Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  They were so friendly and pleasant, no massive egos. Stuart was lovely: very quiet, gentle, a really nice guy, small with dark glasses, and with fairer hair than Paul. John was nice but very different. I got the feeling he wouldn’t have bothered having us there if Paul wasn’t friendly with me. So John accepted that—he opened the door and let us through. Cynthia was there once but I can’t say she spoke to us. George didn’t really say anything. He wasn’t unpleasant, he used to say “Hello” and “What did you think of us last night?,” but that was about it.

  I mostly spoke to Paul. He was friendly and there was no unpleasantness about him at all—he didn’t stand off or anything, he was just a nice boy. There was no sexual relationship between us, we were simply mates and I was a good girl, still a virgin when I married in my twenties. I’m sure others were willing to give themselves to him. He’d give me a hug when we met and we held hands when we walked together, but he treated me right. We occasionally met at the Jacaranda for a tea or coffee. I paid and that was right: I had a job and he didn’t.

  He was very chatty—he told me he was really McCartney, not Ramon, he talked about his songwriting and we laughed because it seemed such “a teenage thing.” He talked a lot about the Beatles: how hard they needed to work to earn money and how they hoped to become famous. I always felt the Beatles were determined.

  Paul called Pat Moran “our number one fan,” accepting her as both their first and their keenest, but her enthusiasm led to some sorry consequences at home. Her father demanded to know what-the-devil a good Catholic girl was doing chasing boys who played filthy rock and roll. And when these same boys began to shape her vocabulary—she started to say “fab” and “gear” because they did—he almost hit the ceiling (but hit her instead). In the end, she drove him so mad with her nonstop chattering—Beatles for breakfast, dinner and tea—that he pronounced it a sin and ordered the first Beatles fan to seek almighty God’s forgiveness at confession. “I had to tell the priest, ‘I spend too much of my time worshipping the Beatles.’ He just ignored me and said, as he always did, ‘Remember your prayers. Say five Hail Marys and four Our Fathers and you’ll be forgiven.’ ”

  That mention of “the Beetles” in Record and Show Mirror led, a week later, to a second. A born publicist, Royston Ellis knew how to manipulate a follow-up, writing a letter for publication that clarified a point in the first. He expressed his intention to find a group that would join him on TV appearances with Bert Weedon and the Shadows, and reiterated, “For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that the ‘Beetles’ (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill.”

  This, it seems, was enough to stir John and Stu into action. Of the many curious episodes that pepper the Beatles’ story in 1960, here is one of the most fascinating, if frustratingly inconclusive. It goes something like this …

  By July 10, at the end of his three-year art school vacation, John had arrived at a key decision in his life: he would try to earn his living from the guitar. “I became a professional musician the day I got a red letter from the art college saying ‘Don’t bother coming back next September,’ ” he later said.31 Cyn would remember, “John decided that this [music] was very definitely the life for him. All the ideas that everyone else had for him of making an impact on the art world faded into the back of beyond with incredible rapidity, and with almost no regret at all. Aunt Mimi was distraught. Her view of his future couldn’t have been blacker at that time.”32

  These events coinciding, it seems John and Stu decided to head south and hang out with Royston Ellis. Allan Williams is emphatic on the matter: he says John and Stu “split the Beatles and went down to London.”33 Norman Chapman would remember Stu asking him for a lift through the Mersey Tunnel one day so he (or he and John) could hitchhike to London—“They wanted to go down to London and become involved in this poetry-music scene.”

  Beat poets led a nomadic life by definition. Ellis lived for periods in all sorts of places, but his main base was still his parents’ house, at 31 Clonard Way, Hatch End, Pinner, Middlesex, a pleasant detached villa with the name Denecroft. This was the address he gave John while staying at Gambier Terrace. When Ellis arrived home one day his mother said he’d missed a visit from his “beatnik friends from Liverpool.” He never knew how many or who had come, but—as insane as it appears—John and Stu (and/or as Ellis always thought—hoped—Georgef) had hitched the best part of two hundred miles, taken the trouble of locating his house in leafy Metroland, not stayed or left a message and then gone home again, never returning or making further contact. It makes no sense, but there it sits, illogical and incomplete.

  Allan Williams remembers them being “back in Liverpool within a week, because it didn’t work out,” at which point the Beatles “reformed” as if they’d never been away. With bookings only every Saturday, it’s conceivable they did all this without missing one, and perhaps that was always the intention. However, while three independent witnesses (Ellis, Williams and Chapman) all remember something happening, none of the Beatles ever mentioned it—though in their interviews they talked with candor about everything. So it must remain in doubt, an intriguing puzzle unlikely to be solved.

  There are two additional curiosities that may or may not be incidental. One is that, in the last days of July, a group of Liverpool art school students, apparently including John and Stu, went to London (or tried to go) to see a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

  Second, and most fascinatingly, a set of photographs taken at this very time (mid-July 1960) in Stu and John’s studio-bedroom-slum at 3 Gambier Terrace includes several people they knew but not John and Stu themselves—perhaps because they were on the Hatch End trip. It was published on July 24 in the national Sunday rag the People in a sensation-splash headlined THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR. It’s as if a man on a flaming pie was pointing down at Flat 3, Hillary Mansions, Gambier Terrace, Liverpool 1. In six months, three Beatles moved in and the fourth was hanging out, the nation’s best-known beat poet had come here to get them high, and now, when a Fleet Street journalist and photographer were looking to substantiate a load of old tosh about dirty beatniks—reportage that could have been cooked up anywhere in the country—they landed in Stu and John’s room.34

  Though hugely amusing, the feature had one unfortunate side-effect: because the address was given (a “three-roomed flat in decaying Gambier Terrace in Liverpool”) and some of the occupants (“well-educated youngsters”) were named, the landlord gave the tenant, Rod Murray, notice to quit. On August 15, everyone—Rod, Diz, Ducky, Stuart, John and sundry other bodies who’d joined them—would be out on the street.

  While all this was happening, the Beatles lost their drummer. Norman Chapman’s call-up arrived and he was off. Not for him a backwater barracks posting: he was sent to Kenya for two years to help suppress the Mau Mau uprising. “That could have been us,” the Beatles might have said, and probably did. They’d missed it by months.

  This time, the bother of looking for a replacement was beyond them: the Beatles just contracted to a four-piece and Paul went on drums, a move that coincided with a delicate moment in his life. He’d left Liverpool Institute at the end of the summer term, on July 21, and faced an unclear future. He didn’t have to leave—within a month he’d know his two A-Level results, and there was always the option of retaking anything he failed, staying on yet another year. He hadn’t ruled that out in as many words … but he was never going to do it, just as he’d somehow neglected to arrange a college or university place for September. He wasn’t going to be the only Beatle in school. Jim clung to the hope Paul would do the right thing and train to become a schoolteacher, but such plans were wafer-thin now. Paul had six weeks to sort himself out, or start looking for a job.

  For the moment, drumming was his only occupation. He already had a kit (nominally his brother Mike’s), assembled in the Quarry Men and Japage 3 days, and to these he added one or two pieces from Tommy Moore’s set,
so carelessly left behind in the Jac. Paul’s kit now had a bass drum, a snare, two fixed toms, a floor tom, two cymbals and a hi-hat—quite the best kit they’d had. It looked pretty cheap but he got a piece of card, wrote beatles. on it in individual angular lowercase letters, and stuck it on the bass drum head.

  But, as much as Paul liked exhibiting versatility, he was unhappy—he felt he’d been lumbered, that his multi-instrumental ability was tying him down. Who looked at the drummer? By rights, his place was out front, especially with his new guitar. Here he was, paying off the Solid 7 at ten bob a week and hardly getting to play it. Jealousy of Stu was stoked: Paul was in the back line while he remained out front (even if he was hiding and in dark glasses). One thing was for certain: Paul wasn’t going to abandon singing. “I was drumming with my hands, playing the hi-hat and bass drum with my feet and I had a broomstick stuck between my thighs on the end of which was a little microphone, and I’m singing ‘Tell me what’d I say …’ It wasn’t easy!”35

  Though John and George took turns behind the kit, enabling Paul to venture forward occasionally, drums was his main position for maybe three weeks, and it was one at which he was certainly accomplished. “He was quite good at it,” George said. “At least, he seemed OK. Probably we were all pretty crap at that point.”36

  John, Stu, George and Paul played the Grosvenor as a quartet probably just once before the weekly dances came to a halt, stopped because of the violence. Though most of the three hundred or so teenagers—Pat Moran among them—caused no trouble, they lost their Saturday fixture and so did the Beatles. Now they had nowhere to play.

  They weren’t the only Liverpool group suddenly desperate for Allan Williams to do something. In mid-June, he’d signed a contract for Derry and the Seniors to appear in Idols on Parade, Larry Parnes’ summer season in Blackpool. It was a fairish deal, up to six weeks at £75–90 a week between them from July 17, enticing enough for the Liverpool musicians to quit their jobs. But then, at something approaching the eleventh hour, Parnes withdrew the offer. The relationship between the two entrepreneurs had gone into such a steep decline it was now terminated, which left Derry and the Seniors high and dry. They wasted little time making Williams aware he had to help them—and because there was no work anywhere in Liverpool, and because he was Allan Williams, he said he’d drive them all to London. They could look up his friend Tom Littlewood at the 2i’s.

  They arrived in Soho hot, hungry, tired and about to get incredibly lucky. Their first piece of good fortune was that the rock acts Littlewood managed, who normally sang in the 2i’s tiny basement, were all on tour. With the stage more or less empty, Derry and the Seniors were free to get up and play. Then came a second stroke of luck, which Williams would rightly label “a million to one chance.” In a coincidence so extraordinary it beggars belief, also sitting in the 2i’s at that moment was Bruno Koschmider. He was back in London to find another English group for the Kaiserkeller.g “It was like Stanley meeting Livingstone,” Williams says, with understandable lyricism. (“Herr Koschmider!” “Herr Williams!”) The great 2i’s, wellspring first of British skiffle, then rock and roll, completed the holy trinity by propelling Liverpool groups to Hamburg. As soon as Derry and the Seniors struck up their first number they blew the Londoners out of the room, just as Williams had told Koschmider they would. Bruno liked them, ja.

  Williams couldn’t very well conduct rival business in his friend’s club, so he ushered Koschmider out of the 2i’s and into Act One—Scene 1: the coffee bar opposite. Locating an interpreter in London’s most cosmopolitan village presented no difficulty and soon the two men were shaking hands on the business agreement they’d floated at the start of February, by which Williams would send across to Hamburg any English entertainment Koschmider might want. Having come to London to find work for the Seniors, Williams produced a blank Jacaranda Enterprises contract from his briefcase; having been a stage magician before owning bars, Koschmider produced a Kaiserkeller rubber stamp from his pocket. Williams wrote out the terms, Koschmider stamped it, and the two men signed. Derry and the Seniors would play thirty hours a week for two months, for £100 a week less 10 percent for Williams. This was July 24; seven nights later they were in Hamburg and ready to rock. As sax man Howie Casey recalls, “We took cabs to Grosse Freiheit from Central Station. At this point, Hamburg just looked like any other city, foreign but still a city, and then suddenly we started to drive into a different area with lights and clubs. These naive boys were being driven into this hell-hole of iniquity—it was marvelous.”37

  Allan Williams had landed a miracle for Derry & Co., but what of the Beatles? There was nothing, really. Those local bookings had dried up. He told them about Hamburg, saying his association with a club owner there might lead to something for them, but that was all he had. With debts mounting and nowhere to play, they needed something now … and so it was that Williams fixed them their oddest job yet: to provide backing for a striptease artiste at his other-other operation, the shady “private members” club in Liverpool 8 he jointly owned with Harold Phillips, his calypsonian comrade Lord Woodbine.

  In bigger venues strippers disrobed to live music, here they did it to discs. A few days into August, though, they were sent a Manchester girl who insisted she’d strip only to a live band. Woodbine told Williams, who told the Beatles, a small fee was on offer if they’d play while “Janice” stripped.h It was an indignity, but they were boys ’twixt 17 and 20 so there was only going to be one answer.

  The lineup was still John, Stu, George and Paul, a foursome with Paul on drums, all in Mr. Richards’ lilac jackets. Janice handed them sheet music, including a Beethoven piece and, for her rousing finale, “España Cañí,” the so-called “Spanish Gypsy Dance.” In an article he wrote two years later, Paul recalled, “We said, ‘We can’t read music, sorry, but instead of the “Spanish Fire Dance” [sic] we can play “The Harry Lime Cha-Cha,” which we’ve arranged ourselves, and instead of Beethoven you can have “Moonglow” or “September Song”—take your pick … and instead of the “Sabre Dance” we’ll give you “Ramrod.” ’ So that’s what she got. She seemed quite satisfied anyway.”38

  So tiny was the stage, Janice had to romp right in among them. It was an act she prolonged as much as possible, long on tease and short on strip, but eventually it got most of the way there, down to a G-string. The Beatles feasted their eyes and then played her off as she returned to the coal cellar that doubled as a dressing room.

  Saddened as she was at no longer having the Beatles rock her every Saturday night, the main concern of Pat Moran, their first fan, was for the boys themselves. “I knew they were hard up, that they weren’t earning much or had jobs, and because I had a proper job I sent them money. I folded pound notes in such a way that they couldn’t be seen through the envelope, and I also sent stamped addressed return envelopes so Paul would reply. He did, and he wrote Beatles in script on the back of them.” Pat had all sorts of plans: she offered to start a petition to get the Beatles more bookings; she offered to have a word with her uncle, Bill Gregson, who led the resident dance orchestra at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, to ask if he’d put the Beatles on; she even started to organize them a holiday at a little cottage in Rhyl, for which secrecy from her father was paramount (“He’d have most probably lynched me if he’d found out”).

  Two of Paul’s letters back to Pat reveal pretty much what was going on for the Beatles at this moment. The first was written on Sunday, August 7, and posted late on the 8th:

  If it’s OK, George (Carl) and I might be able to come—we fancy the idea of a holiday.

  Oh yes! I hope your uncle can fix us up with something, anyway if he can’t it’ll make us get around and look for some good bookings ourselves—it works both ways. I hope.

  Have you got your embroidered sweater yet, No. 1 fan?i

  The second letter chased the first into the mailbox late on the Monday:

  This note is to let you know that I think everything you’r
e doing for us is great.

  I’ve seen John since I wrote the first letter and he says he can come too if you don’t mind. This is very nearly definite. See—we were promised some tours of Scotland, road shows, trips to Hamburg & everything but we don’t believe any of them, & a couple of promises have been broken already, so we’ll probably be able to come; we can hitchhike down there. It’s not far—is it?

  I think it’s a great idea about the petition.

  You ask me if I’m offended by your giving me all these gear things; well, I’m not—I’m flattered and I don’t know what to say! I don’t know how you can do all this for us, you must think we’re not bad, or else you’re just a kind hearted type.

  Everything was coming to a head. Individually and collectively the Beatles had drip repayments for equipment they’d no prospect of being able to meet, running the risk of Hessy’s reclaiming them; Paul was coming under pressure at home for doing nothing about school or college—he wanted neither but the alternative meant being badgered into a job; George was enduring parental sermons along the same lines; John had mortally wounded Mimi (and aggravated her ulcer, she said) because he was unfit for proper work—plus, he’d pledged his future to a career she hated and which was petering out before it even started; and on top of everything else, John and Stu were being evicted from Gambier Terrace a week from now, had no place to go and no money to get there. They were on the brink.

  Paul remembers their attitude at such times: “We had this way of getting over problems—someone would say, ‘Well, what are we going to do now?’ and we’d say, ‘Well, something’ll happen,’ and the four of us believed that. Nobody would ever go, ‘What do you mean, “Something’ll happen”? That’s no answer!’ We’d go, ‘Yeah, something will happen.’ There was this, like, faith.”39