The Beatles (30 page)

Within days Paul and Dot were an item. A nearly exclusive togetherness during the week quickly became the norm, but Saturdays were reserved for the Casbah, where Dot now joined Cynthia in her new role as inconspicuous cheerleader. “It was amazing how popular the band had become—and how fast,” Dot says, recalling those nights from a vaunted perspective. “Watching them, you could see how effortlessly they engaged the crowd. It was a full-blown mutual admiration society.” Perhaps nobody appreciated it as much as Mona Best, who couldn’t print Casbah membership cards fast enough to satisfy the demand. She was thrilled by “
the fantastic scenes outside
the house”—interminable queues that snaked across her front lawn, along the drive, and down Hayman’s Green—to say nothing of
the club fees and five-pence admission
that accrued beyond her wildest expectations. On word of mouth alone, she could pack in four hundred kids before conditions reached a critical stage, when tempers flared and the crowd became uncontrollable, and with the nonstop turnover, as many as 1,300 kids passed through the club on any given Saturday night.
Despite the constant crush
, parents drifted unobtrusively downstairs to check out the goings-on; policemen on the beat stopped by for a Coke. And everyone had a good word for the house band, whose residency seemed destined to stretch on indefinitely.

Which is why everyone was dismayed when it all soon collapsed.

Stories abound about how the Beatles hemorrhaged money, mostly because there was so damn much of it and no one to tend the purse strings. But in the early days they could tell you where every farthing went. “
They didn’t have much
… in those days,” Mona Best recalled, “so they’d fight over a halfpenny.”

Inconceivably, the Quarry Men blew off their gig at the Casbah over the equivalent of a whopping seventy-five cents. On the seventh Saturday night that the Quarry Men rocked the Casbah, Ken Brown, who had done a capable job of handling rhythm guitar, turned up suffering from a mighty bout of the flu. He was ordered upstairs, to the Bests’ living room, where he lay slumped across a sofa for the rest of the night. The band went on without him, which didn’t make a speck of difference to their
performance, of course, since a fourth guitar was almost as superfluous as the fact that Ken didn’t sing. But he was missed. Ken was “
an immensely likeable guy
,” whose ongoing work around the club had endeared him to Mo Best and Pete, whom he had encouraged to learn the drums. In the spirit of appreciation, “
Mo decided to pay [Ken]
, even though he didn’t play,” said Pete, who should have heeded the consequences with a keener eye.

According to an observer, John, Paul, and George “
went ballistic
.” Since Ken hadn’t played, they argued, he didn’t deserve a cut, and they demanded Ken’s share of the fee, which amounted to a measly fifteen shillings. It didn’t matter that the three others each received the amount due them; even if Mo wouldn’t fork over Ken’s share, they stood opposed to
his
getting it. Nobody, they insisted, was going to get a free ride.

Mona Best was the last person who would yield to a band’s demands, and there was never any effort made to appease them. Said Pete: “
She kept Ken’s fifteen bob
and gave it to him later.” When the Quarry Men found out, they decided to ankle their residency. “
Right, that’s it, then!
” Ken Brown remembered Paul shouting before they stormed out of the club.

A few days later, as Pete Best recalled, Ken came up with a solution. They’d form their own band—the Blackjacks—which would get them “
back into the business
.” Initially, Best balked at the offer. He had only recently taken up the drums after months of tattooing the furniture with “
pencils, and later drumsticks
.” At the time, the most he could do was “
knock beats out
” on his thigh, the way successive generations of teenagers have marked time to “Wipeout.” Bright, coordinated, and energetic, Pete could probably muddle his way through some standard rock ’n roll covers, but not capably enough to power a band. But as time wore on, as unexceptional bands passed through the Casbah, the idea seemed to make some sense. Rationalizing, Pete figured that it provided him with a hands-on opportunity to practice and right an unprincipled wrong at the same time, Pete still being “shocked” by the way Ken had been treated by his former bandmates. Little could he have imagined that Brown’s dismissal was a mere dress rehearsal for the sacking that would haunt Pete Best for the rest of his life.

When the Liverpool College of Art reopened in September 1959, John was permitted to enroll in the painting department, working toward a National Diploma in Design, but only on a probationary basis. Having failed his
intermediates, only the advocacy of Arthur Ballard allowed him to advance to a permanent area of concentration instead of having to resit the general studies program.

Having stuck his neck out for John, Ballard enlisted the help of his prodigy, Stuart Sutcliffe, to somehow inspire and motivate this problem student. “
Stuart was his last hope
,” says Bill Harry. “[Arthur] knew if anyone could reach John, it was Stu.”

Somehow, Sutcliffe hit the right note, and before long the two boys began painting together in late-afternoon sessions conducted in an empty studio on the top floor. Long after the other students had gone home, they worked furiously on technique, experimenting with free expression and a nebula of colors to generate a flow of ideas. In what was essentially a painting tutorial, Stuart introduced John to the basics of image and composition, doling out tips on how to control the brush or direct the flow of paint. Sutcliffe taught him how to grind his own paints, which oils produced the most effective mixtures, how to control and exploit the flow of emulsions. Cynthia, who sat framed by the windows, where soft, blue light filtered in off the street,
remembered being “fascinated
” by the way John took instruction. “
Here with no one watching
, no one to entertain, and no one to criticize, [he] could relax and learn,” she recalled. “John was having a wonderful time, splashing bold colors across his canvas, throwing sand at it—trying out all sorts of experiments that he would have been too cautious to try in front of anyone else.”

They were a breed apart, and Sutcliffe looked it, too. “
Stuart wore tinted glasses
in honor of his idol, Cybulski, the so-called Polish James Dean, to say nothing of his underground art heroes,” Harry recalls. “
[He] had a lot of innovative
ideas about how to dress,” said Rod Murray. “Stuart wore what we called Chelsea boots, Italian pointy-toed [shoes] with side gussets… and one of those old flying jackets made out of the inside of a sheep.” Cynthia referred to Stuart as “
a tiddler
” because of his size and frail build, but it never detracted from his stature. As Rod Murray pointed out, there is a difference between being weak and being quiet. “
Stuart was not an outwardly forceful
personality—not insofar as John was—but he was a
very
strong character. He was small, but determined… a very intense person.” No art student was more respected or better liked. In whatever class Stuart sat down in—painting, drawing, lifework—“
a tremendous energy and intensity
” filled the room. He painted with power and conviction, and John knew it. In most cases, that would have been
enough to drive John into an envious rage, but Stuart didn’t affect him that way. Neither his popularity nor his talent proved threatening to John’s ego. He didn’t flaunt his artistry or try to stick it under John’s nose, and he always encouraged John without making an issue of his deficiencies. It also impressed John that, unlike so many other students he encountered, Stuart wasn’t handed everything on a silver platter. He had no grant, no student subsidy.
Whatever “milk money
” his mother set aside for him was spent on paint. “
Stuart never let on
how hard he had it,” says Bill Harry, “but things were really difficult for him at that time. He had practically no money, and you were only allowed a certain amount of free materials from the college. It was never enough. Canvas was expensive, so his art was done on big sheets of cheap foolscap paper; otherwise, he broke up furniture and painted on the unfinished surface. But as hard up as he was, you were always entitled to half of anything he had.” That was Stuart’s power: his sincerity.

“
John did all the things
that Stuart would have loved to have done if he had the courage,” Stuart’s mother, Millie, recalled. And he had the same passion for music and poetry that Stuart exhibited for art. In fact, John exuded onstage what Stuart felt like in front of an easel, something real and visceral.

By the mid-sixties, the prevailing cultural sensibility would embrace both Shakespeare and Pynchon, Rembrandt and Warhol, Beethoven and the Beatles. But in 1959, in an insular city such as Liverpool, the aesthetic took longer to gain a foothold.
The incipient taste was enshrined
in popularized “experimental work” such as
The Catcher in the Rye
and
The Outsider,
both of which, according to Bill Harry, “were highly regarded” by Stuart and John. Throughout the fall, the two mates were inseparable, reinforcing each other’s pressing passions. And exploring the fringe. John schooled his painting mentor in all the vagaries of rock ’n roll—playing every record he could get his hands on and rhapsodizing about Elvis, Buddy, and Chuck—to which Stuart responded in kind, dragging out museum exhibition catalogues and analyzing
John Bratby or Russian abstractionist Nicolas de Stael
in great detail, explaining the composition of each picture. In the evenings, they would head over to Ye Cracke, tanking up on half-pints of beer, and then wind up at the Jac, drinking coffee and talking until closing time.

For John, it was an idyllic semester. He practically moved into the little Percy Street flat—“
kipping in [Stuart’s] room
” most weekdays, much to Mimi’s consternation—where there was always space to paint, play
guitar, or cuddle with Cynthia. It provided a place to exchange ideas and escape the loneliness of Menlove Avenue, and Rod and Stuart were happy to have him around. When they got tired of working or just bored, a party solved the doldrums. They could always count on an interesting mix of acquaintances turning up, not just other art students but people they’d met in Ye Cracke: nurses, dockworkers, faculty—even Paul and George, whose presence confirmed their boost into John’s orbit. Music was never a problem. Stuart had an old turntable, Rod a tape recorder, and with John handling music chores, enough records to go all night, which was usually the case.

By early November, however, the parties stopped as every effort was being made to accommodate Sutcliffe, who was preoccupied almost obsessively, often lapsing into long, trancelike work sessions, painting for the prestigious biennial John Moores Exhibition at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. Underwritten by the city’s most eminent philanthropist, the show was a tour de force of local talent and eagerly anticipated throughout the year. All students at the college were encouraged to submit work, even though it was hardly ever accepted. Stuart, however, was determined to make the final cut and had been struggling with
a “monumental painting
”—in size alone, its eight-foot-square proportions filled the bill—that captured the impetuosity and restlessness of his generation. His progress was excruciatingly slow, but worth the effort: the canvas had “
real resonance
,” its scrim of irregular shapes on a field of green and blue shading giving off a rhythmic, abstract energy that lent legitimacy to Stuart’s mission.

The painting, which was actually done on a board, had to be assembled in two pieces and hinged because of its size. “We carried half of the painting down to the Walker Art Gallery,” recalled Rod Murray, whose own entry, a piece of sculpture, had already been rejected. “Something happened, and the other half never [made it, but] the half that got carried down got into the exhibition—and got sold!” And to no less formidable a collector than the show’s esteemed sponsor, the John Moores Foundation, which paid £65 for the piece.

Stuart was ecstatic
. The fabled arbiter of the local art scene had reached across a vast field of inveterate talent and conferred honor on a young abstractionist. It was the ultimate endorsement. To be selected for the exhibition and achieve critical success, along with his first sale! The combination proved thrilling, to say nothing of a financial boon. “All of a sudden Stuart had some serious money,” Murray said. How he spent it would be unforgettable.

John undoubtedly felt the loss of his friend’s attention, but if he was stung or resentful, it didn’t show. Eager to harness the progress made at the Casbah, he rechanneled his energy into the band. Paul and George shared his urge to push ahead. But in the fall of 1959, logistics presented some uncommon obstacles. Paul remained close by, at the Liverpool Institute, where he had advanced into the Remove
^*
and joined the regular lunchtime crowd at the art college. But George, who by this time had become an integral part of the band, was unable to tag along.