John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Elvis at his most hyperactive. In painful contrast to these joined-at-the-hip ravers, self-conscious George barely moved at all, while Stu, as usual, was too ashamed of his poor bass playing even to face front. Behind this mismatched ménage sat their temporary drummer, Johnny Hutch, in ordinary street clothes, making his feelings clear with every passionless roll and perfunctory cymbal smash.

      The audition, as expected, proved to be a carve-up among Merseyside’s heavy hitters. The plum job of backing Billy Fury went to Cass and the Cassanovas, while Derry and the Seniors were hired for Fury’s stablemate, Duffy Power. But, despite the Silver Beetles’ lack of lustre, something about them appealed to Larry Parnes. It so happened that Parnes also needed backing musicians for another of his artists, Johnny Gentle, who was booked for a Scottish tour from 20 to 28 May. The Silver Beetles, to their astonishment, were offered the job at a fee of £18 each.

      Though its dates fell smack in the middle of college and school term time, there was no question of anyone turning it down. George had by now left Liverpool Institute to become an apprentice electrician and, like Tommy Moore, could take the time as holiday. Paul, theoretically cramming for his A-levels, persuaded his father that a spell of travelling around Scotland would give his brain a rest. Stu and John simply cut college classes for a week, a decision that horrified Stu’s teachers—and his mother Millie—because he was just about to take his finals. John did not tell Mimi about the tour, knowing too well what a storm of protest it would unleash. A week was about the maximum time he could disappear off her radar screen without making her wonder what he was up to.

      There was a general feeling that, as employees of Parnes, however junior and temporary, they should adopt stage names after his own well-tried principle. So Paul became Paul Ramon, thinking it had a sultry, tango-dancing feel; George became Carl Harrison in homage to Carl Perkins, the writer of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’; and Stu became Stu de Stael after the Russian abstract painter Nicolas de Stael. In later years, John would deny with some annoyance that he did follow Cass’s advice after all and identify himself with the peg-legged sea cook of Treasure Island. ‘I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver,’ he wrote to music journalist Roy Carr more than a decade later, ‘I always preferred my own name…There was one occasion when a guy [Cass?] introduced me as Long John and the Silvermen…in the days of old when they didn’t like the word Beatle!! I’m actually serious about this…it gets on my TIT!’ But according to Paul, ‘He was Long John throughout that Scottish tour…and he was quite happy to be Long John.’

      Johnny Gentle was, in fact, yet another fellow Liverpudlian, a former merchant seaman named John Askew who had first found his voice by singing to fellow crewmen and passengers (although, of course, no one wanted to know about any of that). Aged 24, he was the usual mix of brawny good looks and big hair from the Parnes template. But despite extensive promotion as a gentler alternative to Fury and Power, he had not yet made any impact on the UK record charts.

      He did not meet his new backing group until they came off the train at Alloa. There was time for only half an hour’s rehearsal before they went onstage together at the Town Hall in nearby Marshill. This first show was so bad that Parnes’ Scottish co-promoter, a sometime poultry farmer named Duncan McKinnon, almost sent the Silver Beetles back to Liverpool on the next train. But Gentle liked them and managed to convince McKinnon they would improve with practice.

      Any illusions about the glamour of rock-’n’-roll touring melted away quicker than a Scotch mist. The six remaining gigs were not in big cities like Glasgow or Edinburgh but remote towns scattered up the northeast coast and deep into the Highlands: Inverness, Fraserburgh, Keith, Forres, Nairn and Peterhead. The venues were ballrooms, municipal buildings or agricultural halls, with Gentle heading a bill otherwise composed of local singers and groups. He and his five sidemen travelled together with their equipment in one small van, driven by a McKinnon employee named Gerry Scott. ‘We were playing to nobody in little halls,’ George remembered, ‘until the pubs cleared out, when about five Scottish Teds would come in and look at us.’

      While Gentle, as the star, was accommodated in hotels, the sidemen had to make do with shared rooms in grim Highland boardinghouses and bed-and-breakfasts, where Calvinist texts decorated the walls and light and heat were measured out by coin meter. Thanks to their rock-bottom allowance from Parnes, they could afford to eat only in the cheapest workmen’s caffs and fish-and-chip shops. John’s cold comfort holidays at his Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, away to the west, seemed luxurious by comparison.

      As things turned out, few Scottish teenagers even realised they were watching ‘Long John’ Lennon, Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison and Stu de Stael—or even the Silver Beetles, for that matter. Press advertisements and posters billed them simply as ‘Johnny Gentle and his group’. There had apparently been some loss of nerve over the new name: a gig at Lathom Hall on 14 May saw them truncated to the Silver Beats and, according to Johnny Gentle, they had reverted to calling themselves the Beatals by the time they reached Alloa.

      Fortunately for them, the star was a through-and-through Scouser whose life in the Parnes stable had not made the least swollenheaded. So John, Paul and George put themselves out for Johnny, conscientiously learning his Ricky Nelson ballad repertoire, goosing it up with livelier Presley numbers like ‘Wear My Ring Around Your Neck’. He in turn did what he could to make them more like a conventional, uniformed backing group. ‘They’d come without any proper stage clothes,’ he remembers. ‘George had a black shirt and I had one, too, that I didn’t wear. So I let them have that, and we scraped up enough money between us to buy another one so that at least their three front men would look roughly the same.’

      On their van journeys through the Highlands, John took the lead in quizzing Gentle about life as a teen idol and the quickest route to achieving it. ‘He was inquisitive about everything…what was Billy like…what was Marty like…should he and the others go to London and try to get discovered…where would they stay? He was going places, and he knew it even then. At one place after we played, he and the others got pushed aside by some girls crowding round to get my autograph. John shouted out “That’ll be us some day, Johnny.”’

      The long intervals of discomfort and boredom that had to be endured gave extra edge to John’s sarcastic tongue and his impulse to pillory human weakness or frailty wherever they revealed themselves. Tommy Moore, the group’s too-elderly drummer, was a frequent target of Lennonesque practical jokes—often cruel, usually pointless, sometimes perpetrated for an audience no larger than himself. As Tommy lay in bed at night, John would softly open the door of his room, lasso his bedpost with a towel, then pull the bed by slow degrees toward the door. However tireless the baiting of Tommy, he got off lightly in comparison with Stu Sutcliffe. It was as if standing onstage with the Hofner president like a sunburst millstone around his neck robbed Stu of everything that had made John respect, or even like, him. The others took their cue from John, mocking Stu’s musicianship and appearance, making sure he always got the van’s most uncomfortable seat, the metal ledge over the rear wheel. ‘We were terrible,’ John would later admit. ‘We’d tell him he couldn’t sit with us or eat with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did.’

      Inverness found the star and his group for once in the same overnight accommodation, with the bonus of a pretty view across water. Here it emerged that Billy Fury was not the only Parnes singer in the arcane business of writing his own material. Gentle, too, had already composed several Buddy Holly-ish songs, and he took advantage of this respite to work on a half-finished ballad called ‘I’ve Just Fallen’. John, who was listening in, mentioned that he did ‘a bit of songwriting’ and suggested that Gentle’s middle eight—the gear change after the opening couple of verses—didn’t quite work. He had a spare middle eight, he said, that Gentle was welcome to put into the song.

      We know that we’ll get by

      Just wait and see. Just like the song tells us The best things in life are free.

      Although СКАЧАТЬ