Shout! (22 page)

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.”

Wooler lost no time in urging McFall to hire the Beatles. Paddy Delaney, the club doorman and an accomplished mimic, would from then on impersonate Wooler’s voice and wagging forefinger as he told McFall they would bring in a following of sixty, at least.

Delaney, a huge, straight-backed, kindhearted Irishman, had seen service both in the Guards and the Liverpool Parks Police. He was equally immaculate in his spare-time profession of helping to dissuade Teddy Boys from entering Liverpool’s premier dance halls, the Locarno and the Grafton Rooms. In 1959, to oblige his brother-in-law, he agreed to put in one night on the door of the Cavern Club. “I thought it was a proper place, like the Grafton Rooms, so I turned up smart. I had three dinner suits in those days. I put one of them on with a maroon bow tie, a matching cummerbund with a watermark in it, and three diamond studs in my shirt. I walked up and down Mathew Street three times before I could even
see
the Cavern.”

Paddy Delaney was still there—still in evening dress complete with studs and cummerbund—when the Beatles first played at the Cavern in January 1961. Ray McFall had booked them, tentatively, to appear on a Tuesday, midway through the Blue Genes’ Guest Night.

“I’m standing there under the light and I see this lad coming along in a leather jacket, a black polo-necked jersey. I remember thinking to myself, ‘That’s the youngest tramp
I’ve
ever seen.’ ‘Are you a member,
pal?’ I said to him. He said, ‘I’m George Harrison. I’m in the Beatles.’ I let him go in; then Paul McCartney came along; then John. Then a taxi came with Pete Best and the drums and their two amplifiers. Just chipboard, those were, no paint or anything, with the speakers nailed up inside.”

Bob Wooler’s prophecy was fulfilled. The Beatles brought in at least sixty extra customers, in contingents from Aintree, Litherland, and West Derby. The Blue Genes, supposedly the main event of the evening, were totally eclipsed. Paddy Delaney witnessed the furious row upstairs on Mathew Street between Ray McFall and his outraged regular musicians.

McFall was impressed by the door receipts but shocked to the depths of his jazz-pure soul by the Beatles’ unkempt appearance. He had thought, after seeing Cliff Richard’s Shadows, that groups wore suits. He told Bob Wooler that if the Beatles wanted to play the Cavern again, they must not wear jeans. To this the Beatles replied that Ray McFall could get stuffed. Wooler interceded on their behalf, pointing out to McFall the advantage of block-booking a group that, being “professional”—that was to say, unemployed—would be available to play lunchtimes on any day of the week. “The Beatles,” Wooler said with pride, “were what I called the first rock and
dole
group.”

So it came about that, on three or four days each week, the delivery-men and warehouse checkers in Mathew Street witnessed the unprecedented sight of scores of young girls, from city center shops and offices, in beehive hair and stiletto heels, picking their way down the alleys among the delivery trucks and cast-off fruit crates. By noon, when the session began, a queue would stretch from the corner leading to Whitechapel to the doorway, like a ship’s hatch, that would be unnoticeable but for the bouncer who stood there, blocking it with his arm. As the city clocks struck noon that queue would start to move forward, by degrees, into the hatchway and down the eighteen steps to the table where Ray McFall sat, surrounded by soup bowls full of money. Admission cost 1s (5p) to members or 1s 6d (7p) to nonmembers. Beyond McFall’s table was a microscopic cloakroom, tended by a girl named Priscilla White during her lunch break from a neighborhood typing pool.

Under the gloomy arches Bob Wooler’s voice would gravely resound in what had become each session’s inaugural catechism. “Hi, all you
Cavern-dwellers—welcome to the
best
of cellars.” Wooler broadcast, not from the stage but from behind it, in a tiny recess that served also as a changing room for the bands. The sole ventilation came from the next-door cellar, via a grille that became gradually blocked by a mounting pile of drum sets. A single cupboard served to accommodate the DJ’s amplifier and record-playing deck. Between each live session Wooler sat in this reeking priest hole, playing records from his own large personal collection.

Ray McFall paid the Beatles 25s (£1.25) each per day. For this they did two forty-five-minute spots at the end of the center tunnel, on the tiny stage with dead rats under it, and positively no acoustics. The low-arched brick, and the wall of impacted faces and bodies, so squeezed out all empty air that Pete Best’s drumbeats rebounded an inch in front of him, making the sticks jump like pistols in his hand. A single Chuck Berry number, in that heat, caused even tidy Paul to look as if his head had been plunged into a water barrel. The bricks sweated with the music, glistening like the streams that coursed from their temples and sending a steady drip of moisture over equipment in which there were many naked wires. Each breath they took filled their lungs with each other’s hot scent, mingling uniquely with an aroma of cheese rinds, damp mold, disinfectant, and the scent of frantic girls.