John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ to standard, the most urgent task was finding a name for the new lineup. Johnny and the Moondogs had been no more than a hasty improvisation for Carroll Levis and was now too much redolent of lost chances and premature homeward trains. Rather than the modish formula of such-and-such and the so-and-sos, Stu suggested they should revert to another plain collective noun, ideally one with the chirpy unpretentiousness of Buddy Holly’s Crickets. Pursuing this entomological theme, they came up with the Beetles, unaware that it had been Holly’s own original choice. (Contrary to myth, it had nothing to do the Beetles motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, which none of John’s circle had seen.) To avoid an off-putting image of crawly black bugs, John changed it to Beatals—not a pun on ‘beat’ music at this stage, but on beating all competition.

      Stu also acted as their manager, insofar as there was anything to manage, and during March drafted a weightily worded and not overly truthful appeal for bookings to an unnamed promoter or club manager. ‘As it is your policy to present entertainment to the habitues of your establishment, I would like to draw your attention to the Quar [crossed out] “Beatals”. This is a promising group of young musicians who play music for all tastes, preferably rock and roll…’ But their gigs remained mostly stuck at the piffling level of student dances and socials, where they were usually known as ‘the college band’. Stu’s painting tutor, Austin Davis, had them to play at a party he gave at his Huskisson Street flat early in 1959. The event went on for about two days and was so riotous that Davis’s wife, the future novelist and Dame of the British Empire Beryl Bainbridge, had to remove their two young children from the premises. (Later, it would even be cited among the grounds for the couple’s divorce.)

      Outside pub hours, John and Stu were generally to be found at a little coffee bar in Slater Street, on the fringes of Chinatown, called the Jacaranda. At night, its basement became a club, attracting crowds from all the surrounding black and Asian quarters, with dancing to a West Indian steel band and liberal consumption of spiked soft drinks and the substance still known, if at all, as Indian hemp. ‘The Jac’ was also a haunt of heavyweight local groups—Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Cass and the Cassanovas, and others—who would meet there after their night’s gigs around town.

      To John, these were almost godlike figures, with their carefully blow-waved hair, matching Italian suits, flashy guitars and so-enviable drummers. Each group pumped out its American rock-’n’-roll repertoire with Liverpudlian eccentricity and flamboyance. Ted ‘Kingsize’ Taylor, a brawny apprentice butcher, kiss-curled and tartan-jacketed, combined the personae of Solomon Burke and the Big Bopper. ‘Cass’, aka Brian Casser, and his three sidemen wore shawl-collared tuxedos with Chicago gangster-style black shirts and white ties, and hung up their own special banner on the stage behind them. Most extrovert by far was blond, suntanned Rory Storm, aka Alan Caldwell, a mountaineer manqué who during his set would clamber up one side of the stage proscenium, not stopping until he clung precariously 40 or more feet above his audience. Even so, he was not selfish with the limelight, granting his drummer Ringo Starr a special solo spot billed as Starr Time.

      The star groups’ foot soldiers often proved more approachable than their commanders. At the Jacaranda, John struck up a friendship with the Cassanovas’ bass guitarist, 19-year-old John Gustafson, aka Johnny Gus. Generous about sharing bass-playing tips, Gustafson also became a willing accomplice to John’s love of exhibitionistic sick humour. ‘When we walked round town,’ he remembers, ‘we’d pretend to be two old cripples, helping each other across the road.’ One day he went back to the Gambier Terrace flat with John and Stu to hear John play the latest Lennon-McCartney composition, ‘The One After 909’.

      Johnny Gus’s friendliness was counterpointed by the Cassanovas’ hard-man drummer, Johnny Hutch, who intimidated even members of his own group, and made no secret of regarding musicians who were also art students and grammar-school boys as ‘a bunch of posers’. ‘John was always terrified of Johnny Hutch’, Gustafson says. It didn’t stop him from going down to the Jacaranda’s basement when Cass and the Cassanovas were setting up, and asking to sit in with them on a couple of numbers. ‘He played “Ramrod”, the Duane Eddy instrumental,’ Gustafson remembers. ‘And Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, doing the guitar breaks as well as the vocal. We had to admire his nerve.’

      The Jacaranda’s owner, Allan Williams, was one of the more colourful figures to be found around Liverpool 8. A stocky Welshman, with curly hair and a piratical black beard, he had worked as a door-to-door salesman and artificial jewellry manufacturer before starting his coffee bar, with his Chinese wife, Beryl, on capital of just £100. At 29, Williams had no particular interest in teenage music, preferring the Welsh hymns and thirties ballads for whose dramatic tenor rendition he was famous in pubs from Canning Square to Upper Parliament Street. But, like many another small provincial entrepreneur, he was attracted by its increasingly powerful scent of easy money.

      John was familiar to Allan Williams as leader of the ‘right crowd of layabouts’ from art college who sat around the Jac, nursing the same frothy coffee or fivepenny (2p) portion of toast and jam for hour after hour of conversation about Kierkegaard or Chuck Berry. To begin with, however, his entrepreneurial eye focused on Stu Sutcliffe’s art rather than John’s music. Among Stu’s recent projects was a series of vivid abstract murals, designed and painted in partnership with Rod Murray, one of which now adorned the front window of Ye Cracke, another the interior of a Territorial Army hall in Norris Green. Williams commissioned the pair to do the same for the Jac’s street window and the walls of its basement club. For the latter, they created a garish voodoo-inspired design, then roped in John and another sometime flatmate, Rod Jones, to help them paint it.

      Britain in 1960 had only one nationally known pop manager. This was Larry Parnes, a young Londoner, originally in the dress business, who had helped launch the nation’s first teenage idol, Tommy Steele. Since striking gold with Steele, Parnes had gone about the country seeking out handsome young men and turning them into rock singers under American-flavoured pseudonyms that blended the cute with the suggestive: Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride. From among this so-called Larry Parnes Stable, the most successful was Billy Fury, who, as Ron Wycherly, had previously worked as a deckhand on a Liverpool tugboat—though, of course, that unglamorous fact was always played down by his publicists.

      As well as manufacturing homegrown teen idols, Parnes was also the principal importer of American rock-’n’-roll stars to their ever-faithful British constituency. That first spring of the brand-new decade, he brought over Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran to costar with indigenous acts in a touring spectacular billed as the Fast-Moving Anglo-American Beat Show. Vincent in the flesh proved a disconcerting figure, weasely and emaciated, though still aged only 25, with one leg in braces following a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Cochran looked much the same glossy young hunk who’d inspired Paul McCartney to sing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ but was secretly prey to the darkest fears and neuroses. He had been hit hard by the death of his close friend Buddy Holly a year earlier, and now believed himself fated to meet a similarly premature end.

      The Fast-Moving Anglo-American Beat Show came to the Liverpool Empire for a week in mid-March, playing to rapturous capacity audiences that included John, Cynthia, Paul McCartney—and Allan Williams. Paul would always remember the demented female shriek that went up as the curtains opened to reveal Eddie Cochran with his back turned, nonchalantly running a comb through his hair. John, however, was furious when the screaming drowned out Cochran’s virtuoso playing of his wafer-thin red guitar.

      After the show, Williams sought out Larry Parnes and suggested how Liverpool’s evidently fathomless adoration of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran might be exploited still further. Williams’s grandiose idea was a joint promotion between Parnes and himself that would combine the American stars and other Parnes acts with the best of Merseyside’s own rock-’n’-roll talent. Parnes took the bait, agreeing to bring Vincent and Cochran back for a second appearance, supported by other nationally-known groups like the Viscounts and Nero and the Gladiators, while Williams supplied local crowd-pullers СКАЧАТЬ