The Beatles (62 page)

“That was all he talked about, so much interest in the drums,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford, who on a subsequent visit brought him a copy of “Bedtime for Drums,” a rather flashy, if overwrought, solo recording by veteran swingman Alyn Ainsworth. “
Someday, I’m going to play
just like that,” he bragged after listening to the record over and over again.

Following his recovery from tuberculosis, Ritchie returned home to the Dingle in the late fall of 1953, having “grown into a young man, but much frailer than other boys his age and somewhat disoriented.” Behind him was the painful memory of his debilitating illness; ahead, the dim prospect of returning to school, where he’d fallen even further behind. Another year of absence had left him woefully ill prepared; he was hopelessly lost in class, unfairly ostracized. As a result, “he played on his illness to avoid school,” says a friend, hatching a dozen excuses not to attend. Ultimately, he
never went back to school
, staying home instead, languishing in the back room of Admiral Grove, listening to music and rapping along on “
biscuit tins
” with a pair of sticks. There was also a new development there that knocked him slightly more off his stride: another man had become a fixture in what had always been a strong, matriarchal household.

For the past few years, Elsie had been dating Harry Graves, an unusually warm and even-tempered ex-Londoner who had “come to Liverpool for a change of air” when his first marriage had “gone wrong.” A conspicuous presence at the little gatherings that were customary in the Dingle homes, Harry was a gamer with a lovely voice who never hesitated to break into “Star Dust” or “That Old Black Magic”—his so-called party pieces—whenever someone was seated at a piano. In fact, Harry had been roaming the periphery for some time, dating Ritchie’s widowed aunt, Edie Starkey, while Elsie was romantically involved with a local man named Joe Taylor. For some time, the couples had been eyeing each other’s partners, trying to devise a way to make their restless feelings known. Finally, one night it all came tumbling out—everyone confessed—and without any awkwardness, they coordinated “a swap,” whereby both half-baked relationships now fell neatly into place.

Ritchie was drawn to Harry the moment he laid eyes on him. “
He was a really sweet guy
,” Ringo remembered, ruggedly handsome, with elfin eyes and an easy, engaging smile that hid a pent-up melancholy. As a painter at the American army base in nearby Burtonwood,
Harry had access to all the luxuries
that captivated poor Scouser boys brought up on wartime
rationing: comic books and American magazines, exotic chewing gum, toys, and, every Valentine’s Day, big red hearts stuffed with rare, scrumptious candy. Best of all, music was an essential part of his makeup. Having grown up around London, where he ferreted out live music, Harry had acquired a consuming passion for big bands and their vocalists—Dinah Shore, Sarah Vaughan, and Billy Daniels, among his favorites—whose records he collected and played incessantly for Ritchie.

Much like Paul’s father, Harry helped introduce Ritchie to the intricacies of popular music, pointing out how the classic stylists expressed themselves and why their music had the power to touch listeners. The new wave of lowbrow pop singers such as Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, and Eddie Fisher had not yet managed to claim the airwaves, though they were clearly on the horizon. In the meantime, Harry taught Ritchie to appreciate the old crooners and the relationship between their voices and the instruments. In countless interviews after the Beatles became famous, Ringo would always insist he had had no formal musical training, but the shaping of his ear—this introduction to sophisticated syncopated rhythms, along with the ability to identify a scattering of tempos—provided a root foundation that forged his talent in ways no formal training could duplicate.

Harry was also the perfect answer for an emotionally needy adolescent who’d somehow coasted through a broken home and two life-threatening illnesses. As a role model, he was a world apart from the absentee Richard Sr., exuding understanding, reassurance, and unerring commitment to the strictures of a conventional family life. Harry bent over backward to connect with Elsie’s son, and Ritchie quickly succumbed to the favor of his “
great gentleness
.” Whatever misgivings he may have had about his mother’s remarriage, in April 1954, they were quickly erased by Harry’s abiding—some might say blind—support for Ritchie’s scattered pursuits.

Indeed, from the day he quit school until his break with Rory Storm, Ritchie Starkey’s experience in the workforce was an unfolding disaster. Having grown up free of any real discipline or accountability, he had learned indifference, not ambition. He took a job at British Rail for the uniform, “
because they give you suits
.” Unable to pass the physical, Ritchie was eventually laid off and forced onto the dole until he signed on as a waiter, serving drinks on a day boat from Liverpool to North Wales. It was light, agreeable work that appealed to his happy-go-lucky nature and ostensibly served as an apprenticeship, a jumping-off point to his dream job,
working at sea on a succession of international luxury liners. Unfortunately, reality got in the way. With the effects of war still prominent on every street, it was the responsibility of all able-bodied British men, if called, to do active duty in the armed forces. Ritchie, fresh from a hospital lie-in, was unnaturally “terrified” that he’d be drafted. Had he stopped to consider his pathology, of course, he’d have known there was no way the army would induct such a run-down specimen. Nevertheless, he immediately set about ensuring that the possibility would not occur. For starters, that meant quitting his job on the day boat. If he was fit for seafaring work, he believed, it remained likely that before very long he’d attract the navy’s interest. Instead, he cast about for some kind of engineering work, based on a rumor that the armed services weren’t taking apprentices that year.

Fortunately, Harry had a contact at Henry Hunt & Sons, a gymnastic-equipment company in the south end of Liverpool, and in the summer of 1956 Ritchie began working there as an apprentice fitter. It was steady, if unstimulating, work, just a short daily commute from Admiral Grove. At first, Ritchie was “the altar boy,” dispatched “to fill the glue pots and to fetch chips during the breaks.” There wasn’t much else for him to do all day long. “
But it was a great gang
of people,” recalls Roy Trafford, a gangly dropout from Toxteth, who worked side by side with Ritchie as an apprentice joiner and, in no time, became his closest friend. “Eventually, we were taught to finish the wooden parts—all the balancing beams for the gymnasium bars. There was only thirty-eight and six in our pay packets—no more than a handout—but at the time the money was secondary. We were learning a trade, which was more than most guys in our situation, and as we well knew, it was considered a job for life.”

It wasn’t long before the boys discovered a shared love of music. The two of them would spend dinner breaks at Hunt’s in the downstairs shaving shed, earnestly talking about trad jazz and blues while their coworkers rummaged through brown-bag lunches. Trafford’s conversation was filled with the snappy jargon of skiffle, which he’d gravitated to via weekly guitar lessons. Stirred by the spontaneity and directness of it, Ritchie became an ardent fan, and before long they began “working some songs in the cellar” during lunch. “I played guitar, and [Ritchie] just made a noise on a box,” Trafford recalls. “Sometimes, he just slapped a biscuit tin with some keys, or banged on the backs of chairs.” It was a strictly rudimentary but joyous affair. Eventually, Ritch invited his neighbor and workmate, Eddie Miles, to sit in, and a little band began to take shape.

Eddie, with his bird’s-eye maple Hofner cutaway and its homemade pickups, was something of a guitar dynamo in Liverpool. He had a vigorous, impatient way of strumming that went wildly astray; strings snapped like rubber bands as he picked at simple leads. When, instead of polishing off phrases, he bulldozed straight through mistakes, it gave songs a loose but heated energy that was like nothing else they’d ever heard. A twelve-bar break would become a tangle of chords and flourishes. A traditional folk song would be transformed into a jazzy Big Bill Broonzy–like interplay of whoops and hollers. Eddie impressed the boys with his flamboyant ability, to say nothing of his enthusiasm, and over the next few months they developed a band around him.

What began as the Eddie Miles Band soon evolved into Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares, named after a landmark in downtown Liverpool. It had a revolving-door cast of anywhere from five to seven musicians, all of whom (aside from Eddie, of course) were interchangeable. At Ritchie’s insistence, they featured him on percussion. When the accompaniment kicked in behind Eddie, Ritchie tucked an old washboard under his arm, leaned back at a slight angle, and raked thimbles across the bevels—slashing at them, really—to produce a driving, clattering sound. On skiffle standards such as “Walking Cane” and “Rock Island Line,” he could rap out a beat at a reasonably steady clip. It was still fairly unsophisticated, but he didn’t care—and neither did anybody else. He was in his element.

When they put down their instruments (never for long), it was usually to dance. “We really loved the whole idea of dancing and wanted to learn properly,” remembers Trafford, who, on more than one occasion, dragged Ritchie to Skellen’s Dance School on the corner of Lark Lane for lessons. Later, they tried another dance school on Aigburth Road, where Ritchie was partnered with a policeman—“a bloody big fella, about six-two”—resolved to teach him the waltz. It was a short-lived disaster, but enough of an introduction to the basics for them to eventually end up dancing rather capably at the Winter Gardens, the Rialto, and Wilson Hall.

Every Friday they would “meander around town,” beginning at the pub where Elsie worked “for a couple of freebies, a few large whites to give us the glow.” After that, they stopped at the Lisbon Pub on Victoria Street to meet friends, retank the engines, and then head over to the Cavern, where trad jazz still ruled. “We loved trad jazz,” says Trafford, “almost as much as we loved to dress up.” The boys always went out “immaculately groomed.” Like twins, they wore matching outfits purchased at Yaffe’s: black-and-gray-striped jackets, crepe trousers with red-and-black half-
inch stripes, a red-and-black-striped shirt, studded belts, and string ties from the haberdashery counter at Woolworth’s. Their overcoats came from Eric’s, the Quarry Men’s local tailor. “I got a black one and Ritch’s was blue,” recalls Trafford. “We thought we were the bee’s knees.” To complete the effect, they plastered down their hair with gobs of brilliantine, which melted in their hands, then “went hard like a helmet” in the cold night air.

That Christmas of 1957, Harry presented Ritchie with a secondhand drum set he’d found in a shop near his old home in Romford. It was just a snare with plastic heads and a big old bass, “like a Salvation Army drum,” that bore the marks of past ownership. There was also a cymbal, a big garbage can lid with nicks and dings on it, that made a clangorous sound. At the time, it was merely something durable, something that he could pound on to keep him engaged, but the gift enthralled Ritchie—and changed his life.

Before, they had only played at being a band, but now with a drummer, the Eddie Clayton group powered its way into the world of small-time show business. Drums set them apart from the hundreds of other amateur bands vying for precious stage time. The boys, having sharpened their act, began hustling for gigs on the skiffle circuit and, in no time, won a number of impressive bookings that gave them a definite glow. The pay was pitifully small—“just buttons”—but they kept regularly engaged.

Nevertheless, before too long skiffle ran out of steam. Unable to compete with the visceral kick of rock ’n roll, its practitioners defected en masse, trading in their washboards and tea chests for instruments that sizzled with electricity. Ritchie continued to play behind Eddie Clayton but moonlighted with other bands as well. One of the best-known local skiffle groups making the transition to rock was Al Caldwell’s Texans, who were desperate to snag a sideman with his own drum kit. “
We knew him pretty well
. He’d gotten a snare drum, a high hat, and a cymbal by then,” Johnny Byrne recalls. “When we told him we were going into rock ’n roll full-tilt, he said he was interested.” With Ritchie keeping the beat, they reemerged in the clubs in November 1958 as the Raging Texans, and shortly thereafter as Jet Storm and the Raging Texans, and finally Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a name that might easily have rolled off the Larry Parnes assembly line of stars.
Ritchie borrowed £46
from his grandfather to buy an Ajax drum kit with “
lapped” pigskin
instead of plastic heads, designed to resemble the pricey Ludwigs favored by professional drummers.

Formerly a diehard blues fan (he even considered emigrating to Texas so he could “live with Lightnin’ Hopkins”), Ritchie was lit up by rock ’n roll. He spent all his spare time gorging on it, listening to Radio Luxembourg’s
staticky broadcasts, and on Sundays religiously tuning in to Alan Freed. As a drummer, he played along with whatever came over the airwaves, beating time to one song after the next, even running through the commercial breaks.

Almost immediately, the simple rat-a-tat-tat patterns evolved into ever more complicated, exuberant wrist work. This would eventually help set him apart from drummers like Pete Best and Johnny Hutch. Everyone else at the time was emulating the bangers who relied on bruising upper-arm strength to power an arrangement, but Ritchie developed a discipline for playing shuffle rhythms that made the drums a more integral part of songs. He could punctuate what the other instruments were doing musically instead of just keeping strict time. Largely unschooled as a drummer—he claimed he “
had about three lessons
” as a beginner—he only knew how to play by ear. But however he approached the drums, no matter how reflexive or improvisational, the patterns he played were distinguished by an overriding degree of control. Perhaps, barring other explanation, this was an outgrowth of his unusually broad musical tastes. Whereas other teenagers jumped right into bands from a steady diet of uptempo pop,
Ritchie was influenced
by exacting country artists and modern jazz exponents such as Chico Hamilton and Yusef Lateef, who relied heavily on their knowledge of composition. Intuitively—and beyond explanation—he captured an energy and ease of expression that eluded other young drummers trying to find the right groove.