Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  The Pacemakers played this day’s Cavern lunchtime too, and the Nerk Twins went down to watch. The Beatles—especially Paul—considered Gerry and his group the main threat to their supremacy. They were good professionals and showed the experience of two Hamburg seasons with Tony Sheridan. John and Paul didn’t usually turn up just to watch others, but they wanted to show the Pacemakers their new look. They were like Mods among Rockers, and knew they’d receive carping comments from their peers—which, naturally, they were more than ready to rebuff.

  After the session, and a few swift pints in the Grapes, John and Paul (with the Pacemakers’ Les Chadwick and maybe others) accompanied Bob Wooler for a liquid afternoon in Toxteth, in the Mandolin, where they proceeded to get hammered. The Mandolin was a newly opened drinking club with modern touches—ultraviolet lighting on the wall and purple heart amphetamines behind the bar—but it was in an old building, one of Liverpool’s earliest cinemas, the Warwick Picturedrome; without realizing it, John was gulping Scotch and pills in the hall where both sides of his family used to go for their entertainment.

  They arrived at Litherland Town Hall in a highly bevvied state, and one sight of their condition was sufficient to send Gerry Marsden scuttling to the pub around the corner, where, as Wooler put it, “he got steamed as well.” Far from expressing regret to Brian Kelly over messing him about, the Beatles took exception to his insistence that each group play a full hour instead of forty-five minutes. The Pacemakers felt the same way, and in what Wooler would describe as “a carefree mutual mood of cooperativeness,” they went on stage together. Even he, the epitome of professionalism, allowed himself to be swayed by the moment: he announced the Beatmakers and parted the curtains to reveal an eight-piece band—John, Paul, Gerry, George, Les, Les, Pete and Fred. “They exploded on an astonished crowd with a sound bigger than the Guns of Navarone,” Wooler wrote.8

  It wasn’t only the sound that surprised. Paul wore an old pink nightie given to Fred Marsden by his mum to protect his drums; Fred himself wore a railwayman’s tunic; Gerry had George’s leather jacket; George was in a hood; and John blew Les Maguire’s saxophone. He also joined Paul on top of the piano: they lay on their stomachs and leaned over to strike the notes upside down. The Beatmakers thundered through four numbers—“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “What’d I Say” (extended mix), “Red Sails in the Sunset” and the new Ray Charles record “Hit the Road Jack”—during which John, pissed and pilled, slid from the piano and slumped on the stage. It was the Top Ten Club in the Town Hall ballroom. The dancers stood and gaped. As Bob Wooler conceded, “Brian Kelly was fraught with anxiety over it. It was only a short episode and a bit of a shambles.”9

  Kelly was more than fraught, he was appalled; and on top of numerous previous insults, their erratic punctuality, and those cancellations, it brought his relationship with the Beatles to an end. If he was annoyed with Wooler for colluding in the prank, the two men could patch that up; of the Beatles, however, he’d had more than enough, thank you. There were four further bookings in the diary but, after those, no more. First Hill and now Kelly … one by one, the Beatles were cutting ties with the providers of their paid work. If they carried on like this they’d have nowhere left to play—not unless new opportunities could be conjured out of thin air. Here was Maureen and Jennifer’s challenge.

  Excepting Sunday night at the Casbah, every Beatles booking in the next seven days was in the Cavern, including another eventful Saturday all-night session. And it was probably during this week that Stuart Sutcliffe sent over the initial copies of their first record. It wasn’t “Ain’t She Sweet” and “Cry for a Shadow,” as they’d long been expecting, but “My Bonnie” and “The Saints”—not so much them as them backing Tony Sheridan. Bert Kaempfert and Polydor scheduled it for a October 23 release in West Germany, where it stood a fair chance of being a hit.

  Still, the Beatles had the unrepeatable thrill of handling and hearing their first real record. It looked strange to them, a 45 with orange labels, a large center-hole and a picture sleeve. Sheridan’s photo was on the front and back and the Beatles weren’t shown or named: the label credit, on both sides, was Tony Sheridan & The Beat Brothers. Underneath each song title was the word “Rock”—it was standard practice in mainland Europe to classify the music—and “My Bonnie” had a German translation in brackets underneath: Mein Herz ist bei dir nur (“My heart is with you only”).

  George showed his enthusiasm in a warm letter to Stu, also enclosing a £5 note in the hope he would send over as many as twenty more. “They aren’t as good as the play-back at the studio, but that was stereo. Everybody thinks it’s great. There’s that feeling (when speaking to a member [or members] of other groups) ‘showed you again!,’ cos I think a lot of people didn’t really believe we had made anything, and no matter what anybody says, it’s Beatles on a ‘real’ record. I didn’t get the hang of ‘Beat Brothers,’ though.”10

  The Beatles’ dislike of “My Bonnie”—Paul’s in particular—would be made clear at a later date. For now, they were just thrilled to be on a record. “I didn’t stop playing it for days,” George told the NME two years later.11 Teenage lad Jimmy Campbell would remember Paul running up the stairs at Aintree Institute shouting “This is our record!” “He made the DJ [Bob Wooler] put it on and he was bouncing all over the place just listening to himself coming out of the speakers. He was really made up. Listen to that!”12

  The consequence of such grapevine exposure came quickly, mid-afternoon on Saturday, October 28, when a young man from Knotty Ash, Raymond Jones, walked into the Nems shop on Whitechapel and tried to buy the record.

  What happened next is the subject of conflicting accounts, though they end the same way. Jones remembers that Brian Epstein, unable to find “My Bonnie” in any release lists, asked him questions about it, which concluded with Jones saying the Beatles were locals and “the most fantastic group you will ever hear.” Brian himself, in his autobiography, suggested this additional information only came to him over the following days, and in the raw interview transcript for that book, he said one of his shop-girls noted Jones’ order.13

  Whatever took place, it was because of Brian’s policy that Nems obtain any record a customer ordered, no matter how obscure, that the inquiry didn’t end here as it could and probably would have done in other shops. He said he’d find it, and his determination then doubled when two girls came into Nems a day or so later also wanting to buy it. And this wasn’t the first time he’d come across the name Beatles. He remembered seeing it on a poster somewhere, and surely he’d seen it dozens of times in Mersey Beat since July. It was an unusual and clever name, one that lodged in the brain.

  Brian had only just returned to Liverpool when this Saturday came around. He’d taken his longest-ever break from Nems, five weeks in Spain to soak up the sun, brush up his language, see a few bullfights (an intoxicating new passion) and pursue hedonistic pleasures. He had the shop purring with such efficiency that its management bored him—it was, as he would describe it, “working too easily.”14 Restlessness rolled up month on month; he craved a new challenge still unidentified as he set about his “My Bonnie” inquiries.

  He had yet to connect the name Beatles with the leather-jacket lads who loitered in Nems’ browseries every few days, consuming all the latest 45s, those kids who knew what they liked—everything American—and usually found something to stoke their excitement. As much as they had a reputation for performing obscure B-sides, all the newest additions to the Beatles’ set were US top tens—and chief among them was “Take Good Care of My Baby,” recorded by Bobby Vee and written by Goffin-King. Paul added an attractive harmony line but the lead vocal was George’s. In the Cavern, he’d dedicate the song “to Doctor Barnardo’s,” the well-known charity for abandoned children.

  It was probably Paul who sang Elvis’s newest British number 1, “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame,” written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, while John handled “You Don’t Kn
ow What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It)” by Ral Donner, a Chicago singer who’d cloned Elvis’s voice to an unnerving degree. Donner’s record was one of two additions to the Beatles’ set picked up from Parlophone, along with the energetic R&B number “One Track Mind” by Bobby Lewis. Paul sang “Hit the Road Jack,” Ray Charles’ latest hit; he got a good reaction to reviving “Fools Like Me” (the B-side of Jerry Lee Lewis’s memorable 1959 hit “High School Confidential”); and he enjoyed singing the new country sound of Brenda Lee’s “Fool #1.”

  The chances are that Paul first heard Lee’s record on Juke Box Jury, BBC-tv’s single thirty-minute weekly concession to pop. It featured (along with Elvis’s “His Latest Flame”) in the October 21 edition, picked up on the small black-and-white set at 20 Forthlin Road while Paul prepared for the Cavern all-night session. The four panelists included two 15-year-old schoolgirl stars, singer Helen Shapiro and actress Jane Asher, and it was Miss Asher’s third appearance in nine weeks: the monochrome picture grayed her flame-red hair but still she was the show’s bright new face, instantly becoming the British media’s go- to girl whenever “the teenagers’ opinion” was sought. Mike McCartney would recall, “We watched Juke Box Jury religiously, especially when Jane Asher was on … She was young, beautiful, had a well-cultured, Dad-admired accent and when she smiled the set lit up. Paul and I both fancied her.”15

  The Beatles’ new songs were presented on a nightly circuit visibly contracting in size. Brian Kelly’s decision to drop them coincided with Mrs. Best’s to end outside promotions and limit herself to the Casbah. Desperate to break out of their rut, Paul said they should get back to where they’d had good times, to Hamburg, and John agreed. As he’d reflect, no matter how much they’d vow at the end of a Hamburg season not to put themselves through the ordeal again, time would mellow the memory: “… you’d be home for three months and then you remember the good times, so you say ‘OK!’ ”16 Around the end of October, Paul wrote to Peter Eckhorn announcing the Beatles’ availability for a Top Ten season from January 1962.

  This time, they’d be steering clear of involving Allan Williams, although his threat of legal action against them did seem to have petered out. The tough rebuttal of his claims by Paul’s solicitor had silenced him: there’d been no reply at all and no action taken. “The Beatles were brazening it out and I caved in,” Williams concedes. He appeared to be softening to the Beatles individually—George said in his letter to Stu that he’d seen and talked to Allan, and he wrote of no ill feelings—but the impresario maintained a sour attitude toward them as a group, banning them from the Blue Angel. “Everybody came to the Blue,” he says, “all the groups after they finished work for the night, all the girlfriends—it was their private club, and the Beatles were shut out.”17

  There was no chance of their current “managers” shutting them out—they were having trouble getting them into places. Jennifer and Maureen enjoyed being around the Beatles and visiting their homes but were finding it hard to create openings for them. The familiarity of their friendship with the Beatles, established through running the fan club, never quite allowed for practical conversation. As Jennifer remembers, instead of discussing opportunities when they saw John, he was more likely to say, “ ‘Eh Jen, can you gerrus a ciggie from somewhere? I’m desperate for a ciggie and I haven’t got any. And don’t tell Cynthia you’ve seen me.” He was, she says, “always trying to avoid seeing Cynthia if he was up to no particular good. John liked a lot of fun.”18

  Bob Wooler remained the Beatles’ chief guide, and they’d profited greatly from his expertise and advice, while also being frustrated by him. A witty man who liked a laugh, Wooler was weighed down by unfathomable secrets, and so steadfastly did he thwart attempts to probe his private life, the Beatles’ imagination was running riot, as Paul would remember: “We used to try and get Bob Wooler to let us in his house. He never would. We used to imagine whips, manacles on the wall, or that it was incredibly dirty. We used to drop him off every night after gigs and he’d never let us in. ‘Why won’t you let us in, Bob?’ ”19

  John called Wooler “Dad”—as a joke, perhaps to acknowledge a comfortable familiarity, and certainly to accentuate the gulf between men born in 1940 and 1926 (even if Wooler did pretend it was 1932). One was a literate young punk of 21, the other a literate old gent of 35 (29). In turn, Wooler announced John to audiences as “The Singing Rage.” “He could hurt with his remarks and observations,” Wooler said of the many Lennon serrations that hung heavy in the air and left recipients and witnesses feeling grazed or uneasy … while Paul, George and Pete “would laugh in a nervous, apologetic way.”20 John hardly ever said sorry and the others hardly ever muttered it on his behalf: the victim would be left to laugh it off or lick his wounds.

  Wooler included John’s new appellation in an Echo classified in which he had names for all them:

  John Lennon (“The Singing Rage”)

  Paul McCartney (“The Rockin’ Riot”)

  George Harrison (“Sheik of Araby”)

  Pete Best (“The Bashful Beat”)21

  … and it was Wooler who created and put into print the first-name order John, Paul, George and Pete. It scanned well, and reflected the lineal imperative: the Beatles were John’s group, he started it and was the leader; he brought in Paul, who introduced George, and then they got Pete. It was a hierarchy one had to keep in mind, especially in conversations. Wooler had more with them than anyone, and he was acutely aware that the Beatles had reached a crossroads. If something was going to “turn up” for them, it really had to happen now.

  Things weren’t going very brilliantly. Something had to be done for this group. They had so much. My Bonnie kept them a bit jubilant but nothing was really happening for them. We had a little confab. I was very concerned because I liked them very much.

  They were definitely going to collapse as an entity unless something happened for them, and I suggested I write to Jack Good, who was linked with Decca at the time. They admired Jack Good and I thought maybe he would give them an audition.

  They were really at desperation stage … they needed guidance, they needed someone with finesse and with money.22

  Right on cue, on Thursday, November 9, 1961, at the Cavern lunchtime session, the tracks that had been running in parallel for so long finally converged.

  Brian Epstein’s “My Bonnie” inquiries had taken him so far but no further. He knew it was a foreign record, probably from Germany, and found it “very significant” that Nems had received three orders for it.23 He knew the Beatles were a Liverpool group and for the first time actively searched Mersey Beat for their name. The current issue (which, also for the first time, had a Nems front-page ad) included Wooler’s report of the Beatmakers’ spectacle, and the Beatles advertised for appearances at Litherland, New Brighton and the Cavern.

  They were listed three times at the Cavern. Brian had been here when it was a jazz cellar run by its founder Alan Sytner—they’d grown up together, boys of the same age at the same synagogue.24 Now it was “a teenage venue,” the very thought of which intimidated him … though not enough to squash his interest. He phoned Bill Harry, who made inquiries and found out the Beatles were playing the Thursday lunchtime session; Harry informed Ray McFall that Brian Epstein of Nems would be coming down to speak to the Beatles; doorman Paddy Delaney was told to expect him—he was to be signed in without a membership card, special dispensation. Going to see live rock music wasn’t new to Brian—he’d been to Empire shows and, with his sharp eye for presentation, always found the staging dismal, noticing that few acts projected their personality across the footlights—but going to the Cavern was sure to be a different experience. Brian suggested his PA Alistair Taylor join him: they would go for lunch and drop into the Cavern on the way, to find out more about this “My Bonnie” record.

  The club was just a two-hundred-step walk from Nems, but November 9 was one of those smoggy, cold early-winter days in Liverpool, so damp that smuts glued to
skin, so dark that the sooty buildings lost detail and car headlights couldn’t put it back. Flights were canceled at the airport and foghorns groaned over the Mersey sound: the cawing seagulls and booming one o’clock cannon. The businessmen picked a path through narrow Mathew Street, between Fruit Exchange lorries and their debris, and at number 10 Paddy Delaney showed them along the dimly lit passage and down the greasy steps.

  Bob Wooler was in the bandroom when Delaney ushered in their visitor. Wooler recognized him from Nems, though they’d never met. Brian waited for a pause in that cellarful of noise, then leaned across and asked, impeccably RADA, if that was the Beatles on stage, the group on the “My Bonnie” record. Wooler confirmed it was: “They are they, they’re the ones.”25 The visitor made his way to the back of the center tunnel and watched.

  It was pretty much an eye-opener, to go down into this darkened, dank, smoky cellar, in the middle of the day, and to see crowds and crowds of kids watching these four young men on stage. They were rather scruffily dressed—in the nicest possible way, or I should say in the most attractive way: black leather jackets and jeans, long hair of course, and rather untidy stage presentation, not terribly aware and not caring very much what they looked like. I think they cared more, even then, what they sounded like.26

  The Beatles had started the second of their two lunchtime spots. As Brian watched, Ray McFall made a point of introducing himself to the man whose elegance instantly impressed him, and Cavernites consuming cheese rolls and soup wondered about the natty feller. Margaret Douglas remembers he was “standing at the back, near the snack bar. He looked so out of place that people were saying ‘What’s ’e doin’ ’ere?’ Ray McFall and Bob Wooler always wore suits and ties but they were nothing like Brian Epstein—he always looked like his mum got him ready.”27