Though Stu was a Beatle no longer, he allowed himself to be deputized for the job that none of the others fancied. He wrote to Allan Williams in Liverpool, informing Williams of the decision to withhold his 10 percent commission. It was shabby treatment for a man who, for all his shortcomings, had made genuine efforts on their behalf. Williams wrote back a long and aggrieved letter, threatening to have them blacklisted among theatrical agents, if not deported from Germany all over again. He seems, for once, to have been too hurt to exact retribution. All his written agreements with the Beatles had been destroyed in the fire at his own short-lived Top Ten club. So Williams let the Beatles go.
In Hamburg, meanwhile, a new Messiah had appeared, in Bert Kaempfert, a well-known West German orchestra leader and producer for the German label Polydor. Kaempfert had been to the Top Ten to see Tony Sheridan and immediately put him under contract to Polydor. As a backing group—largely on Tony Sheridan’s recommendation—Bert Kaempfert hired the Beatles.
They had gone to bed as usual, Pete Best remembers, just after dawn. At eight sharp, taxis arrived to take them and Tony Sheridan to the recording studio. This, despite Kaempfert’s eminence, proved to be no more than the hall of the local nursery school. They recorded on the stage, with the curtains closed.
Bert Kaempfert’s idea of rock ’n’ roll was to put a drumbeat behind tunes familiar to a German audience from their nights of beer and boomps-a-daisy. He had chosen for Sheridan and his backing group material that included two of the world’s most boring songs, “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Tony Sheridan sang them in a voice still wide-eyed with last night’s Prellys, while the “Beat Brothers”—as Kaempfert had renamed them—rattled off two versions of the same non-arrangement.
The Beat Brothers, thrilled just to be in the proximity of disc-making equipment, were content with their subordinate role. They did prevail on Kaempfert, however, to listen to a handful of Lennon-McCartney songs. The great man’s verdict was one to which John and Paul were growing accustomed—their songs did not sound enough like the hits of the moment. But Kaempfert was impressed enough to let them cut a disk in their own right. They did “Ain’t She Sweet,” one of the standbys from their all-night club act, with John taking the vocal and the old jazz chords rearranged in a style strongly reminiscent of Paul. Kaempfert also liked an instrumental that George had worked out as a parody of Cliff Richard’s group, the Shadows. This, too, was taped under the ironic title “Cry for a Shadow.”
The tracks chosen by Polydor for release were, as might have been feared, “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” coupled with “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The Beat Brothers had played for a flat fee of three hundred marks each (about twenty-six pounds), and so could expect no royalty on the disk’s quite healthy German sales. “Ain’t She Sweet” and “Cry for a Shadow” were still in the Polydor vaults in June 1961, when John, Paul, George, and Pete caught the train back to Liverpool.
Stu Sutcliffe did not go with them. He had decided to settle in Hamburg, marry Astrid, and continue at the state art college. His mother shortly afterward received a photograph of him taken by Astrid in his attic studio, in jeans and gumboots, standing before the easel bearing some new work in headlong progress. The technique was the same that she had used on George and John, splitting the face between light and shadow. In this portrait of Stu the effect was eerie, his features the palest glimmer against what seemed an encroaching dark.
In Liverpool now, beat music raged like a fever. From Mathew Street it had seeped up between the warehouses onto Dale Street and through the studded gates of the Iron Door, another longtime jazz stronghold gone over to evening or all-night pop sessions in overt rivalry with the Cavern. The same had happened all over the city, in clubs like the Downbeat and the Mardi Gras, in dance halls formerly dedicated to quicksteps and Veletas. The Riverside Ballroom and the Orrel Park Ballroom, the Rialto Ballroom, the Avenue cinema, even the Silver Blades Ice Rink clamored for beat groups to fill their Saturday nights. New groups sprang up by the dozen, mutating from older ones, then splitting like amoebas into newer groups still. Now, as rivals to the Beatles at the Cavern, there were the Searchers at the Iron Door. There were Ian and the Zodiacs; Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes; Faron and the Flamingoes; Earl Preston and the TTs; Lee Curtis and the All-Stars; Dale Roberts and the Jaywalkers; Steve Day and the Drifters; the Remo Four; the Black Cats; the Four Jays. Hessy’s music store thronged each day with eager customers for new guitars, new basses and drum sets to be paid for far into a future that had no relevance compared with the finger-sliding, tom-tomming excitement of tonight.
Bill Harry knew every group and every place there was to play. The curly-haired design student from Parliament Street was always to be seen in the clubs and jive halls, talking to the musicians between numbers and scribbling on bits of paper. He kept notes on every new group that was formed and every new venue opened. For him, as for John Lennon, beat music disrupted an art college course, though in Bill’s case, poor family circumstances dictated that even a hobby should be a matter of feverish hard work. He earned extra money by designing stationery for a local printer, and by writing and drawing anything, anywhere, for anyone.
Bill, an inveterate compiler of sci-fi fanzines, had long cherished an ambition to start his own music newspaper. For a time, he planned one called Storyville and 52nd Street, to cover jazz. Then in 1961, with details of 350 beat music venues in his notebook, another idea occurred to him. He had noticed, on his trips around clubs and ballrooms, how parochial each one was, how little each audience knew of the sheer size and variety of the beat craze. The musicians, too, often had no idea where their friends or their rivals were performing. Bill Harry conceived the idea of a fortnightly beat music newspaper that would serve both as a guide to clubs and halls and an insight for the fans into the lives of their favorite groups.
The paper, launched on July 6, 1961, was christened Mersey Beat. A local civil servant named Jim Anderson provided its fifty pounds starting capital. Bill Harry was editor, designer, chief reporter, sub editor, and advertisement and circulation manager, all while ostensibly studying at the art college. Each lunch hour, he would sprint out of college, down the hill to the Mersey Beat office, a single room above a wine merchant’s shop in Renshaw Street. His girlfriend, Virginia, who typed and took telephone calls, was the only other member of staff.
John Lennon’s former Gambier Terrace flatmate could naturally be counted on to give the Beatles plenty of space in his new paper. When Bill asked them for photographs they handed over a pile of the ones Astrid had taken in Hamburg, together with some informal snapshots of John in his underwear, standing on the Grosse Freiheit and reading the Daily Express. John’s was precisely the kind of Goon Show humor Bill Harry wanted to flavor the Mersey Beat editorial. He had never forgotten the nonsense verses that John had shown him during student lunchtime sessions at Ye Cracke. For Mersey Beat’s first issue he asked John to write his own personal account of the Beatles’ beginnings as a group. This was produced, Billy Harry remembers, on scraps of paper, with a hangdog, half-embarrassed air. John clearly did not expect his words to be suitable for publication.
Issue number one of Mersey Beat had a print run of five thousand copies. Bill Harry, as well as writing the entire paper, delivered bundles of it personally to twenty-eight Liverpool newsstands. Further stocks went on sale at local dances, at Hessy’s music shop, and on the record counters of major city stores like Blackler’s. One of Bill’s best contacts had proved to be NEMS, the electrical appliance shop in Whitechapel that had a record department run by the owner’s elder son, Brian Epstein. He showed keen interest in Mersey Beat, giving Bill Harry a firm order for a dozen copies.
The first issue carried on its front page a picture of Gene Vincent, the American rock ’n’ roll star who had visited Liverpool, as the caption admitted, “earlier in the year.” Bill Harry, unable to afford to make photographic blocks, was compelled to b
orrow what he could from a local weekly newspaper. Underneath, a story headed “Swinging Cilla” told how Cilla Black, the Cavern Club’s part-time cloakroom attendant, better known along Scotland Road as Priscilla White, had begun to gain confidence as a singer by afterhours appearances on stage with Rory Storm’s group and the Big Three.
The right-hand column was given over to John Lennon’s article. Bill Harry had printed it complete under its author’s heading “a short diversion on the dubious origins of Beatles, translated from the John Lennon.” What followed revealed little of those origins but much about the boy whose fascination with words coexisted with utter disregard of all normal punctuation and spelling. “Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision—a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them: ‘From this day on you are Beatles.’ ‘Thank you, Mister Man, they said, thanking him.’”
Mersey Beat was an immediate sellout. At NEMS in Whitechapel, all twelve copies went within minutes of their appearance in the record department, and Brian Epstein telephoned Bill Harry with an order for two dozen more. The next day, he requested a further hundred. For issue two, published on July 20, Epstein’s order was twelve dozen copies.
Prominent in the first issue, and every one that followed, was a large display advertisement for the Cavern Club, giving details of its lunchtime, evening, and, occasionally, all-night sessions. Here, the Beatles’ name, varying in type-size from the garish to the microscopic, rotated week by week with that of Gerry and the Pacemakers, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, and also the traditional jazz bands that Ray McFall stubbornly continued to hire.
Though conscientiously filled with news about all groups and their doings, Mersey Beat made no secret of its overriding preference. Issue two, when it reached the counter of NEMS record store in Whitechapel, banner-headlined the retrospective hot news of the “Beatles’” recording session and contract with Bert Kaempfert in Hamburg. Only now did their Liverpool following learn of the existence of the Beatles’ music on disk, albeit a little-known foreign label. The story was illustrated by Astrid’s photograph of them, with Stu Sutcliffe, on the traction engine at Der Dom. Paul’s surname was given, in one of its several Mersey Beat versions, as “McArtrey.”
The paper soon became known not merely for news about the Beatles but as an extension of the comedy and clowning in their Cavern Club stage act. John, at Bill Harry’s encouragement, contributed more nonsense verses and an irregular column called “Beatcomber,” called after the Beachcomber column in the Daily Express. He also wrote and paid for comic small ads, filling a section that would otherwise have been empty, and prolonging Beatle in-jokes for weeks at the modest cost of fourpence a word. “HOT LIPS, missed you Friday—Red Nose.” “RED NOSE, missed you Friday—Hot Lips.” “Whistling Jock Lennon wishes to contact HOT NOSE.”
Mersey Beat flourished, thanks to its thorough coverage and the sprinting energy of its editor. Anyone who placed a large ad could expect a large story to be written about them. If the advertiser could write his own copy, so much the better. It was on this principle that Mersey Beat, in its early August issue, published a short article by one of its best customers, Brian Epstein of the NEMS electrical shop, reviewing the new records NEMS currently had for sale. Mostly, he recommended ballads from musical shows like West Side Story and The Sound of Music. A cursory reference was made to Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again,” and the Streamliners’ “Frankfurter Sandwiches.” The closing paragraph was devoted to new John Ogden piano recitals of works by Liszt and Busoni.
Bob Wooler, the Cavern disk jockey, also wrote regularly for Mersey Beat. His debut column on August 31 dealt entirely with the Beatles: They were, said Wooler, “the biggest thing to hit the Liverpool rock ’n’ roll set up in years.” Among hundreds of groups playing roughly the same R&B material, Wooler pinpointed accurately the novelty in musicians with equal appeal to both sexes—to the boys through their dress and manner; to girls, in Wooler’s view, chiefly through the “mean, moody magnificence” of their drummer Pete Best. Pete, indeed, was the only Beatle singled out by name. Wooler summed them up, with true alliterative relish, as “rhythmic revolutionaries…seemingly unambitious yet fluctuating between the self-assured and the vulnerable. Truly a phenomenon—and also a predicament to promoters. Such are the fantastic Beatles. I don’t think anything like them will happen again.” The only other item on the page was the brief column by “Brian Epstein of NEMS” recommending new releases by Frank Sinatra, the Shadows, and the George Mitchell Singers.
Bob Wooler’s endorsement in Mersey Beat was backed up by ceaseless plugging of their Polydor record, over the Cavern microphone and in the halls where Wooler ran regular dances for Brian Kelly. Such was their drawing power now that Kelly would post bouncers outside their changing room to stop rival promoters from offering them more than ten pounds per night.
Between the groups, by contrast, there was little competition, save in the sinking of pints and the attracting of girls. Bob Wooler’s strict running-order would frequently be confounded by a hybrid semi-orchestra formed of two, or more, groups who felt like jamming together. At Litherland Town Hall one night the Beatles merged with Gerry and the Pacemakers to form the “Beatmakers.” Gerry wore George’s leather outfit, George wore a hood, Paul wore a nightdress, and Gerry’s brother Fred and Pete Best played one drum each.
Three or four nights a week at the Cavern the queue would move, past Ray McFall’s soup bowls, into heat barely describable by those who ever experienced it. “You could feel it as you went down those eighteen steps, climbing up your legs,” Paddy Delaney, the doorman, said. “The lads used to faint as well as the girls.” In the glue of bodies the only space, apart from the stage, was an area at the opposite end of the center tunnel where the boys would go and urinate. A girl wishing to get to the ladies’ room could often make the journey only by being passed over the heads of the crowd.
For all the “kicks and kudos,” as Bob Wooler alliteratively phrased it, the summer of 1961 ended on a note of anticlimax. The Beatles seemed to have progressed as far as any group could outside the mystic sphere of London. Other local idols, like Rory Storm with his Butlin’s holiday camp dates, seemed to be forging far ahead.
John Lennon took out his boredom in writing for Mersey Beat, and in letters to Stu Sutcliffe in Hamburg—long letters in pencil on exercise book paper, full of scribble and doodles, poems that started seriously but petered out into self-conscious obscenity and anguished cries about the “shittiness” of life. The correspondence could not be shown to Aunt Mimi or Millie Sutcliffe, teeming as it did with swear words and a running joke whereby Stu took the character of Christ and John, that of John the Baptist. It seemed that Stu, by staying on in Hamburg, had done the adventurous and enviable thing.
One letter from Stu mentioned that Jurgen Vollmer, a photographer friend of Astrid’s, was soon going to be in Paris on vacation. John and Paul decided on the spur of the moment to use some money John’s Scottish aunt had given him to go across to Paris and meet Jurgen. They went without a word to George or Pete Best, and despite the imminence of several important bookings. For almost a week they lived in Montmartre and hung around the Flea Market, looking for sleeveless jackets like the one Jurgen wore. They also persuaded Jurgen to cut their hair in the “French” style that Astrid had given Stu and George. They returned to Liverpool to find George and Pete Best disgusted with them; for a time, it seemed that the Beatles were finished. Bob Wooler and Ray Mc-Fall persuaded them to continue, each lecturing John and Paul sternly on the need to be reliable.
What did it matter anyway? The Cavern was always there, with another nightlong session to trap them underground. Up on Mathew Street, where Paddy Delaney stood in his evening dress, a cloud of steam from the close-packed bodies below drifted out under the solitary light.
PART TWO
GETTING
SEVEN
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“WHAT BRINGS MR. EPSTEIN HERE?”
Each Wednesday night in the late 1930s little Joe Flannery would be dressed in his nightclothes and taken to spend the evening at the house of his father’s best customer, Harry Epstein. Joe’s father, Chris Flannery, was a cabinetmaker specializing in the heavy sideboards sold at Epstein’s Walton Road shop. “Mr. Harry” was a stickler for quality, refusing to accept any piece whose drawers did not slide in as easily upside-down. But on Wednesday evenings formality relaxed. The Flannerys and the Epsteins drove into Liverpool together to attend the weekly wrestling bouts. Seven-year-old Joe would wait for his parents at Mr. Harry’s house, playing upstairs in the nursery with the Epsteins’ son, Brian.
This other boy was not like Joe. He was slender and delicate; he had a nanny to look after him in his own softly lit upstairs domain. He did not speak like Joe, nor like any Liverpool child. And he had many beautiful toys. Joe, in particular, loved the model coach that Brian had been given to mark the 1937 coronation of George VI. It was the state coach in miniature, made of tin but magnificently gilded, drawn by a dozen plumed tin horses, spurred on by liveried tin postillions and grooms.
Brian knew how much Joe loved the coronation coach. To grant, or arbitrarily refuse, permission to play with it gave him a sensation he slowly recognized as power over someone older and stronger. Though he himself cared little for the coach, he worried that Joe, because of loving it so much, would somehow gain possession of it. So one night while Joe was there, he stamped on it until he had broken it.
In 1933, the wedding took place of eighteen-year-old Malka Hyman to twenty-nine-year-old Harry Epstein. The match was approved of, uniting as it did two highly respectable Jewish families and two comparably thriving furniture firms. Harry’s father, Isaac, owned the Liverpool shop he had founded as a penniless Lithuanian immigrant at the turn of the century. The Hymans, Malka’s people, owned the Sheffield Cabinet Company, mass producing such items as The Clarendon, a bedroom suite that, in the twenties and early thirties, graced many a suburban English home.