The Beatles (32 page)

Chapter 11
Hit the Road: Jac

A
fter Stuart joined the group, a proper name seemed more appropriate. One night in February, while sitting around the Gambier Street flat, John and Stuart brainstormed to come up with something that worked better than Johnny and the Moondogs. John later told Hunter Davies that he was “
just thinking about what a good name
the Crickets [Buddy Holly’s band] would be for an English group, [when] the idea of beetles came into my head.” It may have been no more complicated than that, or as other accounts contend,
Stuart might have suggested beetles
from the slang term given to biker chicks in
The Wild One.
In either event, it was John’s idea to change the spelling “
to make it look like beat music
, just as a joke,” although when they printed it on a card to show the other boys, it became Beatals.

Paul remembers being told of the name the next day, along with George, and immediately liking it. “
John and Stuart came out
of their flat and said, ‘We’ve just thought of a name!’ ” he recalls, smiling.
The Beatals.
It had the right sound, its reference a dazzling throwback. The name was bluff and cheeky, sturdy; it possessed an easy, buoyant, ornamental quality.
The Beatals.
Yes, he thought, it would do, it would do nicely.

But names do not gigs get. Even with a conversation piece like “the Beatals,” the band was still not able to compete for legitimate work. There was still the hitch with the drums, or lack thereof. And while Stuart looked swell with an electric bass slung across his body, there was the matter of actually playing it that needed to be worked out. Instead of the bass notes accenting the beat, as is the purpose, Stuart’s leaden thumb thunked the chunky strings, producing little more than a steady but tedious heartbeat. There was no flourish or glide to his phrasing, just that monotonous pulse:
thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk.
Even so, John never grew discouraged. In a
reversal of their painting roles, John began to fine-tune Stuart’s technique, working diligently with him each evening to teach him the set of songs. The sole objective now was to get him ready to face an audience; without that, there was no point in holding everything together.

The only gig to speak of
was at the end of February 1960, a short spot offered by Jim McCartney’s Labour Club, which only Paul and George attended. This was a world apart from their Quarry Men gigs and certainly any they would ever play as the Beatles. But as a favor to Paul’s dad, the boys pulled up stools and played “Peg o’ My Heart” to the delight of two dozen, middle-aged Scousers.

It wasn’t until March that the Beatals got a shove in the right direction. Early that month news rocketed through the city that
Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent would headline a show at the Liverpool Empire
. The concert was a milestone for local bands, which thronged to the theater like mayflies. Here, live and in person, was confirmation of their calling—and everyone heard an identical call.

The Beatals began by rewiring the sound of the band. “
They knew that to get any attention
, they needed amplifiers,” Bill Harry recalls. “This really hit home after the Eddie Cochran show.” Up to then, they’d relied on whatever P.A. system, if any, was provided by a hall; otherwise, their increased output was a result of just strumming or singing louder. That method, however, no longer carried any weight with an audience. They wanted it loud; they wanted some juice behind the music.

But how? Amplifiers cost money. The boys were just about getting by on fumes, and everyone was already into “Hessy” for one hire-purchase loan or another. There was no way he’d float them enough for an amplifier. Frustrated and resentful of their situation, John hatched a plan. Weren’t they considered the art college band?
The Student Union had a discretionary fund
to purchase equipment. Certainly, an amplifier was within its jurisdiction.

Both Bill Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe were members of the Student Union committee. “At the next meeting, in the library,” Harry recalls, “Stuart and I proposed and seconded a motion that we use our funds to buy P.A. equipment for the art college dances.” It sounded like a good idea to the other students. No one raised any opposition.
Voilà!
The Beatals had amps, and not just a tiny Truvoices, the staple of most Liverpool bands, but a professional getup, with cabinets and eighteen-inch speakers.

To show their appreciation, the band played an art college dance that same month, in the school’s basement auditorium. The place was packed to capacity. Fresh from a series of midterms, students welcomed the opportunity to unwind, but there was also an air of anticipation—and great spectacle—about the musical debut of Stuart Sutcliffe. Everyone showed up, including Arthur Ballard, who told colleagues he was “
troubled
” by his prize student’s “
distraction
.”

Ballard had good reason to be concerned. Stuart hadn’t touched a paintbrush in weeks. A usually disciplined worker, now days—even weeks—elapsed between sessions at the easel; visits to life classes, once as routine as breathing, had become increasingly erratic. It seemed to Ballard and others that Stuart had turned his back on that world. And his hands—those delicate instruments through which his expression flowed to the canvas—were in terrible shape. Bill Harry remembers encountering Stuart at the college dance, bent over his guitar in such a way as to conceal wrenching pain. “He told me, ‘
Oh, the skin has come off
all my fingers,’ ” Harry recalls, having noticed blood on Stuart’s hands. “He hadn’t built up proper calluses. He’d plunged right in, never realizing that conditioning was necessary.” Or if he had realized it, it was with the knowledge that the other boys did not want to slow their stride to wait for him.

The four boys would rehearse for hours at Gambier Terrace, really winding it up, then camp out at the Jacaranda, talking until closing time, well past one in the morning. They’d commandeer a table that would grow like dominoes as each new friend appeared, requiring additional chairs and tables. “
Art students were inclined to drop in
… and loll around a bit,” says Beryl Williams, whose role fell somewhat precariously between that of den mother and disenchanted bar manager. She loved having students and musicians there, provided that they buy something to eat, which meant putting the squeeze on them every so often. Bill Harry recalls that when flush, they’d order the “student specialty—toast,” which cost fourpence and a penny extra for jam. According to Allan Williams: “
They’d go into a great big huddle
… and decide if they could afford to have jam or whether it would be best to stick to toast and butter.” Always a premium, jam toast was usually split five ways.

The “
sort of musical revolution
” Williams discovered unfolding in small local basement clubs was intriguing, inasmuch as it complemented his stake in the Jacaranda. However, it wasn’t until he attended the Gene Vincent–Eddie Cochran show at the Empire that he experienced an epiphany. Sitting
ringside, walled in by rows of clearly overwrought teenagers, Williams was flabbergasted. “
I began to realise the implications
,” he recalled, taking the temperature and doing the math. Everyone was rockin’ and rolling, “and I simply had to get in on it.”

Williams wasted no time attaching himself to the scene. He booked Liverpool Stadium for a night in May, then traveled to London, where he sought out a meeting with no less a figure than megapromoter Larry Parnes.

Before Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood, before the dozens of future British pop moguls who dominated the music business, Larry Parnes ruled the scene.
LARRY PARNES PRESENTS
toplined every bill featuring a rock ’n roll act in London. Only twenty-four years old, Parnes—or “Flash Larry,” as he was known—was a modern-day Svengali. Cruising the bedrock of London coffee bars, he signed up a stable of good-looking male singers—pretty faces, actually—that he could groom into teen idols, regardless of talent, as he’d done so successfully with Tommy Steele. “
In most cases, what attracted Larry
was their potential to whip audiences into a frenzy,” says Hal Carter, who served as Parnes’s right-hand man. “But he was gay and loved pretty boys, which became his stock-in-trade.”

By 1960,
Parnes had a cluster of glittery stars
, each with an outlandish stage name he’d created in the hope of adding that undefinable pizzazz: Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, Nelson Keene, and Johnny Gentle. Recalls Carter: “
Larry was on tour
in New York and had heard the [Elvis] Presley tune, ‘Fame and Fortune.’ He immediately sent a telegram back to the office that said:
CLIVE POWELL NOW GEORGIE FAME.
”

His most accomplished creation, however, was turning Ronnie Wycherly, an ex–tugboat hand with a sludgy Scouse accent, into pop sensation Billy Fury. Parnes had discovered the lad backstage at a Marty Wilde show in Birkenhead and “
immediately fell in love
.” Billy had little in the way of a voice and, if it were at all possible, even less stage presence, but his “
high cheekbones and restless eyes
” were all Parnes needed to throw the star-making machinery into gear. He swathed the youngster in gold lamé, framed his hair in a mane of wild forelocks, brought him a riot of American hits to cover, and packaged him on the high-powered Cochran-Vincent tour that was crisscrossing the U.K. In no time, Billy Fury was being mentioned in the same heated breath as Cliff Richard.

Insecure and basically uneducated, plagued by a round, pudgy face, Parnes was “
a very elegant dresser
,” coming, as he did, from what friends described as “a good Jewish family in the
shmatte
business
.” He had bronzed, olive skin and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Williams found his manner to
have “much of the smooth persuasiveness of a lawyer” and was delighted that Parnes was amenable to his pitch. For a “
fee of about £500
,” Williams booked a show he dubbed “the Merseyside and International Beat Show.” It was a rather grandiose name for a rehash of the Cochran-Vincent tour, although Parnes attached another half a dozen artists from his stable, along with local attractions Cass and the Cassanovas and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to give it a homegrown touch.
The show was scheduled for May 3
, and by early April all indications were that it would sell out. Ticket sales were strong—there were six thousand seats available—and it appeared profits would exceed all projections.

Perhaps with luck running in such an unlikely surge, disaster was inevitable. On April 17, a television show Williams was half listening to was interrupted to report “
the tragic death of Eddie Cochran
.” Cochran and Gene Vincent had been on their way to Heathrow Airport following a concert in Bristol when their speeding car blew a tire and crashed into a lamppost. Cochran died from massive head injuries; Vincent suffered a broken collarbone and was hospitalized, along with Cochran’s girlfriend, Sharon Sheeley, who had been a passenger in the car. Williams couldn’t believe it. “Robbed of [his] two top stars,” there would be no way to recover.
He flushed with guilt
for even thinking that way, but he couldn’t help himself.

Despondent, Williams called Larry Parnes, who commiserated. Neither man had to say what each was privately thinking: this tragedy was going to cost them a bundle. Indirectly, Parnes suggested that if Vincent were healthy, they might still be able to pull something off, but he couldn’t make any promises. Days went by without word while Williams made arrangements to dissolve his obligations with stadium vendors. Rumors persisted that Vincent’s condition was worse than reported and that he would return to the United States as soon as he was able to travel. Then Parnes called with an update: Vincent was okay and had agreed to do the show.
To fill the gaping hole
left by Eddie Cochran, they added two more of Parnes’s acts to the bill—Julian X and Dean Webb—as well as local groups Derry and the Seniors, Bob Evans and the Five Shillings, Mal Perry, and Gerry and the Pacemakers. As Bill Harry recalls: “
Everyone who was anyone
was invited to perform.”

Not quite everyone. It never even dawned on Williams to include the Beatals on the program. Without a drummer, they wouldn’t stand a chance alongside other major bands. To spare the lads the embarrassment, he made sure they had good seats. In the audience. Punters. Fans. Like everyone else.

All the same, the concert prevailed as “
a seminal event
.” It was the first time, says a local musician, “that all the Liverpool bands became aware of one another.” After the stadium show, the local scene was invigorated by a sense of community. According to Adrian Barber, the Cassanovas’ guitarist: “As the groups started to communicate with one another, they shared information about places to play. Phone numbers were exchanged, schedules coordinated.” They flocked to one another’s gigs. Since everyone played basically the same set, new songs became not only community property but currency. Bands burst out of obscurity by introducing the latest unknown American hit, then passed it around to fellow acolytes, to underscore its provenance.