Paul’s challenge was greater. He wasn’t going to miss out on Scotland, no fear, but he was just a couple of weeks from sitting his A-Levels, a period the school liked to insist was devoted to concentrated revision. More than that, a written paper for his Art exam was to be taken in the coming week and he would miss it.2 Few greater illustrations exist of what the group meant to Paul McCartney, of his keenness, his confidence in the power of persuasion, and his instinct about how to win over his dad. His ploy was complex: first to fabricate that Liverpool Institute had given all A-Level students a preexam week off, and then to praise the restorative powers of fresh air for the tired mind.3 A trip would do his exam chances the world of good, he said, and everyone knew there was no fresher air than in the Scottish Highlands. Oh, go on, Dad—all the others are playing! Only if Jim McCartney was a mug could he have swallowed such deceit, and he was no such thing. Nevertheless, this latest battle with his eldest son ended quickly and, like most others, in defeat and with a resigned shrug. Mary would most certainly have said no and that would have been the end of the matter, but Mary had been gone coming up four years.
The Institute was another thing entirely: The Baz would yield to no tactics of any kind, and in his long years as headmaster had heard them all. There was nothing else for Paul but to feign sickness on the Friday, all of the following week, and probably the Monday after—a scam that might well have entailed an elaborate illness and concluded, on his return, with the forgery of a handwritten letter from his dad. Putting one over on the school was simply too tasty for Paul to keep quiet about. Ivan Vaughan, who’d got him into John’s group in the first place, argued with him that exams had to come first, that he mustn’t fritter away his Art A-Level like this. Another student, Ian Caulfield, says, “The conventional wisdom among my classmates was what a stupid idiot he was, ruining his career.”4
George had an equally big problem: Blackler’s or Beatles? Actually, no contest. While it isn’t clear if he asked for the time off and was refused, or didn’t bother asking because he knew what the answer would be, he arrived with speed at his decision. At the same moment Richy Starkey was on the cusp of chucking in his apprenticeship to go off and play drums in Wales, George chucked in his apprenticeship to go and play guitar in Scotland.
The decision went down badly at home. In postwar Liverpool, where times were never less than tough, if you had a trade you were made and if you abandoned a trade you were mad. There was no accommodation for defeatism, on top of which George had stiff financial commitments; how did he plan to pay off his Futurama without a bloody wage? Harry Harrison was greatly upset, but, as usual, George could not be shifted from his position once his mind was made up—a trait he’d got straight from his dad. As Harry would remember, “I told George it would be better if he was only a part-time professional, but our George is a determined lad.”5 He’d been at Blackler’s exactly six months when he threw the job back at them with, at most, a few hours’ notice.
All this was contingent on Allan Williams persuading Tommy Moore to go with them, which was far from clear-cut. Moore wasn’t “one of them,” he was an old man, approaching 29, a factory worker, not the brightest of sparks to join a group of cocky grammar-school kids; but on the almost literal eve of departure they simply had to have him. No drummer meant no booking, so now was not the moment to be choosy.
Moore had to be encouraged to beg time off from the Garston Bottle Company, or feign sickness, but he said yes; £15 was more than he earned driving the forklift and maybe he simply fancied the chance of playing drums for a week, and gazing upon glorious Scottish scenery instead of the factory clock. His woman told him he was a fool but Moore told Williams he was on board. For at least the week ahead, Tommy Moore was a Silver Beatle.*
Or was he? It was in this time frame, give or take a day or two, that the name evolved once more, when the Silver was dropped and they became the Beatles unadorned. While Stu held out for Beatals just a little longer, and Allan Williams continued to call them the Silver Beetles (and advertise them this way) well into the summer, they were, clean and clear, the Beatles.
Williams’ role in getting them the Scotland tour and his taking of a commission defines the moment when he became the Beatles’ manager.† It was a position he acted upon with immediate effect: while they were away he fixed them a string of local bookings for their return. This doesn’t mean he was convinced of the Beatles’ great potential or had grand ideas about how to make them international stars, rather that there was a situation to be explored for mutual benefit. Mostly it was a relationship rooted in his amity with Stuart and his appreciation of the lads’ personal qualities. As he reflects, “They were rough, and I probably wouldn’t have managed them if it wasn’t for their personalities: they were a bit more intelligent than most other groups. They weren’t the run-of-the-mill average thickie doing rock ’n’ dole.”6
The Beatles weren’t the only group Williams looked after, and he wasn’t their first manager; as far as John, Paul and George were concerned, he was their third, after Nigel Walley and Derek Hodkin, and they measured him against that yardstick.
They had, at most, the night of Thursday, May 19, to rehearse. Rod Murray remembers a practice session in his front room at Gambier Terrace when Tommy Moore played drums, and this might be it. Then they went home to pack. They didn’t have much beyond the single stage outfit got for the Fury audition, and Tommy didn’t even have that. They forgot to tell Brian Kelly they couldn’t play at Lathom Hall; they probably had a small advance on their fee from Allan Williams, sufficient to buy train tickets; and by Friday morning, while all their mates were at school or work, they were off to Scotland like professional musicians, the first Liverpool rock group to go on tour.
Where we going, Johnny?
Alloa, boys, to Alloa, the county town of distant Clackmannanshire.
Where the——?
It was a long old journey, plenty enough time for the excitement to rise and fall. Paul had his 1957 guitar still, the Zenith; George had the Futurama he might soon have to surrender back to Hessy’s if he couldn’t meet the drip; John had his Club Footy and Stu his Hofner bass; the separate pieces of Tommy’s kit were carried among them. As for amplification, they didn’t have enough, probably only Paul’s little Elpico. “In Scotland … they had no amplifiers,” John wrote a few months later, suggesting they’d not been able to bring the art school amp. Begging and borrowing was a permanent state for these boys.
Johnny Gentle was pretty much unknown to them. In the Parnes stable there were unofficial but clear A, B and C stalls and Gentle was in the last, sometimes not even mentioned when his manager named his artists in press interviews. If the Beatles had caught Gentle singing on TV it was only once or twice, down the bottom of bills, and it’s unlikely they knew his Philipslabel records, not one of which had made the NME or Record Retailer charts and all of which were the kind of sappy 45s from which they instinctively recoiled.7 Did they even know he was John Askew from Liverpool, born in 1936 off Scotland Road? “We thought it was a pity we were out on tour with a Gentle,” Paul has said, “because we’d wanted a Fury or an Eager.” Still, the idea of being “big time” was intoxicating, as Paul remembers:
We all thought, “This is it! We’ve arrived, we’re showbiz people now. He’s Johnny Gentle, who do you want to be?” So, in the Larry Parnes spirit, George became Carl Harrison, after Carl Perkins, Stuart became Stuart de Staël, after his favorite painter Nicolas de Staël, Tommy Moore became Thomas Moore—he signed autographs “Thomas Moore, drums”—and I became Paul Ramon, which seemed to me like a sexy French name. It made us all seem like these great London showbiz guys. When you were in Fraserburgh, instead of saying “I’m a kid from Liverpool” it suggested there was something more to you. It’s an old trick.8
John’s subsequent insistence that he kept his real name (“because I could never find one I liked better than my own; that was the only thing I ever clung on to, that I never changed my name”) has
at times been confirmed and refuted by Paul. The proof rests in two sets of autographs from this week, where he signed himself Johnny Lennon. This was a tour with two Johnnies.9
Their first date was the Friday-night dance in the fine ballroom of Alloa Town Hall, an area of maple floor, big windows, a balcony with seats. Apart from their Carroll Levis dates, John, Paul and George had never played anywhere so grand. There was time only for a half-hour rehearsal … and during this the bubble of excitement burst. Here they were, meant to be professionals, about to go on stage before a paying audience, and they didn’t know the songs Gentle wanted to sing. They knew them, from radio or records, but they’d never played them. It was a challenge for all five, but especially for that there de Staël on bass who had no hope whatever of playing songs he hadn’t painstakingly been shown. It was a setback they’d fail to overcome to any satisfactory degree throughout the tour.
Though he wouldn’t have known them anyway, Gentle hadn’t been told who his group would be—partly because their involvement was arranged so late, and partly because these things were always so. It was the lot of solo singers to be shunted from hall to hall and given a pickup band, they and everyone else shortchanged in the process. The Beatles, however, were a sight worse than Gentle had encountered before. They had to scrounge the use of an amp, their ability was mixed, and they were scruffy: their stage clothes were also their everyday clothes, quickly showing signs of distress. As George would recall, “We were like orphans. Our shoes were full of holes and our trousers were a mess, while Johnny Gentle had a posh suit.”10 Larry Parnes’ local man in Scotland was Duncan MacKinnon—he was the promoter who fixed up the seemingly endless cycle of visits north o’ the border by the likes of Messrs Gentle, Power and Eager—and he was not pleased with the Beatles. Not at all. He was soon on the phone to London, lodging a complaint that Allan Williams (who heard it secondhand from Parnes) remembers as “they’re a scruffy no-good group.”11
Having got the booking at such short notice, the Beatles weren’t named in newspaper ads for any of the seven dates they’d be playing—it was always “Johnny Gentle and His Group.” And there are only three known photographs from the entire week, all taken on the first night here at Alloa.‡ They feature Gentle of course—white sports jacket and, miraculously, shoes that almost matched the Beatles’—and it’s fortunate that one shot happens also to include a member of his backing group. Here is Carl, twanging his Futurama, his face tight. Pressed up to the lip of the stage, by the footlights, a row of girls gaze admiringly upon the star … and only the star. The Beatles are just His Group. “We were crummy, horrible, an embarrassment,” George would say. “We didn’t have amplifiers or anything.”12
An eyewitness from one of the midweek dances says the Beatles performed three numbers on stage before Gentle made his entrance, John singing them all, and also that Gentle performed a couple of songs from a chair brought on stage for him. The songs the Beatles had to play have never been convincingly remembered. John Askew liked Bobby Darin, Brook Benton, Perry Como and Dinah Washington, but Johnny Gentle’s career had been routed down a different track: his records were all “beat ballads” and the only songs ever mentioned in reviews of his stage work (on the occasions he played the bigger tours) were designed to get the girls cooing, chart hits such as “Only Sixteen,” “Living Doll” and “A Teenager in Love” and oldies like “I’m Confessin’ ” and “Alright, Okay, You Win.” “Johnny Gentle is one of the new school—good looking, quiet, relaxed,” Jack Good noted in his weekly Disc column. While it’s possible that in Scotland, away from Parnes’ watchful eye, Gentle performed a little more rock—George would remember them doing Elvis’s “Teddy Bear” and “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”—there wouldn’t have been much: he had to give the audience what his name suggested and they expected, and as at least three of the week’s presentations were called The Beat Ballad Show this was clearly the main menu. In all, Gentle performed less than an hour, and they went on stage here in Alloa after a support act, Alex Harvey and his Big Beat Band.13
The Beatles didn’t know this opening night was the biggest they would play. It was Friday, payday, a good ballroom in a populous area, and the man advertised as a “Star of TV and Decca Recording Fame” had come to town.§ Of the seven dates, Alloa was the only one to receive a local paper write-up: a piece headlined GENTLE ADMIRERS WERE GENTLE was published with a photograph of the Parnes boy draped by nine local lasses. The attendance was “exceptionally large” and the police prevented a few young females from trying to mount the stage and touch the heartthrob. Nonetheless, the audience was more orderly this night than when other beat boys had visited, with fewer “screaming teenage girls,” and the person who threw pennies at the musicians during Johnny’s performance had been quickly removed from the hall. There was no explicit mention of the backing group.14
Crummy, horrible, embarrassing on stage … it was generally worse off it, when they were exposed to an absence of care shown them by Parnes and MacKinnon—or, for that matter, Allan Williams. They had to pay for their food throughout the week and find their own accommodation at least twice. Mostly they stayed in a small, respectable riverside hotel in Inverness, but they spent at least one night in a Dormobile van and Paul would return to Liverpool with tales of sleeping in a hayloft.15 The van, provided by MacKinnon to ferry musicians and their gear/luggage between towns, was papered with posters from his promotions, so everyone knew they were entertainers.
Little is known of how the troupe spent the long offstage hours, beyond the fact they completely got on each other’s nerves. George would recall, “There weren’t enough seats in the van, and somebody had to sit on the inside of the mudguard on the back wheel—usually Stu.”16 The de Staël desire to be a rock star was put to a severe test during the course of the week, when everyone made his life a misery. Paul played a more open hand than usual, sniping away the entire time, and George played a closed hand, literally hitting him: “I had a lot of fist fights with Stuart. It was fighting for your inch then. I suppose the reason I was fighting him was that in the ego pecking order he wasn’t really a musician.”17 John weighed in too, of course, mouthing off at his best friend and flatmate, the guy who not four months earlier he’d been so desperate to entice into the group. “We were terrible. We’d tell Stu he couldn’t sit with us, or eat with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did. That was how he learned to be with us. It was all stupid, but that was what we were like.” In one town, they heard—or imagined they’d heard—that a circus had not long departed and that a dwarf had slept in a particular hotel bed. They insisted Stu sleep in it; no one else would, so it had to be him.18
Even more than Stu, however, the Lennon tongue was directed at Tommy Moore. Here was a verbal cruelty that knew no bounds, especially when his target’s weakness—and the unlikelihood of a physical response—had been assessed. He wound up Tommy from start to finish, unrelenting, until the drummer (he liked jazz) was utterly sick to death of the Beatles, the van, the tour and life. This “weakness,” as Allan Williams calls it, was nothing Moore could change. “Tommy was a simple man, not very bright, and he was also much older than them, so he stood no chance: John Lennon had no time for anybody who wasn’t on his wavelength.” As George would reflect, “John was very tough. He had that ability to be gentle and soft and lovely but he was acid too. He gave that hard edge to the Beatles.”19
Not much of this behavior was modified by the arrival of Margie. Johnny Gentle brought along his bird, a Berkshire blonde who, they gathered, had modeled for men’s magazines Spick and Span. With her fine features, modish dress and spirited personality, she turned heads everywhere in Scotland, which seemed to all of them several years behind the times. As double-rooms in hotels could only be taken by married couples, it was necessary to pretend they were, and it seems the ruse was extended to the Beatles. In spite of the terrible behavior among themselves, they demonstrated they knew too their adult-instilled values of politeness by calli
ng her “Mrs. Gentle.”20
Alloa was the only date in the south of Scotland. They didn’t emerge again from the van until they’d bumped their way 150 miles north, through the Cairngorms mountains to Inverness—George and John returning to a town visited in childhood holidays. Though the “Silver Beats” should have been at Lathom Hall in Seaforth, they spent Saturday night playing a Beat Ballad Show with Johnny Gentle upstairs in the Northern Meeting Ballroom. The management provided an alternative entertainment on the ground floor, where the good folk of Inverness—in their tartan kilts, dresses and ghillies—were dancing jigs, hornpipes, Gay Gordons and reels to Lindsay Ross and his Famous Broadcasting Band. These musicians were celebrating the release of their first record, issued by Parlophone only the previous day. It had been recorded three weeks earlier by a tall, good-looking and wryly amusing young man up from London, George Martin, who was making his annual Scottish sortie to capture the latest sounds.
The beat boys spent the remainder of the week in the van, trundling back and forth between here and Peterhead, mostly driving in their own tire tracks along the northeast coastal roads. After playing Friday and Saturday, Gentle’s next show was Monday night in Fraserburgh, and they spent much of Sunday hanging around Inverness. Paul sent home a postcard saying they were “going down better than Vince Eager or Duffy Power.”21 George and John lounged around their hotel with Johnny Gentle. He was an easygoing individual and a fair musician: he played a guitar he’d made during his days as a ship’s carpenter, and he wrote songs. Half of the six sides on his three singles were his own words and music. He tells the story of how, here in Inverness, he showed John and George a song he’d written though not yet finished, called “I’ve Just Fallen for Someone.”
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