Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  John, Stu and Tony Carricker all took their women (John with Cyn); Paul and George may have been with them but memories are hazy. Some girls screamed during Cochran’s performance and John is said to have become angry, shouting at them to “shurrup” so he could hear the music.26 Paul was a huge fan of Cochran and (like the others) had already caught his appearances on Boy Meets Girls. As he’d recall, “A lot of the guys would just stand up and swing their guitar around, but we’d look to see if they could actually play, and when you looked at Eddie he could really play. He played the solos and you knew he was writing this stuff.”27 Cochran’s arrangement of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” lodged instantly in their memory, so although he never cut it for record and they never heard him do it again, it became the arrangement they themselves would always perform.

  It remains unclear whether Paul did see the Vincent/Cochran stage show—at different times he’s said he was there and insisted he wasn’t—but George certainly did. The night he sat just a few feet from Eddie Cochran would be etched forever in his mind, enabling a permanently clear recall of the American’s black leather waistcoat, black leather trousers and raspberry-colored shirt, how he stood with his back to the audience before launching into the opening number, “What’d I Say,” and how he then spun around to show the great Gretsch guitar George had drooled over in all the photos, complete with a black Gibson pickup and Bigsby tremolo.28

  Eddie blew me away. He had his unwound 3rd string, looked good and sang good and he was really getting to be a good guitarist … One moment will always represent Eddie to me. He finished a tune, the crowd stopped screaming and clapping, and he stepped up to the mike and before he said something he put both his hands back, pushed his hair back, and some girl, a single voice in the audience, she went “Eddie!” and he said “Hi honey!” … I thought, “Yes! That’s it—rock ’n’ roll!”29

  It isn’t known if Ringo Starr saw the show, but Johnny Guitar went, and so did Pete Best and Neil Aspinall. Most of Liverpool’s rockers went to pay homage and learn new tricks. And though the Liverpool Echo declared, “Anyone out of their teens has no place in the theatre this week,” at least one older person was present, a man just turned 30 whose eyes widened with every beat and scream. Allan Williams had never been to a theater rock show before, but because someone told him it might be interesting he left the Jacaranda one evening and went down. “It really wasn’t my scene at all,” he says, “but I got quite a shock to see the favorable reaction. I thought, ‘This is the future.’ ”30

  No one else operated like Allan Williams. Electrified by the enthusiasm and the business possibilities, he instantly decided to put on a promotion just like it. The next morning, he contacted Larry Parnes and asked if the tour had any open dates. Parnes looked and replied yes: Gene and Eddie were making a trip home to America in mid-April but they were returning to England a fortnight later and Tuesday, May 3, was free. Williams checked around the local venues and then phoned Parnes again to confirm: he wanted to bring the show back to Liverpool for one further night, at the boxing stadium. A contract was agreed, Williams paying Parnes £475 for Vincent, Cochran and eight other acts, to which he would then add some local Merseyside talent. This was high stakes for a first-time promoter but Williams was intent on staging the biggest rock show Liverpool—or anywhere else in Britain—had ever seen.

  John Lennon wrote a new song around this time, his first for a year or more. It was a train song, a strongly rhythmic rocker about a girl traveling on the one after 9:09. Cyn has a clear memory of sitting in the Jacaranda and helping him with some of the words of what he decided to call “One After 909”—and it seems he needed it because, even to him, they never made much sense. Paul and George didn’t get them either and the three always considered the song unfinished because of it, though it was left in that state.a

  John, Paul and George (though not Stu) took “One After 909” to Percy Phillips’ little home studio in Kensington and cut it as a record. This was where they’d made “That’ll Be the Day” and “In Spite of All the Danger” in 1958, but while that recording survives, “One After 909” does not. Arthur Kelly was at the session: “It was just the three of them, no Stuart and no drummer, and I didn’t play either—I was just the mate, tagging along. I’m 100 percent certain they did ‘One After 909’ and got it cut as a one-sided acetate because I had it for a while. I was allowed to borrow it and played it to my mum and dad.”31

  Around this same time, maybe a shade earlier, a domestic tape recording was made of John, Stu and Paul rehearsing (there seems to be only three players; George could have been at work). Attaching a precise date to this session is not possible but it’s from the early weeks or months of 1960, and they may not even have been the Quarrymen any more. The reel runs about forty minutes and has eight numbers, most of them untitled twelve-bar rambles of an especially unlistenable kind. Stu is audibly a bass beginner, and there is scant connection between the players and a painfully high number of bum notes. Though they’d just completed a four-month club residency at the Casbah—from which it’s clear they could play and sing and were especially good at harmonies—this is, inexplicably, a horror of a tape, suggesting they were chronically bad when testimony has them better than proficient. The recording has only two barely redeeming features: one is a tune that might be called “Well Darling” and could be a Lennon-McCartney Original; the harmonies are decent and it’s just about listenable. The second is “Cayenne,” a twangy guitar instrumental composition by Paul.32

  This was a group that needed to get out and play, and with no manager or agent to provide push, the only way to get bookings was to write letters. Three examples survive, all drafted in this period of spring 1960 (probably, though not necessarily, resulting in letters being sent). Two are written by Paul and one by Stu. Paul prided himself on his handwriting and seems also to have had no qualms about being economical with truth and generous with untruths. As he’d come to concede, “We would lie our faces off to get anyone to notice us.” The first of his letters—addressed to a Mr. Low—is a particular joy, allowing a richly detailed insight into the tiny window of time when, as Paul hesitantly expresses it, the group “is called the …………”33

  Putting his own name first, then John’s, Stuart’s and George’s, Paul details their instruments as “guitar,” “guitar,” “bass” and “another guitarist”; he doesn’t say they have no drummer, he simply doesn’t mention a drummer at all, clinging to the hope the recipient (despite his evident involvement in the business) wouldn’t notice. Just in case he did, though, Paul skirted the point with particular imagination:

  This lineup may at first seem rather dull, but it must be appreciated that as the boys all have above-average instrumental ability, they achieve surprisingly varied effects. Their basic beat is the off-beat, but this has recently tended to be accompanied by a faint on-beat; thus the overall sound is rather reminiscent of the 4 in the bar beat of traditional jazz. This could possibly be put down to the influence on the group of Mr. McCartney, who led one of the top local jazz bands (Jim Mac’s Jazz Band) in the 1920’s.

  The rest of the letter was expert blather: Paul said he and John had written over fifty songs, some instrumental, others composed “with the modern audience in mind,” numbers such as “One After 909,” “Years Roll Along,” “Thinking of Linking” and “Keep Looking That Way.”b He also named the group members, starting with John and then claiming for himself the advanced age of 18 and a position at Liverpool University, reading English Literature. The potted biographies of George and Stuart are unavailable because by this point Paul had reached the bottom of the sheet and nothing more survives.c

  On March 27, Stuart wrote a letter looking to get the group a holiday camp booking … and as if in competition, which he was, Paul also wrote one that same day or soon after. Both are indicative of their hopelessness, for—as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes thrillingly knew—summer seasons had already been tied up a month or more. Paul�
��s was another masterpiece of dressing: this time he made no mention of personnel, obscuring altogether the question of a drummer, and added one to every calculation—the boys were “eighteen to twenty” and had been together four years, time in which they had “acquired three very important things—competence, confidence & continuity.”34

  Stuart’s letter was also verbose, and more intense. The recipient couldn’t have had many letters from rock groups that began “Dear Sir, As it is your policy to present entertainment to the habitues of your establishment …” There are four drafts of the letter—finding the right pitch was clearly a problem. In one the group is “promising,” in another “very experienced”; in one their stated preference is for rhythm and blues, in another rock and roll. Stuart signed the letter “Stu Sutcliffe (Manager)” which was almost certainly just a ruse to create a good impression—though it could be he was actually their manager for a few hours, a moment that came and went and was forgotten by all save for being captured in writing.35

  The letter caught something else too—the very moment of transition when one name died and another was born:

  I would like to draw your attention to a band to the Quar “Beatals.”

  John and Stu came up with the new identity one evening at Gambier Terrace. All four were desperate to find a new group name, and they didn’t lack ideas: “We had about ten a week,” Paul has said, referring to names not good enough to last and never put to use because they had no bookings. Most were jokes, of which only one—Los Paranoias—would lodge in their memory.36 If they were ever going to get someplace, though, they needed to find a good one and stick to it.

  The influence, once again, was Buddy Holly. Not only had he caused John and Paul to start songwriting, his group now inspired a new name, as John would recall: “I was looking for a name like the Crickets that meant two things, and from Crickets I got to Beetles. And I changed it to B-E-A because it didn’t mean two things on its own as B-double-E. So I changed the E to A and it meant two things—when you said it people thought of crawly things, and when you read it, it was beat music.”37 It was no more complicated than that: Stu and John were talking, up popped Beetles, and John, for whom wordplay was second nature, made it Beatles; a quick two-step process, finished.

  Though Stuart preferred to spell it with an –als, as Beatals, Paul and George seem instantly to have preferred John’s version. Paul has a clear memory of being told it while walking along Gambier Terrace toward Huskisson Street and Upper Parliament Street. “John and Stu had come out of the flat one night and we were walking toward the Dingle and just chatting and they said, ‘Oh, we’ve had an idea for a name—Beatles, with an A.’ ”38 There seemed no question of changing it again, and it was a name that would have the most desired of effects: when people heard it spoken, it annoyed or repelled them—“Ugh, Beatles?”—and when they saw it written they queried it. As such, it became an extension of John, Stu, Paul and George: they turned heads everywhere they went, because of their clothes, their hair, their attitude, their presence, and now their collective name stopped people in their tracks.

  It also stood out as different by bucking a trend. Most (though not all) of the other Liverpool groups—in a different class to them in terms of proficiency and stage experience—followed a name formula. There was Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Derry and the Seniors, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Ken Dallas and the Silhouettes, King-Size Taylor and the Dominoes, and more. As George put it, “All the groups were ‘Harry and the Somethings’ or ‘Charlie and the Somethings’ so we decided we’d just have ‘The _____’ and that’s it. Instead of trying to get one of the fellers as the star with the rest in the back we thought we’d just all be together.”39

  The first place the Beatles played was the art school, which, during spring 1960, provided their only bookings. They still had no drummer, although this wouldn’t have been how they expressed it: in their language they didn’t lack a drummer, they lacked a fuckindrummer. But while they remained stuck at four guitars they did have the use of a second amplifier, one that had the necessary two inputs. This was bought by Sulca (the art school Students’ Union) at the urging of Bill Harry, who as Stuart’s friend was now closer to John and the others than before. Harry was on the committee and pushed through the purchase on the basis that they played the monthly Saturday-night college dance, performing to canoodling couples in the basement canteen (where, two years back, Paul and George had snuck in from the next-door Institute). The amp didn’t belong to the Beatles, it was Sulca’s property, but as the “college band” no one else used it but them.

  Jon Hague recalls the Beatles’ first appearance as a “complete fiasco—it never took off and the electrics didn’t work.”40 One can only imagine what kind of collective sound they had—close to shambolic, probably. Still, after two or three months’ rehearsal, it was a major moment for Stu finally to be playing live, to be on stage performing. He was a fumbling novice but among friends here, playing to people who picked over his deficiencies gently, if at all. It would be worse elsewhere. Shortcomings were anyway partly deflected by his eye-catching appearance: Stuart in the Beatles was not the Stuart people saw every day standing behind the easel, he was a young dude in crepe-sole shoes, tight trousers, light beard, dark glasses and hair fondly recalled by Arthur Kelly as “a foot high.” The glasses effected the James Dean look, or so people thought, but Bill Harry knew better. He ran Sulca’s film society, booking mainly continental movies; Stuart had become fascinated by the Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski, whose adoption of dark glasses had gained him the probably unwanted mantle “the Polish James Dean.” Stu’s sunglasses weren’t quite as they appeared anyway: they were shades clipped on top of his standard spectacles. He didn’t only look cool, he could see clearly without embarrassment. If John considered doing the same (and he probably did), he opted to stay blind.

  Though his influence is unlikely to have been Cybulski, Ringo Starr had also adopted the same moody look provided by sunglasses on stage. It enhanced yet further, and rather madly, the Hurricanes’ flamboyance. Rory Storm’s group, along with Cass and the Cassanovas, had been invited by Allan Williams to join the Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran bill at the Stadium. Scruffs from Liverpool on a bill with Gene fookin’ Vincent and fookin’ Eddie fookin’ Cochran! They’d even be hanging around with them backstage. It was simply incredible. Then the unthinkable happened.

  By Easter Saturday, April 16, after almost three solid months on the road, Vincent and Cochran had reached the break they’d been longing for. The following lunchtime they were flying home to America, not due back in England until the tour’s resumption on the 30th. They had been appearing this week in Bristol and from here it was a straight A-road run to London. A local man, George Martin, offered his driving services at a cheap price, and the two stars, their luggage, Sharon Sheeley (Eddie’s girlfriend and sometime songwriter) and a tour manager all packed tightly into a Ford Consul and set off. Though only 20, Martin already had two convictions for speeding, and as his car entered the town of Chippenham he was doing 80mph when he lost control and smashed into a concrete lamppost. At his trial, the court heard how the car’s roof split open and Cochran, Vincent and Sheeley were thrown out. The latter two were badly though not seriously hurt, but Cochran suffered severe head injuries; he died in a Bath hospital on Easter Day, aged 21.

  The news dropped in Liverpool like a bomb. All those young rockers counting the days until they’d be playing in the same show as Cochran were just devastated. Ringo was still feeling it fourteen years later, saying in an interview, “I’ll never forgive him [Cochran], even though he’s dead.”41 The disappointment could even, perhaps, have prompted the young drummer to make a vital decision, for in the teeth of vociferous objections at home, and from Gerry, and also from uncles and aunts, he said he was going to abandon both his apprenticeship and his fiancée and play Butlin’s with the Hurricanes. The thin walls at 10 Admiral Grove would not have prevented the neighbor
hood from hearing them all go off.

  As for Allan Williams, his ambitious plan for the Stadium show appeared to be in pieces. “I phoned Larry Parnes to say ‘I take it it’s all over,’ but he said no, Gene Vincent was OK and was willing to do it. He gave me the choice, I could either pull out or carry on, so I said, ‘Right then, let’s go ahead.’ That’s when I had the idea of adding even more Liverpool bands to the bill.”42

  Scrapping his first set of flyers, Williams had a second set printed without Cochran, and over the next few days added Jerry and the Pacemakers (Allan was never good with names), Mal Perry, Ricky Lea, Johnny and his Jets, the Connaughts with midget comedian Nicky Cuff, and Derry and the Seniors. The bill now totaled nine “professional” acts and eight from Liverpool. It would be a single three-hour show and Williams arranged for tickets to be sold from outlets throughout the city. Brian Epstein agreed to sell them from the Nems counter in exchange for the standard small commission and two complimentaries. While Eddie Cochran, in the words of his posthumous single, was taking “Three Steps to Heaven,” death was never enough to stop Liverpool.

  If George Martin hadn’t been doing eighty and hadn’t crashed, the Ford Consul would have driven Cochran and Vincent through the Berkshire town of Reading—where, oddly enough, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were also headed. In the Easter school holidays they made their way south to spend a few days with Bett and Mike Robbins and their two infant children.

  After leading a nomadic life, Mike had hung up his Butlin’s redcoat to become tenant at the Fox and Hounds pub at Caversham, a Thames-side town close to Reading. He and Bett invited Paul and a friend down for Easter, but Paul didn’t take Dot and offered the space to John. There probably wasn’t room for more than two, so Stu wasn’t asked, and George couldn’t go anyway because Blackler’s wouldn’t give him the time off. The trip gave Paul welcome undivided time with John (who in turn had come without Cyn).