The Beatles (59 page)

I
n the dawning days of the Mersey sound, before packaged tours kept bands booked for months on end, a summerlong gig at Butlins was regarded as either Fat City or the Gulag. Few getaways were as popular as the institutionalized “holiday camps” scattered around Great Britain in rather modest and unassuming locales. Vacation retreats in Skegness, Pwllheli (Wales), Clacton, Blackpool, Filey, and Bognor Regis provided sanctuary for thousands of young working families on a budget for whom two weeks of regulated social activity and nightly entertainment was the perfect interlude to a fearsome fifty-week grind. Work and play: you could load up the car, drive a few hours through countryside as uncompromisingly beautiful and familiar as the backyard, and arrive in a walled-in oasis shimmering in the heat, where kids and adults romped side by side.

Catering to the masses, the Butlins camps were governed by vox populi, and by 1960 it was clear that rock ’n roll had crystallized as a mainstream trend. Up-and-coming groups were awarded summer residencies at each Butlins satellite: Cliff Richard at Clacton, Clay Nicholls and the Blue Flames at Filey, and the Trebletones at Bognor Regis. For £16 a week—a cushy
twenty-hour
week—plus room, board, and flocks of adoring birds, it was a steady, much-sought-after gig.

The Beatles, however, avoided Butlins like church. Disdainful of organized functions and the camps’ loutish appeal, John, who was inexorably middle class, refused to apply there for work. The whole concept of “chalet”—or barracks—living and uniformed perky “redcoats” who herded guests from activity to activity revolted him, and he waxed eloquent on it, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Paul’s family had spent many happy summers at Butlins. Johnny Byrne recalls how John wasted no opportunity
to trash Butlins. “He told us it
reminded him of a German concentration camp
,” Byrne says.

Liverpool’s representative at Butlins was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. In 1960, billed as Jet Storm, they spent two fun-packed months at Pwllheli, opening for the blustery Blackjacks. After the headliners departed early, Storm swiped Rory Blackwell’s first name and suggested his sidemen change theirs as well to spice up the band’s “
boring” image
. Just as the aggressively offbeat Lord Sutch had given his Savages appropriate stage names, Storm imposed a Wild West theme, so Johnny Byrne became Johnny Guitar, Charlie O’Brien metamorphosed as Ty Brien (after Ty Hardin, the star of TV’s
Bronco
), and Wally Egmond adopted the name Lu Walters, which, for all its commonness, sounded to Scousers like a chaw-spittin’ desperado.
The only group member who balked
at the hijinks was the drummer.

Ritchie Starkey’s tenure as a teddy boy gave him the requisite aura: flamboyant clothes, an exquisitely chiseled beard, swaths of silver streaked through his lank hair, and status as
one of the city’s fleetest dancers
. His twelve-cylinder, red-and-white Standard Vanguard (for which he had no license) sealed the spectacular image. Although disenchanted with the idea of stage names, Ritchie was a team player and for a while consented, begrudgingly, to let Storm introduce him as “
Rings
,” in deference to his penchant for flashy jewelry. There was
an effort to amend it to Johnny Ringo
, after the mythical gunslinger; however, that fizzled when it was determined that the Colts’ singer had already staked a claim to it. Still, Rory was nothing but persevering. When Rory grabbed a ten-minute break in the middle of a set, his illustrious drummer took over the spotlight. “
Ritch wasn’t that interested
,” recalls Byrne. “He didn’t want to sing. But we’d bring the drums forward, which kind of amazed the crowd—you’d never see a drummer singing—and he’d do three numbers: ‘Alley-Oop,’ ‘Matchbox,’ and ‘Boys,’ the B-side of a Shirelles record we dug up.” In no time, he grew into the role; its blinding attraction energized him. “And eventually Rory began introducing the break, saying: ‘All right folks—it’s
Ringo Star-Time!
’ ”

Ringo: it had a nice theatricality—not too tricky, not too serious. It synchronized awkwardly with Starkey, but “
Starr was a natural
,” the drummer recalled. “It made sense to me, and I liked it.”
Ringo Starr
. It rolled right off the tongue. What’s more, it looked great emblazoned on his bass drum. While the others struggled to establish their new names, Ringo seemed born to it.

But his style wasn’t limited by name alone. Ringo had chops. “
He was an excellent drummer
and had a good feel,” says Adrian Barber, with whom Ringo occasionally gigged. It was an opinion that resonated throughout the Merseyside club scene. He was very popular with musicians, in general because of his personality, but particularly because he wasn’t a showboat: he established a nice groove that managed to serve the songs without taking anything away from them. His ego never got in the way. Of all the drummers in Liverpool, where the pecking order was so clearly established, bands ranked Ringo among the best. And by the summer of 1962, he figured in many of their plans.

One band in particular.

The Beatles had more than an inkling that they were only one man away from being great. As musicians, they had developed immeasurably over the years together, and it was impossible not to hear exactly how far they had come. They had gotten progressively better—and not just better, but accomplished, versatile. There was a cleverness about their playing, an ingenuity that took routine lines of music and gave them a sharp, inventive twist. A lot of it happened without a great deal of forethought. They’d hit a chord, either experimentally or by accident, and bells would go off. Some of it was innate. Paul picked up instruments the way some people pick up new languages; he had the ear for it, with all the proper accents in place. And George, especially, seemed consumed with fundamentals and technique. Both handled guitars with stunning self-assuredness and possessed the power to make their instruments hum like Maseratis. John had everything else: the right sensibility and taste. And it all fit together in a stylized groove.

And then there was the matter of ambition. “
There was a feeling we all had
, built into us all, that something was going to happen,” George recalled in his memoirs. Who else would have presumed to write their own songs? Or team up so audaciously with a manager? Ambition. It was never more apparent than in their long-range outlook: none of them had anything to fall back on. Their peers all had day jobs; the Beatles had never even thought seriously about punching a clock. It was only ever music, only the band,
only the Beatles.
There were no other options. This was their life’s work.

If perfectionism was one objective, continuity was another. Neither John nor Paul wanted to rock the boat, so it was George who ultimately was “responsible for stirring things up.” As a perfectionist, it bugged him
that the drum patterns remained so static.
Thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk! Thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk!
They provided no contrast to the music, no matter what was being played.

Paul’s own deep passion for drumming had never been concealed. He’d long had a trap set at home, which he mastered as he did all the other instruments in the band. And during jam sessions at the Blue Angel, with Gerry Marsden and Wally Shepherd, he “
always made for the drums
.” Earl Preston’s drummer, Ritchie Galvin, recalled encountering Paul and Pete huddled at the Mandolin Club one afternoon in 1962 after a lunchtime session at the Cavern. “
Paul was showing Pete
the drum pattern that he wanted on a particular song,” Galvin remembered. “Pete tried to do it, but he didn’t get it.”

And by now
it was no secret that the other Beatles resented Mona
Best. The band had used her house as its unofficial headquarters since 1960, camping in the Bests’ upstairs Oriental living room between gigs and using her phone to confirm dates; as a result, they suffered her persistent interruptions—and opinions. “
Mona was an attractive, strong, very forceful woman
, in the tradition of John’s aunt Mimi,” says Bill Harry, who admired her. “She ran the Casbah with an iron fist, and she tried to run the Beatles with the same vigor.” Radio personality Spencer Leigh shared Harry’s regard for Mona but wrote that “
she could also be a harridan
.” “
If she said it was Sunday
when it was Tuesday,” one musician relented, “you’d say it was Sunday too.” Her high-handedness seemed particularly accentuated when the Beatles were there holding court. She came to view herself as their adviser, their patron, and the Beatles, who were fiercely independent, to say nothing of chauvinistic, “
didn’t want her interference
.” Only one person dreaded her more, and that was Brian Epstein. She was the bane of his existence, always on his back, always haranguing him, demeaning his position, challenging his authority, belittling him. In self-defense, he referred to her impersonally, as
that woman,
never by name.

Aside from a two-month stint with Tony Sheridan, Ringo had been with the Hurricanes for four years, but rumors abounded that he was again up for grabs.
Kingsize Taylor’s band, on tour
in Hamburg, was losing its drummer, Dave Lovelady, who was due back at school in September to finish his degree in architecture. “
Teddy wrote to Ringo
to ask him if he’d take my place,” Lovelady recalled. A decent raise was proposed: £5 a week more than the £15 Rory was paying him. A 35 percent hike was nothing to sneeze at. “[Ringo] wrote back to say that he would [do it,] and he gave Rory Storm his notice.”

But Ringo and Johnny Byrne were tight. They had shared a camp chalet at Pwllheli for two years running, and this summer at Skegness, on the east coast of England, arrangements remained the same. Truthfully, their chalet was an awful hole—a shabby little room so primitive that it had no electricity aside from a solitary bulb hanging by a frayed cord. But otherwise, “
the lifestyle,” as Byrne says, “was ideal
.” There was a snazzy new performing center, the Rock ’n Calypso Ballroom, with energetic crowds and “an electric-type atmosphere” that recharged itself every night. The boys would get up late and go for a swim or a horseback ride. Johnny and Ringo, in particular, enjoyed some lazy roller-skating in the afternoons, then came back for “a lie-in.” If they behaved, Rory’s sister, Iris, who worked in the camp dance troupe, brought some of her friends around. Recalled Johnny, “We had food, money in our pockets. We weren’t getting our hands dirty. And
the girls!
We did quite well with them at Butlins. There were different campers every week, so nothing ever got messy. After all, they were the main reason we’d gotten into rock ’n roll—the money and the girls. What else was there? Well, maybe the music.”

Ringo remembered the scene was “
fabulous… the best place
we could have been.” And his years with the Hurricanes were loaded with similar memories. “
But Ringo was like all of us,” according to Byrne, “ruthless
. You had to be to stay on top. Rory was that way; I was, too. And the Beatles were the most ruthless of all. No one was going to stand in the way of success.”

On the morning of August 15, 1962, Johnny and Ringo had slept late after having been up “until nearly dawn” the night before following a raucous show and its vital cool-down. Two weeks earlier Johnny and Ringo had been unceremoniously “put off” the Butlins grounds for “security purposes.” At two in the morning, after yet another uproarious show, the boys had been caught “committing the cardinal sin” of playing music in their chalet. The two young girls lounging there, however innocently, didn’t help matters.

So as not to jeopardize the gig, the two boys had rented a trailer, laying out a precious £2 per week, and parked it rather presumptuously opposite the Butlins front gates. “Ringo had one end, I had the other,” Byrne recalled. They decorated it with posters of American rock ’n roll artists and brought the record player out of hiding. Johnny brewed coffee; Ringo heated “tins of beans,” which before would have tipped them to “the camp Gestapo.” And it was there, on that Wednesday morning in August, just after ten o’clock, they were so rudely awakened by a knock.

Drowsily, Byrne answered the door. “It was John and Paul,” Johnny recalls vividly. “As soon as I saw them, I knew what they wanted. They wanted Ringo.” Apparently they’d been driving since dawn, roaring along the narrow highways toward Wales, around the sprawl of Manchester and Sheffield, then winding, with slow progress that continued mile after mile, through Wragby, Horncastle, and Spilsby, traveling even narrower roads that took a good five hours to negotiate. Byrne invited the two Beatles inside, but he grew increasingly distraught at the sight of them. He loved Rory Storm and the music they’d made together, and this development had disaster written all over it. As Johnny rubbed his eyes, sinking into the dull reality of the situation, John Lennon confirmed his worst suspicions. “Pete Best is leaving [the band],” John stated, “and we want Ringo to join.” Everyone stood there awkwardly, embarrassed, as Johnny and Ringo got dressed. “Let’s find Rory,” they suggested, and set off for their leader’s chalet.