The Beatles

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for
Sandy & Angie D’Amato
and Lily
And for all those whose lives are enriched
by the Beatles’ music

PROLOGUE

December 27, 1960

T
hey had begun to pour into the village of Litherland as they always did, half an hour before the doors opened. Nightcrawlers: their bodies young and liquid, legs spidering along the sidewalks, exaggerated by the blue glare of the streetlamps. This time of year, Sefton Road at 6:30 was already dark; evening pressed down early from the desolate sky, raked by gunmetal gray clouds drifting east across the river toward the stagnating city of Liverpool.

Tuesdays at Litherland’s town hall were usually what promoters referred to as “soft nights”—that is, midweek affairs attracting a reasonable 600 or 700 jivers, as opposed to the weekend crush of 1,500—but tonight’s shindig was billed as a Christmas dance, which accounted for the unusually large crowd. Every few minutes another double-decker bus groaned to a halt outside the hall and emptied a heaving load of teenagers onto the pavement. The crowd, moving erratically in the brittle night air, swelled like a balloon waiting for a dart.

The main attraction, ex post facto, had not yet arrived. Running customarily behind schedule, the band had left West Derby Village later than anticipated after choosing, by consensus, a playlist for that night’s performance. The selection process was no mean feat, considering their repertoire of well over 150 rock ’n roll songs, from the seminal hits (“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “What’d I Say”) to pop standards (“Better Luck Next Time,” “Red Sails in the Sunset”) to obscure gems (“You Don’t Understand Me”); each demanded brief consideration. Afterward, equipment was loaded into the old bottle green van that had been recruited for service only that morning.

"
The four boys, riding in the dark, grimy cargo hold like astronauts
in a cramped space capsule, braced themselves with experienced hands as the
old crate rattled north along the Stanley Road, past shops splashed with a waxy fluorescence. The road hugged the shoreline, where they could see harbor lights and the wharves of the distant port, then broke inland along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Even to a native, which they all were, it was difficult to tell where one borough ended and another began: Crosby became Kirkdale and eventually Bootle, then Litherland, their boundaries marked only by wide-mouthed intersections and the occasional shop sign incorporating a piece of local heritage into its name.

They stared silently out the back window for a while, absorbing the hallucinatory darkness. Paul McCartney and George Harrison, both prodigiously handsome, straddled two boxy amplifiers, while Pete Best, shifting and elusive, posted like a cowboy atop a bass drum case. Unspeaking also, John Lennon, who had been to Litherland twice before, rode shotgun in order to direct their driver to the proper location.

Chas Newby knew he was the odd man out. Crouched perilously on an enameled wheel arch, he regarded his mates with respectful detachment. Until a week before, nearly half a year had passed since he’d last heard them play. Those few months ago, they were like most other aspiring Liverpool bands, talented but unexceptional, performing identical cover versions of current hits that everyone else was doing. “I certainly didn’t think they would make much of an impression,” he says, recalling their muddy sound, their clumsy, mechanical attack, their unintentional anarchy. In fact, his former band, the Blackjacks, in which Pete Best had played, was no better or worse at entertaining the kids who followed local groups from dance club to dance club to dance club. On any given night, five bands on a bill would perform the same set of songs—the same way. Homogeneity was the criterion on which the whole scene turned.

Now suddenly everything had changed. When Chas had arrived at Pete’s house in West Derby Village the week before, he was quite unprepared for the scene inside. The living room was overheated and brighter than usual. An umbrella of purple smoke hung over the coffee table, Coke bottles lay scattered like chess pieces. As Newby moved toward the couch, his eyes filled with a vision that looked like one of Rouault’s Gothic monochromes: four ravenlike figures were grouped there, clad in ominous bruised leather and blackness—trousers, T-shirts, jackets, boots, a riot of black. It took him a few seconds, reading the faces of the caped quartet, to realize they belonged to Pete Best and musicians he’d previously known collectively as the Quarry Men.

The band hadn’t played a date in weeks, owing to a creeping malaise that nearly rendered them extinct. Then, a week ago, four decent gigs materialized, which they’d hungrily accepted, despite one glaring obstacle: their bass player, Stuart Sutcliffe, was spending the holiday in Germany with his girlfriend.

“We need a bass player,” one of the musicians complained, courting Newby.

Best nodded significantly. “Get yourself a bass and practice with us,” he said. Newby was amused and touched by their invitation. His know-how extended only to rhythm guitar, but he was familiar with droning bass figures, and George Harrison, the band’s true technician, volunteered to simplify it for him.

Newby borrowed a bass from his friend Tommy McGurk and agreed to an impromptu practice. They set up shop in the Bests’ capacious basement—a room that moonlighted as the Casbah jive club, where kids came to hang out and dance—and ran down some songs. “The sort of music they played was fairly easy to pick up,” Newby says. But the sound they made unnerved him. It was still dependent on cover versions of current hits, but unlike the reverential copies performed by all other Liverpool bands, they burst through an entirely new dimension. These songs were not meticulous imitations, there was nothing neat or controlled about them. They were fierce, rip-roaring, they had real muscle, underscored by Best’s vigorous drumming—a lusty, propulsive volley that drove each song over a cliff—and the vocal acrobatics of McCartney. Newby was amazed at how Paul, especially, had transformed himself from an able crooner into a belter whose vocal range seemed to spiral off the charts. “Paul had developed this way of falsetto singing that knocked me for a loop,” he says. “No one in Liverpool sang like that, like Little Richard—
no one.
”

Lennon, more than anyone, knew they had made great strides. (Years later he would acknowledge as much, saying, “
We thought we were the best
before anybody else had even heard us, back in Hamburg and Liverpool.”) But only that August the band had left Liverpool a virtual embarrassment. Their playing was haphazard, their direction uncharted.
The word around town
was that their band was the worst outfit on the circuit—not even a band, if you took into account that they were unable to hold a drummer. Howie Casey, who fronted the Seniors and would one day play for Wings,
says, “
We sure didn’t know them
, and I don’t think anybody else… knew them either.” Only one bandleader of significance was able to recall a nightmarish triple bill they’d played that May at Lathom Hall, in the Liverpool suburb of Seaforth. “
They were so bad
,” he said, “[the promoter] just shut the curtains on them!”

So it had been off to Hamburg and then, afterward, the bleak likelihood of an apprenticeship on the Liverpool docks, a clerk’s position at the Cotton Exchange or British Rail, or rivet duty at one of the automobile plants sprouting in the suburbs. No doubt about it, after Germany there would be no further high life. John Lennon had been chucked out of art college for extreme indifference, a disgrace he seemed to court, as if a dark diagnosis had been confirmed.
Paul McCartney had squandered
his early academic promise by performing so poorly on his exams that teachers abandoned any hope that he’d advance to the university level.
George Harrison, who regarded school
as a terrific inconvenience, had decided to sit for exams—and failed
every one
of them.
Thrilled by performing, Pete Best
had drifted away from plans to attend a teachers training college. Only Stuart Sutcliffe, who was an impassioned, proven artist, had any hope of success, and his bandmates knew he would eventually forsake music to pursue his destiny as a serious painter.

But Hamburg had thrown them all a powerful curve. Something strangely significant had happened there, something intangible opened a small window of hope and gave their dreams an unpredictable new lift. Their shows took on an excitement that bordered on anarchy. Frustrated by the feeble drone that English rock ’n roll bands had settled into, they exploited their notoriety as “
a gang of scruffs
” and pumped up the volume. They began retooling their show to reach the audience through antics gleaned from hell-raisers like Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. In the process, they became not only rigorously proficient onstage but immensely popular with the German nightclub crawlers.