by Larry Kane
After all, Paul was just a boy when it all began—a little younger but just as wise as his writing companion and fellow genius John Lennon and the leader of the All-Starr Band, and a bit older than George and his guitar-mastering magic fingers.
I first met the Beatles in February 1964 during their brief visit to the States, and first joined the Beatles on tour on August 18, 1964. But two decades before that, their journey began. This is that story.
Was the Beatles’ success story improbable? Yes, more so than you know. But it is a story where all things were possible. In many ways, the prequel to the Beatles’ arrival in America was more exciting than the main event.
Filled with characters dimmed or forgotten by the lapses of history, marked at times by despair and defeat, punctuated by moments of drama and fate, this story was mostly created by the energy and talent that overcame the most overwhelming odds.
My search for the characters was daunting. There are no doubt lies reported in this book, because there are so many contradictory reports. But everyone gets their moment of truth.
This is also a story about a city and its people. Alfred Lennon and his wife, Julia Stanley, would burn their own bridges of love and companionship in the parks and bedrooms of Liverpool, but flickers of art and banjos and guitars would burn inside a son. Harold Harrison, a friendly bus driver and stalwart union leader, taught his wiry son to respect the music, and to listen to its wonderment. James McCartney of the north side brought a middle-class work ethic and a charismatic personality to his son. And the less financially endowed Starkeys of the South Side of Liverpool saw their shy and sickly son, obsessed by the music, emerge into a man, and a talented one at that. The Sutcliffes encouraged their only son, Stuart, to paint and to play guitar. The legendary Mona Best played den mother to her drummer son, Pete, and to the early makeshift band. A tense, consistent, and frequent writer, Bill Harry, wielded a pen as mighty as a guitar, and he had plenty of company—the likes of Beatles pressmen Tony Barrow and Derek Taylor, and others. The promoters, some of them still promoting, are vibrant in life and in recollection. The catalyst, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, is the most fascinating of entrepreneurs, provocative and endearing.
There are many heroes and heroines, risk takers, doubters, and hundreds of others who claim a piece of the history. To the people of Liverpool, their names stand beside the rich and the famous as architects of a revolution in culture. Sit beside early Beatles promoter Sam Leach, or longtime Beatles insider Tony Bramwell, or the original Quarrymen, and you feel what it was like to be there when the beginning began. You sense the uncertainty, the determination, the doubts, and the perilous flights of fancy and dreaming that live in young people. Ironic, isn’t it? Youth is fleeting, but in the case of the Beatles, the music freezes them in time.
Time is the greatest enemy of history. Real events and people are distorted, exaggerated, and often forgotten. We are dependent on individual and collective memories. And there are so many people who try to shape their stories to suit their own biographies. That is expected. After all, what is memory but a hazy, subjective reconstruction of the vivid reality from so long ago?
Such is the history of the Beatles—conflicting stories, betrayal, love (lots of that), intrigue, and real or imagined adventure, some of which I shared while touring with them.
But about one fact there is absolute certainty. Before the world noticed, before the glare overwhelmed them, it all came together in the period from 1957 through 1963, when they were boys.
And it was all preceded by a bloody nightmare that would define the city and the boys.
Madness Above the Mersey
Jim McCartney would stand on the rooftop and watch. The glare of fires burning on the waterfront of the river Mersey would make his eyes squint and his stomach turn. He would glance out over the neighborhoods of his city and wonder how close the bombs would come. He was a volunteer—his job was to observe and report fires, and then, after the strange whistle of bombs hit the air on their way down and then exploded on the ground, Jim would fight the fires, and silently hope beyond hope that the killers in the sky would miss him. Jim, considered too old at thirty-eight to join the fighting forces, and hampered with a childhood injury, was determined to do his part.
A mile away, his wife, Mary, was delivering babies by darkness, another player in the drama that was Liverpool. For Mary and Jim, their only solace was that their first son, Paul, was born after the blitz had stopped. During the bombardment, German bombs strangled their city, but the heroism in the middle of the hell was a tribute to the stalwart fabric of the British and their undying hope to always see another daybreak. But daybreak also brought with it the shocking sights and smells of the tragedy.
That odious gas escaping from its destroyed pipelines, the smell of lathe and burned metal, and the stink of sewage streaming through the streets—it was unforgettable. As the horrified citizens emerged from the shelters, they discovered piles of soot several inches deep, and ultimately, the feared sight—lifeless beings extricated from the rubble.
As in all historic bombing campaigns, a few minutes late or early could decide the fate of an individual. On July 7, 1940, Elsie Starkey was late, but also early. As her son Richard entered the dark world of poverty she lived in at 9 Madryn Street, the first air-raid warnings were sounded. Fortunately, the height of the blitz started a few months later. Richard Starkey was born one month later than he was due, but early enough to survive the bombs.
Some people—wounded, dazed, and disoriented—wandered the remains searching for relatives and friends. Animals, left behind in the hurry to find safety, were clueless victims. Anticontamination units moved through the narrow streets to contain the filth and protect the living. The citizens of the city knew, quite privately because the enemy didn’t know the extent of the damage, that thousands were dead and dying.
Bus conductor Harold (Harry) Harrison managed to maneuver his vehicle in and around shattered streets. He was a thin man, with intense dark eyes and a great love for his wife, Louise, and three children, including the youngest, Peter, born during the horrific blitz. A fourth child, George, the spitting image of his father, would arrive in 1943.
Harry, like his fellow wartime mates, experienced the suffering firsthand. Day by day, the toll was mounting.
In the end, the count was 4,000 dead in Liverpool—second only to London’s loss of 30,000 in the extended aerial carnage. More than 6,000 Liverpool homes were gone, and nearly 200,000 damaged. The city was a shooting gallery. The blitz by the German Luftwaffe continued from Christmas 1940 until early in 1942.
But fate would have its moment, defying the destruction. On the evening of October 9, 1940, a woman could be seen running in the dark, fearless in the face of fear, heading for the Oxford Street Maternity Home, as it was called then. It is said she missed the explosion of a land mine by a few minutes. One thing is certain: a few hours earlier the Germans had launched another attack on populated areas. This attack did not stop Mary Stanley, known as Mimi, sister of Julia Stanley Lennon, from getting to the maternity home. Julia, a beautiful and caring young woman, married to merchant seaman Alfred Lennon, had just given birth to their first child, John Winston. Mimi, a strong-willed woman—some would say extremely stubborn almost to the point of defiantly immovable—was quoted as saying, “This was the one I was waiting for,” as if it were her own child. The sisters were close, but Mimi viewed herself as a guardian to Julia. Inevitably, years after the bombs and war ended, Mimi’s “wait” would take a historical turn, and the controversy over her role would live into the next century.
The blitz ended when the twentieth century’s most prolific mass murderer, Adolf Hitler, turned his attention east toward the Russian threat against his expanding domain of death and fear. But the damage had been done.
The city of Liverpool and its environs had been a likely target. The port on the river Mersey, a waterway that would be romanticized by the young bands of musicians that roamed the s
treets fifteen years later, was the entry port for over 90 percent of raw war materials that arrived from other countries. Liverpool, whose great wealth was secured as a port of call several hundred years prior, was the port of call for the lifelines of World War II, and the gateway to the West. The Germans, diabolical in their bombing campaign, tried to stop the flow and kill the morale. But the mounting deaths, and the additional pain and suffering, only emboldened the populace to resist and fight daily for survival. Rationing of all resources was standard, but there was one critical commodity that the people of northwestern England had in abundance, and that was, quite simply, hope.
There was, and remains today, a sense of pride in the northwest of England. Is its sense of superiority unbound? No. But the mothers and fathers and children who grew up amid the ruins, many of them limited by economic duress caused by war, learned that, while London was the capital, the people of Liverpool would never afford themselves anything but first-class status in British society. Much of that moxie emerged from survival in the war, and it was on display when the greatest band in the world emerged from the port city, at first denied by the London music scene, and later embraced by Her Majesty’s empire, and the rest of the human universe.
Liverpool is also a city of remembrance, whether it is the simple grave of the young retailer-cum-band manager, Brian Epstein—a member of Liverpool’s small Jewish community who catapulted Britain’s greatest entertainment exports to fame and glory—or the small, crumbling stone marking the resting place of the mother who produced a musical genius, both of whom died much too early. There are the houses of the famous and the hospitals where they emerged. But superseding the famous and those who were left behind is the spirit of the city’s working-class people, nurtured over decades of seeking a better life for their successors and etched in the courage burned into their souls by the great aerial bombardment.
Perhaps the most famous nod to the past is the church that remains standing, remarkably, in the heart of the city. On May 5, 1941, a German bomber dropped a firebomb on St. Luke’s Church. Today, when you walk aside the church, you dwell on the beauty of the structure, until you look closer and notice, chillingly, that its insides are gone, destroyed in the attack. While “Merseyside,” as the people call Liverpool, has been reconstructed with contemporary multilevel shopping malls and a large waterfront development, the shell of St. Luke’s remains erect to this day, a memorial to the thousands who died in the second great war, and to the hundreds of thousands who survived.
The aerial attacks brought the city to self-imposed darkness amid the lights-out warnings that were strictly observed, lest the Germans spotted a flicker and attacked it with added intensity—for history shows us that the Luftwaffe rarely made the humane distinction between strategic targets and those with no strategic value at all. And so darkness itself became a terrifying ordeal.
June Furlong tried to live with the darkness of war. She would later make history posing for a young art student who would achieve undying fame long after his heart stopped beating. She was ten years old when the bombs started dropping.
“We would sit around the table during the blackouts. The only illumination [was from] the paint on the railings of the narrow staircase. I practiced piano in the dark, studied in the dark, sat in the dark, and heard the news that my cousin, a pilot, was shot down and killed. It was truly terrifying.”
Furlong still shudders to think what else could have happened. Recalling the fright, she talks of one fateful night. “An incendiary device came crashing through the roof,” she tells me.
She remembers the moment, her eyebrows arching, her face still showing the pain of the memory, sixty years later. “We sat under the table in the dining room. As the house shook, so did my body. It was so bloody frightening.”
When the bombers stopped, even before the war ended, Furlong and her generation remembered the way it hardened the souls, and brought people together.
Furlong, who would play a role in the education of John Winston Lennon, is a woman of great enthusiasm, and has an undying love for her city. Her lips widen, her eyes glow, her voice becomes high-pitched and cheerful as she talks about the suddenly unchained people of her city and their ultimately positive reaction to the war.
“It [brought out] the best in people. People who didn’t talk for years started talking. Friendship and dependency in war was second to none. We had street parties, jellies [candies], and parades. They were filled with music.”
She beams with the wise counsel of a woman who has been there.
“Let’s face it. It was the music that kept us going.”
The music kept Liverpool going, but so did the differences, the dividing lines that infuse the energy of a great city. And those differences are fascinating, starting with the country’s most popular sport.
In 1892 the Liverpool Football Club was born. By the year 2000, Liverpool F.C. was declared the most successful English soccer team of the twentieth century. Yet, the team was not the first one established in the city. Over a decade earlier, in 1878, Everton F.C. was founded. And today the two teams’ respective stadiums sit right across the way from each other. The Liverpool team is known as the “Reds,” and Everton is the “Blues.” For many years the teams were divided by religions—the “Reds” were viewed as the Protestant team, the “Blues” as the Catholics. Indeed, Liverpool is one of the few cities in the world with two massive cathedrals, Protestant and Catholic, tall and becoming, facing off each other in a neighborhood not far from where the Beatles went to school.
Many years after soccer arrived, another major arrival would change the fate of a city and the world. This was, of course, the arrival of the guitar boys, who in 1957 replaced the banjo and washboard stars they had worshipped. A teenage band, in raw form, arrived on the scene through a circuitous journey, on streets hardly paved with gold, but rather lined with the trapdoors and quicksand of decision, fate, and competition. The surviving four boys of the band never wavered in their meteoric rise to immortality. It is an irony that in today’s Liverpool, many of the younger generation embrace these boys with less intensity than the rest of the world, but ask any one of them which four men made the greatest statement of independence to the elites of the English south, and they know exactly where their modern-day heritage was born.
Yes, it is a city of contrasts and great pride, and like all cities, was founded on illustrious contradictions.
The city’s eponymous soccer club earned its success in no small part by the spirit of its fans. Generations of Liverpool fans and players have moved through the sacred grass of Anfield, their home from the beginning. And in the modern era, the team and players have marched to the beat of their theme song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” borrowed from the musical Carousel.
The song was recorded by Gerry Marsden, the leader of Gerry and the Pacemakers. Although Marsden lived in the shadow of the Beatles, he had a successful career in his own right, and is beloved by Liverpool soccer fans for the song, which is, in itself, a major contradiction. Marsden may be the voice of the “Reds,” but it is said that he was actually a fan of the “Blues” until he was thirteen. Fans will rarely walk into each other’s stadiums, but when it comes to Marsden’s soccer preferences, no one really cares.
But to all others: beware. These are sacred grounds, and one should never enter the wrong turf. The Reds and the Blues play in separate stadiums, facing each other, just like the towering cathedrals. Each stadium holds over 40,000 fans. The economies of modern communities suggest a single stadium could better serve both fan bases. But to date, loyalty and sacred heritage are more important than money.
It is true that a soccer fan never walks alone in Liverpool, just as the besieged residents of the war’s blitz knew that their backs, if not their houses, were covered. The friendliness of the people even today is catching. I have never met a cabdriver in Liverpool who didn’t ask where I was from, nor did any man or woman ever balk when I walked up to ask directions. I have
never seen such a city where happiness is not bounded by social or economic standing. People may call you “luv” and, believe me, they really mean it. The accent is thick with a slightly Irish brogue, and sometimes it is hard for the visitor to understand. So, on occasion, you have to ask, “Can you please repeat that?” And they do, willingly.
In Liverpool, no one ever really walks alone.
The people who endured the bombings, the postwar mothers and fathers who looked forward, not back, and the parents of the boys in the band who kept saving money for their sons, worried that the bubble would burst.
And the boys themselves? They were not always saints, but like their fellow citizens, they always had people covering their back. These people were so important, and in many ways, so ignored by history. Surrounded by a cast of characters no writer of fiction could ever invent, blessed with inordinate talents and a determination to succeed, ordained with tons of luck, and destined to narrowly escape the dangers of their path, they wrote their history, and gifted their joy to a surprised world.
And it all began in the coastal city in northern England, where life, some of it soaked in rain, can, in itself, be a daily surprise.
WHEN
THEY
WERE
BOYS
PART ONE: STIRRINGS
The milkman makes his rounds, smoking and dreaming. Little Paulie pines for his mother, tinkles with the piano. George has his own bus, sort of. Pete studies hard; Richie not so much, instead listens to Donegan, while Johnny Boy scrapes up the money to buy the contraband 45s, hoping for a peek at the Everlys. Paulie loves the bicycle and the comb and strumming the strings of his future, while the milkman terrorizes teachers with a vengeance. The teachers have no clue. The hearts are beating fast, the stomachs churning, the dreams lighting up the dark of the night, along with the booze, the cigs, and the sounds on the radio from the small country that dares to play the censored music. There are stirrings, and seeds planted; will they grow?