Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  On Saturday, January 7, Neil took them to Aintree Institute for their first booking at this atmospheric upstairs hall not far from the Grand National racecourse. Again, Neil was staggered by how the Beatles made a direct and instant impact on people who’d never heard of them and were expecting nothing out of the ordinary: “All the people were there as normal and suddenly the Beatles came on and everybody who was anywhere in the hall, anyone who was dancing, stopped and came forward, straight to the front of the stage. They stood there with their mouths open. The Beatles caused a lot of trouble because all the Teds who’d brought their girls to the dance got very jealous, and then John did this big fucking wink, which really wound them all up.”12

  Lennon’s big wink was a new instrument in his stage armory, transmitting maximum sarcasm and provocation in one move. It was a music-hall wink, a wink with built-in windup, with attitude, accompanied always by a sideways chasm in the mouth, a great gaping oval. It was seldom impotent, and if a fight wasn’t already in the air, this could kick one off—inciting tempests that to John, as blind as a bat, were but a violent blur. Tough nuts at Aintree Institute used as weapons any wooden chairs around the edge of the dance floor that weren’t bolted together, and some went up to the balcony and lobbed chairs down from there, causing mayhem.13

  Considering the ever-present danger, the Beatles were assaulted surprisingly few times. It did happen, but only rarely. Paul was reliably effective in a role familiar and necessary from four years of Lennon friendship: pouring oil on his troubled waters, taking the heat out of his steam, pulling him—and often all of them—back from brinks to which they were so recklessly propelled.

  Bob Wooler staged the Aintree dances for Brian Kelly as he did in Seaforth and Litherland. He was the benevolent besuited scout leader with a twist, a master of the microphone who traveled by bus all over Merseyside with a hand-tooled wooden box full of 45s. Partial to a tot or two of Navy Rum, and smoking sixty a day, he worried how to encourage everyone to do their best, and how to make these groups of youths behave themselves on stage, respecting the audience as well as his meticulous handwritten schedules.

  Almost all of the Beatles’ bookings in this period were stage-managed by Wooler and he quickly got to know them well—while they in turn tried to find out about him, which wasn’t easy. He gave them prime position in every show, not the final spot but the middle one, around 9:30; people would be drifting off by 10:15 to catch the last bus home and the closing group generally played to a fraction of those who’d been in the hall earlier.

  It was Wooler who broke the Beatles beyond Brian Kelly’s Beekay circuit. A new venue opened in January 1961 in Huyton, on the outskirts of Liverpool. Hambleton Hall was rented from the local council’s Parks & Gardens Committee, but there was nothing remotely recreational about the beat nights at this forbidding place. It was in the middle of a housing estate and gang fights always broke out. The promoter was a car salesman, Vic Anton, only 20 and an acquaintance of Brian Epstein, though he wasn’t involved in these promotions. Like everyone else, Anton hired Wooler as disc jockey, compere, bookings manager and stage manager.

  One of Wooler’s many tasks for these promoters was to compose and place advertisements in the Echo. Editorially, Liverpool’s nightly newspaper didn’t go anywhere near the rock scene. Its journalists, mostly middle-aged men, knew nothing of it and wouldn’t have considered it worth covering. The only indication of activity was in the paid-for classifieds, where events were itemized in fascinating, amusing and illuminating detail. Everything still ran under the Jazz heading, but these ads, studied in hindsight, represent a daily bulletin of the beat, reflecting and responding instantly to the current pulse and temperature. And while the Teds at Aintree Institute lobbed chairs, Liverpool promoters lobbed text grenades at one another, small-print vendettas needled at five bob a line.14

  Ads in the Echo and in the north end local press provide black-and-white proof of the Beatles’ impact. From very soon after they started ripping into the Brian Kelly jive circuit, there was an increase in the number of promoters, venues and groups. Everyone and everything became noticeably busier in the first weeks of 1961, and this built month on month throughout the year and beyond. Having steadily gained momentum in the preceding two years, the Liverpool rock scene suddenly took a mighty leap. Bass player Johnny Gustafson, one of so many to benefit from the increased opportunities, summarizes it succinctly: “The Beatles cracked Liverpool open, and the avalanche came after that.”15

  These ads also show that the Beatles went straight in at number 1. Their name was placed top almost without exception, sometimes in block capitals, centered, while the groups underneath were in upper- and lowercase. Wooler’s relish for alliteration and liberal use of eye-catching exclamation marks made them, in this first month alone, Dynamic, The Great! The Sensational! and, on the last day of the month, in one of his Hive of Jive ads, the Stupendous, Stompin’ Big Beat Beatles.

  The man central to most of the spiky ads between promoters was Sam Leach, who’d launched Liverpool’s first regular rock dances in 1958. No longer the youngest operator (Dave Forshaw, 18, wore that mantle, and Vic Anton was second), Leach remained the most eager and expansive. He didn’t promote at one hall, he was everywhere, and he liked to think big … though his grand ideas could lack sufficient planning. His was a Peter-to-Paul operation—groups might be paid for one show with the takings from another to come—and he regularly annoyed rivals by publicizing something he couldn’t deliver, or by encroaching on their ideas or slogans. His latest plan was to take over the name Cassanova Club and run rock nights in the Sampson and Barlow ballroom in the heart of Liverpool … and the moment he saw the Beatles, in their Hambleton Hall debut on January 25, Leach knew he’d found his headlining act.

  The curtains fell open and there they were. Even now, I can still feel the kick. You couldn’t mistake how good they were. Even the fighting stopped.

  The first thing I said to the Beatles was “You’re going to be as big as Elvis!” Lennon looked up like I was mental and said, “We’ve got a right nutter here, Paul.” Paul—who knew I was opening a club in town because he was always in the Jacaranda chasing my girls—said, “Yes, but I bet you’ve got some work for us, haven’t you, Mr. Leach?” I gave them twelve bookings that first night at £6 or more a time.16

  The Beatles seen by Sam Leach were a five-piece again. Stu arrived home about January 15 and took his place in the group a day or two later. Though he came back for another purpose, and had often written of his intention to pack up rocking, he wanted to carry on.

  Stu’s days of standing with his back to the audience were past; while he liked to stand side-on, there was no pretense at hiding his guitar work. One year and all those Hamburg hours later, the Dean-like dude in dark glasses could play his bass—albeit not brilliantly, and not well enough to please Paul. He didn’t welcome Stu’s return, even if it did mean he could stop fiddling with those odd bass notes and stick to miming with his broken guitar.

  Primarily, Stu was home because his temporary residence permit in Hamburg had elapsed, and because he was applying for a place on the Art Teacher’s Diploma course at Liverpool College of Art, to begin in September 1961—in other words, to do his fifth and final year there after a twelvemonth break. He set this in motion right away and was invited to interview on February 23. He was going to be in Liverpool at least a month, and after all the years of sharing bedsit flats, lastly in Gambier Terrace, he returned to his family, who were now living in Liverpool. (The Sutcliffes moved from Huyton in autumn 1960 and were renting the ground-floor Flat A at 53 Ullet Road, by Sefton Park.)

  This was Stu and Astrid’s first separation, and though brief—she was coming to join him in Liverpool for two or three weeks at the start of February—he sent her long love letters (“Tonight I play once more with the Beatles my beauty, and I will play in your jeans, and your blue pullover and your hempt and will close my eyes and think always of you. As I play, I think of the da
ys that keep us apart …”)17 and realizing his fiancée would struggle to comprehend the words, he drew a cartoon self-portrait: dark glasses, high collar, big hair, bigger guitar, hearts as crotchets, I LOVE ASTRID sung sweetly in a speech bubble and floated across Europe by airmail.

  Stu wasn’t the only one returning from Hamburg in January: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes headed back on the second day of the year. Their three months in St. Pauli had in no sense galvanized them as it had the Beatles; the experience had soured after Rory broke the Kaiserkeller stage, and when they tried to open in another venue, on New Year’s Day, Bruno Koschmider instantly put an end to it, pointing to the exclusive contract they’d signed with him. As it took a while for their bookings to pick up, they all went on the dole. This meant declaring they’d no other income, though they did. A fair number of the Liverpool rockers took this risk—the so-called rock ’n’ dole—but not, it seems, the Beatles. They had no need. Ringo briefly, semi-seriously, looked around for a proper job, one that would enable him to earn by day, play by night and leave him free to go away when necessary, like back to Butlin’s or Hamburg. He thought about becoming a freelance hairdresser, and while he wondered how to make it happen, it didn’t.

  “Welcome home from continental tour,” an Echo classified announced on January 6, advertising the Hurricanes’ reemergence on a scene where they were no longer tops. Save for a few sporadic appearances in September 1960, they’d not played locally in seven months and momentum had been lost. The night before, Rory, Johnny and Ringo went to Litherland Town Hall and discovered the Beatles were still in their Kaiserkeller groove, setting a blistering pace. The Hurricanes’ mate and sometime roadie Dave “Jamo” Jamieson remembers, “The curtains opened, Paul went into ‘Good Golly Miss Molly,’ the crowd rushed forward and that was it—the place just took off. The Beatles were in leathers and black T-shirts—they were rebels. Richy, Johnny and Rory never said anything about being overtaken, they didn’t say anything at all.”18

  The two groups started to share the same bill, but no matter how much Rory leapt and jumped and climbed and combed there was no doubt who was the fairest of them all. Ringo often left the dressing room to go out front and watch them. “I just loved the way they played; I loved the songs, the attitude was great, and I knew they were a better band than the one I was in.”19

  Plenty of onlookers—John, Paul and George among them—continued to revere Ringo’s rock-steady tempo in all styles, and his ability to play evenly with either hand, but Pete believed he now held the upper hand, and would later claim “Ringo … copied our [my] beat.”20

  The three Beatles saw a wider picture. There was no question Pete’s forceful four-in-the-bar drumming was one of the ingredients that ignited their explosion. But, as they’d quickly assessed in Hamburg, he was less convincing when they played anything that wasn’t meaty rock. The Wallasey singer-guitarist Jackie Lomax puts it bluntly when he says, “Pete could only play one drum beat, either slowed down or speeded up.” And as John reflected, “We trained him to keep a stick going up and down four-in-the-bar, [but] he couldn’t do much else.”21

  Crucial too were the personality differences. No other group was close like the Beatles, three of whom functioned as intimate friends with their own shorthand language, humor and complexities. That heart and strength—John, Paul and George—went back to 1957–8 and advanced from there through a thousand shared experiences: they were mates, tight, fine-tuned to a frequency unfathomable to others, which was all right by them. Pete didn’t think this way and didn’t share their attitudes; to the three of them, quite simply, he wasn’t one of us, and they knew it now as surely as they knew it when they’d first met him at the Casbah in 1959, and when, out of sheer pragmatism, they grabbed him as their last choice for Hamburg a year later. It was nothing to do with quality of character—Pete was “a good skin,” decent, well brought up, hard to dislike—it was about fitting in, simple chemistry. “Pete was a bit slow,” John said. “He was a harmless guy but he was not quick. All of us were quick minds and he never picked up on the idiom.”

  John, Paul and George saw Pete in the halls but rarely beyond, John being the only one who socialized to any extent with him. It was like Hamburg again: they said hello, did the show, then he’d go his own way while they stuck together and did something else as a threesome … or foursome, with Stu. There were plenty of exceptions, but this was the general way of things. And Pete’s onstage personality also presented difficulties. He’d settled into a role he hardly ever varied, booking after booking, night after night—playing with his head down, avoiding eye contact, not smiling, projecting the study in moody shyness he knew would win girls’ hearts. Fine, but it was bound to wear thin for the other Beatles. Sometimes they wanted to see a spark when they turned around, some vibrancy, emotion, an engagement of eyes or mind.

  “We were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer,” John revealed a decade later. As it was, he, Paul and George lacked the courage of their convictions. They allowed themselves to grow comfortable with the way Pete, his mother and his friends efficiently ensured the smooth running of their group, so all they had to do was turn up and play. They didn’t want to deal with it, and they had no one to get rid of Pete for them the way they’d made Nigel Walley dump Eric Griffiths. They continued to grumble in private, but their failure to act meant that Pete’s position in the group settled and solidified, and the problem of what to do about it was swept under the carpet.

  Bob Wooler would write that the power of the Beatles’ performances and old-rock repertoire made them “explode on a jaded scene,” but those who saw them actually heard a broad variety of musical styles—country and western, rhythm and blues, instrumentals, tender ballads, standards and much more.22 Their set constantly evolved, and so great was its range that people never saw the same show twice. John, Paul and George were always fascinated by the pursuit of new sounds, and in 1961 this still meant American sounds. Absent from Liverpool for the last third of 1960, they spent winter days in Nems and other shops, crowded into the browseries, checking out what was happening across the Atlantic, and listening in particular to the labels that licensed excitement from the wonderful American independents—primarily Decca’s London imprint and Top Rank, newly acquired by EMI.

  As Liverpool groups started to proliferate so competition for songs became more intense. “Long Tall Sally” and “What’d I Say,” two of the Beatles’ biggest weapons, were done by Rory Storm and Gerry and the Pacemakers respectively, and duplication could be awkward when groups shared a bill. The Beatles, John and Paul in particular, identified a challenge and turned it to their advantage. They decided to find obscure songs the other groups didn’t know, numbers they alone would do, to stay different and ahead of the pack.

  Their own Lennon-McCartney Originals would have achieved this for them, but they didn’t consider them up to scratch, not something to play in front of people—and on the odd occasion they did, they wouldn’t announce the songs as their own. So quiet did John and Paul keep the fact that they’d written anything, no one around the Beatles in 1961 (with the possible exception of Bob Wooler) was aware of it, and it appears they wrote no new numbers this year. The Lennon-McCartney partnership was lively in so many ways but as creating composers it was dormant.

  Paul’s labors at Massey & Coggins gave John plenty of solo time in the city in the early weeks of 1961, and it’s no coincidence that the important musical discoveries in this period, the key additions to the Beatles’ repertoire, were unearthed and sung by him—and that, as a consequence, he steered a shift in their musical direction. All these were discoveries that existed to John as sounds, as records—no image came with them except those formed in his head.

  An early obscure find was “You Don’t Understand Me” by Bobby Freeman, an intense and dramatic “doo-wop” number located on the B-side of a Parlophone 45.* There’s no recording of the Beatles playing it, but with this type of song and John’s kind of voic
e it must have been a showstopping moment.

  They also performed “Stay,” by Maurice Williams, and “New Orleans,” by US Bonds, rearranging them for exciting interaction between lead singer (John) and backing vocalists (Paul and George). Other additions to the repertoire included “Leave My Kitten Alone” by Johnny Preston (covering Little Willie John) and the Olympics’ rocking update of “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” John sang these too, sometimes singing the repeated line “shimmy shimmy” as “shitty shitty.” It was unheard of for an entertainer, of any kind, to swear on stage, a genuinely daring departure.

  John also loved “Corrine Corrina” by Ray Peterson, an American hit on the New York label Dunes. It was a new version of an old Joe Turner blues shouter, and though no producer was named on the London label, ten years later John was delighted to find it was Phil Spector, working with an orchestra for the first time. It was songs like this, and the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me” (again sung by John), that presented particular challenges to Pete, numbers where four-in-the-bar just wouldn’t do.

  It was also at this time that John discovered a record he would eulogize for the rest of his life, “Angel Baby” by Rosie and the Originals; and he’d always associate that cherished 45 with another vital discovery, perhaps because he found them on the same day or in the same shop—the Miracles’ “Who’s Loving You.” Following Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want),” it was the second time John had been knocked out by a record from the Detroit label Tamla.23