The Beatles (34 page)

Billy Fury heard it immediately and cued Parnes that the Silver Beetles were a natural fit. Parnes, ever cautious, remained unconvinced. “
I thought the boys in front were great
,” he told a writer many years later. “The lead
guitar and the bass, so-so.” Stuart had played
in “a most off-putting style
,” wandering toward the rear of the stage, with his back to the room either to create a bit of mystique or to conceal his lack of ability. Meanwhile, Tommy Moore stalked in, looking disheveled and breathing heavily from his sprint across town, and went straight to the drums, where he took over for Johnny Hutch. Together at last, they had time for one more song, but it was anticlimactic. Afterward, Parnes noted that the magic seemed to collapse. “It was the drummer… who was wrong,” he’d concluded.

Given how chaotic their audition turned out, the Silver Beetles were received with surprising kindness by Parnes. They weren’t perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something intriguing to work with, something that suited his artist’s style. “
Quite suddenly,” Allan Williams recalled
, “[Parnes] said he’d take the Beatles [sic] as Billy Fury’s backing group—but that he only wanted four [band members]. No bass.”

There are numerous accounts of what happened next, though most remain sketchy at best. According to Williams, John stepped forward like a knight-errant and turned him down cold. The message was bluntly clear: as far as the Silver Beetles were concerned, it was an all-or-nothing proposition. Stuart was a mate, a musketeer: one for all, and all for one. Parnes later said he had no recollection of this mythic showdown and insisted that Tommy Moore, not Stuart, had soured the band’s chances. Instead, Parnes cast his blessing on Cass and the Cassanovas.

With sentiments running in such contrary directions, some clarity was needed. Williams and Parnes stole off to the Jacaranda, where they attempted to sort out a deal: who would play with whom and where and for how much. There were myriad configurations that might work. The bands trailed the two promoters to the tiny, deserted coffee bar and sat around tables near the door, speculating about their chances and casting glances at the two men huddled like warlords in the back. In the end, there was confusion in the cards. Parnes did a swift about-face and decided that no Liverpool band was needed to back Billy Fury. Instead, he offered the Scottish tours to Cass and the Cassanovas and the Silver Beetles, who would open for Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle, respectively.

The Silver Beetles were understandably ecstatic. In their eyes, Johnny Gentle, while hardly a household name, was an up-and-coming recording star.
When Williams brought them the offer
, they greeted it with jubilation, all except for Stuart, who felt he’d lost them the big-time Fury gig. Stuart’s mother recalled that he apologized to John for letting the band down. “
Forget it, Stu
,” John reportedly told him, ending any discussion of
the subject. They’d been offered a legitimate tour at
the astounding sum of £90
a week. For a Liverpool band, it was an unprecedented deal. Ten days on the road, most expenses paid by Parnes, playing in front of adoring audiences, hotels, girls, invaluable experience, proper exposure. An unprecedented deal from any angle.

Crowning a burst of energy and artifice, arrangements were hastily made.
George and Tommy took time off
from their jobs, Paul sweet-talked his father into a holiday before the upcoming exams, while John and Stuart simply cut classes.
The problem of equipment
was similarly solved when they decided to “borrow” the art school P.A. All the pieces fell neatly into place. Suddenly everything seemed possible. They were actually going on the road—a road from which they would never look back.

It began with a baby step.

Sometime after daybreak on May 20, John, Paul, George, Stuart, and Tommy assembled on a platform outside Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, where the glossy black Midland “locos” sat huffing, steam rising in plumes against the sharp morning chill. The platform was a confusion of commuters, businessmen, sightseers, porters, conductors, and freight handlers in whose midst the boys stood, slightly bewildered by their role. Their gear was sprawled around them in a circle of fluent disarray. In consensus, the band had decided to travel light; few personal items infiltrated the tangle of incidental clothes jammed into old satchels. John and Stuart had brought along sketch pads, Paul a couple of books.

Before they boarded the train, the subject of names arose.
Names:
there was never any question that the band would be known as anything but the Silver Beetles; however, that did not limit them, as musicians, from adopting temporary personal stage names. Most likely the idea originated with Stuart Sutcliffe, who had a penchant for affectation and image. He decided to call himself
Stuart de Stael
, after his painting idol, the Russian abstract classicist. John had already rejected using a pseudonym, as did Tommy, but Paul and George were game. The two mates from Speke, stepping out, called themselves
Paul Ramon
and Carl Harrison (after Carl Perkins), respectively.

The train was insufferably hot and depressing, the stale air not only bone-dry but hard to breathe. There were none of the modern conveniences that cushioned rail travel between cities such as Liverpool and London. The boys surrendered to an inherent restlessness as the last ripples of civilization flattened into grim, barren tundra. Hundreds of lonely miles rolled by between Carlisle, Queensberry, Broughton, and Lanark. Only John was used to the long, desolate route that stretched for hours into the countryside, having made a similar trip each summer to visit his cousin Stanley in Edinburgh.

They landed in Glasgow a rude ten hours after leaving home, then transferred to a rugged little local line and transferred again in Central Fife as the train snaked slowly up the east coast of Scotland, past the villages and one-street towns that skirted the veiny river Clyde. Alloa was provincial, the sticks, a stagnant little industrial town at the crook of the Firth of Forth, the inlet from the North Sea that fed into Edinburgh. The tired, sallow streets, lined with thin, half-timbered houses, had been starved by the more colorful urban centers farther west that beckoned to young families. More than half of the fourteen thousand Alloans served the fringe of hosiery mills that huddled along the riverbanks; the rest, like good Scots everywhere, distilled whiskey or fished.

Parnes broke in all his acts on the Scottish dance-hall circuit, where there were more than six thousand such small venues for bands to play. It provided steady work and an opportunity to develop an act away from London’s unforgiving stare. You could go on the road for months, playing one-nighters in outposts like Newcastleton, Musselburgh, Sunderland, Melrose, Stirling, and Dundee, hopscotching across the whole of northeastern Scotland, and never have to repeat a stop. For Johnny Gentle, by no means yet a star, Parnes had scheduled a seven-city tour of “border dances,” social gatherings in little halls that held 200 to 300 kids who could shuttle between upstairs rooms featuring a rock ’n roll show and a downstairs auditorium where traditional bands played the Scottish reel.

Arriving in Alloa late that afternoon, weary from the trip, there was no time for the band to get acclimated to the alien surroundings. They went right to work, transferring directly to the local town hall, where they were scheduled to go on within an hour.

Gentle (born John Askew) was waiting for them in a canteen behind the stage. With his velvety black hair, eyes and cheekbones sculpted in flawless proportion, a sleepy, inviting smile, and, of course, personality on the order of Cliff Richard, he was the very model of a Larry Parnes artist.

A Liverpool dropout, he had apprenticed as a ship’s carpenter on the
Rindel Pacifico,
a plush passenger steamer on the Britain–South America run, and took to entertaining folks on deck in his spare time. Parnes discovered Johnny during a layover in London in 1958 and signed him to a modest record deal with the Philips label. He made two records in quick succession—“Wendy” and “Milk from the Coconut”—and though neither struck gold, they’d mined a respectable enough audience to hold Parnes’s interest.

Johnny and the Silver Beetles had half an hour to hammer out an agreeable set of songs and work out arrangements. They needed enough material for two one-hour shows, and even though the Silver Beetles had practiced Johnny’s repertoire in advance, there were copious all-important details about the performance yet to solve. Johnny relied on a sleepy mix of rock ’n roll and country standards that included Jim Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go,” “(I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do,” popularized by Clarence “Frogman” Henry, and the current Presley release, “I Need Your Love Tonight.” A die-hard Ricky Nelson fan, he proposed they do “Be-Bop Baby” and “I Got a Feeling” but couldn’t get a decent enough take of “Poor Little Fool” in time for the performance, substituting Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” which had, at one time, been a trusty Quarry Men number. As the band worked furiously to get up to speed, a squad of stiff-backed women made haggis pies to serve during the interval.

The first set went remarkably well for an act that had just met. “
The crowd was lovely
,” remembers Askew. “They knew who I was. And the Beatles [sic] sounded as good as any group that was thrown at me by Parnes.” That said, it came as something of a surprise when, a day later, he got a phone call from a rather disgruntled Larry Parnes. “I’m thinking of sending the Beatles [sic] back to Liverpool and getting you another group up there,” Askew recalls being told. “[The promoter] is not happy with them and doesn’t think they’re an outfit, he feels they’re not together.”

“
They weren’t the normal bunch of kids
he was used to having up there,” says Hal Carter. “They were flippant, cheeky northern kids who could be quite rude at times, which didn’t go down [well].”

Askew practically begged Parnes to buy them more time. “They are good lads, the enthusiasm’s there,” he argued in their defense. “Leave it be and we’ll get it right.”

He was right. Soon the tour found real artistic balance. The Silver Beetles, dressed in matching black shirts, paired effortlessly with
Johnny Gentle
, his slick, earnest crooning and their raw, high-charged
accompaniment an ideal match. The opening numbers, giving Johnny his brief star turn, were stronger than anything he’d done in the past—energetically or artistically. But once he finished and Paul rushed the mike, winding out the nearly incomprehensible opening of “Long Tall Sally,” the pretense fell away: Johnny had entertained, but now it was time to rock ’n roll.

Inside those dinky, dilapidated halls, the Silver Beetles “
pulled out all the stops
.” They pummeled those Scottish kids with forty minutes of kick-ass music that never let up for a beat. One after the next, the songs built to a furious, undisciplined pitch, rumbling, wailing, like a train through a tunnel. The kids at each show were undone by the music, practically throwing themselves around the floor. “Those two boys operated on a different frequency,” Askew says of Paul and John. “I used to watch them work the crowd as though they’d been doing it all their lives—and without any effort other than their amazing talent. I’d never seen anything like it. They were so tapped into what the other was doing and could sense their partner’s next move, they just read each other like a book.” It was uncanny, he thought, how well they
knew
each other. “It was always Lennon and McCartney, even then.
Lennon and McCartney.
They wouldn’t even look at George or Stu to determine where things were going. Everything was designed around the two of them—and the others had to catch up on their own.”

Incredibly enough, the rest of the Silver Beetles never flinched. George maneuvered like a master in their long shadows to keep the rhythm more interesting than the mere slap-slap-slapping of chords. He worked intently, embroidering their strums with a plait of textured riffs and intonations that, while simple in structure, served to string the songs with bits of glorious color. “[And] Tommy Moore,” says Askew, “made just enough noise to distract attention from Stuart, [who] was inept—and not needed.” Almost in spite of themselves, the Silver Beetles rose mightily to steal the whole show. And the stronger they played, the more girls they attracted; the more girls they attracted, the stronger they played. Askew remembers watching a litter of sweet young “birds homing in on the stage” each night, lying in wait for the boys, as they finished their performance. “There were plenty to choose from after the gigs,” he says. “They’d take them back to the hotels for all-night parties and have so much fun that I’d find them stretched out, asleep, on the stairways around dawn.”

With all the tomcatting, it’s a wonder they got out of some of those towns alive. The crowds that border dances attracted were notoriously tough. “All farm lads,” says Hal Carter, “who’d get pissed and have a punch-
up at the drop of a hat”—or the drop of a hem. “Often, if the [local] boys suspected some kind of attraction going on, they’d start a fight onstage and stop the show. However, if they were feeling charitable, they’d just whip glass ashtrays at the band to send a message.”