Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  There was another wrinkle: climbing the local entertainment ladder, and seizing a new business opportunity, the Beatles negotiated with Eckhorn for a higher fee. Having represented themselves, they wrote Allan Williams telling him they didn’t intend to pay him a percentage on their new job. Williams wrote several letters in protest that went unanswered.

  But Koschmider was the local businessman with pull, and he played his trump card: he called the police to look into George Harrison’s work permit, which his English-speaking son, George Steiner, had vouched for originally. Once the police discovered Harrison’s age, they immediately deported him. Stuart and Astrid put the dazed George on the train to England with a sandwich bag full of snacks. The remaining Beatles played a few more nights without him at the Top Ten. After a couple of days, McCartney and Best wandered back to their rooms above the Bambi Kino to get some of their things, which they found untouched. Depending on who’s telling the story, McCartney either lit a match for light in the dark hallway or set fire to some condoms tacked to the wall as a farewell gesture to Koschmider. A minor fire was quashed as they escaped.

  The next day, police arrested McCartney and Best at the Kaiserkeller and hauled them down to the station for questioning: Koschmider threatened to charge them with arson. Two more Beatles were promptly deported, although Koschmider didn’t press charges. Lennon left by train the day after that, Rickenbacker slung over his shoulder; Sutcliffe holed up in Astrid’s attic until February 1961. By then, he had begun to make plans to settle in Hamburg, continue his art studies, and marry.

  Everybody had underestimated Koschmider’s revenge impulse. Back in Liverpool on December 10, 1960, Lennon threw stones at Aunt Mimi’s window to wake her upon his early morning arrival at Mendips. “Where’s the £100 a week, then?” she said as he hit her up for his cab fare.42

  Just as the Beatles returned from Germany, Allan Williams launched a brand-new club, named after Eckhorn’s: Liverpool’s own Top Ten. The grand opening was on December 1, 1960, and featured Terry Dene and Garry Mills. But five days later, a week after the fire in Hamburg, the club burned to the ground. With Williams, the talk inevitably turned to arson: whether a rival club owner settled a score or he botched his own insurance scam, Williams found himself belly-up again. The crime went unsolved.

  The Beatles, who watched a sure gig go up in smoke, started nagging anybody and everybody at the Jac for work. One day, Bob Wooler, a local music collector who had quit his railway-office job to emcee at Williams’s now-defunct Top Ten, took pity. He rang up Brian Kelly, who booked them for a show after Christmas at Litherland Town Hall in North Liverpool. (In the parallel movie of how the Beatles never saw worldwide fame, Wooler is the well-meaning but small-time manager who could never break them out of their local market.) Kelly reminded Wooler that the Beatles had burned him the previous spring, when they had stiffed him on a Lathom Hall booking to traipse up to Scotland with Johnny Gentle. Wooler persisted—and negotiated the fee up from four to six pounds.

  So even though Lennon only got back to town on December 10, by the following week, having hired one Chas Newby to fill in for Sutcliffe on bass, the Beatles had gigs back at the Casbah (December 17 and 31), the Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard, Wallasey (December 19, booked by Williams), and Litherland Town Hall (December 27), none of which paid very much, but all of which testified to the Beatles’ determination to show off their Hamburg chops. Few in Liverpool had yet heard whispers of their progress or of their Hamburg reputation.

  By far the most important gig was the one at Litherland Town Hall, which billed them as “Direct from Hamburg.” Half of the kids who showed up were impressed to hear the band sing such good English. A futuristic new “glitter ball” hung from the ceiling, spraying down colored patterns on the dance floor during the show. Except that this evening there didn’t turn out to be all that much dancing. Wooler put them in the prime center slot, between the Deltones and the Searchers, and instructed them to hit their first song as the curtains opened.

  McCartney’s voice cut Wooler off before he was done, before the curtain had even moved. With a death-defying leap into Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” the band charged in behind him, a thunderbolt of sound that quickly dashed all preconceptions. The Hamburg feistiness and grit poured forth as a new, unspeakable force on the Litherland stage—the Beatles’ command of the room left their Liverpool audience gasping. The crowd lunged for the stage; the promoters thought a riot had broken out. If they had ever heard this band before, it would have been playing skiffle as the Quarrymen, or in Best’s basement at the Casbah. But few had: most local listeners that night had never heard of the Beatles, never mind music this driven, passionate, and brutal. The impact set loose something fierce and unknowable, and the volume of their amps only hinted at the intensity. Beatlemania was more than two years off, but Hamburg rock ’n’ roll fever suddenly swept this local crowd, rekindling both buzz and expectations.

  Everybody who was there swears they saw the Second Coming. Tony Bramwell happened upon George Harrison on the 81 bus, George’s father’s route, carrying his guitar, and latched on to him as a free pass: he had known the group before Hamburg and was curious to see how they sounded. He came away astonished, with a peculiar memory of their music’s effect:

  On stage that long-ago night in 1960 the audience seemed to sense that the Beatles were different from the other Liverpool bands. They seemed more aware, they had an edge, you felt they were dangerous. Part of the mystique was that they were different. You could jive when they played R&B, or Elvis hits . . . but it was almost impossible to dance when they played their own songs. It was totally the wrong rhythm, so we’d just cluster around the stage and watch.43

  Lennon himself remembered the gig vividly: “Suddenly we were a wow. It was that evening that we really came out of our shell and let go. We stood there being cheered for the first time. This was when we began to think that we were good.”44

  After his initial shock, Kelly quickly forgot past complaints and hired the Beatles for another thirty-five dances in the region through March of 1961, which built them a local following and more gigs as word spread. Here, suddenly, was music limned with new vigor and authority, a band suddenly recast as an act, with personalities crowding the microphone and an ensemble pitching at greatness. Among all the unrecorded milestones in rock history, the Litherland Town Hall gig tops everybody’s Beatles list.

  Leaving his fiancée in Hamburg early in the new year, 1961, Sutcliffe returned to Liverpool to tell his family about his bride. He stepped back in on bass as the band continued gigging and building up their new reputation, but he “was always a target because of his small stature,” Pete Best wrote.

  One night at Lathom Hall . . . Stu was jumped on by a bunch of thugs and was taking considerable punishment when two girl fans breathless dashed up to [John and me] with the news. Lathom Hall was a two-tier dance hall in a tough area and the Teds had been able to trap Stu backstage. John and I doubled back and in usual style put our heads down and charged into the fray, freeing Stu and collecting our fair share of knocks along the way. Lennon broke a finger belting a Ted and had to play guitar for a while wearing a splint.45

  When they rescued Stu, he was bleeding from the head. They brought him home to his distraught mother, but Sutcliffe was adamant that she not call the doctor.

  Hamburg’s club scene had changed since the Beatles’ first Indra booking. Eckhorn’s club, the Top Ten, thrived during their absence with the tame yet eager Gerry Marsden and the Pacemakers. A return visit booked for April 1961 promised fourteen weeks to build upon what the Beatles had begun the previous fall. This time, however, the Beatles would share the bill as veterans with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and were welcomed back into the scene as contenders by the old Koschmider crew. Launching into sets on the new stage, without fear of Koschmider’s reprisals, they honed their skills and settled into a professional nightly routine they had barely grasped before getting run out of town: long
sets, a big dance floor, and a more agreeable employer. Their prospects quickened. During this spring stint, Tony Sheridan brought a producer in to give them a listen: Bert Kaempfert, who booked them to back Sheridan on their first professional recording sessions.

  One morning Kaempfert simply drove them over to an elementary school where he had rented out the auditorium. The boys set up their equipment onstage and he closed the curtains to create the “studio.” He became the first producer to record the band (June 22–24, 1961), and their sessions backing Tony Sheridan led to their first singles: “My Bonnie,” “The Saints (When the Saints Go Marching In),” and “Why.” At this stage in his career, Kaempfert had enough label clout to try a quick cash-in on rock ’n’ roll. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison were aware of his industry stature: after all, he had cowritten Presley’s recent hit “Wooden Heart.” (Later, his ship would come in with Frank Sinatra’s smash “Strangers in the Night.”) The closest American analog to the pop stature Kaempfert held at the time might be Mitch Miller: a middle-aged label power stuck in Tin Pan Alley, cynically rearranging old songs as rock ’n’ roll “jive.” Kaempfert conducted his own pop orchestra on the radio and freelanced as a producer for Polydor. He even had been voted “Man of the Year” by Cashbox in 1959, coming off a huge international hit called “Wonderland by Night,” a “sound portrait of Manhattan.”46

  As students of the genre, it is easy to imagine the Beatles pressing Kaempfert for details about the Presley sessions. Naturally, they hit him up to include their own material; but he only rolled tape during George Harrison’s instrumental “Cry for a Shadow.” The song veered between Cliff Richard tribute and parody, but Kaempfert heard it as more than a curiosity. For one number, “Ain’t She Sweet,” he let Lennon sing lead; he also did some takes singing lead on “My Bonnie.” Kaempfert billed them as the Beat Brothers, hoping to sidestep the “Peedles” pun; Sheridan was framed as the star.

  “Ain’t She Sweet” survives as a good example of how Hamburg conditions shaped their jaunty sound. In all likelihood, they chose this standard because of Gene Vincent’s modest hit with the song in 1960. But Vincent’s rendition is a third again as slow, and Lennon’s delivery combines a showman’s verve with an arch suavity—while the band bustles alongside, siphoning energy off the sly confidence in his voice. At this remove it’s difficult to understand any resistance to this sound: Lennon’s lead already needles that mischievous interplay of sincerity and self-mocking irony. The beat isn’t hard, but it’s certainly not soft, and the band is keyed into the varied meanings that slide off Lennon’s delivery: he’s singing about a girl, but he’s also singing about how silly it feels to give in to such feelings.

  This single also presents the best evidence in favor of Pete Best’s drumming: while not showy, the beat is steady, and gives the lie to those who say he couldn’t drum. Best was not a bad drummer in any sense; whether he was up to the others’ level was becoming the key question.

  Most of the Beatles’ tracks sat in the vault; Kaempfert released only “My Bonnie” backed with “The Saints,” which gave the Beatles their first commercial pressing, even if their name didn’t appear on the label. The single sold twenty thousand copies in Germany within two weeks that summer, landing at number five on a regional chart, alongside a remake of Joey Dee’s “Peppermint Twist,” Charly Cotton’s “Liebestraumals Twist,” and the Oliver Twist Band’s “Steller Zahn.” But it disappeared quickly.

  As the band’s career found a toehold with a recording, Sutcliffe continued romancing Kirchherr. One night he recognized the pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi (“I Was A Rich Man’s Plaything,” 1947) surrounded by German art students at a club. He introduced himself and made an appointment for Paolozzi to view his work. With his focus on love and his prospects as an artist, Sutcliffe’s interest in the band began to wane just as things were falling into place. In Sutcliffe’s mind, living in his fiancée’s house, and painting under a new mentor, it wasn’t really much of a choice at all.

  Chapter 7

  I Found Out

  Hamburg had seasoned the Beatles’ live show and boosted their opportunities—on the Reeperbahn they enjoyed celebrity status. Back on their home turf, however, they returned to anonymity. For the uncertain stretch between the Litherland Town Hall concert in December 1960 and a professional manager’s handshake in December 1961, they dug in for twelve months of solid slogging: long winter treks sleeping on top of one another in a van belonging to Pete Best’s friend Neil Aspinall, trying to stay warm while shuttling between Derbyshire and Kent and Hull and Portsmouth and back again, pushing fifty miles an hour on Britain’s winding, two-lane motorways. After these grueling hinterland gigs, Lennon famously hectored the others: “Where are we going, boys?” “To the top, Johnny!” “Where?” “To the toppermost of the poppermost!”1 They were a small-time operation, but they were afloat.

  In March 1961, Bob Wooler began booking them several times a week downstairs at the Cavern Club on the winding alleyway called Mathew Street, first for lunchtime breaks and then for evening slots. The club’s original owner, Alan Sytner, had sold the club to Ray McFall in late 1959, and the former “trad-jazz” venue relented to the growing beat scene. At first the Cavern faced stiff competition from other clubs, like the Iron Door and the Casanova Club, booked by Sam Leach, but the Cavern soon became the best known. That year alone, the Beatles played three to eight Cavern sets per week, often twice in the same day, complete with groupies clamoring for front-row seats.

  The music propelled them even through new political tension. By the time Lennon turned twenty-one in October 1961, Sutcliffe had been living with Astrid in the Kirchherrs’ Hamburg home for a year. Engaged to the hippest German art student imaginable, he returned to his canvases and accepted a prestigious invitation to enroll in Eduardo Paolozzi’s class at the German Hochschule. A giant from the cultural world had reached down and blessed Sutcliffe’s work, making his choice obvious.

  Even after all he’d been through before that, Lennon must have experienced his twenty-first year as his longest. By this point, he had gambled everything on rock ’n’ roll. In professional terms, 1961 saw the Beatles snare a German contract with Polydor backing Sheridan, a Kaempfert session, even a modest hit on the German charts. By that November, the proprietor of Liverpool’s biggest record shop, North End Music Stores (NEMS), had come knocking with ambitious plans for a UK record contract. In between, the band worked on expanding its set list, even though hopes far outran their success.

  Their embrace of rock ’n’ roll (which had grown to include C&W, gritty R&B, and hard-bashing Little Richard, as well as the cornball Hollywood stuff that McCartney seemed to get off on) served and challenged Liverpool’s wide-ranging stylistic palate. The Mersey scene thrived on an uncommonly generous and self-propulsive flow of musical ideas. As the music got bigger, the gigs increased, the set lists mushroomed, and the culture constantly renewed itself; the larger project benefited them all. The spirit was both craven and hilarious; but even so, very few other acts had as large a song list as the Beatles. All these bands hunted down obscure B-sides for material, and the test was to see who could come to “own” certain numbers, the way standup comics fingerprint their routines.

  Some songs entered several bands’ set lists: Chan Romero’s “Hippy Hippy Shake,” for example, which became a hit for the swinging Blue Jeans in 1963. Others, like “Twist and Shout,” became exclusive Beatle territory: with Lennon’s spread-legged stance, smiling eyes, and slashing vocal, he bored holes in the song night after night to the point where a lesser piece of material might have emerged in tatters. The wonder was that the more they dug in, the more this song repaid their investment. And this was the story of how just one of their covers became one of many signatures. The larger game among bands was to keep everybody guessing, change the set list frequently, and toss surprises out when rivals were spotted in the audience. Bands like the Fourmost and the Mersey Beats were dim refractions of Beatle energy; but the
Big Three thumped some serious beat (with numbers like Richie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy” and Chuck Berry’s “Reelin’ and Rockin’ ”); the Swinging Blue Jeans had both oomph and swing; the Remo Four were known for hard-driving tempos; and Cass and the Casanovas specialized in vocal harmonies.

  Sam Leach began booking the Beatles for several Liverpool Jazz Society events (“jazz” in name only), all-night marathons featuring twelve groups over twelve hours between eight o’clock Saturday night and eight the next morning. The first gig, held at the Aintree Institute on March 11, squeezed two thousand kids into a Temple Street cellar, capacity one thousand. By October, again at the Litherland Town Hall, the Beatles merged with Gerry’s Pacemakers to form the Beatmakers, the supergroup as musical demo derby. Sharing the bill only goaded acts to play harder in front of each other; stealing material from other bands depended on the ability to top them. The Beatles developed group dynamics, alternating lead singers and projecting big personalities. If McCartney played the softy, the pretty boy in leathers fronting a bunch of toughs, that bill’s Gerry Marsden made the “cute one” look demonic. Marsden did “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel warhorse, and irony did not know his address. Many, many others fueled and fed off the Beatles’ energy, which made their triumphs the scene’s triumphs, until success quickly snowballed beyond all fathoming. Acts doubled up for marathons (a famous Rory Storm and the Wild Ones, Beatles, and Pacemakers bill appeared at the Liverpool Jazz Society in March), all-night Cavern blowouts, and last-minute subs and trade-offs when a band arrived at a gig a player short. In early spring of 1961, the Beatles returned to their Hamburg cash retreat, hungry for more.