The Beatles (35 page)

A battered skull wasn’t the only danger. In no time, the Silver Beetles learned one of the profession’s dirtiest little secrets: beyond the lights and the applause, beyond the hotels and the girls, no one ever makes money on the road. Four days into the tour, in godforsaken Fraserburgh, the last scrap of land on the gusty northeast coast, their pockets were empty. John Askew had to plead with Parnes to advance them some money, which eventually arrived by courier. “But the lads were so in debt by then,” he says, “they’d just spent it.” Because of the penny-wise sleeping arrangements—musicians were doubled up in most cases—eager couples had to wait their turn in the hall or steal off to a dark corner. Usually, no one got to sleep before dawn, when they would simply pass out on a bed or, as Askew already observed, in a deserted stairwell.

The next day could be even rougher. One morning, after determining the roadie “was out of it,” Askew loaded the band into the van and took off through the maze of rutted Highland roads. John Lennon was slumped in the navigator’s seat, and not much use to Askew. “The lads were still shattered from a gig [that lasted until] one in the morning, and of course there was the bird scene afterwards that ran to five or six.” Piloting on intuition, Askew panicked at a crossroads just outside Banff and, realizing—a hair too late—that he should have gone left instead of right, caromed “straight across the junction and into a little old couple” in their modest Ford.

The van took “such a smack” that John Lennon ended up crumpled under the dashboard. Tommy Moore, who was sitting behind him, flipped over the front seat and landed on top of John. Anguished by the apparent damage he caused, Askew bounded out of the car to assist the people he’d hit. “
Don’t worry about us
,” the woman said adamantly. “Take care of that boy over there.”

Askew wheeled around and nearly fainted. Tommy’s face was a garish mask of blood. “[It] was everywhere,” Askew recalls, “mostly streaming from the drummer’s mouth.”

A detour to the hospital provided more encouraging news: Tommy was okay. He’d lost a tooth, with several others knocked loose, but “there was no concussion.” At the worst, he was extremely shaken up. He’d never been in an accident before, and the strain of it had unnerved him. “I don’t think I can play tonight,” he told John Lennon, who returned to the
hospital later that afternoon to collect his drummer. John did not reply for a long moment while a black rage crept across his face. “
You listen to me, mate
,” he eventually growled. “
You’re bloody playing!
Understand? What do you got—a bloody loose tooth?” He bent menacingly over Tommy, his lips twisted in a snarl, and Askew, worried that John was about to haul Tommy out of the bed by his hospital gown, edged closer in case it was necessary for him to intervene. “We need a drummer, and
you’re it!
Now, let’s go.”

When it came to the band, you didn’t demur. There was no halfway about commitment. If there was a future to playing music together, it had to start somewhere. The only way to find out was to begin playing with some consistency. And Tommy, who was fifteen years older than John, melted obediently under his smoldering glare. Wordlessly, he peeled back the covers, slipped out of bed, and got dressed for the gig.

Courtesy of the well-oiled Scottish pipeline, Allan Williams knew that this unheralded local band had held their own—and then some—with a figure like Johnny Gentle. That struck him as fortunate inasmuch as he’d brokered their inaugural appearance, and hoping to cash in on his run of luck, he swooped in with another bid of timely offers that bound band and Williams in an informal but deliberate management situation.

The most promising proposal came via Larry Parnes, who dangled the prospect of another Scottish tour, this time with one of his top dogs, Dickie Pride. It was a giant step up the same ladder that held the houndlike Johnny Gentle. But somewhere in the early stages of discussion, negotiations foundered. In rebounding from the setback, Williams stumbled into the honeypot. He managed to book the Silver Beetles for a string of dances that ran through the summer, across the Mersey, on the Wirral. The gigs, which would help establish them locally, were steady, well attended, and paid an awesome £10 per night. But they were in the worst hellholes this side of the equator—the Grosvenor Ballroom and the Neston Institute. Punch-ups were strictly kid stuff where these crowds were concerned; for dances here, you came fully armed. This was combat duty. As the Quarry Men, they had played in similarly dangerous situations, but on the Wirral they’d graduated to the big time. Come Saturday night, the Bootle teds and the Garston teds would go at it, with “
flying crates and beer bottles
and glasses.” All it took was one misinterpreted look and—
bam!
—while the band whipped through a version of “
Hully Gully
.” After one show, awakened by a disturbance in the middle of the night, Pauline Sutcliffe crept nervously into the bathroom, where she found her mother, Millie, laboring over Stuart’s scrawny body, stretched out awkwardly in the tub. “
He was injured
,” recalled Pauline, who stood speechless in the doorframe. “He said he’d been beaten up—‘Well, you know how rough these clubs [are]. There’s a lot of jealousy’—the implication being that it was some girl’s boyfriend. He’d been kicked… and badly beaten. He had bruising on his face.” Fortunately, there were no broken bones. It was reported that at another show a boy was almost kicked to death as the band continued to play.

The violence, however, seemed the least of their immediate worries. In early June the momentum of the Silver Beetles’ progress was snapped by the
defection of Tommy Moore
, who left the band “in the lurch” following a raucous gig at the Neston Institute. It took them by complete surprise when he failed to show up for a ride they’d arranged to their next scheduled date. Four weeks of working with a capable drummer had lulled them into an unrealistic sense of security. Of course, no one imagined for a moment that Tommy was a Silver Beetle at heart. Indeed, by the end of the Johnny Gentle tour, he was barely on speaking terms with anyone. His ability, however, was undeniable. Desperate to keep the band intact, they tracked Tommy to the Garston bottling plant where he worked, in an effort to beg him to reconsider, but it was no use. The excuse he lamely offered was an unexpected transfer to the factory’s night shift, but the truth was he’d just had it.

The boys were devastated. Unable to play the Wirral dances without a drummer, they agreed to provide background music at a couple of unlicensed cootch joints run by Allan Williams and Lord Woodbine. John, Paul, and George had not thought it possible to sink much lower. They’d done their share of oddball engagements in the pursuit of an appreciative audience: golf clubs, bus depots, cellars, and socials. But this was another world entirely. Where other gigs had been raucous and exhilarating, the shabeens were decadent and corrupt. There was an “anything goes” quality about them, where the very fringe of society collected like sludge in a rain puddle. They were generally small and filthy rooms, just big enough for ten or twenty men to congregate for the express purpose of drinking themselves blind. Many of the patrons were drunks, nothing more; they turned up there not out of congeniality but because the pubs were closed
and there was no place else to satisfy their addiction. One of the tenements, the
New Cabaret Artistes
, was nothing but a cover for a grungy strip club in one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. Nothing in their experience had prepared them for the likes of this. Their mission was to back “an exotic dancer” while she wound up a small crowd of randy middle-aged men. Miserable, embarrassing, presumably pathetic, and depressing—an indication of how badly their dreams had stalled.

The band tried to keep up appearances. John continued to call rehearsals at the Gambier Terrace flat and work on scraps of songs with Paul. They even retained a new drummer named Norman Chapman, whose bruising backbeat seemed tailor-made for their style of music. Only twenty, he was young enough to fit in socially, enthusiastic, and reliable, with a healthy passion for rock ’n roll. But following three promising gigs together at the volatile Grosvenor Ballroom, the band’s lousy luck intervened. Chapman, to his own great surprise, was suddenly called for national service and dispatched to Africa for two years.

The sense of impotence—of being cut off from the action again—was devastating. From the weekend section of the
Liverpool Echo,
now about three pages strong, it was possible to see dozens of ads for local jive dances, and at each hall, the names, band after band—an elite corps of groups bundled together, who were cashing in on all the action. And always the same names—Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cass and the Cassanovas, Derry and the Seniors, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes—playing in every conceivable combination. Running one’s finger down each column, there was no mention of the Silver Beetles. Nothing. As far as anyone knew, they’d disbanded, they didn’t exist.

This time, they needed serious help.

Of all the characters influential in the Liverpool beat scene, the Silver Beetles turned to only one—again: Allan Williams. But Williams was up to his whiskers in other problems. In mid-June, when the steel band failed to show for their regular Tuesday night performance at the Jacaranda, Allan was informed they’d done “
a moonlight flit
.” Unbeknownst to him,
the “dusky troupe
,” sans Lord Woodbine, crept into the basement after hours and made off with their set of tinny oil drums. Williams depended on music to attract college students to the Jacaranda, and the intensely exotic steel band gave him untold cachet. Williams’s nightmare was that they’d gone over to the Royal Restaurant, whose owner, Ted Roberts, had tried
repeatedly to woo them away and, when that failed, declared “war” on the Jacaranda. But, alas, it was worse than that. They were nowhere in Liverpool. Or even Great Britain, for that matter. Where in the world, he wondered, would a Caribbean steel band find favor and gainful employment?

Given any number of guesses, it is unlikely he ever would have come up with Hamburg, Germany.

Two summers before, Williams and his wife, Beryl, had befriended a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker they’d picked up on the road from Chester to Liverpool. The boy, whose name was Rudiger, was from Ahrensburg, a few miles north of Hamburg, and he beguiled them with tales of hedonistic excess surrounding the bustling German port. Rudiger—whose name they anglicized as Roger—returned to Liverpool several times the following year, always extending an invitation for Allan to “
come to Germany and stay
with him.” Now, prompted by rumors of his steel band’s new home, the opportunity presented itself.

Williams, along with the irrepressible Lord Woodbine, booked a weekend charter to Amsterdam and then connected by train to Hamburg, where he arranged to stay chez Rudiger, who was delighted to be able to reciprocate. Looking rather Mephistophelian, they set off, conspicuous in their matching top hats, with shabby suits, scruffy beards, and wild-looking hair, and chainsmoking cheap English cigarettes.

To many people, Hamburg was a terrifying place: bustling, turbulent, dirty, decadent, German—especially for Liverpudlians, whose city had been strafed by Messerschmitt bombs. But Williams basked in its seedy glow. “
Hamburg fascinated me
,” Williams wrote in an unpublished memoir. For someone who traded in hyperbole, that was an understatement of colossal proportions. No city could have been more aptly suited for a man on the make such as Allan. All day long, he and Woody trolled the notorious St. Pauli district, pickling themselves in the endless chain of bars and wandering through the mazy arcades that featured flagrant down-and-dirty sex shows and where prostitution was hawked in roughly the same manner as schnitzel.

There was something else, too. With all the British and American servicemen stationed in Hamburg, demand for live music far exceeded the supply. Despite all future denials, Williams knew that—and he’d brought a tape along with him, showcasing three Liverpool bands, including the
Silver Beatles (
they had changed the spelling
in June), which he intended to play for German club owners. If he timed things right, Williams could corner the Hamburg market for British bands.

Sometime on a weekend in early July—the exact date cannot be determined, but it was a night when Lord Woodbine, exhausted, remained behind in a strip club on the Grosse Freiheit—Allan Williams wandered through the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red-light district, taking its fidgety pulse. Stopping outside the Kaiserkeller, a three-step-down tourist club, he listened to a “
dreadfully crummy
” German band attempt to mug its way phonetically through a set of American rock ’n roll standards. Their delivery was awful. Seizing the opportunity, Allan pushed through the club’s big glass doors and accosted the Kaiserkeller’s manager, a florid-faced man with a preposterous wiglike mop of hair named Bruno Koschmider, and made his pitch. As “
the manager of a very famous rock ’n roll group
in England,” Williams proposed to stock the Kaiserkeller with authentic British bands for the sum of £100 per week, plus expenses. It was a ridiculously large amount of money and Williams knew it, but he held his ground when Koschmider expressed interest.