Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Once again, the Beatles had to immerse themselves in the latest American sounds, checking out what they’d missed while in Hamburg. Their main venue of discovery was the basement at Nems Whitechapel, where they flicked through the racks, chatted up the salesgirls and wedged themselves and their opinions tight into a browserie, requesting to hear both sides of every selected 45.

  While John, Paul and George still went around almost exclusively as a threesome, Pete sometimes joined them here, needing to perform whatever they were picking for the stage. He recalls how if someone said “I’m gonna do this one” that song then became theirs.10 Nems’ manager, the immaculately attired Mr. Epstein, would glare at them from time to time, wondering if (despite what they claimed when he was within eavesdropping distance) they actually intended to buy anything. “Every afternoon a group of scruffy leather-jacketed lads came in,” Brian would remember. “Strange and odd but attractive. I thought at one time they were messing about with the girls, and I asked the girls. The girls said they did buy discs and they knew what they wanted. They bought R&B.”11

  When the Beatles returned from Hamburg in 1960 they found tidy guitar-instrumentals all the rage; this time the rising trend was for trad jazz. It was as if rock and roll had never happened and everyone was back dancing to 1920s Dixieland music, the Temperance Seven featuring strongly. John’s hatred of old jazz scaled new heights. Still, there was plenty of new American music to excite them. “Quarter to Three” by US Bonds was a noisy, distorted, danceable, rocking mush that broke all the rules because Bonds sang it over an existing record. Standing there in the Nems browserie, John was the first Beatle to shout “I’m gonna do this one.”

  It isn’t clear who grabbed “Buzz Buzz A-Diddle-It” by Freddy Cannon but it was probably the title as well as the chugging Bo Diddley–like rhythm that swung it; this and the fact that they were checking out all the imports on EMI’s Top Rank label. US Bonds’ record also came from this source, as did the latest 45 by the Shirelles; Paul bagged “Mama Said,” using his high register for the lead vocal, John and George on either side of the other microphone for the girl-group backing. There were no new Goffin-King numbers they wanted to sing but they did perform “Time,” a similarly styled American-written hit for the young British singer Craig Douglas.

  The London label gave the Beatles at least three more songs. They did “Livin’ Lovin’ Wreck” by Jerry Lee Lewis (the B-side of his hit cover of “What’d I Say”) and they did a rousing rendition of a Coasters B-side, “Thumbin’ a Ride.” Paul sang this, as he did other Coasters records, “Searchin’ ” and “Besame Mucho,” the last of which he’d rearranged to accommodate comically dramatic “cha-cha-boom!” shouts by John, George and himself. The real highlight, though, was “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King. John thought it a great record and made sure to nab it first; for the intro percussion shuffle he rubbed together two matchboxes, and he sang it with a fervor and tenderness that captivated audiences—especially girls. As he recalled fourteen years later, “ ‘Stand by Me’ was one of my big ballads, I used to score a lot of groupies with that one.”12

  The antithesis of “Stand by Me,” which inflamed hearts, was the Olympics’ “(Baby) Hully Gully,” which usually stirred up violence. John sang it, and as George would recall, “Every time we did ‘Hully Gully’ there would be a fight … On Saturday night they would all be back from the pub and you could guarantee Hully Gully.”13

  To have a laugh, and keep their distance from other groups, the Beatles also found more fun numbers. Paul had a record of Fats Waller’s “Your Feet’s Too Big,” and it became a big number for them in the Cavern. And George then added three vintage tunes currently performed by Joe Brown: “I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am” (written 1910), “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” (1917) and “The Sheik of Araby” (1921).14 They gave the latter a sprightly rock arrangement, starting with a twangy guitar intro that badly suggested “Middle East,” and then John and Paul embellished it with several bizarre “not arf!” interjections. It was odd but done for laughs, and became a staple of the Beatles’ act for a year, George’s trademark vocal spot in many shows. He usually sang two or three numbers a night, and another new one was “So How Come (No One Loves Me),” which he learned from the spring 1961 LP A Date with the Everly Brothers. The song’s very title made George laugh and sometimes he introduced it to the audience as “So How Come brackets No One Loves Me brackets,” said with a wacker’s jagged edge.

  Unchallenged and ideal, the Cavern became firmly established as the Beatles’ home. While never the club’s only act, they became the backbone of Wooler’s and McFall’s booking schedule … and with good reason, because no group ever created such excitement. It suited the Beatles too. For the lunchtime shows, Pete would arrive with Neil Aspinall about eleven o’clock and lug the drums and amps down the steep and slippery stone steps; John, Paul and George would rise around ten, ride separate buses into town with their guitars, meet at the cellar at half-past eleven and between them set up the gear on stage, ready to play. It was easy, hassle-free and fun.

  It was here, for the first time, that the Beatles became central to the lives of their audience. This daylight gathering, the crowd of metropolitan Liverpudlians, were the first members of an inclusive and ever-widening circle, the same people turning up again and again to stand under a particular arch or sit in a specific seat. The stage was only eighteen inches off the floor, easily accessible, so they handed up song requests, many of them written in the style of the Beatles’ wit, as if submitting a script to be read and ridiculed. The girls were more vociferous than the boys but the Beatles won their love and devotion equally, to a degree far in excess of any other group.

  Lunchtime sessions were really two separate shows, taking into account workers’ typical “dinner-hour” breaks: the first shift began at midday, the group playing from 12:15 until 1PM, then the act would return after a ten-minute break and play again until two.15 The second shift was the busier, but throughout the session people would be reluctantly tearing themselves away, needing to get back to work … though always carrying the cellar around with them.

  The Cavern stank. In the empty morning, the smell was “Aunt Sally” disinfectant on top of every-yesterday on top of damp on top of fruit (the neighboring three- to six-story warehouses didn’t only cast the narrow Mathew Street into permanently sunless gloom, they also packed a lot of produce). Once a session began—lunchtime sessions were hot, evenings hotter—the smell was enhanced by aromas from the men’s and ladies’ toilets, which regularly overflowed into the general area; from perspiration on top of body odor seeping from the mass of humanity packed into the hot cellar; from the soup and hot-dog-infused steam rising from the gas rings in Thelma’s snack bar; and from the cigarettes smoked by most of the crowd. Speak to anyone who saw the Beatles in the Cavern and two particular comments emerge every time: they wish they’d “bottled the smell,” because it was so intensely evocative, and they could never disguise from their parents, bosses and colleagues where they’d been, because the Cavern clung to their hair, skin and clothes.

  “Every time I walked down the steps of the Cavern my glasses steamed over,” remembers Alan Smith, a trainee journalist from Birkenhead who was set on moving to London to work for a music paper. “People would call from the middle distance, ‘Hi Alan, how you doing?’ and I’d need to wipe off the condensation before I could see who it was.”

  The walls were literally running—you could have lifted a glass to them and filled up a drink. That’s no exaggeration. How people were not electrocuted I don’t know. But all that is just the mildly eccentric side of it—the thing is, it was incredible. There was love in the air as well. It was like the meeting of a club: the audiences loved the bands and the bands loved the audiences, and half the time they were related to them or were old schoolmates. It was a tremendous place.16

  It was also dangerous. The conditions in the Cavern would never have been permitted in later years; at this time, 19
61, the law had no power to enforce safety inspections, which were carried out solely at the discretion of club owners. In terms of sanitation, there were only three toilets and a single urinal, grossly inadequate for large crowds, and while it was assumed these led to mains sewerage, everything went into the ground, ultimately oozing into the tunnel of Liverpool’s underground railway. There was also no fire escape, just one hopelessly narrow way in and out. The consequences of a fire would have been appalling, as was shown all too tragically when a blaze swept through a club thirty miles away, in Bolton, on May 1, 1961: fifteen burned to death, trapped in an upstairs room with no fire escape, and four more died leaping from windows.

  The government promised to tighten safety regulations, and there was a test case in Liverpool inquiring into what would happen if a local venue suffered a comparable tragedy. This was the Cavern, which now made the front page of the Echo for the first time. The court heard that

  the cellar, 11 feet below street level, is 58 feet by 39 feet with a stage at one end. The only means of access is a doorway from Mathew Street, then along a passage 3ft 6in wide, through another door 2ft 6in wide and then down 17 steps. As many as 200 and 300 are in the club at lunchtimes and in the evenings 500 to 600. It is a well-run club where teenagers can resort to listen to the type of music they like and in this respect it has the [Liverpool] Corporation’s blessing … but the Corporation is extremely worried that the one staircase is utterly inadequate as a means of escape in case of fire.17

  The inquiry found that the Cavern should undergo structural changes, but, while plans were drawn up, a loophole meant they weren’t enforced; the premises would remain unaltered until the club was enlarged some years later. In the meantime, it was felt that because the place was entirely stone, there was little that could catch fire.

  For Paul, the Cavern was little short of heaven. He was five years from first hearing Elvis, since when his life had taken so many unexpected twists and turns. “My best playing days were at the Cavern, lunchtime sessions, where we’d just go on stage with a cheese roll and a Coke and a ciggie, and a few requests. And you just sing them in between eating your cheese roll, and no one minded, and afterward you went and had a drink. That was great. We really got something going in that place, in the Cavern, we really got a rapport with an audience that we never got again.”18

  There was nothing precious about a Beatles lunchtime session. Anything went. One day Bob Wooler asked them if a young man called Steve Calrow could get up and sing: he had a good voice and was beginning a career as a club entertainer. The Beatles did three numbers with him—two Elvis and one Little Richard—and, says Calrow, “They were out of this world as a backing group, and naturally funny on the stage.”

  There was a shopkeeper character in Coronation Street called Leonard Swindley, played by Arthur Lowe. He was courting his assistant, a Miss Emily, and Paul used to do an impression of Swindley that had everyone laughing. Then John would read out requests like “Will John sing ‘Money’ because we want to see his face turn red” and “Will Paul sing ‘Till There Was You’ because he looks so lovely.” Paul would pretend not to hear and John would say to the audience, “He’s not looking but he’s listening to every word.”19

  John and Paul became closer once Stu left the Beatles. He’d come between them for eighteen months and now the rift was closed. John loved Stu as a friend but didn’t miss his musical contribution—he’d ended up a fair bass player but Paul overtook him in no time at all. John and Paul forged ahead with ambition, drive, dedication, humor and so much more, even drawing mutual strength from being motherless. It was something only they could laugh at, and they enjoyed watching people squirm when innocent mentions of their mothers would be met with the blunt and straightfaced riposte “She’s dead.”20

  The lunchtime sessions strengthened Beatle friendships tighter than ever. They didn’t only see one another at night, like other groups, but often spent entire days together, best mates. When the Cavern session ended—when Bob Wooler played Bobby Darin’s “I’ll Be There” and everyone fetched their coats—the Beatles retired to one of the local pubs. They sometimes went to the wood-paneled back room of the White Star, just around the corner, but mostly they went into the Grapes (at the rear of the Fruit Exchange, plum opposite the Cavern door) where festoons of carved wooden grapes hung from an ornate mahogany bar. There they downed pints of cider mixed with Guinness—black velvet—and were never quiet.21 Come chucking-out time, unless they were going on to Nems together, Pete and Neil usually went home to West Derby and John, Paul and George stayed in the city.

  Summer afternoons were spent on the streets, smoking, swearing, darting, larking, cuffing, cackling. The sight (and smell) of three young men in leather with either cowboy boots or black winkle-picker boots made people gape or step aside or cross the road or pass the standard judgment—“I fought the war for you young layabouts!”22 They sometimes visited Bill Harry, dropping into the Mersey Beat office on Renshaw Street; they watched films in the Tatler, ogled the instruments in Hessy’s and Rushworth’s, and—barred from the Jacaranda—idled away hours in the Kardomah tea rooms, to the disgust of many.

  The haul of Preludin brought back from Hamburg was diminishing with some speed, especially as John was sprinkling them around “to get people talking.” One afternoon, after the Grapes had shut, John and George went with Wooler to a private members’ establishment, the White Rose Social Club on South Castle Street, where boozing was legal outside pub hours. Returning to the table after buying a round, Wooler saw two little white pills bobbing in his glass, dissolving but not yet gone. When John and George relented and told him what they were, John countered the suggestion they could be harmful by drinking the glass dry, auf ex. Still, Wooler did start taking Prellies from time to time. Because they came in metal tubes, he’d say to the Beatles, with a knowing look, “Anyone traveling by Tube tonight?”23

  “It was a glorious age to be young—to be not drinking, not doing anything we shouldn’t do, but having such a great time,” says Eileen Robinson.24 She was among the new wave of Cavernites, all aged between 15 and 20, who tuned right in to the Beatles and had with them the closest reciprocal relationships any fan could ever have.

  “The Beatles were just mad,” remembers Margaret Douglas.

  They were always chewing—we called it “chewy”—and John pulled cripple faces, though no one took any offense. Everyone fancied at least one of them, but if they’d asked me out I’d have been too scared to go. Paul was my favorite, and my best friend Marie was friendly with John—she was a fat girl with a brilliant sense of humor and John made a point of talking to her. I found John OK but a bit frightening. He often used to be with Cyndy [Cynthia], who was quite arty. If another group was on, they’d sit together and eat apples while they watched.25

  Roberta “Bobby” Brown always tried to get the middle seat on the second row because it gave a grandstand view of all of them … and Paul in particular. He’d usually acknowledge her and invite requests, and she always asked for “Your Feet’s Too Big,” knowing he’d be doing “Till There Was You” and “Over the Rainbow” anyway, “always with the big eyes and his face turned up, looking above our heads.”

  Paul was my favorite. I really adored him, like lots of us did. George was very quiet and shy but totally honest and truthful, a good person. John was funnier but I couldn’t quite get his humor. Pete was sullen, miserable and moody, or at least he looked it—he made no attempt to engage with anyone. Some girls preferred him, for his looks, but my friends and I didn’t and couldn’t understand why others would.

  I remember Paul taking Dot’s face in his hand and kissing it. It was so romantic. I thought “Wouldn’t it be lovely to be kissed like that?” but I wasn’t jealous—you knew your place. He was out of our reach but always a friend. He’d say to me, “Dot’s coming down tonight, can she sit with you?” Of course she can! My friend Anne and I were thrilled he’d asked us to look after her. Honored. It meant he trus
ted us.26

  Bernard “Bernie” Boyle was one of the many Cavern lads fascinated by the Beatles—and in his case it cost him his job. Aged 16, he was the tea boy in an architect’s office on Water Street when a friend tempted him down to a lunchtime session. “There were four guys on stage who’d just come back from Hamburg, four guys in black leather trousers playing absolutely spot-on the music I’d bought on 78s and 45s—’Memphis,’ ‘Kansas City,’ Jerry Lee Lewis numbers. The place was thumping, and at one o’clock in the bloody afternoon.”

  I went to every session after that. John’s voice was absolutely magic, and their harmonies were superb. I used to ask them to do “Memphis” and I also liked “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Honey Don’t” and “Three Cool Cats.” John chewed constantly, and I often saw him do an exaggerated wink if he was saying something with a double-meaning.

  I talked to Bob Wooler and kept saying to him, “This group’s the fucking greatest ever!”—so he introduced me to them. I was over the moon. I looked up to all of them: I was young, naive, wide-eyed, and I thought these guys were the greatest in the world. My one-hour lunch breaks from the office got longer and longer until eventually I went back to find I’d been fired. So I started doing occasional jobs for the Beatles, to help Neil. I’d carry the gear and go to gigs with them in the van. I was just a kid but I wormed my way in and they didn’t mind.27