Criminal charges were not pressed, but Koschmider, inevitably, had the last laugh. It wasn’t a camp to which Paul and Pete were being taken, but the airport—and in handcuffs, according to Stuart. They were being deported, and banned from reentering Germany unless they lodged an appeal within a month. Auf Wiedersehen, Piedels! Handed their passports at the gate, they were put on the London plane, set to fly for the first time in their lives. It then got even tastier for Koschmider because Eckhorn was billed for at least part of the cost of the plane tickets. Bruno must have been rubbing his hands with joy.
At the time all this was happening, George was sailing from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, praying he had enough money for the train into London, for porters (necessary), a taxi to Euston, train to Liverpool and taxi out to Speke. “I had too many things to carry and was standing in the corridor of the train with my belongings around me, and lots of soldiers on the train, drinking. I finally got to Liverpool and took a taxi home—I just about made it. I got home penniless. It took everything I had to get me back. I felt ashamed, after all the big talk when we set off for Hamburg.” 44
Paul and Pete reached Liverpool at more or less the same time. They traveled with no money at all, or possessions. Everything was still at Reeperbahn 136—musical equipment, luggage, purchases, cash. They had only the clothes they’d thrown on when the police burst in. From London Airport they took a courtesy bus to West London Air Terminal in Kensington and then the Tube to Euston, perhaps dodging the fare. Without money for tickets to Liverpool, Pete phoned home and Mona said she’d wire cash to the station’s post office. They had to hang around Euston several hours and it wasn’t until early the following morning that Pete finally arrived back in West Derby and Paul in Allerton. Like George, they felt the embarrassment of such ignominious returns.
Mike remembers Paul full of speedy talk about what a fantastic time they’d had and what wonderful things he’d bought for them … and then he sat down on the couch and revealed legs “as thin and white as dad’s pipe-cleaners.” Jim thought Paul looked half-dead, a skeleton, in dire need of nourishment and rest. “What an object of art!” exclaimed Mona when she saw Pete in his leather jacket, torn jeans and cowboy boots.45 Louise wasn’t around to greet George—she’d sailed to Ontario, Canada, to see her daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and one of her brothers, and wouldn’t be home for five months; Harry was very pleased to welcome back his youngest boy—and wondered, as did they all, whether these children would finally now “settle down,” having surely got this rock and roll music out of their system.
John and Stu were still in Hamburg. On the same day Paul and Pete were sent home, December 1, they had to fill in forms for work and residence permits; Stu was planning to stay until January and what John had in mind isn’t known. It was moot anyway: when they had a further interview on the 6th, they were told they couldn’t work, and that while Stu could stay on temporarily, John had to leave Germany by the 10th. He spent some of these days with Stu, Astrid and Nielsa at 45a Eimsbütteler Strasse and he played with Tony Sheridan in the odd Top Ten session, Rory Storm—sacked from the Kaiserkeller—singing here too.
It all ended on December 7 when John became the fourth Beatle to head home, having flogged clothes to pay for his travel. His journey was the same as George’s—train, boat, two or three more trains, maybe taxis—and he was hellishly burdened, shaped into the very hunchback he’d been acting on stage these months. “It was terrible, setting off home on my own. I had my amp on my back, scared stiff I was going to get it pinched. I hadn’t paid for it. I was convinced I’d never find England.”46 He got back to Liverpool on December 8, 1960, in the middle of the night. There was nowhere to go but Mendips, and John knew very well how this humiliating return would be greeted by Mimi. She made him wait. He had to throw stones up at her bedroom window before she went down to open the door.
Well! Mimi had never-seen-such-a-sight-in-all-her-born-days.
As Paul had defied his dad in the way he’d left school, and breached his every resistance to Hamburg, Jim felt it was time to lay down some rules. Paul was back home in the middle of the academic year, so any resumption of studies—if he could be persuaded, which didn’t seem likely—would have to wait until September 1961. Jim saw months of nothing-much stretching ahead and was determined to prevent it. “Satan finds work for idle hands,” he kept saying.47
Paul went down the Labor Exchange at Renshaw Hall and landed a £10-a-week Christmas-period job with SPD Ltd., Speedy Prompt Deliveries. He was “second man” on a lorry, hopping off to deliver parcels while the driver waited with the engine running. The depot was at 51 Sefton Street, by a scruffy patch of dock road wasteland called the Bally, and Paul had to be down there five mornings a week at 6:30, riding the early bus in the damp wintry darkness with other working men. He fancied himself as one, wearing a donkey jacket and unusually buying the Daily Mirror.48 It was like Hamburg had never happened.
Paul and Dot picked up relations where they’d left off. If she pressed him on the question of his fidelity he had the ultimate answer, a ring for her finger … except it was still in Hamburg. George, who had no girlfriend, popped around to see Arthur Kelly and sink a pint or two. As Arthur remembers, “He came to my house wearing cowboy boots and tight jeans. Going out like that was risky—you could get the shit kicked out of you for it, but I was still as envious as buggery.”49 Having harbored all those gloomy thoughts about his place in the Beatles, George was hugely relieved to find Paul and Pete home. He was missing out on nothing, which meant he could probably resist his dad’s prodding to get a job. No matter what they did next, it would be done together. All they had to do was wait for John to get home, to find out what it was.
They’d no idea he was back in Liverpool, because John was lying low. He was at a crossroads. It was rare for him to consider anything quite so carefully, but five months after deciding to earn his living from the guitar, he took stock of his position. “I had to think it over. It had been quite a shattering experience to be in a foreign country. We were pretty young. I’d come home on my own, with no money and just carrying amplifiers and guitars. I was thinking, ‘Is this what I want to do? Is this it? Nightclubs? Seedy scenes? Being deported? Weird people in the clubs?’ I thought hard about it: ‘Should I continue doing this?’ ”50
These were days that must have given Mimi faint hope, a straw to clutch, that John might yet set aside these foolish things and turn his talents to something useful, like a job. His decision would dash that once and for all. At least John had Cyn for comfort, and they consumed each other again. The last day of art school before the Christmas break was December 16 and John saw her lunchtimes and nighttimes.
Pete and Mona were already in touch with Peter Eckhorn, arranging transportation of the gear he and Paul had left behind. John and George had their guitars and amps, but Paul’s unSolid 7 was still in Hamburg along with his Elpico amp, and Pete’s drum kit was still parked on the Top Ten stage. Pete had recently written BEATLES ROCK COMBO on the bass drum head, his preferred name for them. If they were going to play again—and the Casbah was the obvious place to kick off—they needed the gear back. Eckhorn was as cooperative as Koschmider was obstructive, arranging a shipment that was due in Liverpool before Christmas.
In the Beatles’ absence—which wasn’t noticed—the Liverpool rock scene had continued to grow. The busiest individual was Bob Wooler, its guiding hand and wit in residence. Telling colleagues “This is not my station in life,” he uncoupled from a steady job as a railway clerk at Garston Docks to become a full-time rock and roll professor and champion. It was a courageous move for a man of almost 35 (though he never admitted his age), but Allan Williams had been at his most persuasive, offering him the top job at the Top Ten: day-to-day manager as well as DJ and MC. Williams hadn’t wasted a moment to rush through the launching of the first seven-days-a-week rock club in the center of Liverpool … yet his haste was its undoing. The club opened for business on December 1
(at the very moment George, Paul and Pete were struggling home from Hamburg), and its location was all wrong. One end of Soho Street joined Islington, which wasn’t too far from Lime Street, but number 100 was up the top end, close to Everton. It was well beyond easy reach from the city center and in a part of Liverpool with a reputation. Williams knew right away he’d made an error of judgment when he drove around the area in his minibus, making announcements about the club’s opening, and people started throwing stones at him.51
In too deep, he pressed on. As well as appointing Wooler, he booked good talent from a London agency to appear alongside all the Liverpool groups, he brought in an ultraviolet light that made everyone appear drenched in dandruff, and he hired the most breathtaking Swiss-made jukebox anyone had ever seen. The building attracted much comment too: it was an old wood-built factory with low beams. “Even I was banging my head on them,” says the 5ft 3in entrepreneur. “I had to put up signs everywhere telling people to duck their head.”
There was trouble right away with the local toughs, and Wooler also worried about all the electrical apparatus—and so many people smoking—upstairs in a wooden building. Sure enough, after just six nights, half an hour after the club had emptied for the evening, the place burned down. It was gone in minutes. “Someone got careless with the Bryant & May’s,” Wooler always said, one of many to think it a torch job, or an insurance job by Williams, but an investigation found overloaded electricity as the cause.
Paul and George went to Soho Street the next day. The fantastic new club meant to establish the Beatles in their home city was smoldering timber. How very strange that, after two of them had been deported for trying to burn down the Bambi—in John’s jokey words, the official order was “Bad Beatles, you must go home and light your English cinemas”52—the Liverpool satellite of their favorite Hamburg club burned down before they even got there. Herr Koschmider would have loved that.
The destruction of the Top Ten (which Wooler was already calling “the Soho Street hotspot”) brought out ulcers in Allan Williams and he went into hospital. Beyond his loss, he felt bad about having enticed Wooler to jettison a job for one already gone up in smoke. Williams also asked him to “look after the Beatles—get them some work.”
George was introduced to Wooler in the Jac on December 15, when he went to collect a letter Stuart had sent him—and he was very surprised to find John in there too. He was back! In a warm and chatty return letter posted the following day, four pages that spoke volumes for their friendship, George gave Stu the Beatles’ latest news and views. They had bookings for Christmas Eve, Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve, and a man he called “some queer bloke” seemed particularly keen to put work their way. George begged Stu to return quickly to Liverpool because Paul would be a “crumby” bass player—even if he had a bass guitar and amp to use—and George wanted the Beatles to be at their best: “I would like to have the whole group appearing for our first few bookings at least, so as to go down well from the start. So how about coming home, son. Wouldn’t it be good, Astrid’s first Christmas in England!”d
The “queer bloke” in George’s letter was surely Wooler—queer probably meant in the sense of being singular. Wooler was a homosexual, but this, like his age, was a secret he guarded deeply and to which he gave no outward clue—it would be surprising if George had already twigged it. Wooler’s keenness to find the Beatles work was being executed in good faith: he’d barely or never seen them play and was accepting Williams’ assurance that Hamburg had made them hot. Though not doing anything themselves to bring about this new arrangement, the Beatles would benefit enormously from being taken under Bob Wooler’s wing. He was astute, he encouraged, he had everyone’s respect and he kept his word.
After the Top Ten fire, Wooler was approached by Brian Kelly. “Beekay” was now fully switched on to rock, promoting jive dances throughout the north end, two or three a week, and he offered Wooler general charge: booking manager, stage manager, compere and DJ. Kelly ran Liverpool’s best circuit, and as the Beatles no longer wanted to play in the Jacaranda coal-hole, they were ideal for Wooler to bring together. But Kelly was also the man they’d let down seven months earlier, when he’d advertised them for a Saturday dance in Seaforth and they rushed off to Scotland without telling him. He’d sworn never to book them again, and it was only because of Wooler’s high regard, and some Williams-like persuasion skills, that Kelly grudgingly agreed, adding them to a dance at Litherland Town Hall on the 27th. He did so even after being affronted by the £8 fee Wooler asked for them. Kelly offered £4 and they settled on £6. Wooler took no commission.
“When George and Paul found out [I was home] they were mad at me because they thought we could have been working,” John would say. It was only a week for him, but they’d been home two. Like George, Paul had been “wondering whether it was going to carry on or if that was the last of it.”53 Now that John had done his thinking, and he was pointing forward, this was where they would go.
Still, they had to get themselves sorted out, and fast. Johnny Gustafson was taken aback to see George in the Jacaranda and even more surprised to be asked to join the Beatles as their new (or at least temporary) bass player. Content in the Cassanovas, he declined.54 Instead, the Beatles took on Chas Newby as a short-term fix. Pete’s friend had already offered himself for the two-week Christmas college break, expecting to replace George in Hamburg; instead, he deputized for Stu in Liverpool.
Their first booking was for the members of the Casbah Coffee Club on Saturday the 17th. The Quarrymen had last played here in January, now they were back as the Beatles and the club belonged to their drummer. As long as Pete was in the group, 8 Hayman’s Green would be a useful base and Mona Best an indomitable ally. John, Paul, George, Chas and Pete had a quick rehearsal, the last two using gear borrowed from local group Gene Day and the Jango Beats, Paul perhaps playing his old Zenith. Chas, a left-hander, was new to the bass, and because he wasn’t allowed to restring Tommy McGuirk’s right-handed Hofner President, he had to play it upside down. McGuirk also loaned him a leather jacket, and though it had a furry collar it just about looked the part. Newby remembers having to learn “Wooden Heart” (by Elvis, not yet released in Britain), “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “Hallelujah, I Love Her So.”
Pete’s regular letters home from Hamburg had assured his best friend and housemate Neil Aspinall of the Beatles’ massive improvement since they’d left Liverpool. Neil took the news in good faith, made a poster announcing Return of the Fabulous Beatles and pinned it on the club wall. Come the night, he saw his hyperbole fully justified. “They could have been awful for all I knew. I was upstairs when they started playing, then Rory [Best] came and found me—’Hey, come and see them!’ And wow, they were so fuckin’ good. Their music was very different and they were scruffier than ever in twat ’ats, cowboy boots and leather.”55
In his own particular dead-straight manner, Aspinall was a Beatles fan from this moment … as was everyone else at the Casbah. Pete remembers, “We belted it out exactly as we had been doing in Hamburg, and you could physically feel the crowd gasp. It just silenced them. When we finished the first number the place went into rapture, it just exploded.” The Beatles hadn’t told Chas their act involved a lot of stomping, and by the end of the night—they closed with a riotous “What’d I Say”—his feet had lost all feeling. “It was only a year since I’d seen them as the Quarrymen and they were vastly better. They were much more professional and had a really solid sound. I was frightened to death of making mistakes.”56
Between this date and their next on Christmas Eve—back at the old familiar Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard—the Beatles’ ship came in. Pete and Mo went down to the customs shed to retrieve the gear they’d left in Hamburg. Unable to fit the crate into the taxi, they had to dismantle it on the quay, in a bitterly cold wind. Through their efforts, the Beatles were really ready to rip.57
The year that began hopelessly ended explosively. They played the Casbah o
n New Year’s Eve, in the cellar of the house in West Derby,e but the moment when things really kicked off for the Beatles in Liverpool, the night that presaged high times, was the one Bob Wooler fixed with Beekay in the ballroom of Litherland Town Hall on Tuesday, December 27.
Here, a mile from the Mersey docks in a northern working-class suburb, the ferocious waiters and angel friends of St. Pauli were a world away. No bawdy neon or guttural barkers punctured the quiet, dark night, just two to three hundred young Liverpudlians, loping Lowry-like toward the council ballroom, lasses in dresses, lads in suits, ties and quiffs, some hoping for a scrap. This was home.
Patrons paid three shillings through a porthole to a middle-aged woman cashier; ladies’ and gents’ cloakrooms left and right, coats exchanged for a numbered ticket. Push through double swing doors and into the hall, built for mayoral balls and firms’ dances; the smell of a polished sprung dance floor and cigarette smoke, six great arched windows, seats around the sides and under the high-set stage, a pair of stewards prepared to kick out troublemakers, clutches of girls already dancing around handbags. Refreshments upstairs on the balcony laid on by Mrs. Morris, ample wife of the caretaker and mayoral mace-bearer; tea and coffee in cups and saucers, Coke bottles with straws, sandwiches, motherly advice for kids with problems. Bob Wooler in suit and tie, playing records from a deck at the side of the stage while the first group set up behind the heavy curtains. The night’s two other groups, almost all teenage lads, lark and cuff backstage in a couple of drab dressing rooms …
It was the fifth of eight Beekay jive dances over the festive week and no one was expecting magic. Visually and musically presentable, the groups mentioned in the local press ad—the Deltones and Del Renas—mostly played chart songs, the influence and little dance steps of Cliff Richard and the Shadows all-pervasive, guitar twangs posted neatly through an echo box. Then it was the Beatles’ turn. Trusting to instinct, Wooler gave them the prime spot, and they had half an hour. He discussed presentation with them, something he alone on the Liverpool rock scene knew to be important. He spoke alliteratively and wagged his forefinger to make the point: it was all about impact! immediacy! impression! He’d announce them with the curtain closed, but the moment they heard their name they should start playing, then the drapes would part and they’d be already up and running.
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