Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  None of this situation was of Brian’s making, but he was a convenient target for the vitriol. The Cavern was a tricky place for a few days and on one visit he accepted Ray McFall’s offer of protection from a doorman. Paint-stripper was poured over Brian’s fine Ford Zodiac, an act he associated with the Pete Best sacking though it wasn’t necessarily so.

  Ringo was another innocent party in the thick of it. Movement among groups was routine stuff and he just happened to have landed the hottest seat in the house, as was his right. Asked thirty years later if he’d ever felt sorry for Pete, Ringo delivered a dose of the Liverpool straight-talk that showed him the match of his new bandmates: “No. Why should I? I was a better player than him. That’s how I got the job.”6

  Ringo was a stranger to most of the Beatles’ audience. Some knew him—those who caught any of the four times he’d deputized for Pete—but plenty had never seen him before. The Beatles were metropolitan, the Hurricanes still suburban: the Cavern hadn’t booked them since June 1960 and they mostly frequented the north Liverpool jive halls the Beatles had left behind; Ringo had also spent most of 1962 in Hamburg, France and Skegness, playing Merseyside no more than seventeen times since December ’61.

  I thought Ringo was rough, a boy from Liverpool 8, the kind of lad who, if he hadn’t been a Beatle, could well have been a crook. They went from having a god to that.

  Margaret Chillingworth

  That first time in the Cavern, people were shouting “Pete forever, Ringo never” and stamping their feet in unison like at Saturday-morning pictures. They were shouting it right in front of Ringo. The Beatles just started playing Some Other Guy but the chanting went on quite a while and no one seemed concerned it might upset Ringo.

  Brenda Murphy7

  All these things happened, but while a posse of disgruntled teenage girls did make their feelings known, the situation was never quite as inflamed as hindsight would suggest. Pete had plenty of fans but never the majority, and while Ringo himself would sensationalize by claiming there were “riots in the streets” over his appointment, this storm passed quickly: broad consensus confirms it was all over between one and two weeks later.

  Pete Best was very handsome but he never looked as if he belonged to the Beatles. I wasn’t that bothered when he left. Ringo had the right personality, if not the looks. I could understand why they’d done it.

  Sue Wright

  New drummer in Beatles—Ringo Starr. He is nice. Sweet—better than miserable Pete Best. Paul asked us if we liked Ringo and we all said yes.

  Diary entry of Sandra Marshall

  Pete was just a pretty guy. He never had anything to say and didn’t match their personalities at all. He just used to go home, disappear, very subdued, whereas Ringo was Mr. Showman.

  Marie Guirron, George’s girlfriend

  I used to love Pete and was heartbroken when they sacked him. It was a dreadful feeling at the time—how can they do that? But it soon passed and was as if he’d never been there. They were much better with Ringo, without a doubt. He gave them that solid backbeat—he’s a great rock ’n’ roll drummer—and he fitted in brilliantly.

  Elsa Breden8

  As it was with the suits, so it was again now: every young voice had an opinion, pro and anti vying for attention—“Pete forever, Ringo never” or “Ringo forever, Pete never”—but no one headed for the exit. The Beatles lost no fan in sacking Pete, and were in fact still gaining them.

  Three days later, at lunchtime on Wednesday, August 22, the Beatles appeared before TV cameras for the first time. They needed little of Eppy’s encouragement to look good, choosing matching dark velvet waistcoats, suit trousers, knitted ties and the Chelsea boots. It was a primitive shoot. The Cavern was so gloomy, the camera could only see when the place was brightly lit, which made it even hotter than usual; the sound was so loud that Granada’s single microphone often distorted; the film stock was black-and-white;* cutaway shots—Beatles close-ups and multiple views of the audience—were achieved with a mute clockwork camera that had to be wound up and ran for twenty-four seconds before the charge dropped away to nothing. But through it all, there is a film, one that its maker Leslie Woodhead evocatively describes as “like something smuggled out of Eastern Europe.”9

  Factually speaking, it’s the second piece of Beatles moving image—predated by the short, silent 8mm color sequence shot six months earlier—but this is the earliest proper footage of the Beatles, their first with synchronized sound, their first TV coverage and the only film of them in the Cavern. Two complete takes survive of “Some Other Guy” (played at Woodhead’s request) along with a mute cutaway of the end of “Money”—music from New York and Detroit sung hard in a Liverpool cellar.

  So here they are—on film, with sound, at last, the Beatles. They do not disappoint. Ringo lays a solid, bricklaying beat behind a powerful three-guitar sound; John and Paul pitch full tilt at the lead vocal, side by side, intense and in harmony. Just like everyone says, they’re themselves, charismatic and dynamic performers, no faking. Except for a change of clothes and drummer, this is what Brian Epstein saw when he dropped into a lunchtime session nine months earlier, and here’s why he was hooked. John sings straight, strong and true, his right hand chopping out the rhythm, the audience but a nearsighted blur. Paul sings with the same total commitment but is more self-aware, mostly looking up at the ceiling, making only occasional eye contact with the audience. George, off to the side, is solidly good on guitar and can’t suppress one wry, shy smile. Ringo is doing his job mostly in shadow, but close-ups catch him laughing and enjoying himself. Looks pass between them, they’re confident with who they are, where they are and what they are, and they’re ready to fly.

  The context is captured well. Screams of enthusiasm and delight sound at the start of “Some Other Guy,” then are drowned by the sound. Bob Wooler’s voice is characteristically crisp in his introductions, and one of the films just catches him crawling back inside his tiny stage-side hole, leaving the Beatles to get on with it. And in a perfect moment of audio-vérité, someone yells out “We want Pete!” both before and at the tail-end of one of the takes—a young man’s voice, not a girl’s.

  Though the camera didn’t see him, Pete was in the Cavern for this session. “I sneaked in and sneaked out again,” he wrote in his autobiography.10 Leslie Woodhead remembers “a dozen or fewer Pete Best fans seething above ground, really unhappy that he had gone and Ringo was there,” and Granada’s clockwork camera filmed a young lad reading the August 23 Mersey Beat, hot off the press with what it touted as an “exclusive story” headlined BEATLES CHANGE DRUMMER! The piece was tucked away on page eight and said “The Beatles comment ‘Pete left the group by mutual agreement. There were no arguments or difficulties, and this has been an entirely amicable decision’ ”—which, insists editor Bill Harry, wasn’t his own independent journalism but a typed quote given him by Brian that he didn’t challenge. It was whitewash—hogwash, from Pete’s perspective—and made little impact. The story also said, truthfully, Ringo had “admired the Beatles for years … [and] is tremendously excited about the future.” It concluded with news that the group would be flying to London on September 4 “to make recordings at EMI Studios.”

  The Beatles were back in the Cavern a few hours later—Wednesday night, as usual—after final preparations for John and Cyn’s quiet next-day wedding. She was at the docks to wave her mother off to Canada again, and John went home and finally broke the news to Mimi: “I said Cyn was having a baby, we were getting married tomorrow, did she want to come?” Mimi shouted “You’re too young!” at the boy who’d never been so, and vowed both her own absence from the ceremony and any other family member’s.11 There’d be no Stanleys present and, naturally, no Lennons. John hadn’t seen his dad in sixteen years and assumed him to be still sailing the ocean waves as a merchant seaman; he was unaware that Alf Lennon was stomping Britain’s byways as an itinerant worker and waif, his happy carefree world since release from prison
in 1950.

  Thursday, August 23, mid-morning, Brian collected Cyn from Garmoyle Road so she could be driven to her wedding in style—or as much style as could be had in a Ford Zodiac over which someone had maliciously poured paint-stripper. Their destination was the register office on Mount Pleasant, where they found John huddled in a corner of its drab waiting-room with Paul and George, each dressed in black suit, white shirt and black tie as if at a funeral. (Ringo and Neil hadn’t been invited and didn’t know about it.) They were all nervous, Cyn would write. Otherwise, there was only her brother Tony and his wife Marjorie in the room, so the total number attending this wedding, bride and groom included, was seven. Nobody had thought to bring a camera and there isn’t a single photograph of the day.

  So solemn was the registrar, it might indeed have been a funeral—and, shortly after the ceremony began, a pneumatic drill started up in the adjacent backyard and no one could hear a thing. The couple barely caught the vows they needed to repeat—“To have and to harm, till death duty part”—and John first knew he’d become a husband when Brian (his choice of best man) nudged him and said it was time to kiss the bride. Then they signed the register. John Winston Lennon, 21, “Musician (Guitar),” had married Cynthia Powell, 22, “Art Student (School).” Their signatures were witnessed by James Paul McCartney and Marjorie Joyce Powell. The great event over, they emerged from the building into a heavy downpour, and burst out laughing.12

  Tony and Marjorie left after the ceremony so it was just the five of them who ran down Mount Pleasant in the rain to the wedding celebration: lunch at Reece’s. As they went, they passed opposite the Vines, the huge ale house where Alf and Julia Lennon celebrated their register office wedding twenty-four years earlier (and there were no photographs of them either).

  The Beatles’ habit of not giving one another gifts was well set, but Brian gave the newlyweds free use of his private flat for as long as they needed it; 36 Falkner Street was where Mr. and Mrs. Lennon would begin married life—and where, hopefully, Cyn would see through the last seven months of her pregnancy. It was a typically generous gesture, and both a surprise and great relief to John and Cyn, who’d done nothing to fix their own accommodation and would otherwise have been sleeping apart for the time being, she back in her crummy bedsit, he at Mendips. Cyn so genuinely overflowed with gratitude and emotion, Brian blushed crimson.

  For the first time since bunking down in the student flat in Gambier Terrace two years before, John left Mimi and moved into a place of his own. It seemed completely suitable: he and Cyn had the full length of the ground floor in a smartish townhouse, with use of a small walled garden at the back. On the downside, their toilet and bathroom was in the hall and shared with the house’s other occupants, and their bedroom fronted a street that was often threateningly noisy. Falkner Street was a violent place. John and Cyn were, appropriately enough, close to the end by the art school, but beyond their front door—the deeper Falkner Street extended into Liverpool 8—the greater its decay and social malaise, and trouble often spread along its length.

  It was strange for a man whom have everything and a wife to boot. A month earlier, marriage hadn’t been in John’s mind, now he had a dependent, with a second on the way, and nothing could ever be like it was, even if he pretended it to be. His new status was going to take considerable adjustment: “I did feel embarrassed being married. Walking about married, it was like walking about with odd socks on or your flies open.”13

  John thought it could be the end of the line for him and the Beatles if people found out—it was what everyone kept telling him, so he believed it—and Ringo was among those he kept in the dark. As he said in 1965, “I didn’t want it to get around and I didn’t know how well I could trust him to keep a secret.”14 They didn’t tell Neil either. He needed to know something had changed because he’d be collecting and dropping off at Falkner Street every night instead of Menlove Avenue, but John didn’t mention marriage, only that he was living in sin.

  Cyn’s appearances at Beatles shows, already diminished, ended completely. Awkward questions were to be avoided at all costs and she certainly didn’t want to be seen with John when her pregnancy was visible. Despite such precautions, however, the first married rumor quickly took root. Apparently, one of the Cavern snack-bar staff had seen John and Cyn leave the register office …

  Lindy Ness was just home from Norway and made a point of seeing John at the August 24 lunchtime session. He’d asked her to bring him back a gift and she brought a wooden troll with trousers around his ankles, sitting on a potty. She found John, with George, by the bandroom, and had a conversation audible only to its participants: “I’d already heard rumors that John had got married, and as he unwrapped my present George said something like ‘Are you going to put it with all the toasters?’ John said, ‘Shut up!’ When they saw what it was, George said, ‘Oh I thought it was another wedding present,’ and John said, ‘SHUT UP!,’ and then he looked at it and said, ‘What’s this, Norwegian wood?’ ”15

  John and Lindy resumed their friendship where they’d left it earlier in the summer, and during a number of good conversations over the following weeks he conceded that the rumor about him being married was true. “He talked about Cynthia ‘expecting,’ and—while I don’t remember exactly what he said—I got the clear sense he wasn’t happy about becoming a father. I also got the impression he loved Cynthia very much.”

  He did, and another of John’s ways of preventing people thinking him married was to carry on carrying-on. For a short while longer, he kept up his fling with the girl who’d posed for his sexy photos, and he also started a new situation, with a dark-haired, Juliette Gréco–like beauty called Ida Holly. Just turned 16, she was one of few unmarried girls who didn’t live “at home”—she flat-shared with a friend in (of all places) Gambier Terrace. John and Ida began a friendship that extended deep into 1963, one he was surprisingly open about: almost everyone in Liverpool seemed to know it.

  All the Beatles were now in settled relationships. Having ended with Dorothy Rhone, Paul played a broad field without hindrance, sparking flames old and new, and he also (from August 1962) found himself a special new “steady.” This was Thelma Pickles—John’s art school lover before he got together with Cynthia. Paul had always liked Thelma, and happened to see her in Liverpool while driving his car—his proud and precious Ford Consul Classic, which he bought new (“on the never-never”) in early August.16 She’d married, had a baby boy and then separated from her husband. Approaching 21, Thelma lived in a Prince’s Avenue bedsit as a single parent and was trying to resume her art school studies, a talented young woman … and here in her life arrived Paul McCartney.

  He was no longer a slightly plump young schoolboy but very much his own person. I only like visual art, I’m not into music, so I had just a vague notion that John and his group were still going. Paul said he’d pick me up later to see them play at the Cavern. It was a jazz club when I’d last been there.

  It was full of raw energy. Girls were screaming and boys liked them as well. I’d only ever watched Six-Five Special and this was different. I hadn’t believed what Paul said about their increasing fame—being brought up working-class in that era, we were given to believe “our sort” couldn’t become successful.17

  George, meanwhile, was still going steady with Marie. On the rare evenings when the Beatles weren’t playing, he’d take her to the bowling alley or the pictures or they’d go for long drives, sometimes heading into Wales, and she also went back to his house, where he showed her his collection of Chet Atkins LPs.18

  These visits coincided with the Harrisons’ last days at 25 Upton Green. Having hated Speke from the moment they moved in, on New Year’s Day 1950, their application to be rehoused was finally granted, and during late August this family of now four—Harry (53), Louise (51), Peter (22) and George (19)—moved to 174 Mackets Lane, a new “overspill” council development on the border of Hunt’s Cross and Woolton. It was close to Menlove Avenu
e and the Harrisons always said it was “in Woolton.” This was the nicest house they’d had: bigger, semidetached, with a driveway and garage that enabled Peter and George to keep their cars off the road and on their own property for the first time. It wasn’t exactly luxury—the floor in George’s bedroom was always bare lino, cold and hard—but it was blessedly removed from Speke’s social and alcohol troubles, of which, after close on thirteen years, they’d had enough.

  Ringo got himself a new steady girlfriend within days of joining the Beatles, and she too was a fan. Mary “Maureen” Cox was a Cavernite who’d already been out with Paul—they dated after a friend dared her to kiss him, which she did. “Maureen was my girlfriend before she was Ringo’s,” Paul says. “I went out with her a couple of times. She was a nice girl and a lot of fun but we weren’t really going to hit it off and then Ringo said he seriously fancied her so I left them to it.”19

  Maureen was training to become a hairstylist, and studying at evening classes. She and her friend Jackie were cutting through Mathew Street on their way back from college when Ringo came out of the Cavern, got in his car and was about to drive off. Maureen tapped on his window and asked for an autograph. She was never sure why—she was generally cool and laid-back, not the star-struck type—but Ringo signed as asked, and as he was driving away called out, “Coming to the Cavern Sunday?”

  Each was an only child and both had a confusion of names. She was Mary, known to some as Maureen and also as its diminutive Mo, though most knew her as Mitch. This was what Ringo first called her (a poor speller, he wrote it “Mich”) and she called him Ringo until he asked her to say Richy, like all his family and loved ones did. It was for Richy and Mitch that romance blossomed, though initially brighter for her: the Beatles had loads more girls around them than the Hurricanes and Ringo was determined to take advantage of the widespread opportunities; but Maureen kept imposing herself and got him to give her and Jackie a lift home at the end of Cavern nights. As he’d recall, “There was always that Liverpool thing: ‘I’ll take you home, love.’—‘Sure, can you take my friend too?’—’er, all right.’ Then one day you’d ask, ‘Can we go out alone?’ ”20