Authors: Philip Norman
“The Jac” was not Williams’s sole enterprise. He had, in his time, pursued many trades, among them plumber, artificial jewelry–maker, and door-to-door salesman. Being a Welshman, naturally he had a voice. Indeed, he had almost trained for the operatic stage. His Welsh tenor was heard, instead, in the Victorian pubs and West Indian shebeens round Liverpool 8, where Williams pursued an energetic but as yet unspecific career as a bohemian and entrepreneur.
At intervals, his curly haired, stocky figure would swagger back along Slater Street to the tumbledown house where, on a capital of a hundred pounds, he had opened his Jacaranda coffee bar. The “right load of layabouts” would still be there. Prying their coffee cups away, Allan
Williams would remark with heavy sarcasm that
they
were never going to make him his fortune.
In the world outside Liverpool unabated disapproval of rock ’n’ roll had worn it into a more acceptable shape. The word was “rock” no longer, but “pop.” The taste—again dictated by America—was for clean-cut, collegiate-looking youths whose energy had left their pelvic regions and gone into their ingratiating smiles. The British idol of the hour was a former skiffler named Adam Faith, with the looks of a haunted Cassius and a voice that all the artifice of recording engineers could not rid of its heavy adenoids. A ballad called “What Do You Want?”—or, as Adam Faith enunciated it, “Puwhat Do Yuh Pwant?”—went to number one late in 1959, using an arrangement of pizzicato violins unashamedly copied from Buddy Holly. Holly lodged no suit for plagiarism, having died in an air crash eight months earlier.
But while Britain listened to Adam Faith and pop, Liverpool listened to rhythm and blues. The Cunard Yanks were bringing over records by a new young black performer still confined by his own country to the low, indecent level of “race” music. His name was Chuck Berry; the songs he sang were wry and ragged, vividly pictorial eulogies to girls and cars, the joys and neuroses of American urban life. His verbal felicity and subversive wit had instant appeal for young men who, although white, felt themselves hardly less segregated in their own land from the more privileged and glamorous south. All over Merseyside, in ballrooms, town halls, church meeting houses, even swimming baths and ice-skating rinks, there were amateur R&B groups pumping out Berry’s repertoire along with that of other kindred black performers such as Little Richard and Fats Domino.
By far and away Liverpool’s most adulated group in those days were Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Rory, a blond, amiable youth known by day as Alan Caldwell, was afflicted by a stammer that, fortunately, vanished when he opened his mouth to sing. He had been an outstanding athlete and swimmer, and would enliven his stage performance by feats of acrobatics and climbing. At the Majestic ballroom in Birkenhead he would shin up a pillar from the stage to the promenade balcony. At the Tower Ballroom, downriver in New Brighton, he would crawl about inside the one-hundred-foot-high dome. His occasional falls increased his drawing power. His group had lately acquired a new drummer—a
slightly built boy from the Dingle, with mournful eyes, prematurely graying side-whiskers, and a habit of burdening his fingers with cheap rings. This drummer’s name was Richard Starkey, but he preferred, in emulation of his Wild West heroes, to be known as Ringo Starr.
After Rory Storm in popularity came Cass and the Casanovas, a four-man group whose drummer, Johnny Hutch, was the most powerful on Merseyside. They said of Johnny Hutch—as, indeed, he said of himself—that he could take his brain out and lay it on the table and his drumsticks would still go on hitting in time.
The Saturday dances over, most of the groups would drive back from the suburbs into Liverpool to congregate at Allan Williams’s Jacaranda coffee bar. At night in the basement there was dancing to a West Indian steel band. Though no alcohol could be served legally, much was drunk in spiked coffee and soft drinks.
Rory Storm, Brian Casser, and Duke Duval were personalities whom John Lennon and his followers held in awe. For John’s group, such as it was, figured nowhere in the leagues of local favoritism. No less an authority than Johnny Hutch, the Casanovas’ drummer, had given his opinion that they “weren’t worth a carrot.”
To begin with, they still lacked a drummer. This wouldn’t have mattered so much with a strong undercurrent of bass guitar. But Stu Sutcliffe had only just begun learning to play the big Hofner “President” bass he had bought with his John Moores prize. The President hung heavy on Stu’s slight frame; his slim fingers found difficulty in stretching to the simplest chord shapes. He would stand turning half-away so the audience could not see how little and how painfully he was playing.
They had had, and lost, one good opportunity at the Casanova Club, a Sunday afternoon jive session in a room above the Temple restaurant on Dale Street. The promoter, Sam Leach, agreed to try them out in support of his resident group, Cass and the Casanovas. But the club members had little time for a group with no drummer and only one small tinkling amp—a group that did not go in for suits and step dance routines like Cliff Richard’s Shadows, but instead wore strange, scruffy, arty black crewneck sweaters and tennis shoes, and jumped and leapt in wild asymmetry. And when Paul McCartney began to sing in his high, almost feminine voice, there were titters of amusement from some of the girls.
They did little better at Lathom Hall, out at Seaforth where the Mersey
broadens against the rim of Albert Dock. The night’s main group were the Dominoes, featuring Kingsize Taylor, a vast youth visible by day cutting up meat in a local butcher’s shop. Paul, John, George, and Stu had been hired merely to play during the interval. They were so bad that the management ordered them offstage after their second song. When the Dominoes came on again, Kingsize Taylor saw John, Paul, and George standing near the stage, each scribbling furiously on a piece of paper. “They were writing down the words of the songs as we sang them. They’d take turns to scribble down a line each of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie.’”
They still practiced for hours on end, at George’s or Paul’s house, using a tape recorder of the old-fashioned sort that grew warm after a couple of hours’ use. They had no idea of the way they wanted to be. They knew only that they wanted to be nothing like Cliff Richard’s neat, smiling, step-dancing Shadows. A tape has survived of a long, rambling blues sequence with George on lead guitar, his fingers stumbling frequently over half-learned phrases, John and Paul strumming along, and Stu Sutcliffe keeping up on bass by playing as few notes as possible. At one point, Paul’s voice breaks in impatiently with a kind of impromptu jazz scat-singing. Later there are attempts at various rhythms, first rockabilly, then Latin American, then a note-for-note copy of the Eddie Cochran song “Hallelujah I Love Her So.” Suddenly they break into a song that was among the first ever written by John Lennon—“The One After 909.” The beat lifts; their voices coalesce: For a moment they are recognizable as what they were to become. Then they go back to sitting round while George, painfully, tries to learn the blues.
From the same period there is a letter drafted by Paul in his scholarly hand, soliciting a mention in some local newspaper after a chance encounter with one of the journalists. The letter claims group accomplishments as much academic as musical; it makes great play with the fact that John goes to art college, and confers on Paul himself a fictitious place “reading English at Liverpool University.” Paul’s songwriting partnership with John is said to have produced “more than 50 numbers,” among them “Looking Glass,” “Thinking of Linking,” “Winston’s Walk,” and “The One After 909.” To cover every option, the group is credited with a “jazz feel” and a repertoire of “standards” such as “Moonglow,” “Ain’t She Sweet,” and “You Are My Sunshine.” “The group’s name,” Paul wrote, “is…” They still had not been able to make up their minds.
Stu Sutcliffe had lately been evicted from his basement in Percy
Street for painting all the furniture white. He suggested to John that they both move into their friend Rod Murray’s flat in Gambier Terrace, a big, windswept Victorian promenade overlooking the Anglican cathedral. The flat was principally floorboards, strewn with records, stolen traffic signs, and the mattresses used by various seminomadic tenants. Bill Harry, a frequent sleeper in the bath, remembers all-night talk sessions in which he and Stu elaborated their plan to write a book that would give Liverpool the same cultural identity that Kerouac and the beat poets had given America. John Lennon’s chief contributions were word games and charades of elaborate craziness.
Though John soon left Gambier Terrace, his friendship with Stu continued. The two were together most of the day, when Paul and George could not escape class at the Institute. They would sit for hours in the Jacaranda, Stu sketching and crayoning while John, with his wolfish smile, cadged coffees from the softer-hearted waitresses. So it came about that Allan Williams, with his talent for using people, discovered a way of using even two penniless art students.
Williams was currently engaged in his first major venture as an entrepreneur. He had hired St. George’s Hall, Liverpool’s chief public building, as the venue for a gala modeled on the Chelsea Arts Ball in London. John and Stu found themselves roped in to design and build the decorated carnival floats whose ritual destruction was the best-known feature of the London event. On the day of the ball Williams used them as a laboring gang to manhandle the floats across St. George’s piazza, under the disapproving eye of Victoria and Albert, and into the Great Hall with its mosaic floor, its marble busts of Peel and George Stephenson, and its towering pipe organ.
The 1959 Liverpool Arts Ball was an event prophetic of Allan Williams’s career as an impresario. The comedian Bruce Forsyth was among VIP guests who watched, not only the ritual destruction of the carnival floats, but also flour and fire extinguisher fights and intermittent attempts to play rock ’n’ roll on the Civic organ. At midnight, balloons came down from a web of football goal nets suspended in the ceiling. After that, owing to employee error, the heavy, greasy nets themselves fell onto the heads of the crowd.
Among the promoters of British pop music in the late 1950s, none had so potent a reputation as Larry Parnes. It was Parnes who, in 1956,
metamorphosed Tommy Steele, Britain’s first rock ’n’ roller, from a Cockney merchant seaman he had spotted strumming a guitar in a Soho drinking club. Tommy Steele’s colossal success with British teenagers was due largely to his youthful manager’s intuitive brilliance as an agent and image-builder and the jealous care with which, following Colonel Tom Parker’s example, he guarded his money-spinning protégé. Though Tommy Steele had now somewhat diminished as a pop attraction, the enterprises of Larry Parnes had prospered and multiplied.
By 1959, Parnes controlled what he himself liked to call a stable of the leading British male pop singers. Most were ingenuous youths from unknown provincial cities who had somehow found their way to London and the 2i’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, hallowed as the place where Larry Parnes had spotted Tommy Steele. Whether they could sing or not Parnes fashioned them into lucrative teen idols by giving them stage names that combined the homely with the exotic: Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, Johnny Gentle. A closet homosexual who made extensive use of the casting couch, he styled his protégés to reflect his own private fantasies, equipping them all with virtually identical blow-waved hair, tight jeans, and pointy cowboy boots. It was wonderfully ironic, therefore, that the adult anti–rock ’n’ roll lobby should have complained so vociferously about their sexual power over teenage
girls
. Several of them actually lived at Parnes’s flat on London’s Cromwell Road, directly opposite Baden Powell House, the headquarters of the Scout movement. When not coaching his charges in deportment or stagecraft Parnes would produce a pair of powerful binoculars and gaze longingly through them at the Boy Scouts across the road.
As well as furnishing the cast of early TV pop shows such as
Oh Boy!
and
Drumbeat
, Parnes used his stable to create self-contained traveling shows that for British fans in places far from London represented the sole chance to see live rock ’n’ roll music. Larry Parnes shows played at theaters and cinemas, but also at town halls and rural corn exchanges (grain markets that had been turned into cultural and community venues). No audience was too far-flung or insignificant to be visited by the glossy-haired, unflappable young man whom the music business—believing money to be his sole preoccupation—had nicknamed Mister Parnes Shillings and Pence.
Early in 1960, Larry Parnes promoted a tour headed by two imported American stars, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Cochran, whose “Summertime Blues” had sold a million copies in 1958, was a twenty-one-year-old Oklahoman with the hulking pout of an Elvis run to fat. Vincent was a twenty-five-year-old ex-sailor famous for his wailing voice, his group the Bluecaps, and a classic piece of rock ’n’ roll gibberish called “Be Bop a Lula.” Partly disabled from a motorcycle accident, he performed anchored to the stage by a leg iron and irradiating depravity and ill health. Nor was this present tour destined to build up his constitution.
In Liverpool, as in every city along its route, the Cochran-Vincent show was a sellout. Larry Parnes himself was at the Empire theater to watch the wild welcome his artists received, even in this remote corner of the land. Elsewhere, amid the shouting and stamping, three would-be rock ’n’ rollers from a group last known as Johnny and the Moondogs strained their eyes to try to see the fingering of Eddie Cochran’s guitar solo in “Hallelujah I Love Her So.” In yet another seat, the proprietor of the Jacaranda coffee bar suddenly perceived that there might be easier ways to a fortune than by attempting to bring the Chelsea Arts Ball to Liverpool. In Allan Williams’s own words, “I could smell money. Lots of it.”
Afterward, Williams sought out Larry Parnes and, as one impresario to another, invited him back to the Jacaranda. By the end of the night Parnes had been talked into bringing back Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent for a second concert, promoted in partnership with Allan Williams at the city’s boxing stadium. Half the program would consist of Parnes acts; the other half would be provided by Williams from among local groups like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Cass and the Casanovas. The concert, lasting several hours, was fixed to take place after Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent had finished their current tour.