Even Astrid could not affect Stu’s life as the downtrodden butt of the other Beatles’ humor. On stage, they teased and taunted him continually, for his smallness, for his outrageous new clothes, above all for the bass playing that never seemed equal to their needs. John inflicted the worst treatment of all, even though, as Astrid well knew, a deep friendship still existed between Stu and him. It was in Paul’s more bantering tone that the true arrows came. For Paul wanted Stu’s job as bass guitarist. “When John and Stu had a row,” Astrid says, “you could still feel the affection that was there. But when Paul and Stu had a row, you could tell Paul hated him.”
A few yards up the Reeperbahn stood a large, semiunderground arena called the Hippodrome. In former days, it had been a circus, featuring horses ridden by naked girls. By 1960, such entertainments having grown unfashionable, the Hippodrome stood, behind its heavy iron portcullis, dark and in decay. Its owner, a certain Herr Eckhorn, decided to hand it on to his son, Peter, who had recently come home from the sea and was anxious to start a music club in competition with Bruno Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller.
Young Peter Eckhorn wasted no time in hitting at his intended rival. First, he suborned Koschmider’s chief bouncer, Horst Fascher. While still employed at the Kaiserkeller, Horst was helping Eckhorn convert the old Hippodrome, putting in a stage and dance floor and makeshift wooden booths painted the cheapest color, black. Fascher, in addition, began to sow discontent at the Kaiserkeller, telling Bruno’s musicians of the better pay and conditions that Eckhorn’s club—the Top Ten—would offer. “I showed Tony Sheridan out of the back door right away,” Horst recalls with pride. “That Koschmider went crazy, but what could he do to me? He had too great a fear.”
The Top Ten club opened in November 1960, with music by Tony Sheridan and his original Soho-levied group, the Jets. Eckhorn also wanted Derry and the Seniors, but they were by now so poverty-stricken that they had applied to the British consul in Hamburg for an assisted passage home to Liverpool.
The Beatles stayed on at the Kaiserkeller, although in a mood of increasing restlessness. The Top Ten, with its circuslike dimensions and higher rates of pay, was infinitely more attractive than Bruno Koschmider’s nautically inspired basement. Their employer, moreover, stung by Horst Fascher’s and Tony Sheridan’s defection, grew rabidly proprietorial. With a stubby forefinger he drew their attention to the clause in their contract that forbade them to play in any other club within a twenty-five-mile radius of the Kaiserkeller. It had reached Bruno’s ears that when visiting the Top Ten they would sometimes get up and jam with Tony Sheridan on stage.
Before long, Peter Eckhorn had persuaded them to forget the residue of their contract with Koschmider and come across to play for him at the Top Ten. Koschmider, according to Pete Best, hinted that if the Beatles joined Eckhorn, they might not be able to walk with complete safety after dark.
Retribution of a different sort overtook them, however, possibly with some help from Bruno Koschmider. They were about to open at the Top Ten when the Polizei, conducting a belated examination of George Harrison’s passport, discovered that he was only seventeen, and too young to be in a club after midnight. For plainly flouting this rule George was ordered out of Germany. Stu and Astrid put him on the train home, dismayed and lost-looking, with some biscuits and apples for the journey.
The others played a few nights at the Top Ten, with John taking the lead guitar part, or leaving it out, and Paul doubling on a piano that was there. Astrid, Klaus, and the exis had followed them from the Kaiserkeller; so had Akim Reichel, a dockside waiter who had discovered them first at the Indra. Akim remembers how tired and dispirited the four survivors seemed. They had been on the Reeperbahn, after all, nearly four months. “They would play sometimes a whole hour,” Akim says, “sitting on the edge of their amplifiers.”
Peter Eckhorn, as well as paying ten marks a day more than Koschmider, provided sleeping accommodation above the club, in an attic fitted with bunk beds. Though far from luxurious, and shared with Tony Sheridan’s group, it was still a vast improvement on the Bambi Kino. Rosa, the WC lady—who had also forsaken the Kaiserkeller for the Top Ten—was prevailed upon by John Lennon to bring coffee and shaving water up to them when they woke in the early afternoon.
In their haste to desert Koschmider Paul and Pete Best had left most of their belongings in the rooms behind the Bambi. They nerved themselves to go back a few days later, walking in through the cinema foyer without opposition, and finding their property all intact behind the screen. Coming out again, down the dark corridor from their respective cubbyholes, Paul struck a match in order to see. “There were some filthy old drapes on the wall, like sacking,” Pete Best says. “Paul caught a bit of that stuff with the match. It wasn’t anything like a fire. It just smouldered a little bit.” Paul’s version is that, in a spirit of half-hearted vandalism, they set fire to a condom.
Early the next morning, policemen entered the Top Ten club, pounded upstairs to the attic, hauled Pete Best and Paul out of bed, hustled them off to the Reeperbahn’s Station 15, and placed them under lock and key. Between them, using their O-level German, they elicited the fact that they were being held on suspicion of trying to burn down the Bambi Kino. “They only kept us there a few hours,” Pete Best says. “Afterward they admitted it never should have happened.”
No charges were pressed—according to Bruno Koschmider, a magnanimous gesture on his part. Even so, Paul and Pete were both immediately deported. The next day found them on a flight to England, minus most of their clothes and luggage and Pete Best’s drum set.
For John and Stu there was no alternative but to follow the others home. Stu made the journey by air, with a ticket paid for by the Kirchherrs. John went on the train alone, carrying his guitar and the amplifier he had not yet paid for, and terrified he wouldn’t find England where he had left it.
SIX
“HI, ALL YOU CAVERN-DWELLERS. WELCOME TO THE BEST OF CELLARS”
He reached home in the early hours of a December morning and threw stones at his aunt Mimi’s bedroom window to wake her. Mimi opened the front door and, as John lurched past, enquired sarcastically what had happened to his hundred pounds a week. And if he thought he was going around Woolton in those cowboy boots, Mimi added, he had better think again. John collapsed into bed, not stirring out of doors for a week afterward. In a little while there came a timorous knock at the door of the outer porch. It was his ever faithful, long-suffering girlfriend, Cynthia Powell.
At Forthlin Road Paul found waiting for him a single GCE A-level certificate—in art—and a father who, luckily, was not the type to crow. Even so, Jim McCartney pointed out, it was time to think about getting a proper job. Paul gave in and registered at the local Labor Exchange. The two weeks before Christmas he spent helping to deliver parcels around the docks on the back of a truck belonging to the Speedy Prompt Delivery Company.
He didn’t contact John again until just before Christmas, by which time, to add to the gloom, snow was falling. Snow is never pretty in Liverpool. The two ex-Hamburg desperados, with watering eyes and fingers huddled in their pockets, met down in the city for a drink. They could feel through their boot soles, too, the chill damp of dead-end failure.
Together, they sought out their erstwhile manager, Allan Williams, and found him in equally deflated spirits. Returning from Hamburg the last time he had decided to open the first Liverpool version of a Reeperbahn beat music club. He had taken over an old bottle-washing shop in Soho Street, and employed Lord Woodbine to effect a brief renovation. The new club was to be called the Top Ten and run by Bob Wooler, the railway clerk and spare-time disk jockey who had helped Williams recruit attractions for his Boxing Stadium concert. Wooler, on the strength of Williams’s offer, had even resigned his steady job with the docks office.
Liverpool’s Top Ten club opened on December 1, 1960. Six days later, it burned to the ground. Local opinion suspected a “torch job.”
Only the cellar club in
West Derby run by Pete Best’s mother remained as a potential gig for Williams’s unlucky protégés. Derry and the Seniors had played the Casbah following their own Hamburg disaster, and had good-naturedly plugged the Beatles’ name. When Mona Best gave them their first return booking a poster was put on the cellar door loyally proclaiming the “Fabulous Beatles” had returned. George was then contacted—lying low in Speke, he had not realized that John and Paul were home. Stu Sutcliffe, however, remained out of touch with the others until well into the following January.
That first night back at the Casbah showed what a transformation Hamburg had wrought. The months of sweated nights at the Kaiserkeller had given their music a prizefighter’s muscle and power; each number was stamped through as if against a Reeperbahn brawl, or in one last attempt to break through Bruno Koschmider’s stage. They literally rocked the little club under the Victorian house, where nothing more wicked than Pepsi Cola was drunk, nothing popped more potent than peanuts, and where no fracas arose that could not be quelled by Mrs. Best’s vigorous, dark-eyed stare.
A few days later they were, once more, sitting round Allan Williams’s Jacaranda coffee bar. So was Bob Wooler, the disk jockey who had quit his railway job in the expectation of running a beat club for Williams. That job having gone up in smoke, Wooler was now working for a promoter named Brian Kelly who ran regular dances at Litherland Town Hall, Lathom Hall, and Aintree Institute.
“They were moaning to me about how little was happening,” Wooler said. “I’d never heard them before, but I said I’d try to get Kelly to put them on. In fact, I rang him up from the Jacaranda. I asked for eight pounds for them. Kelly offered four; we settled on six.”
Brian Kelly, a somewhat melancholy man employed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company, had no overwhelming enthusiasm for rock ’n’ roll music. To Kelly, it was a question of simple mathematics. You hired a hall for five pounds, and by filling it with jivers at three shillings (fifteen pence) each you showed a profit. As a dance promoter he possessed one major asset—he did not mind clearing up vomit. Much tended to appear midway in the evening as late-comers arrived from the pubs.
At Litherland Town Hall, on December 27, 1960, Brian Kelly stood in his usual place on one side of the dance area, waiting to go forth with mop bucket and disinfectant. A large crowd was there, curious more than anything to see the group that Bob Wooler had billed dramatically as “Direct from Hamburg.” Because of this, many people thought they must be German. Among the spectators was Pete Best’s young brother, Rory, and a friend of his called Neil Aspinall, an accounting student who lodged with the Bests. Neil, a thin, serious boy with an impressive cache of O-levels, had never been much interested in rock ’n’ roll. He was here tonight only because Rory had said it would be good.
Brian Kelly did not think so. He had booked the Beatles before, in their pre-Hamburg days, and remembered them as very ordinary. He was astonished, when Bob Wooler announced them and the terrible noise started, to see what effect it had on his customers. “Everyone—the whole lot—surged forward towards the stage. The dance floor behind was completely empty. ‘Aye aye,’ I said to myself. ‘I could have got twice the numbers in here.’”
After their performance, the Beatles emerged into the parking lot where, a few months earlier, Stu Sutcliffe had been knocked down and kicked in the head. Once again, there was an ambush waiting—but of girls this time, squealing and asking for autographs. Their van had been covered with lipstick messages. Some of the girls who mobbed them still thought they were German and complimented them on speaking such good English.
Amid the general acclaim they had made two important new friends. One was Bob Wooler, the disk jockey. The other was Neil Aspinall, the accounting student for whom Fate had ordained a future very different from sitting his finals.
Wooler became the intermediary for further six-pound bookings at Brian Kelly’s other weekly dances at Lathom Hall and Aintree Institute. He also became the means of spreading the Beatles’ name over wider and wider areas of Liverpool. As a disk jockey he was an unlikely figure, with his round face, his earnest politeness and devotion to wordplay and puns. He loved to draft elaborate posters and handbills in which, for example, the initial letters of Litherland Town Hall served additionally to spell “Lively Time Here,” and all the bus routes to the hall would be microscopically detailed. “Jive Fans!” a Wooler handbill would say, “This is It!” In neat capital letters he would draft the evening’s running order, murmuring to himself such cautionary slogans as “Horses for courses. Menus for venues.” Somehow, in the shabby jive halls, he maintained the gravitas of a Roman senator, wagging his large forefinger as he strove to impress on beer-crazed seventeen-year-olds that punctuality and politeness were the primary virtues of life. Yet his voice, through the microphone, was as rich and relaxed as the best to be heard on Radio Luxembourg.
The Beatles were not interested in punctuality or politeness. But they respected Bob Wooler and recognized that his wagging forefinger often conveyed a valuable point. It was Wooler who advised them to begin playing even before the curtains opened, and who delved among his own record collection for the “William Tell Overture” and suggested using its opening fanfare as their signature tune.
Their other strong supporter was Mona Best. They always met first at the Casbah, setting off on dates in a van driven by Mrs. Best’s part-time doorman, and usually accompanied by Neil Aspinall, ever ready to leave his accounting studies to help unload and set up the drums and amplifiers.
Mona Best made forceful efforts on behalf of “Pete’s group,” as she considered them. She took their bookings over the telephone, when Pete was not at home to do it: She became, as much as anyone was, their agent and manager. She wrote on their behalf to the BBC in Manchester, requesting a radio audition. The BBC’s answer was not discouraging. The Beatles’ name would be kept on file.
In Bob Wooler’s eyes, too, Pete Best was their principal asset. At Ain-tree or Litherland, as the first bars of the “William Tell Overture” died away and the crash of guitars began behind still-closed curtains, that shriek of ecstasy, that rush to the front of the stage, was mainly for Pete. At a dance on St. Valentine’s Day, 1961, Wooler offered the novel idea of moving Pete’s drums forward to a rank equal with the other three. That night, the girls all but dragged him off his stool and off the stage.
One evening just after Christmas Mrs. Best rang up the Cavern Club on Mathew Street and asked to speak to the owner, Ray McFall. It happened to be a big trad jazz night at the Cavern, starring Humphrey Lyttleton, and, what with the noise, McFall had to press his ear close to the receiver. “Look here, Mr. McFall,” insisted the dulcet voice that sounded both a little Indian and a little Scouse, “there’s this group called the Beatles—you should have them at the Cavern, you know.” McFall replied politely that he’d think about it.
When Alan Synter started the Cavern as a jazz club in 1957, Ray McFall had been the family accountant. In 1959, Synter decided to get out, and McFall took over the lease. It was he, in fact, who had booked John Lennon and the Quarry Men the night they gave offense by playing rock ’n’ roll. Orders to desist were relayed to them from the man who still looked like an accountant, with his light gray suit, his close-shaven cheeks and carefully manicured hands, and the small fur hat he wore during winter.
Mathew Street is among the warren of cobbled lanes that once carried goods traffic up from Liverpool docks to their hinterland of dark Victorian warehouses. By day, the lanes were alive with heavy goods trucks, unstacking and loading in the squeak of airborne hoists. By night, they were empty but for cartons and cabbage leaves and the occasional meandering drunk.
Underneath the warehouse at 10 Mathew Street, in 1960, could be found the Cavern Jazz Club. Its entrance was a hatchway, under a single naked lightbulb. A flight of eighteen stone steps turned at the bottom into three arched, interconnecting brick tunnels. The center tunnel was the main club area, with a stage against the inner wall and school-
like rows of wooden chairs. In the nearer tunnel, the money was taken; in the further one, beyond obscuring pillars, you danced. The best British jazz bands had performed down there, in an atmosphere pervaded by damp and mold and the aroma of beer slops and small, decaying mammals and the cheeses that were kept in the cellar next door.
Ray McFall, though a passionate jazz fan, was aware of rock ’n’ roll’s growing popularity. The call from Mona Best only confirmed what he had heard about huge and profitable beat dances in out-of-town halls. The short craze for trad was now definitely over, and modern attracted only the earnest, intellectual few. McFall, therefore, decided to let pop into his jazz stronghold, gradually at first so as not to enrage the existing clientele. His first regular group, the Blue Genes, occupied a curious middle ground, playing both rock and jazz, with banjo and stand-up bass. Tuesdays, the Blue Genes’ Guest Night, became the first break in the Cavern’s all-jazz program.
McFall had noticed how many young office workers in central Liverpool spent their lunch hour hanging round music shops like Hessy’s and the record department in NEMS, the electrical shop in Whitechapel, round the corner from Mathew Street. It suddenly occurred to him that he could just as easily open the Cavern for dancing at midday as at night. So he began to put on lunch-hour sessions, featuring trad jazz bands in alternation with a beat group called the Metronomes whose singer, Tommy Love, worked in a city insurance office. Derry and the Seniors also got a lunchtime booking after their return from Hamburg.
Bob Wooler, visiting the Cavern one lunchtime, was persuaded by Johnny Hutch of the Big Three to say something into the stage microphone. “I did it just as the people were going out. I said, ‘Remember, all you cave-dwellers, the Cavern is the best of cellars.’ I’d prepared that little pun on Peter Sellers’ album The Best of Sellers. Ray McFall came across. I thought I was going to get a lecture, but instead he offered me the job of compering the lunchtime sessions.”
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