When They Were Boys (17 page)

Paul was more hopeful.

“The thing is, you know, that our families, even our friends, were happy, but, you know, we were just another band. But I felt we were getting a little better.”

So, in the summer of 1960, depressed, almost deflated, John, Paul, George, and Stu did not know what was happening around them. They didn't even know that the kids who saw them perform in church halls and community centers and all those long-ago venues were starting to spread the word, and that mild fever was spreading. The boys could feel the tension in the rooms, but they were still waiting for a break that would set them free. Discouraged and hoping for that opportunity, they continued waiting for a door to open.

Meanwhile, Allan Williams had been scouting out the scene in the music-starved city of Hamburg, Germany. What he saw was a red-light district, flooded with prostitutes and a few nightclubs reverberating with a heavy beat and the words of fifties rock sung in German and English.

Williams will readily admit that he had no thoughts of bringing the painters of the ladies' room at the Jac to Hamburg. But again, a door would need to open.

And ironically, it was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, with their sad-faced but enthusiastic drummer, “Richie,” who opened it.

CHAPTER FIVE

PEN PAL #1—BILL HARRY

“‘The Beatles are the stuff that screams are made of. . . .'

That's what Bob Wooler wrote. . . . I don't think

anything like this will ever happen again.”

—Bill Harry, recalling a famous quote from
Mersey Beat

T
HE NEXT CENTURY WOULD HAVE THE
I
NTERNET
, F
ACEBOOK, AND
T
WITTER
, but in the early 1960s, during the cloudy dawn of the boys' march to greatness, there was Bill Harry—the inventor of social networking for the boys in the bands.

Bill Harry was all about dramatic journalism and exciting writing, and was also a master of promotion. It was quite a package for a young kid who really never had a chance, or so his neighbors and the kids who bullied him thought. Now in the twilight of his life, Harry knows what lives he shaped, even if some of the stars he made have a very short memory. At the 2010 salute to John Lennon in Liverpool, Bill Harry received an invitation, only to be sent away at the stage door into the general-admission crowd. Bill Harry? Impossible. No one did more to accelerate the path of the Beatles. But Harry, a philosophical man with a keen photographic memory, passed it off as a slight of time and ignorance, for in reality, he knows the truth.

Destiny called him, or was it the other way around? The record is there, even if the surviving Beatles don't remember, or respect it. After all, it was Harry who arranged for Brian Epstein to go to the smoky Cavern to meet the Beatles for the first time.

He savored his many talks, some of them under a mild buzz of alcohol, with the Art Institute's version of the beat generation. He nursed and nourished his ambition to publish the music scene, but did he know that he would awaken not just a city, but the entire planet?

His ambition and determination had allowed him to rise up from the poorest of neighborhoods near the Liverpool docks, where he was beaten to
a pulp by classmates, and received routine corporal punishment from the priests at his school. His father died young, and his mother, mired in poverty, scraped for the money to send him elsewhere; scholarships provided the rest. Yet, through his young learning years, the boy had no electricity in his home. He read comic books and sketched by candlelight, and became an avid fan of science fiction. His life would later resemble a work of fiction. This diminutive and soft-spoken young boy, with an immense vocabulary and a gift for writing, would travel the world with the movers and shakers of rock music. But first, with the power of the pen and a rare insight into human nature, he would propel the boys to international fame.

Many individuals will gladly and convincingly credit themselves with aiding and abetting the boys' ascent, but very few can claim a major piece of their rise. Bill Harry is the real deal, and an unlikely one at that.

Bill Harry could smell it, even in the dark wood panels of the eighteenth-century pub, Ye Cracke. He could see it in John Lennon's conviction; in Cynthia, sitting next to John, with admiring glances; in the gentle face of Stuart. Few people really can sense history being shaped, but like all teenagers, Harry was fixated on a dream, and the dream master was sitting across from him.

He would soon come to know George and Paul, who went to school next door to the art school at the Liverpool Institute. He viewed them as less articulate than the semi-Bohemian John, yet intense in their desire to break through. But in the beginning, and through his life, there was always a fierce public loyalty and private dedication to John. And Harry loved the talking part.

Back in the art school days, John Lennon—poet, guitar man, and general troublemaker—held forth in a side room of Ye Cracke, also known as a public house, or watering hole, for the school's young elite. Dubbed the “war room,” the space was transformed into John's version of a Churchill-like command center. After all, John was in command as he held forth with a pint in hand, maybe something stronger, discussing the state of the world and reading his poetry to the young journalist and friend, Bill Harry. John's future wife Cynthia would share in the conversation. It is an interesting
contrast that while American teenagers gathered at drive-ins for milk shakes and Elvis music, the future cultural leaders of Britain gathered in pubs.

Harry smiles wistfully as he remembers the first meeting with the young and brazen John. It was 1958.

“I was sitting in the college canteen. I looked up and saw this guy stride in. I said, ‘My God, who is that?' He had a DA haircut.”

The DA, or “duck ass,” haircut was famously popular in the fifties. If you want to try it now, comb your hair back around the sides of your head, then make a part down the middle of the back. The look, favored by Elvis Presley and many of this author's high school classmates, resembled the rear end of a duck.

Harry continues,

H
E WORE
T
EDDY
B
OY–TYPE CLOTHES
. A
LL THE ART STUDENTS WOULD WEAR DUFFER COATS IN GRAY, FAWN, OR BLACK
. T
HEY ALL HAD TURTLENECK SWEATERS, EITHER BLACK, GRAY, OR NAVY BLUE
. I
SAID TO MYSELF, THE ART STUDENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THE
B
OHEMIANS, YET HE IS THE REBEL
. I'
VE GOT TO GET TO KNOW HIM
. H
IS WHOLE PRESENCE WAS LIKE
, “WOW!” S
O I GOT TO KNOW HIM AND INTRODUCED HIM TO
S
TUART
. A
FTER THAT, THE FOUR OF US WOULD DO EVERYTHING TOGETHER
. W
E WENT TO PARTIES, PUBS TOGETHER
. W
E SPENT A LOT OF TIME AT
Y
E
C
RACKE
.

“The four of us” included Rod Murray, Stuart's roommate and best friend at the time. Harry enjoyed Rod's company. The renegade four formed the nucleus of what would become a powerful teenage speaking and drinking club. The pub was the heart and soul of their conversations.

Ye Cracke is a few steps up Rice Street, just off of Hope Street, near the Liverpool John Moores University (formerly the Art College) where Colin Fallows is a professor of sound and visual arts. Fallows is no ordinary professor; he's a man who studies the past and weaves its fabric into the future. It is Fallows who brought Stu Sutcliffe's girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr's amazing photo retrospective to Liverpool in 2010–2011. It is Fallows who points out the physical nuances of the art school, such as the actual chair that John sat in during classes where he would glance over at Cynthia, sometimes with a nervous smile, other
times with the bravado of a hunter. Fallows notes the small courtyard through which Paul and George would travel quickly from their school, the Liverpool Institute for Boys, into the lower level of the Art Institute.

Fallows is a man who understands the Art Institute's physical insides, and the real meaning of art to the artists' world of popular music.

He beams with pride when he remembers the work of Stu Sutcliffe, the young artist and writer Bill Harry, and the direct connection between his institution, the Beatles, and so much of the popular music that preceded and followed them.

“In that day,” Fallows remembers, “British art schools were an incubator for many rock stars. Almost all of them, almost all the big ones, were artists. Rock and art, a very significant connection.”

Harry, an artist on canvas as well as the artist of one of the world's greatest verbal tapestries, agrees: “You can follow the beat generation. You can remember the days at Ye Cracke. All of it tied together. Rock and art. Art and rock.”

Bill Harry remembers the makeshift rehearsals when George and Paul would join John in the art school canteen; Stuart often stayed behind, drawing.

As life model June Furlong confirms, “Young Mr. Lennon was very talented, but the real student of art was Stuart Sutcliffe. He was the man with talent.”

Bill Harry even suggested, not too subtly, that Stuart was a better artist than a bass guitarist. His advice to Stuart: paint, and paint more. Harry is a real gadfly when it comes to making a point. Through the years, he has caused tremors in the minds of journalists, serving as the ultimate proofreader and arbiter of truth and fiction in the early life of the Beatles.

Harry's humble beginnings, his rise from poverty to worldly knowledge, may have disguised his ability to seek out and know people just like him.

After cultivating a warm and relaxed relationship with Stuart and John, and a good one with Paul and George, young Harry, inspired by the Dissenters, the group that met at Ye Cracke and other watering holes, began to survey the scene. By 1959, there were five hundred bands playing skiffle, jazz, and emerging rock in Liverpool. But there was little coverage in the
established media of John's young band, and the other troubadours. Harry had an idea.

“I wanted to do a magazine that was part traditional jazz and modern jazz, called
Stories of 52nd Street
. I knew Sam Leach from Storyville Jazz Club, so I asked Sam if he would front the money, and he said he would get me the money I needed through the people from the club. So [my girlfriend] Virginia and I went up there. He was not there, and this happened four times. And I got dismayed. Now it was 1960.”

The relationship with Bill Harry and Sam Leach has been strained for years, but never was it so intensely troubled as in 1960.

Leach forgot to connect. Leach would later tell me, “What a mess that was. I would have tripled my investment. Who knew what would happen?” A lot of people still ask that question in Liverpool today.

Harry
knew
. Although he had the greatest respect for Leach, he decided to look elsewhere and expand his outlook.

“I also wanted to do a rock magazine,” Harry explains. “I wanted to [cover] other bands, too, like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Buddy Holly. I also wanted to do a music newspaper. So Virginia gave up her job and she lent me fifty pounds to do the magazine, newspaper, whatever. At that time, I finished the art-design course and I was supposed to travel to Europe, but I used the money as part of the startup.”

The loan was repaid with decades of marriage, a partnership of love, long nights at the office, insightful news gathering, and ink-stained hands. The name of the newspaper/magazine became
Mersey Beat
. It was a catchy name, based on Harry's view of a policeman “on the beat.”

The couple's
Mersey Beat
launched on July 6, 1961. Five thousand copies were printed. Five thousand copies were sold. Among the first distributors (and columnists) was Brian Epstein, the music merchant. Epstein's fascination with the music scene, sparked by
Mersey Beat
, would lead him to uncharted worlds of excitement. In a way, with its up-to-the-minute reporting, lively articles, and recurring themes of teenager entitlement to love, dance, and rock 'n' roll,
Mersey Beat
was the early-sixties version of social networking.

For the boys,
Mersey Beat
was, as they say in the record business, solid gold. Bill Harry soon realized that his friend John's band was ascending, and he covered that ascent with wild abandon. Yet, despite his love for Mersey music and the boy Beatles, Harry often let others sing their praises.

Bill quickly became a reporter's editor. Overwhelmed by John's poetry and creative writing, he commissioned John to write the first autobiography of the Beatles. These are the founder's words in the piece, titled “Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles (Translated from the John Lennon)”:

O
NCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE THREE LITTLE BOYS CALLED
J
OHN
, G
EORGE AND
P
AUL, BY NAME CHRISTENED
. T
HEY DECIDED TO GET TOGETHER BECAUSE THEY WERE THE GETTING TOGETHER TYPE
. W
HEN THEY WERE TOGETHER THEY WONDERED WHAT FOR AFTER ALL, WHAT FOR
? S
O ALL OF A SUDDEN THEY GREW GUITARS AND FASHIONED A NOISE
. F
UNNILY ENOUGH, NO ONE WAS INTERESTED, LEAST OF ALL THE THREE LITTLE MEN
. S
O-O-O-O ON DISCOVERING A FOURTH LITTLE EVEN LITTLER MAN CALLED
S
TUART
S
UTCLIFFE RUNNING ABOUT THEM THEY SAID, QUITE
“S
ONNY GET A BASS GUITAR AND YOU WILL BE ALRIGHT
”
AND HE DID—BUT HE WASN
'
T ALRIGHT BECAUSE HE COULDN
'
T PLAY IT
. S
O THEY SAT ON HIM WITH COMFORT
'
TIL HE COULD PLAY
. S
TILL THERE WAS NO BEAT, AND A KINDLY OLD MAN SAID, QUOTE
“T
HOU HAST NOT DRUMS
!” W
E HAD NO DRUMS! THEY COFFED
. S
O A SERIES OF DRUMS CAME AND WENT AND CAME
.