Shout! (18 page)

Halfway down the Grosse Freiheit, opposite a Roman Catholic church, Williams stumbled into a downstairs club called the Kaiserkeller. He found it to be decorated in confusedly nautical style, with booths like lifeboats, barrels for tables, and a mural depicting life in the South Sea Isles. On a tiny central space several hundred people danced while an Indonesian group performed Elvis Presley songs in German.

Williams demanded to speak to the proprietor and, after some delay, was shown into the presence of a short, broad-chested man with
a quiff of sandy hair, a turned-up nose, and a disabled leg that little inhibited his movements. Before the conversation had progressed far a waiter came in to report a disturbance in the club area. Williams, through the open door, saw a squad of waiters systematically working over a solitary customer. Snatching from his desk drawer a long ebony cosh, the proprietor left the room with an agile, hopping gait, to lend them a hand.

The talk then resumed on amiable lines. Allan Williams introduced himself as the manager of the world’s best rock ’n’ roll groups. The Kaiserkeller’s owner, whose name was Bruno Koschmider, inquired if they were as good as Tommy Steele. Williams assured him they were better than Elvis Presley. For proof he brought out the tape he had made of the Silver Beatles and others. But when it was played on Herr Koschmider’s tape recorder, nothing could be heard but scrabble and screech. Somebody back in Liverpool had blundered.

Having failed, as he thought, to convert Hamburg’s Reeperbahn to Liverpool beat music, Allan Williams returned to being a functionary of the great Larry Parnes. The Silver Beatles—or plain Beatles, as they now defiantly called themselves—receded somewhat in Williams’s mind. His chief property was the rhythm-and-blues group Derry and the Seniors, which Parnes had promised work in a summer show at Blackpool. The entire band, in expectation of this, gave up their jobs to turn professional. Then, at the last minute, a letter arrived on elaborately crested Parnes notepaper canceling the engagement.

An enraged deputation led by Howie Casey, the Seniors’ sax player, confronted Williams at his Blue Angel Club in Seel Street. Casey was a youth of powerful build, and Williams promised hastily to find them some alternative work. In sheer desperation, he packed the entire five-piece group and their equipment into his Jaguar and headed for the only place he could think of where work for a rock ’n’ roll band might magically exist. He was taking them, he said, to the famous 2i’s coffee bar in London. There, in the home of skiffle, where Tommy Steele had first been discovered, something or other must surely turn up.

Fortune now smiled upon the agitated Welshman to the ludicrous, implausible extent that Fortune sometimes does. Upon entering the 2i’s, whom should he see first but a small, barrel-chested West German gentleman with a quiff of sandy hair, a turned-up nose, and a disabled leg
not at the moment noticeable. It was Herr Bruno Koschmider, proprietor of the Kaiserkeller club in Grosse Freiheit, Hamburg.

Koschmider, it transpired, had been deeply impressed by Williams’s visit to his establishment, playing unintelligible tapes and boasting of rock ’n’ roll groups better than Elvis. Not long after Williams’s dispirited return to Liverpool, Herr Koschmider had decided to visit England and hear these wonderful groups for himself. Naturally, however, it was not Liverpool he visited, but London, and the famous 2i’s coffee bar.

He had already paid one visit to the 2i’s and had signed up a solo singer, Tony Sheridan, to appear at the Kaiserkeller. Sheridan in fact was a gifted performer, temporarily down on his luck. At the Kaiserkeller, he had been such a sensation that Bruno Koschmider had decided to sack his Indonesian Elvis impersonators and go over completely to English rock ’n’ roll. He was thus at the 2i’s a second time, hoping to hire another English group. He had not yet done so when Derry and the Seniors walked in.

It was the work of a few minutes for Williams to get Derry and the Seniors up and playing on the 2i’s stage. Despite having had nothing to eat but some stale cake, they performed so well that Bruno Koschmider booked them for his Kaiserkeller club on the spot. They would receive thirty marks each per day—about twenty pounds a week—with travel expenses and accommodation found. A contract was drafted with the help of a German waiter from the adjacent Heaven and Hell coffee bar.

Derry and the Seniors set off by train from Liverpool to Hamburg with five pounds between them and no work permits. If challenged, Allan Williams said, the four tough-looking Liverpool boys and their black lead singer should pretend to be students on vacation. The story did not convince German frontier officials, and at Osnabruck the entire group was ordered off the train and held in custody until Bruno Koschmider could be contacted to vouch for them.

The next news to reach Williams was a great deal better. Derry and the Seniors, together with Tony Sheridan and his band, were a hit at Herr Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller. Together with rapturous postcards from various musicians, a letter arrived from Koschmider himself, asking Williams to send across a third group to play in another of Koschmider’s clubs, the Indra.

The group Williams wanted to send was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They, however, were already committed to a summer season at
Butlin’s Skegness holiday camp. Gerry and the Pacemakers, his second choice, did not fancy going abroad. So Allan Williams, rather reluctantly, wrote to Bruno Koschmider, telling him to expect a group called the Beatles.

Shortly afterward, a letter of protest arrived from the Seniors’ lead singer, Derry Wilkie. It would spoil things for everyone, Derry said, if Allan Williams sent over “a bum group like the Beatles.”

The offer came when John Lennon’s art college career was approaching the point of collapse. He had recently sat—or rather half-sat—the exam by which his past three years’ work would be assessed. The test paper in lettering, his weakest subject, was supposed to have been completed in May, while the Beatles were touring Scotland with Johnny Gentle. Cynthia, John’s girlfriend, had risked her own college career by doing the paper for him, racked by pains from a grumbling appendix, under a single lightbulb at the Gambier Terrace flat.

And yet, for all John’s inexhaustible laziness, there were still glimpses of brilliance, in his cartoons and poster designs, which made Arthur Ballard, his tutor, think him worth defending. In Ballard’s view, the only logical place for John was the newly opened faculty of design: unfortunately, however, he could not convince the relevant department head. “I had a row with the fellow in the end,” Ballard says. “I told him if he couldn’t accept an eccentric like John, he ought to be teaching in Sunday school. Then I heard from Cyn that it didn’t matter because John was going to Hamburg. He’d told everyone he’d be getting a hundred pounds a week.”

For Stu Sutcliffe the break with college was more serious, coming as it did at the start of a year’s postgraduate teacher training. Stu at first turned down the Hamburg trip; then John and the others talked him into it. The college subsequently indicated it was willing to accept him on the teaching course as a late entrant.

Paul McCartney obtained his father’s consent with typical diplomacy and circuitousness. With A-level exams now past, he technically had no further school commitments. His English teacher, Dusty Durband, was in fact one of the first to hear of the Hamburg offer, just before the Institute broke up for the summer. Mr. Durband was skeptical. “As far as I knew, Paul was going on, as his father wished, to teacher-training college. When he told me about Hamburg, I said, ‘Just who do you want to
be, Paul? Tommy Steele?’ He just grinned and said, ‘No, but I feel like giving it a try.’”

Jim McCartney, when told the big news at last, faced a united front consisting of Paul, his brother Michael, and Allan Williams, who came up to Forthlin Road to assure him the arrangements were all aboveboard. Though full of misgivings, Jim felt that if Paul were allowed this one jaunt he might the sooner return to his senses, and to college. He let Paul go at the price of only a minimal pep talk about being careful and eating regular meals.

George Harrison, though even now only just seventeen, encountered the least opposition from his family. With his father and elder brothers he had achieved the status of working man, and was as such entitled to command of his own affairs. The quiet, hardworking Harrison family, besides, had produced its share of travelers. As well as Harry and his sea voyages, there was Louise, George’s grown-up sister, now married to an American and living in St. Louis. Germany, by contrast, seemed not too distant; if the Harrisons knew of the Reeperbahn’s reputation, they were prepared to trust in George’s level head. His mother made him promise to write, and baked him a tin of homemade scones for the journey.

One big worry spoiled the collective excitement. It was the same old plaguing worry—they still had no drummer. What would do as backing for a stripper in Upper Parliament Street would not do, Allan Williams told them forcefully, for a big-time, luxurious Hamburg nightspot like the Indra Club. The contract with Herr Koschmider specified a full instrumental complement. If the Beatles could not provide one, the gig must be given to someone else.

They had been searching, in fact, ever since Tommy Moore had deserted them to return to his forklift truck at Garston bottle works. The only replacement they had been able to find was a boy called Norman Chapman whom they had overheard one night, practicing on Slater Street in a room above the National Cash Register Company. Norman played a few dates with them, happily enough, but then had to join one of the last batches of young Britons drafted into the Army.

Lately, for want of anything better, the Beatles had gone back to playing at the Casbah, Mona Best’s cellar club in Hayman’s Green. They had not been there since they were called the Quarry Men and had walked out over the docking of fifteen shillings from their night’s fee.

To their surprise, they found the Casbah thriving. Ken Browne, the
bespectacled ex–Quarry Man, now led his own group, the Black Jacks, with Mrs. Best’s son, Peter, on drums. The Black Jacks were among the most popular groups in that district, drawing even larger crowds to the Casbah than did big names like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.

Pete Best had just left Liverpool Collegiate Grammar School with abundant GCE passes and athletic distinctions but not so clear-cut a plan as hitherto to go on to teacher-training college. The taciturn, good-looking boy, to his mother’s surprise, announced instead that he wanted to become a professional drummer. Mrs. Best, ever ready to encourage and invigorate, helped him raise the deposit on a brand-new drum set that he had long been admiring in the music department at Blackler’s.

That decision taken, nothing much seemed to happen. The Black Jacks were due to disband because Ken Browne was about to move away from Liverpool. No other group had offered Pete a job as drummer, nor was he one to push himself. For several weeks, he sat around at home all day, and at night went downstairs into the club to watch this other group Mo was now booking. Whenever he came in, a little desperate sigh used to run around the girls on the nearer benches.

The Beatles, too, had noticed Pete Best. More specifically, they had noticed his glittering new drum set. Five weeks after leaving school Pete was rung up by Paul McCartney and asked if he would like to join them for a two-month club engagement in Hamburg. The question, really, was superfluous. Pete Best said he would.

They were to travel to Hamburg by road. Allan Williams had offered to drive them there himself, not in his Jaguar but in a battered cream-and-green Austin minibus that he had acquired for his Liverpool enterprises. Williams, thinking he might as well make a party of it, invited also along his Chinese wife, Beryl, his brother-in-law, Barry Chang, and his West Indian business associate, Lord Woodbine. On their way through London they were to pick up a tenth passenger, the waiter from the Heaven and Hell coffee bar, who was returning to Hamburg to become Bruno Koschmider’s interpreter.

None of the five Beatles had ever been abroad before. John Lennon, indeed, only acquired a passport within a few days of setting off. Their preparations, even so, were not elaborate. Williams advanced them fifteen pounds to buy new black crewneck sweaters from Marks and Spencer and some extra pairs of tennis shoes. For a stage uniform they
now had little short high-buttoning jackets of houndstooth check. Their luggage was the family type, hauled out from under spare-room beds. Paul also brought along a new, very cheap, solid guitar and a tiny Elpico amplifier to go with the one that, strictly speaking, still belonged to the art college. George had the tin of homemade scones his mother had baked for him.

Only one parent was outside the Jacaranda to see them off. Millie Sutcliffe, having said good-bye to Stu at home, followed him down to Slater Street secretly and stood in a shop doorway, watching while the van was loaded and its sides were embellished with a legend,
THE BEATLES
, in cutout paper letters stuck on with flour and water paste. For some reason, Mrs. Sutcliffe could not stop herself from crying.

At Newhaven, where they were to embark for the Hook of Holland, the dockers at first refused to load the top-heavy conveyance aboard its appointed cross-Channel steamer. John talked them into it just a few moments before sailing time. The English coast receded amid a chorus of “Bye Bye Blackbird” from the Anglo-Chinese party clustered at the stern rail.

In Holland next morning the minibus surfaced among crowds of students on bicycles, some of whom leaned against its tattered sides for support. Williams shared the driving with Lord Woodbine while Beryl, perched on the overheating gearbox, acted as navigator. The five Beatles, Barry Chang, and the German waiter, Herr Steiner, occupied the rear, cut off by a wall of luggage and utensils for cooking along the way. As they headed off across Europe, some more fitful singing broke out.

Like Derry and the Seniors before them, the Beatles were without the necessary German work permits. At the frontier, they, too, planned to pose as students on vacation. They had not proceeded far into Holland before Williams began to doubt if they would get even that far. During a brief stop at Arnhem John emerged from a shop with a mouth organ that, in Lord Woodbine’s words, “he’d picked up to look at and forgotten to put back.”