The Beatles (10 page)

At one time or another, John took each of the boys to Julia’s house in what can only be construed as a Quarry Man rite of passage. The series of unannounced, informal visits wasn’t anything like the ones they’d endured at the Griffiths’ or the Hantons’ or the Davises’, where a rigid decorum was observed. At Julia’s, the boys could be themselves, without worrying about “minding [their] manners.” They could listen to records, play instruments in her parlor, make as much noise as they wanted, smoke and swear. She expected nothing of them in the way of conventional parental respect, except that they heed her wish to “just enjoy [them]selves.”
Several of the boys, while completely charmed by the familiarity, didn’t know what to make of her.

“
Julia was unlike anyone
I’d ever met before,” says Rod Davis, who accompanied John to her house, alone and with the group, on several occasions. “She acted familiar in a way that was almost flirtatious, and yet there was such a clear division of standing. She was John’s mum—that never strayed from anyone’s mind—but her manner and the way she acted around us was more like that of a mate.”

“One time,” Colin Hanton recalls, “I was at Mimi’s, when John developed a problem with some guitar chords, so it was off to his mum’s. Julia immediately got the banjo out and showed him everything he needed to know. If one of the riffs got too complicated, she’d sing things to emphasize what she was trying to explain. I thought, ‘Crikey, this is his
mother.
They’re talking
music!
’ It was a lot for a lad like me to digest.”

John tended to forget the distance that separated his friends from Julia. He often talked Shotton and Griffiths into forsaking their school lunch for a surreptitious trip to her house. They’d stock up on chips and cigarettes, then pedal off to Blomfield Road, where they’d flop on the couch like cocker spaniels and listen to records in her sitting room. “
She had loads of records
—mostly her pop, not our pop,” Shotton recalls. But Eric Griffiths remembers unearthing a cluster of rock ’n roll 78s there, which they devoured like sweets. “
In fact, we discovered Gene Vincent
there,” he says with certainty. Somehow Julia had gotten her hands on an American issue of “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” which the boys played endlessly until she begged them to stop. Of all the singers John had encountered, next to Elvis, Vincent came closest to possessing his ideal of a rock ’n roll voice—a deathly growl tempered with blatant sexuality and menace wrapped around an outrageous self-image. He didn’t have to see Vincent to grasp the singer’s penchant for black leather, fast bikes, and faster women; it was all right there, on that steamy track. Julia also introduced the boys to records by Shirley and Lee (“Let the Good Times Roll”) and Charlie Gracie (“Butterfly”). It would take some time for those songs to be deciphered and inserted into the Quarry Men’s repertoire to give them more of a rock ’n roll flavor, but the band’s little cushion of material, largely due to Julia’s bohemian taste, was already swinging in that direction.

Throughout April and the rest of May, the Quarry Men accepted any reasonable invitation to play, performing at various friends’ parties. Nothing seemed to discourage the boys; sometimes, the shabbier the place,
the more they were able to cut loose. Mike Rice, who was in the C stream at Quarry Bank with John, recalls, “
They once came and played
in our garage on Manor Way, to the annoyance of all the neighbors. The noise was such that people confronted my parents and forbid the lads from coming back.”

Nigel Walley, acting as the Quarry Men’s manager, sent homemade flyers to operators of the Pavilion Theatre, the Locarno Ballroom, the Rialto, and the Grafton; however, none were quick to respond. “Instead, we played the Gaumont Cinema, near Penny Lane, a couple [of] times,” he recalls, where performers were treated about as respectfully as the beleaguered ushers who patrolled the aisles. “Most Saturday afternoons, they used to have a skiffle group on [during] intermission. They’d show a couple of short films, then have a break [in order] to change projectors, which is when we’d get up. The kids were never quiet; they’d sing along or stand up on their chairs. I don’t know how the lads got through it; John treated it like an important gig, and incredibly no one ever complained.”

Just how good—or bad—the Quarry Men were at those early gigs is difficult to gauge. Few people have any recollection of them. “We were starting to make some music that sounded good,” says Pete Shotton. But Mike Rice, who watched them rehearse at Hanton’s house, thinks they made a “general noise.” And as chaotic as they sounded at practice, he says, they were absolutely lost onstage.

By John’s own admission
, the stakes grew higher in front of an audience. There was an undeniable rush to performing, “a sense that you could control a crowd’s emotions with your voice.” Eric Griffiths remembers admiring how comfortably John worked an audience, singing and emoting with an ease that eluded him in other social situations, how he seemed “to loosen up” in the spotlight “like a captive animal released into its natural habitat.”

Encouraged by the band’s progress, John was determined to test this new power under more challenging circumstances. Part of that was accomplished by entering the Quarry Men in a succession of “
skiffle contests
” that had become a seemingly indispensable feature of every dance hall, cabaret, and church social in Liverpool. While these shows fed the public’s insatiable appetite for skiffle, the word
contest
was merely code for “
no pay
.” Promoters had found a way, however disingenuously, of providing a rousing variety show without spending a shilling on talent. The bands played for bragging rights, or in the Quarry Men’s case, the opportunity to cut their teeth and satisfy a powerful craving for the spotlight.

Toward the beginning of May, the
Liverpool Echo
began announcing auditions for a talent contest run by Carroll Levis, a corpulent Canadian impresario who was making a name in Great Britain for holding amateur shows in local theaters throughout the country. Later on, he would parlay this into a national TV spectacle and his own cottage industry on the order of
Star Search
or
Stars in Their Eyes,
but in the gloom of postwar England the stage—along with the opportunity to see some homegrown talent discovered and (hopefully) ascend to the big time—proved a tremendous draw.

In Liverpool, especially, the heritage of theater remained strong, providing the city with its chief means of entertainment. Television was in its infancy; very few people in Britain owned a TV set, and those who did watched one with a screen the size of a teacup. “
People actually preferred the theater
,” says a Liverpudlian who remembers that period for its vibrancy of local stage shows and enthusiastic audiences. The grand Pavilion Theatre, for example, packed people into panoramas like “Bareway to the Stars,” in which famous strippers, prohibited from moving (lest they be arrested) by police eager to invoke Lord Chamberlain’s decency law, enacted a series of statuesque tableaux that changed in content only when the curtains were closed. There were lowbrow comedies, burlesque, any number of goofy Dracula spin-offs, topical revues. The audiences were ripe for theatrical entertainment and tapped right into Levis’s brand of open talent shows, with their endless heats and face-offs.

By Liverpool standards, the Levis program was an extravaganza. There were eight acts, featuring a solid hour of old-fashioned entertainment, including Levis himself wearing a tuxedo and dickey bow. The Quarry Men turned up early that night, dressed as uniformly as their wardrobes allowed, in white shirts and dark pants. The entire band was nervous, but they plowed enviably through the allotted three-minute set that restricted them to one song, a straightforward rendition of “Worried Man Blues,” to rousing applause. The last act to appear was another skiffle band, the Sunnyside Skiffle Group from North Wales, fronted by an arch four foot two comic named Nicky Cuff, who mugged shamelessly throughout the number. Rod Davis sensed right away there was trouble ahead. “
They had a coach
and a lot of supporters with them,” he says of the competition, “plus, they really performed. The band jumped all over the stage. At one point, the bass player collapsed and played lying on his back. They created some excitement, whereas we stood in one spot, expecting people to just enjoy the music.”

As it turned out, that was the least of their problems. It was
determined by the promoter that there was an extra three-minute segment that needed filling at the end of the show; since the Sunnyside Skiffle Group was already onstage, they were invited to perform another number. “We felt that was a disadvantage right away,” Hanton recalls. “As soon as they started the second song, John began arguing [about it backstage] with Levis. ‘That’s not right. You’re giving them the upper hand.’ We were all mad as hell.” But it was too late. Levis offered a halfhearted apology but stood adamantly aside while the Welsh group put their luck to good use, turning up the heat.

When it was time to select the winner, the Quarry Men braced themselves for the audience’s reaction. Levis wheeled out the Clap-o-Meter, a device that supposedly read the noise level of the applause. Every act registered scores in the high seventies and low eighties, except two. Portentously, Levis walked center stage to the microphone and announced: “
This is an unusual situation
, ladies and gentlemen, but we’ve actually got a tie.” Both the Quarry Men and the Sunnyside Skiffle Group had scored an identical perfect ninety. “We’re going to bring these two groups onstage again, and we’d like you all to clap for either one or the other.” Each skiffle band posed proudly in the spotlight’s glare, while their supporters hollered and whistled in the seats. It was a thrilling moment all around, but when the last hand subsided, the Sunnyside Skiffle Group proved victorious by a hair. “
We were robbed
,” Hanton says, tapping into some residual anger, “and Carroll Levis knew it, too. While he was lining us up for the grand finale, he apologized, saying, ‘I might have been a bit unfair there, lads, but it’s too late now. Don’t despair—you were quite good. Just keep at it.’ ”

Typically, Rod Davis managed to extract a valuable service from the disappointment. He says, “
We got a lesson in showmanship
. We didn’t win because of the other group’s antics, and that was where the germ of performing came over [us].” For John, however, the letdown was crushing. He had hoped to capitalize on a win in the talent show, wielding it as a magnet to attract work. Come the end of June, he’d be finished with Quarry Bank, shorn of his security blanket, such as it were, and forced to consider a trade. It was a destiny he pushed further and further from his mind. “
I was just drifting
,” John acknowledged. “I wouldn’t study at school, and when I was put in for nine GCEs [General Certificates of Education], I was a hopeless failure.”

Despite the largely unsatisfying result of their talent competition, the Quarry Men pushed on. Nigel Walley, who had quit school at the age of fifteen to become an apprentice golf pro, came up with their “first real engagement” of note at the club where he worked. Lee Park had been founded by a collective of Liverpool’s Jewish families who, having been denied membership in almost every Merseyside club, desired a social sanctuary for their community. One afternoon during a round of golf with Dr. Joseph Sytner, a member whom Walley lionized as a “great tipper,” Nigel broached the subject of his alternate existence managing the Quarry Men. Sytner’s son, Alan,
who “was crazy for jazz”
and had run two jazz clubs—the 21 Club, in Toxteth, and the West Coast, on Dale Street—was launching yet another venture that had so far attracted considerable attention in Liverpool.
Called the Cavern
and situated accordingly belowground in an old produce warehouse, it was modeled after Le Caveau Français Jazz Club, a Parisian haunt Alan had visited on holiday, and had been financed by the £400 inheritance he’d received on his twenty-first birthday.
Since its official launch
in January, the club had showcased a stellar lineup of traditional jazz bands whose fans thronged the subterranean den nightly. Nigel didn’t care a whit for trad jazz, but he’d heard that Sytner filled intermissions with the Swinging Bluegenes, a “
sophisticated skiffle
” band that played traditional standards such as “Old Man Mose” and “Down by the Riverside” with a “jazzy rhythm section.” If it wasn’t too much to ask, Nigel proposed to his teemate, “Would your son give us a shot at [playing] the Cavern?”

Sytner, who knew Nigel well and liked the boy, said he would be happy to arrange something; however, first he wanted to hear the group for himself. “
Can you bring them down
to the golf club one night?” he asked. Nigel volunteered the Quarry Men’s services for the club’s upcoming social committee reception quicker than he could yell, “Fore!” Once again, no pay was involved, but Dr. Sytner said, “We’ll feed and water you. The rest is up to your group.” If everything came off as expected, they’d be assured of at least an audition at the exclusive Cavern.

The Quarry Men regarded the Lee Park “gig” as even more crucial than the Carroll Levis show. The audition aside, there was the matter of vindication, a chance to prove to themselves that they were worthy of commanding such a venerable audience. But the real plum was the billing: they
were the evening’s solo attraction, which meant they’d need to put on a full-scale show, they’d have to
entertain.

“John reacted
as though we were playing the Palladium
,” Shotton recalls. For him, a country club triggered images of poshly dressed socialites, standing in a haze of perfumed cigarette smoke while sipping cocktails from triangular-shaped flutes and basking in unforced elegance. He had an immediate attack of grandeur, suggesting to the others that they wear “real uniforms” out of respect for their position as headliners at such a ritzy affair. On its face it seemed absurd that a cash-poor skiffle band without much experience should worry about smartening up for a party of outcast Jews. A brief discussion ensued in which it was decided to dress respectfully but authentically: white shirts (out of respect) with black jeans (to maintain the edge). Everyone gave his consent, except for Rod Davis, whose parents found jeans repugnant and forbade him to wear them. The lads fretted over this dilemma for a moment, until finally even the upstanding Davis acknowledged the gig’s importance and arranged to buy a secondhand pair from Mike Rice at the usurious price of 37 pence.