Beatles (20 page)

‘It was exciting changing your name,’ says Paul. ‘It made it seem all real and professional. It sort of proved you did a real act, if you had a stage name.’

Paul turned himself into Paul Ramon. He can’t remember where he got the Ramon bit from. ‘I must have heard it somewhere. I thought it sounded really glamorous, sort of Valentino-ish.’ George became Carl Harrison after one of his heroes Carl Perkins. Stu became Stu de Stijl, after the art movement. John can’t remember what he called himself, if anything, but others remember him as Johnny Silver.

The tour of Scotland was to be in the far north, round little ballrooms on the northeast coast. Paul can remember Inverness and Nairn but no other names. He sent back postcards to his father saying: ‘It’s gear. I’ve been asked for my autograph.’

They were all a bit jealous of the fact that George was getting on particularly well with the star of the tour, Johnny Gentle. He promised to give George a present after the tour, one of Eddie Cochrane’s old shirts, so he said. They argued as usual amongst themselves, but most of all they picked on Stu, the newest member of the group. John, George and Paul had been with each other long enough to know that rows and arguments and criticism didn’t mean much. If it did, you just argued back.

‘We were terrible,’ says John. ‘We’d tell Stu he couldn’t sit with us, or eat with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did.’ At one hotel they stayed at, a variety show had just left. There had been a dwarf in the show and they found out which bed he had slept in and said that would have to be Stu’s. They certainly weren’t going to sleep in it. So Stu had to. ‘That was how he learned to be with us,’ says John. ‘It was all stupid, but that was what we were like.’

After the great excitement of Scotland, nothing happened. Larry Parnes didn’t offer them any more work. He admits now he missed a great chance, but at the time he had enough successful solo stars not to be interested in groups. The Beatles went back to dances full of drunken Teds, working men on their night out, or sleazy clubs.

They got a few dates, not long after Scotland, at a strip club in Upper Parliament Street. They had to accompany Janice the stripper as she shed her clothes. ‘She handed us the music she
wanted,’ says George. ‘It was something like the “Gypsy Fire Dance”. As we couldn’t read music, it wasn’t much use to us. We just played “Ramrod” then “Moonglow”, as I’d just learned it.’

They did manage a couple of dates at the Cavern Club in Mathew Street around the same time, though it was still a jazz stronghold. They used to get little notes passed up to them telling them not to play rock and roll, so they would introduce the next number as if it were a genuine jazz piece. ‘And now an old favourite by Fats Duke Ellington Leadbelly, called “Long Tall Sally”.’ And they’d go straight into the beat number. Naturally, this wasn’t liked by the management and didn’t help them to get many further dates.

But most of the time they didn’t do much, except hang around each other’s houses or, when they had any money, the clubs. ‘Scotland had been a faint hope, our first glimpse of show business,’ says George. ‘It was a bit of a comedown being back in Liverpool. We were lucky to get more than two dates a week. All we were making was about 15 bob a night, plus as much eggs on toast and cokes as we could take.’

One of the places they started going back to, for want of anything better, was the Casbah Club. They’d played there earlier in the year, before they’d gone to Scotland.

Mrs Best, who founded the Casbah, is small, dark-haired and very volatile. She comes from Delhi, India. She met her husband, Johnny Best, an ex-boxing promoter, in India during the war. She came back to Liverpool with him and eventually they bought a large 14-roomed Victorian house at Number 8 Hayman’s Green in the good residential district of West Derby.

Pete Best, her elder son, was born in 1941. He went to Liverpool Collegiate, another of Liverpool’s good grammar schools. He passed five subjects at O level and went into the sixth form. His plan was to be a teacher.

He was handsome and well built, but somewhat shy, almost sullen-looking and uncommunicative, especially in comparison with his dynamic, energetic mother. When he began to bring friends back from school, she went to great lengths to encourage this.

During the summer holidays of 1959, when Pete was about to go into his second year in the sixth, he and a gang of his friends asked his mother if instead of cluttering up all her rooms playing records they could clear out the huge cellar and use that. ‘The original idea was that it would be their den,’ she says. ‘That developed into the idea of making it into a coffee club, just for
teenagers, like the ones in town. We decided to make it a private club, charging a membership fee of a shilling, to keep out the Teds and roughs.’

They decided to have some of the beat groups which were springing up all over Liverpool. They knew there would be many who would jump at the chance. Mrs Best, with her flair for running things, and people, welcomed the idea.

The group they found was the Quarrymen, as they were still called. This came through a girl who knew one of the members of the Quarrymen and said how good they were. It wasn’t John, Paul or George she knew, but someone else who was playing the guitar for them at the time, Ken Brown. He was one of the many members of the Quarrymen who were always coming and going in those days.

When John, Paul and George heard they were looking for a group, they all rushed round at once. They were immediately given paint brushes and helped with the final week or so of cleaning and decorating the cellar. John brought his girlfriend, Cynthia Powell, to help.

‘I remember telling John,’ says Mrs Best, ‘to put some undercoat on a wall. When I came back, he’d finished painting but had done it all in gloss. He was so shortsighted he hadn’t been able to tell the difference. I was in a panic that it would never dry in time.’

Even up to the opening day, they hadn’t decided on a name. ‘I went down one evening to see how they were getting on. It was so bloody mysterious, with little dark corners everywhere. It seemed oriental. I thought of this picture I’d just seen with Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer,
Algiers
I think it was called, in which they go to the Casbah. So that was the name I chose, the Casbah Club. As I come from India, it seemed very apt.’

It opened at the end of August 1959. There were almost 300 there that first night. The Quarrymen got a great reception. The Casbah seemed launched for a long time.

‘I was very pleased,’ says Mrs Best. ‘Not for myself, of course, but for Peter. He had vague notions about going into
show business and I thought this might be some sort of experience for him by helping with the club. I thought it would make him less self-conscious, give him more confidence.’

The club thrived. Coffee and sweets were on sale and there were the Quarrymen to listen to. At weekends, there were crowds in the evening of up to 400. Very soon there was a membership of 3,000. A bouncer was hired, Frank Garner, to look after the door and keep out Teds.

All went well for a couple of months. Then a row developed over the Quarrymen. Their fee for playing was 15s. each a night. One night, only John, Paul and George played. Ken Brown was missing. ‘I paid the three of them 15s. each then I paid Ken Brown his 15 bob when I saw him. They said he shouldn’t have been paid at all as he hadn’t been there. They said the fee for the group was really £3 for the evening. The three who had turned up should have got £3 between them, not 15 bob each.’

This is the basis of the disagreement, as Mrs Best and Pete Best remember it. The others can’t. Anyway, after the row over the money, Ken Brown left the Quarrymen and not long after the Quarrymen themselves started to move farther afield.

Pete Best had by this time started banging away at an old snare drum, seeing how well the Quarrymen were doing, but mainly to amuse himself in odd moments at the club. When Ken Brown left, it was decided that he and Pete should form a new group. They got two others, and called themselves the Blackjacks, aided and abetted by Mrs Best.

‘They were very good,’ says Mrs Best. ‘I remember Rory Storm, who was very big in those days, issuing a challenge to see who could get the biggest crowd. Rory got 390 but the Blackjacks got 450, the most we ever had.’

The Quarrymen went to Scotland and became the Silver Beatles but did occasional return engagements at the Casbah, when nothing else turned up. The Blackjacks, with Pete Best on drums, had now become the Casbah’s resident group. They got better during the following year and Pete Best decided he did want to go into show business.

‘I’d been thinking by then of going to a teachers’ training college. My five O levels would have got me in. But I got fed up and left before sitting A levels.’

He left school in the summer term of 1960. The Casbah was still a big success and there was enough for him to do there, but then his group began to disintegrate. Ken Brown moved south and the two others went away on courses connected with their full-time work. Pete had left school for a career in show business, but was now left with nothing to do.

But in August 1960, five weeks after he had left school, Paul McCartney rang him.

‘Paul said had I still got my drums,’ says Pete. ‘I told him I’d just got a complete new kit. I was very proud of that. He said they’d got a job in Hamburg and was I interested in being their drummer? I said yes. I’d always liked them very much. They said I’d get £15 a week, which was a lot. Much better than going to a training college.

‘I went down to Allan Williams’s club, the Jackaranda. I met Stu for the first time. I had an audition. I blasted off a few numbers and they all said fine, you can come to Hamburg with us.’

As Mrs Best had got in on the beat group scene at the teenage coffee club end, Allan Williams, as an experienced nightclub man, had got on to it slightly higher up the scale. He was not only putting on the groups in his own nightclubs, but also finding groups for other people and acting as a sort of agent-cum-manager for groups looking for work. It was he who had helped the Beatles to get their Larry Parnes audition. The Beatles’ money for their Scottish tour, though paid for by Larry Parnes, had come through Allan Williams who had acted for them in getting the tour.

The reasons why Allan Williams, a small-time Liverpool nightclub owner, came to be exporting groups to Hamburg are rather complicated. The first contact had been established when a German seaman had heard a West Indian steel band in the Jackaranda Club and had told people in Hamburg how good they were. This had led to them being engaged by a Hamburg
night club. Allan Williams had followed them over, hoping to interest Hamburg club owners in other Liverpool groups. He went to the Kaiserkeller, which seemed to be the only rock and roll club, and met Bruno Koschmeider. ‘I kidded him on that all the best British rock groups came from Liverpool.’

Koschmeider came to Britain to see for himself but instead went to London where he soon found that nobody had heard of the Liverpool groups. He went to the Two I’s in Soho, then the centre for British rock (Tommy Steele had played there), and signed Tony Sheridan and his group. He was a big success in Hamburg and Koschmeider came back to London to look for more groups. By a coincidence, Allan Williams happened to be in the Two I’s the same evening Koschmeider was looking for another group. Allan Williams was with a Liverpool group called Derry and the Seniors, trying to get them work. He fixed them up to go to Hamburg, the first Liverpool beat group to go there.

Derry and the Seniors were a success and Allan Williams was asked for another Liverpool group. He thought of Rory Storm, but they were going to Butlins holiday camp. So he asked the Beatles. But the Hamburg contract was for a five-piece group and the Beatles didn’t have a drummer. They’d had an occasional drummer, a middle-aged man with a family, but he turned down the chance of Hamburg as his wife was against it. This was when they thought of asking Pete Best. When he agreed, everything was ready.

In the Harrison household there was no great excitement – apart of course from George. But his mother at least never tried to stop him going. She was worried about him being only 17 and going abroad for the first time, especially Hamburg. She’d heard things about Hamburg. ‘But it was what he wanted to do. They were going to get properly paid for once. I knew they were good and were bound to do well. All I’d heard up till then was “Heh, Mum, we’ve got a booking, lend’s the bus fare, eh, and I’ll pay you back when I’m famous.”’

So Mrs Harrison got George ready. She made him promise to write and gave him a tin of home-made scones.

George, despite his great youth, was at least a working man. But Paul and John were still ostensibly studying. Going to Hamburg was going to ruin their great careers once and for all.

Jim McCartney was naturally all against Paul going to Hamburg. Paul had just sat his A levels – Art and English – and they were all waiting to hear if he’d got through them so that they would then definitely know if he’d got a place at a teachers’ training college.

Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, says that Paul, as ever, arranged everything very cleverly. ‘I remember coming home from school with Paul the day he told me they’d been invited to Hamburg. He let it out, just casually. I said, Wow! But Paul said he didn’t know if he should, pretending he was all undecided. I said it was fantastic! He was going to be a big star, wow! He said, do you think Dad will let me? That was very smart. I was then on his side in persuading Dad. He let me get all excited, so that I was desperately
wanting
him to go.’

Paul says that he was of course very excited. ‘We hadn’t seemed to have done anything for weeks, just hanging around. It was the long summer holidays and I didn’t want to go back to school, or college. But there wasn’t much alternative, until suddenly Hamburg came up. That meant I definitely didn’t need to go back to school. There was now something else to do.’

There was still Jim to persuade. Paul got Allan Williams to come home, to help soften up Jim. ‘Allan Williams never got our names right, though,’ says Paul. ‘He would call me John.’ However, Allan Williams managed to tell Jim how well organized it was all going to be and what a lovely respectable place Hamburg was.