation that the Darktown turned to him when they had a vacancy … though this does also seem to have been downtime for the group, a period of restructuring, with fewer bookings than before. And though Richy was with them for possibly as long as four months, the period overlapped with his appointment in the Raving Texans. Like George Harrison, Richy Starkey was a member of two groups at the same time.

  Richy was invited to audition for the Texans, something he’d never had to do before. Al Caldwell and Johnny Byrne gave Richy the thumbs-up with one reservation: Al was flash and his group had to be too, but Richy had turned up looking like an old Ted. “I was still in me black drape and me hair back, looking a bit rough, so they were a bit insecure about me. But I got the job because I was a good player.”20 Being in two groups meant, on occasion, playing with both on the same night. One time he even played with three groups—the Darktown, the Texans and a third outfit who turned up without a drummer. It was invaluable experience, having to adapt to the different musical styles and keep time with all the players, but Richy could do it. He just sat on the drum stool all evening, changing into a different jacket for each group and then walking away with thirty bob at the end, ten bob from each.

  One of his earliest bookings with the Raving Texans was on May 23 and 24, 1959, at the Cavern, still a jazz venue. Richy would always remember this because Johnny Byrne somehow managed to plug his guitar through a radio. The electric guitar had only been seen at the Cavern in the hands of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other blues players; in the hands of a young rock and roll yob it was scandalous. Richy remembers them being thrown off.21

  Another reason Richy may not have created the best of first impressions with Al and Johnny was that, by 18, his hair had developed a peculiar and prominent gray streak just above his right ear. As he later described it, “this whole side went gray.” Richy believed it was due to trauma from all his illnesses. He also realized it looked bloody odd and created another unwanted problem: “Liverpool’s a tough place. People would grab me and say, ‘Who do you think you are, Jeff Chandler?’ Any excuse to beat you up.”22

  Also this year, Richy followed the lead of Eddie Myles and got engaged. He and Gerry McGovern had been going steady for twelve months or
more when he proposed and she accepted. It isn’t known if they fixed a wedding date, but perhaps they had 1961 in mind, when Richy’s five-year apprenticeship at H. Hunt & Son would be completed; as a man with “a trade” he’d be able to provide, and they’d get a house or flat somewhere in the Toxteth/Dingle area or, if his pipe dreams came true, that little place in Aigburth. In the meantime, Gerry started preparing her “bottom drawer”—collecting clothes and household goods in anticipation of setting up a marital home—and they bought each other engagement rings, which for Richy was his second piece of hand jewelry, complementing the signet Elsie gave him when he turned 16. Religion was still a divisive issue between their respective families and it remained to be seen how this would be settled, but of one thing Richy was quietly (or not-so-quietly) certain: if Gerry thought he was going to give up his drums for her, she was mistaken.

  Plenty more great American records were issued by the British companies in the first half of 1959. Gene Vincent, becoming a forgotten man in the States but revered across the Atlantic, recorded the uptempo “Say Mama” and contemporary versions of the Porgy and Bess song “Summertime” and the Wizard of Oz hit “Over the Rainbow,” the latter some distance from rock and roll but still enjoyed by his fans. Eddie Cochran followed “Summertime Blues” with an even bigger hit, the song that joyously stirred teenage rebellion, “C’mon Everybody”—his first British top ten success. And Chuck Berry was still turning out records of cutting-edge originality. “Little Queenie” c/w “Almost Grown” was not only a dynamic 45 but influential to budding songwriters. As Paul McCartney recalls, “ ‘Little Queenie’ was the first time we heard somebody talk in a record—‘meanwhile I’s thinking.’ ”23 There was also yet another driving 45 by Larry Williams, especially liked by John Lennon—“She Said ‘Yeah’ ” c/w “Bad Boy”—while the singer so many of Williams’ fans associated him with, Little Richard, was back in the British charts yet again with a characteristically frantic “Kansas City.” As the NME noted, “Little Richard’s widespread popularity among British fans is quite startling, despite the fact that he still hasn’t been seen here in person”—and there was also the fact that he hadn’t recorded in almost two years. “Kansas City” was dug up from 1955.24