sm SECTION ONE
sm
I.
Derek Taylor threw a cablegram across the neatly piled clutter of his desk top.
"Here!" he said with a smile that would've been broader except that his face was too thin. "Here! Have a look at this!"
Through the window behind him, five stories below, were the brisk, lunch-hour sidewalks of Argyll Street, one of the throbbing capillaries of London's Soho district. Just two doors away was the Palladium, Britain's legendary show business temple, where a crowd had mobbed the Beatles after their first appearance there, occasioning the Beatles' first appearance on the front pages of the country's national newspapers. The address on the cablegram was simply, "JOHN LENNON, THE BEATLES, LONDON." But Her Majesty's civil servants had knowingly delivered it to the offices of the Beatles' personal manager, Brian Epstein, who did business out of the offices of a firm called NEMS Enterprises Ltd. There is where the thirty-two-year-old Derek, as handsome a man as you can find with dark hair and a veddy English face, was sitting in a seat recently vacated by one Brian Sommerville, who'd resigned as the Beatles' press officer. The cablegram said:
"UNDERSTAND THROUGH WEST COAST SOURCE THAT YOU PLAN TO LEAVE BEATLES. CAN UNDERSTAND TRAVELING MOST TIRING AND YOUR DESIRE TO SETTLE DOWN. WHILE WE HAVE NO IMMEDIATE OPENINGS ON KLIF DEEJAY STAFF, WE OFFER YOU THE MUSIC CRITIC'S POSITION ON NUMBER ONE STATION IN DALLAS. SUGGEST YOU REMAIN WITH GROUP UNTIL BEATLES APPEAR HERE IN SEPTEMBER. IT WILL SAVE YOU TRAVEL MOVING EXPENSES. PLEASE ADVISE. CHARLES F. PAYNE, MANAGER, KLIF, DALLAS, TEXAS"
"It's a lot of rubbish, of course," chuckled Derek, as immaculately dressed as a model in a Sunday Times advert. Like the Beatles themselves, Derek had been born in Liverpool, that brooding seaport which is the metropolis of what England calls its North. But Liverpool, once a thriving harbor for slave ships and more recently for trans-Atlantic ocean liners, thrived no longer. The docks were all but deserted and Derek, too, had long ago abandoned the city to make it to London as a newspaperman. Now the picture of charm and suavity, Derek, who weighed only a hundred and twenty-six pounds, had succeeded in confining his Liverpool slugfest temper within the irony of his irresistible wit.
"John hasn't the slightest intention of quitting," he said. "Why should he? The one who quit, of course, was Mr. Brian Sommerville---you know, the 'genius' behind the Beatles' success. I think his official reasons, according to an announcement in the press, were that he had done all he could for the Beatles, that they didn't need him any more. He said they were ready to fly on their own, ready to fly like birds."
In the days following Brian Sommerville's departure from their employment, the Beatles had flown far beyond even their own wildest fancies. It was now July of 1964 and since the previous February, when the Beatles had first visited America, they had vacationed in the South Seas and in the West Indies, where, the British press reported with customary gleeful cattiness, Paul was accompanied by his eighteen-year-old girl friend, actress Jane Asher, while Ringo traveled unchaperoned with a seventeen-year-old girl he described as his secretary-to-be, a hairdresser named Maureen Cox. Ringo and Maureen were not yet engaged to be married at this time.
The Beatles had completed the filming of their first movie, A Hard Day's Night, a low-budget production, which, their twenty-nine-year-old manager blithely predicted, would earn the largest profit in box-office history, certainly enough to ensure that each of the Fab Four would retire a millionaire. At the same time, the sales forecast of Beatles-licensed merchandise was being revised upwards by many millions of dollars for 1964.
The Beatles had toured New Zealand and Australia, where howling mobs of three hundred thousand at a time had greeted them in the down-under winter, trampling one another underfoot. Those collapsing in the thick of the screaming crowd had to be lifted above the heads of everybody and then passed by upstretched arms to mounted policemen at the edge of this seething sea of humanity. In Australia alone, the Beatles had left an estimated one thousand casualties, including a man who had an epileptic fit, a girl who burst a blood vessel in her throat from shrieking too loud and a dozen more who were kicked by the horses' hooves while trying to crawl beneath the mounted police to get to the Beatles' car. Still another girl suffered carbon monoxide poisoning when the mob knocked her down next to the exhaust pipe of an automobile that had been hemmed in by the crowd and forced to a stop with its motor still running. The girl knew the exhaust pipe blowing in her face might asphyxiate her but she couldn't get up because as soon as she'd been knocked down, a bunch of other girls had climbed on top of her to get a better view of the Beatles. Meanwhile, fan letters declaring eternal love and asking for signed photographs continued to pour into the offices of NEMS Enterprises Ltd. at a rate of several thousand a day.
When the Beatles had arrived in the States the previous February, I'd written a cover story about them for the Saturday Evening Post which'd sold more copies than any issue since Benjamin Franklin had founded the magazine. Now, only a few months later, the editors were hungry for a second cover story about the Beatles and they'd sent me to England, where the Royal Premiere of A Hard Day's Night was going to be social event of the season. Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowden, were scheduled to attend and scalpers were charging as much as a hundred and fifty bucks a seat.
"I must say," Derek continued, "that working with the Beatles is an experience that I wouldn't have missed for the world. It's incredible, absolutely incredible! Here are these four boys from Liverpool. They're rude, they're profane, they're vulgar, and they've taken over the world. It's as if they've founded a new religion. They're completely anti-Christ. I mean, I'm anti-Christ as well, but they're so anti-Christ that they shock me, which isn't an easy thing. But I'm obsessed with them. Isn't everybody? I'm obsessed with their honesty. And the people who like them most are the people who should be outraged most. In Australia, for example, each time we'd arrive at an airport, it was as if De Gaulle had landed, or, better yet, the Messiah. The routes were lined solid with people. Cripples threw away their sticks. Sick people rushed up to the car as if a touch from one of the boys would make them well again. Old women stood watching with their grandchildren, and, as we'd pass by, I could see the look on their faces. It was as if some saviour had arrived and people were happy and relieved as if things somehow were going to be better now."
The telephone rang. It was a newspaper reporter asking for tickets to the Royal Premiere.
"Utterly out of the question!" Derek exploded, trying to sound apologetic and reaching for a pack of cigarettes, "I'm sorry!"
Putting a cigarette into his mouth and turning toward me, he said:
"If I were a Beatle, this would be the ultimate. The Royal Premiere would be the ultimate----except for the Sermon on the Mount. The only thing left for them is to go on a healing tour."
Derek lit the cigarette and took a drag. After the Royal Premiere, the next big event
on the Beatles' agenda was to fly to Liverpool for the opening of A Hard Day's Night
in their home town, which was going to hold a civic reception for them in the Town Hall.
After that, beginning August 19, they would be back in the U.S. again for a five-week tour
of concerts in twenty-five cities. The concerts already had been sold out for months. In
some cases, they had been sold out within hours after the tickets were delivered to the
box offices.
"Tell me," Derek asked, blowing smoke through his nose, "how do you think
they'll be received when they go to the States again?"
II.
It has been little more than a year since the Beatles last climbed the winding stone steps
from the Cavern Club, that vaulted subterranean cauldron, out of which John, Paul, George
and Ringo had served themselves up as a delicacy so deliciously and delightfully rare that
a waiting, willing and wanting world obviously couldn't satisfy its appetite for them. The
Beatles had pulled off the neat trick of lifting themselves out of the Cavern Club by the
straps of their own zippered leather boots. In effect, they'd created the very Liverpool
madness which'd created them. Never again would the Beatles have to descend the worn stone
of the Cavern Club's steps. But the Cavern didn't need the Beatles any more, either. Just
the fact that the Beatles had gotten their start at the Cavern had left the dungeon-like
cellar club so famous an attraction in itself that, even with such lesser chefs as Earl
Preston and the Red Caps stirring it, the same overflowing youthful human stew continues
to boil and bubble as it cooks in the cauldron. The Cavern Club has an official capacity
of seven hundred and fifty churning youthful bodies but the house always helps itself to
an extra serving of perhaps an unofficial two hundred and fifty more.
Rumor has it that the Cavern Club, once used for the storage of beer, has also once been a vegetable warehouse. Upstairs, there still isn't even a sign to tell you that this is the Cavern. The club has an unlisted door. The heat of the stew splashes in your face as you hit the bottom step. That's the point at which eyeglasses fog. I've been told that plunging into this cauldron is dangerous for many reasons, not the least of which is that one of the favorite pastimes of Liverpool's youth is brawling and, for Liverpool's youth, the Cavern Club is one of the favorite brawling spots. On my first visit to the Cavern, I suddenly hear a thumping that isn't part of the beat coming from the stage and I also hear shrieks that are not from the girls screaming at the music. A group of young toughs has managed to find room in the crush to start a fight. Immediately a platoon of others rushes to an ammunition cache, where each youth grabs an empty Coke bottle, one by one, like soldiers taking rifles from a stack to arm themselves for battle. An instant later, there is an ominous crash of glass and shards of broken bottles suddenly seem to join the droplets of sweat raining down from the arched stone ceiling. I catch the neck of a Coke bottle in my pants cuff. Pants cuffs are still in vogue at that time. Instantly a flying squad of Cavern Club bouncers dives into the stew and a moment later the bouncers are dragging two boys by their arms across the floor and then up the winding stairway, bouncing them on the points of the stone steps along the way.
"This is the first one we've had in seven months inside the club," thirty-two-year-old Pat Delaney, the two-hundred-pound assistant manager and chief bouncer says afterwards in an apologetic tone. "Outside the club, well, we shouldn't talk about that, should we? But there's been a couple of stabbings and a hatchet fight here and there."
While this is happening, the band onstage, which includes two electric guitarists, a drummer and a singer, never misses a beat. On benches along the wall, where they are obscured under the cover of the mist of the stew plus a thick, hot, wet, nicotine fog, couples continue necking busily and lustfully. Overhead, the bare red light bulbs offer the cramped stone cellar all the illumination of dying embers in a fireplace. The boys, some with hair brushed neatly to their shoulders, are distinguishable from the girls only because the boys wear trousers, which are uniformly stiletto-thin in the style of the Beatles. Not only am I still wearing cuffs on my pants but the girls have not yet been liberated by the jeans revolution. For the most part, the girls wear three-quarter length black leather coats. Also for the most part, their hair is long and straight, like the boys' hair. On the floor, they throb together in what are, for 1964, wild, vivid, nameless dances, with their bodies moving as if controlled like puppets by the strings of the guitar. Even the wallflowers dance, mostly in groups. Even standing still, they seem to be dancing. Everyone and everything seems to be dancing in this hot stew. Rising up the stairway, the steamy heat of the cauldron escapes through the unmarked door, billowing into Mathew Street in large, white clouds of condensation. More than once, unknowing passersby, mistaking the steam for smoke, have summoned fire engines.
Taxicab drivers refuse to enter Mathew Street, a gauntlet of broken glass, mini-vans parked helter-skelter and gangs of fifteen-year-olds wearing collarless jackets and hurling words like rocks. In Scouse, which is what the local Liverpool language is called, the four-letter words are pronounced with two Os instead of a U and they are pronounced more often than any other word I hear.
When I walk through Mathew Street, one of the gangs is not only hurling words at the occupants of a mini-car, they are also kicking its fenders for punctuation. The occupants, a group of musicians who have just finished playing the Cavern, shouts back through closed windows. When the car drives off, the gang surrounds me and asks for cigarettes while one of them threateningly cleans his fingernails with a penknife. I ask them about the Beatles.
"The Beatles?" one of them says in that Scouse lilt that makes every statement sound like a question. "The Beatles are finished in Liverpool! It's the Rolling Stones you want to hear!"
III.
Only a few months before, when the Beatles returned from their first American tour, some six thousand teenaged fans had been waiting at London's Heathrow Airport to greet them. Now on their return from their tour of Australia and New Zealand, only about two hundred teenagers, mostly girls, were there to shriek a welcome from the airport's observation roof.
"Well," said Beatle George, "why shouldn't it level off? I think it was bound to. We can't expect the huge crowds all the time."
Someone handed the Beatles bouquets when they stepped off the airliner and, upon entering the floodlit Heathrow press room for their inevitable press conference, Ringo, waving red roses with both hands, shouted into the television cameras:
"FLOWERS! FLOWERS! GET YOUR FLOWERS!"
When the press conference began, a reporter asked Ringo:
"How do you feel?"
"I feel fine," Ringo answered, "but you asked me the same question the day I left."
Someone asked John about the report that the Beatles had been barraged with eggs in Brisbane.
"It's a dirty lie!" John snapped. "Let's get the whole thing straight. There were exactly six eggs, two tomatoes and a head of lettuce. They were thrown by a group of university fellows and we met them all later. They said they were idealists and they were very stupid idealists because they had no ideals. And they said they didn't like us because we were materialists, which we are. Anyway, we shook hands and laughed at it and convinced them that they were materialists, too, and they went away. But when I read about it in the newspapers the next day, I thought we'd been battered.
The rest of the press conference went like this:
REPORTER: Will all four of you be there at the Royal Premiere?
GEORGE: Rumor has it.
REPORTER: What did you bring back from Australia?
JOHN: Rubbish.
WAITER: Can I get over? I've got some tea.
GEORGE (Into television camera): It's OK. It's a commercial break now.
REPORTER: Do you have any new records coming out?
PAUL: Yes, we have new records coming out.
REPORTER: Are they the same as the others?
JOHN: All the same. If you've heard one, you've heard them all.
REPORTER: What are your immediate plans now?
JOHN: Go to bed.
Then John rejoined his blond-haired wife, Cynthia, and the Beatles rode off in their Austin Princess limousine. There wasn't much to ask at Beatles' press conferences any more.
IV.
The first thing you must realize is that Liverpool is not England any more than Brooklyn is America. It is a gray city, the stone houses below mirroring the drabness of the almost constant overcast above, but Liverpool's passions burn in neon brightness. The people are small, tough and wiry, living testimony to the spare diets and factory wages of England's North, where there are no boom towns. Liverpool has one of the highest unemployment rates in England, a fact which tends to reinforce a suspicion which Liverpudlians have always had that they were never a part of England to begin with.
"I don't know about the other lads," says Billy Hatton, a bony-faced guitarist with a group known as the Fourmost, "but I've always felt that way."
Hatton, twenty-three, the picture of a British entertainer, owns a second-hand American car now.
"For example," he says, "there's one lad with our group who lives only eight miles outside of Liverpool and he has an entirely different accent."
Scouse ends at the city line. So does Liverpool's permissiveness, or at least it did before the Beatles started exporting their contempt of existing attitudes and before the rest of the country started buying what they were exporting. The Liverpool Sound? Billy Hatton grabbed hold of a thread hanging from the Beatles' shirttails and now finds himself booked into the Palladium until Christmas.
A seaport on the foul mouth of the Mersey River, with streets that look dirty in the sunless gray even if they are scrubbed clean every day, Liverpool is an immigrant city, with one-third of its population awash from across the Irish Sea. There was a time when Liverpool even issued its own money and there are still iron rings on the docks where the slaves were chained before transshipment to the colonies in open defiance of the crown. The big colonnaded stone mansions on Upper Parliament Street and Gambia Terrace were built by profits from the slave trade, but, as John Lennon points out:
"It's the coloreds who won out in the end, isn't it? Now it's them that live on Upper Parliament Street."
The mansions have been broken down into the tiny flats of Liverpool's ghetto, and Lennon himself used to live in one of Gambia Terrace's cramped apartments when he was a student at the Liverpool Art Institute, across the street. John's friends still talk about the winter he chopped up the furniture to heat the flat and about the time a London newspaper sent a photographer to take a picture of it for an article about England's Beat Generation. Lennon threw the photographer out.
Lennon's roommate, Stuart Sutcliffe, co-founder of the Beatles but now dead and buried in Hamburg, Germany, was reading the Beat Generation's seminal poet, Allen Ginsberg, in those days. Is it a coincidence, then, that the rock and rollers of Liverpool, re-energizing a cultural wave that originated in America, now rally around a sound they call "Beat" music? In its Liverpudlian context, the word "Beat" has to do with the hard-driving backbeat of the music, pounded out not only by the drummer but also by the other musicians, who stamp their feet so hard that several groups, including the Beatles, have gone crashing down through rotting wooden stages. Lennon himself has acknowledged that the Beatles' name has to do with the word, "Beat," but, he insists, the "Beat" in the Beatles only applies to the music. British intellectuals, nevertheless, remain unswerving in their opinion that the Beatles carry the flag of the British Beat Generation and that if the Beatles' success represents a breakthrough for the social rebellion that rallies around the Beatles' banner, the breakthrough possesses a kinship to the American cultural revolt. Since the advent of the Beatles, Beat music seemingly has begun to overturn the entire British caste system, the young men of the country have become overgrown with long hair, hardly a day goes by without a front-page story about some Beat group's exploits, the BBC has been forced to increase its pop music programming and the nation appears to wait breathlessly each week for the publication of the latest pop record sales charts. Whoever has the number one record is guaranteed seven days of acclaim as a national hero.
"It could only have happened in Liverpool," says Phillip Tasca, a young Liverpudlian poet who also used to read Allen Ginsberg.
It could only have happened in Liverpool, where the football fans are barred from British Railways as a result of a Liverpudlian predilection to rip up train seats to mark either victory or defeat in the cities of rival teams. More often than not, it's victory these days. Liverpool, the slum of England, has the championship football team of the United Kingdom. Out of its population of seven hundred and fifty-thousand, Liverpool also offers Harold Wilson, the probable next prime minister; Miss Brenda Blackler, Miss England of 1964; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, acclaimed as the best symphony orchestra in the country and, of course, the Beatles.
"Except," says thirty-four-year-old Allan Williams, the short and poetic but ready-fisted owner of Liverpool's all-night club, the Blue Angel, "the Beatles don't belong to Liverpool any more, they belong to the world. You know, I used to be manager of the Beatles. It was all done on a handshake. One bloody, nasty paper said I now cry myself to sleep. That's ridiculous. I couldn't have done what Brian Epstein did for them. Nor what he did for Gerry and the Pacemakers. That's another one of my sad stories. I used to manage Gerry, too. You wouldn't believe it could all happen to one fellow, would you?"
V.
There were some twelve thousand persons in London's Picadilly Circus, where the Beatles' giant faces smiled down at them from an advert which decorated the entire facade of the Pavilion Theater, with the statue of Eros aiming an arrow in the opposite direction from the center of the circus. Two hundred policemen held the crowd back while the girls chanted:
"BEATLES! BEATLES! BEATLES!"
And while the boys called out:
"STONES FOREVER, BEATLES NEVER!"
Several fights broke out. The crowd also sang Happy Birthday to Ringo, who was celebrating his twenty-fourth the next day. When the Beatles arrived, there was a loud throaty roar. Afterwards, the theater manager rolled out a newly-cleaned red carpet for Princess Margaret, who walked into the theater on it with her husband, Lord Snowden, trailing behind. Inside, the theater was worn and smoky, with the lingering scent of a Saturday matinee. A detachment of trumpeters blew a tinny fanfare from the stage and the Metropolitan Police Band played God Save The Queen. Then the theater darkened and a selected short subject filled the screen. It was a travelogue of New Zealand. The Beatles snickered knowingly.
"New Zealand," John said afterwards, "is a drag!"
After that, the Beatles were introduced from the stage and then their first film, A Hard Day's Night flickered on the screen. This was the greatest honor the Beatles had received until now. When they were presented to the Princess along with manager Brian Epstein, she asked Paul what he thought of the film.
"I don't think we are very good, Ma'am," Paul answered. "But we had a very good producer."
Then Lord Snowden asked:
"What in the world is a 'grotty' shirt?"
"It means simply, grotesque," John answered, "just a word to describe a shirt in the film."
There was a party afterwards in the Dorchester Hotel and the Princess attended it. So did Rolling Stones Brian Jones and Keith Richards, who walked in with a friend after the Princess had left. Dress for this party was a formal, with the women wearing gowns and the men wearing black ties, but Brian, with his blond hair falling to his shoulders, and Keith, with his dark hair almost as long, were wearing turtle neck shirts.
"Isn't this the greatest party-crash of all time?" smiled Brian.
The Rolling Stones' latest record, It's All Over Now, had just hit the top of the British pop charts, and the Beatles came over to congratulate Brian and Keith with glasses of champagne. A society orchestra was trying to play rock and roll, but not even the dancers were paying attention to the eviscerated beat of the music. An elderly woman came up to John and said:
"You're simply darling!"
"Can't say the same for you, luv," John replied, moving away. Later, as the party broke up, he told her:
"Good night, Mrs. Hait STOP IT!" the woman commanded again, this time with the fury of the Empire in her voice.
Brian stopped signing autographs and picked up a woman's scarf which happened to be lying on the table in front of him. Slowly, to mock the solemn cadence of the anthem, he performed a slapstick gag out of the way he wrapped the scarf around his neck. When the orchestra came to the final chorus of the words, God save the Queen, a voice at the front of the ballroom could be heard bellowing out the word, save, loudly and off-key. The voice was John Lennon's and what he actually sang were the words, "God S-A-A-A-A-I-V-E the cream!"
After the party, John, Paul and Ringo went to the Ad Lib, a loud London disco which they'd turned into their after-hours hangout. Derek Taylor and Brian Epstein went with them. I went to the Ad Lib also, accompanied by Brian Jones and Keith Richards. Also with me was Pete Hamill, who was living in Europe at that time and whom the Saturday Evening Post had assigned to help me write the Beatles story. After we'd been at the club a while, Epstein suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Not long afterwards, Paul left also. It was still early. Ringo was the next to go.
"I stayed up till the papers came out so I could read the reviews," Ringo said later. I got all the papers at half-four in the morning, drunk out of my mind trying to read them. But I couldn't focus. I couldn't read any of them."
When he finally focused on the reviews the next day, Ringo learned that he was a movie star as well as a star drummer. Not one of the normally dyspeptic London movie critics could belch up an unkind word about the film.
"ANOTHER BEATLE SUCCESS!" was the headline in the conservative Daily Telegraph.
"Ringo," the Observer said, "emerges as a born actor."
The Daily Mail compared the Beatles to the Marx Brothers.
At the Ad Lib, meanwhile, John continued drinking Scotch and Coke after Ringo had left. His hand gripped his glass as if he were trying to shatter it with a squeeze. Like his wit, his eyes were hard, sharp and unsmiling, but, after you looked at them a while, they reflected more sadness than hostility. John was a mean drunk. Sometimes, his upper lip curled in a snarl as he talked, displaying hard white teeth. But it was his tongue that had the most bite.
"I loove ya," he told Brian Jones and Keith Richards, with his musical Scouse tripping off his tongue. "I looved ya the first time I heard ya. But there's somethin' wrong with ya, isn't there? There's one of ya in the group that isn't as good as the others. Well, ya idiot, who is that that isn't as good as the others? Who is it? Find out, tell yourselves and get rid uv 'im. You're not playin' ballrooms in Blackpool any more. You're not playin' in those little clubs ya used to play in any more, ya gett!"
"Gett," an epithet widely used in Liverpool, was one of John's favorite four-letter words.
"Ya have to think one way in this," John continued. "Ya have t'think of being a world-wide commercial success! And the world aint that bloody craphouse I first saw you in, or Juke Box Jury or the bloody Palladium. Ya've got to be great! Ya've got to be perfect! Ya've got to be hard! Is there a weak one in the group who'll hold you back?"
It wasn't until years later that I realized it was Brian who was the weak one. But at the Ad Lib, Brian and Keith tried to dodge John's question. They looked at each other, shrugged and then nodded to John.
"Then get rid uv 'im!" John snapped, viciously. "Get rid uv 'im!"
For their part, Brian and Keith, who came from London, boasted that they played authentic Black rhythm-and-blues. They belittled the Beatles for playing white commercial rock and roll. Then the three of them argued about hair styles. John insisted that the Beatles had introduced long hair in England after finding that the kids wore long hair in Hamburg. Keith, meanwhile, said that he had been wearing his hair long since 1959, four years before anybody had ever heard of the Beatles.
"Your hair makes it," John told Brian and then, turning to Keith, John added:
"Your hair makes it, too. But there's some whose hair doesn't make it. Now, Mick Jagger, you know as well as I do that his hair don't make it."
While they continued their banter, a Ray Charles record was playing on the Ad Lib hi-fi, blue and green lights blinked from the ceiling, willowy London models rippled in their finery as they danced with their escorts, waiters in paisley dinner jackets brought more Scotch and Coke to the table and, outside the wraparound picture windows of the fourth-floor club, England's three a.m. summer dawn silhouetted the tight, low-slung skyline of the city. Suddenly, one of the willowy London models sat down next to me, put her hand on my knee and asked me to introduce her to Lennon.
"Later," I said. "Give me your phone number first."
"It's harder for us than it was for you," Brian Jones was telling John, "because we had to contend with you AND America! You only had to contend with America!"
"Ahhh," said John, "in another year, I'll have me money and I'll be out of it."
"In another year," said Brian, "we'll be number one! We'll be bigger than you are!"
"That's all right with me!" John shot back. "I'll have me money and I'll be leaving the group and you can have it! I wish ya luck! But it aint as easy as ya think!"
"Yeah!" said Brian, "In another year, we'll be there!"
"Yeah," John said, "but what's 'there?'"
Eventually, it took more than a year for John to leave the Beatles. And, eventually, the Rolling Stones got rid of Brian Jones. It took longer than a year, but, eventually, after they no longer had the Beatles to contend with, the Rolling Stones also claimed the title of Number One, the most acclaimed rock group in the world. Meanwhile, it was becoming hard for me to catch everything John and Brian and Keith were saying in the din at the Ad Lib. The willowy model next to me was demanding my attention. People kept coming over, interrupting the conversation to congratulate John and, as an afterthought, to congratulate Brian and Keith, too. And also to ask for autographs. Abandoned when he was three by his father and then left in the care of an aunt after the death of his mother, John Lennon, at the age of twenty-three, could expect to be signing autographs for the rest of his life. With "gett" and the two Os of his other four-letter words continually rolling off his tongue, John received all the acclaim with increasing sarcasm.
"Now, what are you congratulating me for?" he told one person. "You're the kind who hums Hello, Dolly!"
"How was Australia?" Keith Richards asked.
"It's all right if you can live on the screaming," John answered.
"They'll be screamin' for us, too, in Australia, if we don't break up first," Brian said.
"Joost remember!" John replied, "if the Stones break up, it'll be over your dead body!"
After Brian and Keith left, John stayed on in the club, as if determined to close it down. It soon became after-hours, even for an after-hours club, but still John kept ordering more Scotch and Coke. Hamill, who was sitting next to John, was drinking heavily, too. Years later, Hamill was to write that "Mick Jagger got up to dance with a young blonde wearing too much makeup," but Hamill obviously had gotten too drunk to remember, because I don't think Mick Jagger was there that night. That is, either Hamill was too drunk or I was too stoned. I, meanwhile, kept telling Lennon that he had to listen to Dylan's records. Years later, Hamill was to write:
"To hell with Dylan," Lennon said." "No, John, listen to him," Aronowitz said. "He's rock 'n roll, too. He's where rock 'n roll's gonna go. Listen."
Lennon's mouth became a slit. "Dylan. Dylan. Give me Chuck Berry. Give me Little Richard. Don't give me fancy crap. Crap. American folky intellectual crap. It's crap." He was snarling and bitter and hard. He didn't want to talk about music. He didn't want to talk about writing. He looked down the table at Keith Richard. "What the hell are the Yanks here for?" he said. Richard smiled and shrugged. McCartney reached over and touched John's hand. "Ach, come off it, John," he said. Lennon pulled his hand away and turned to me. "Why don't you fuck off?" he said. "Why don't you just get the hell out of here?" "Why don't you make me?" I said. "Hey, come on," Aronowitz said. "Let's just have a good time." "What?" Lennon said to me. "I said you should try to make me get out of here." He stared at me and I stared back.
Hamill was a mean a drunk, too. I remembered an afternoon when Hamill and I, accompanied by former middleweight boxing champion Jose Torres, were at the Lion's Head in Greenwich Village, a newspaperman's hangout. In those days, Hamill always got drunk quickly, turning sullen, angry and hostile. In the Lion's Head, too, he'd gotten drunk and immediately started looking for a fight. He'd become annoyed because some young men and women were laughing over a game of darts they were playing. He'd become annoyed and he'd become paranoid. He'd thought the dart-players were laughing at him. Without either provocation or so much as a warning, Hamill had suddenly risen and, with a Sunday punch that nobody had any reason to expect, had broken the young man's jaw. Now Hamill, with the same kind of chip on his shoulder, was looking for a fight with Lennon, who shouldered his own chip. They were about to start brawling with each other in the Ad Lib. The moment came when they were about to swing at each other. It seemed to me that it wasn't my attempts to calm them which succeeded in stopping them so much as it was a fear each one had of the other. They were both ugly drunks. After the moment of confrontation passed, I again was struck by the sadness in John's eyes. I turned toward John and said:
"You can't fool me. You really care!"
"Sure, I care, ya idiot!" John shot back.
It was after five when Brian Epstein returned to the Ad Lib.
"I've been looking for you," Epstein told John mysteriously.
John, Epstein and I took the elevator down along with Derek Taylor. Unexpected daylight greeted us on the sidewalk outside. Suddenly, John started abusing Derek for no apparent reason, calling Derek's wife, Joanne, a cow. I could see that Derek was deeply wounded but he said nothing. I knew Joanne to be a lovely and charming woman, but I, too, said nothing. Epstein offered to drive John home and they got in the car. It screeched off into the morning. On the license plate were the letters, "ALL."
VI.
Liverpool still had the Mersey Monsters. They performed in garishly nightmarish costumes with their heads encased in rubber Halloween masks. Instead of a fan club, they had a fang club, but there weren't any members. According to local Beat music critics, the Mersey Monsters sounded as horrible as they looked. There also were the Undertakers, who performed in top hats and frock coats and who rode to their performances on motor scooters. Still another group uniformly wore their hair to their shoulders and bleached it.
There were still some three hundred and fifty beat music groups in Liverpool, but the best of them almost never played the Cavern or the Iron Door or the Mardi Gras or the Peppermint Lounge or any of Liverpool's other two dozen Beat Music clubs any more.
"The rot has set in," said William Harry, the twenty-six-year-old editor of the Mersey Beat, a weekly newspaper for Beat musicians and their followers. "Success has turned the scene rotten. It has sapped the energy and made a happy scene a rat race."
Success had come not only to the Beatles but also to such other Liverpool performers as Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers and Cilla Black, whose departure for the Big Time had left a void Liverpool's young were stampeding to fill. Liverpool's deserted docks certainly held no future for them. One out of every fifteen Liverpudlians between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four belonged to a Beat group, with some working for as little as five dollars each a night, with some working for nothing and with most not working at all. All of Liverpool's kids seemed to be trying to follow the yellow brick road of gold that the Beatles had paved for themselves. And all of Liverpool's promoters were trying to step into some lucky proverbial stuff by following in the footsteps of Brian Epstein, who, receiving a personal manager's commission of twenty-five per cent of the Beatles' earnings, received a share that was larger than any of the John's, Paul's, George's or Ringo's individual shares. As a consequence, most of Liverpool's club owners had gone into the personal management business and were booking their own acts into their own clubs and getting better money for them in other cities. Authentic Liverpool Beat groups were now in big demand throughout the rest of England.
Actually, there wasn't much conversation about the Beatles in the Grapes, the pub on Mathew Street where the Beat musicians hung out. The Grapes was more a place of sour grapes. Its habitues were now saying, for example, that the Beatles might have put in a good word for some of the Beatles' old friends from the days when the Beatles were traveling to gigs on buses and when, because the Beatles had to stow their drums in the aisles, old ladies were putting their feet through the drumheads.
"It's understandable that they have to live in London now," said William Harry. "London still has everything, all the recording studios and all the facilities. Liverpool is only their home in a sentimental way. But London has naturally suffered with the emergence of the Mersey sound because so much money from the entertainment world has gone into the pockets of groups up North. London has been trying to put down this whole thing. And now, the Beatles are part of the London scene."
Harry, who went to the Liverpool Art Institute with John Lennon and who had published Lennon's poetry in the Mersey Beat, also mentioned that he wasn't even able to get a color photograph of the Beatles for his newspaper. Nor was he invited to the Beatles' civic reception in Liverpool's Town Hall. But then, neither was Allan Williams, nor Stuart Sutcliffe's mother, nor Pete Best, the original drummer with the Beatles, who was fired in favor of Ringo Starr just before the Beatles recorded their first hit. Ringo Starr. Back in the neighborhood, he was still Ritchie. Richard Starkey was his real name.
"I was bitter when it happened," said the twenty-two-year-old Best, who now led the Pete Best Four. "But time's healed it all up again. A lot of fans think the Beatles have forgotten about them, more or less given them the go-by. At the moment, there's a lot of mixed feelings about the Beatles in Liverpool. When they come back here, on the one hand, they could get a big reception and, on the other hand, they could die a big death."
VII.
The Beatles were sitting at the back of the plane. The airline had set aside two rows of empty seats to keep the Fab Four buffered from the rest of the passengers. It was July tenth, 1964, and the Beatles were flying home to Liverpool for an official reception. They would be flying back to London that same night.
"Have there been any changes in us?" asked Paul. "The main thing is the cash, isn't it? That's the main change. And the cash changes you. But it can't change you really inside, because to go bigheaded, you've got to be bigheaded anyway---I think!"
For his father's sixty-second birthday, five days before, Paul had bought a race horse named Drake's Drum. It had cost forty-five hundred dollars and on its first time out, it had run second in a photo-finish, paying six-to-one.
"We think, obviously, that we've got something, because we'd be idiots if we didn't. The danger is in writing it. The danger is in the narrow-minded people, soft people, who will say, 'Ah, it's gone to their head and they're bigheaded.' We've always had exactly the same kind of faith in ourselves---It's not conceit, it's just a confidence in ourselves. Which is what you need anyway to do anything in show business."
I offered him a cigarette.
"No, I only smoke English cigarettes. I can't smoke American cigarettes. They're addicting, you know."
He pulled out a pack of his own cigarettes and lit one.
"You know," he said, "we're all more confident in ourselves now than we were. Ringo, especially. Ringo was always more of an introvert than he is now. Like that thing about us telling him he'd be nowhere without the rest of us. To anybody writing it or printing it, we're the biggest gang of conceited buggers going. But it's a private joke, and a private joke, however public you make it, will never come over. You know, people used to have the idea, and one of two still do, that we pick on Ringo. But it's because of that that we DO pick on him privately as a joke, because it's so ridiculous."
In London a few days earlier, while riding with the Beatles in their Austin Princess to a TV taping at the BBC's Shepherd's Bush studios, I'd persuaded John to let me tape an interview with him in the room I was sharing with Pete Hamill at London's brand, new Hilton Hotel, overlooking Hyde Park. But, after talking Paul, George and Ringo into coming to the Hilton to be interviewed along with him, John'd never showed up.
My room'd been on the twenty-first floor of the Hilton, which'd been at that time the tallest building in London. As soon as Paul, George and Ringo had arrived, they'd rushed to the windows and, marveling at the view, started pointing out specific sights to one another.
"We've never been this high!" a smiling George'd explained. "Not in London, we haven't!"
What George'd meant was that the Beatles had never before been as high as the twenty-first floor. At that time, the Beatles got their highs strictly from popping pills. Just about all the youth of Liverpool were pill-poppers. During their period of marinating in Hamburg, the Beatles'd soon become habituated to "purple hearts" and other such speed pills but they still hadn't been introduced to marijuana, the basic psychedelic. I, for one, had been astonished to learn that the Beatles had never smoked grass and I'd already begun selling John on the belief I held at that time that marijuana was a less harmful way than pills to alter one's consciousness.
With Paul, George and Ringo spread about the room and with my prehistoric tape recorder winding, I'd told them of what Liverpool's musicians had told me during my recent trip there. Immediately, Paul had risen to a denial that John, George, Ringo and he were putting on airs.
"Each time we'd reach a new level, we'd be treated as stars at that level," Paul'd said. "So we've always been this way. We haven't changed because we haven't had to change."
Paul and George'd left after a while, but Ringo'd stayed on to talk to me and Hamill about growing up in Liverpool, when he'd had to undergo numerous stomach operations. He'd lifted his shirt and loosened his belt to show us the scars on his abdomen.
"Do I look like Frankenstein?" he'd joked.
VIII.
Now we were on our way to Liverpool aboard a plane from London. The forty-minute ride was bumpy. Across the aisle from Paul were two nineteen-year-old girls who had won a newspaper contest giving them the privilege of accompanying the Beatles.
"I wrote a letter," explained one of them, "that said I'd always had a nose like Ringo's and I'd like to see if Liverpool is as bad as I've been told. I don't really have a nose like Ringo," and she laughed, "but tell me, is the Cavern really that rough?"
"They've got rats," answered Paul. "They got one!"
"They've got two!" said George. "I've seen one on the stage."
The plane pointed a wing at the countryside and turned for a landing. John, Paul, George and Ringo, who'd been busy jabbering at one another, suddenly quieted and began peering intently out the windows. As the plane floated to a landing, Paul started whistling Anitra's Dance and, one by one, the others started whistling in unison. A moment later, George shouted:
"Look! Down below! This is Fords! It is! It is!"
"Look!" Paul cried out. "That's the new estate!"
It wasn't until the plane landed that the Beatles saw the crowd, fifteen hundred-strong, on the airport roof. Airport officials wouldn't allow any more.
"See those people!" Paul said.
"It's bigger than when Matt Munroe landed!" John chuckled.
Paul and John often joked about Matt Munroe, who'd been England's equivalent of Frank Sinatra.
There was the usual press conference at the airport, although this one was catered, with hors d'oeuvres and whiskey.
"How do you feel?" someone asked Brian Epstein, standing alone at the edge of the mob of reporters and photographers who surrounded the Beatles.
"Not very happy," Epstein answered.
Then there was the motorcade to the Town Hall. At the airport gate, the Beatles saw kids in wheel chairs. They were at the front of the throng of some hundred and fifty thousand who lined the ten-mile route. At the front of the motorcade was an eight-motorcycle police escort. It was bedlam all the way from the airport to the city. Riding in their Austin Princess with the windows rolled up and the doors locked, the Beatles were showered with cheers, jelly beans, flowers, from both sides of the road. The mobs kept breaking through the police lines to claw at their car, which their driver had driven to Liverpool so it would be there when they arrived. The motorcycles raced down the gutters on both sides of the road, forcing small children, their older brothers and sisters and their mothers and fathers to jump quickly back on the crowded curbs. I panicked watching the motorcycles race at the kids in the gutters. Along the way, the motorcycle police kept receiving radio reports that there was rioting at Town Hall. The Beatles' limousine was behind the motorcycles and I was in the second car along with a journalist named George Harrison, who was a columnist on the Liverpool Echo and who was no relation to Beatle George.
"The Beatles were nervous," Journalist George said. "Now they know that Liverpool loves them, too. It's the biggest thing that's happened in this city since the Queen. In fact, it's bigger! Nothing. . .nothing like this ever happened in Liverpool, and the city is only four hundred years old!"
IX.
At the Liverpool Town Hall, the first of the four hundred persons hurt that day were being carried on stretchers from the crowds surging and screaming behind the barricades when the Beatles arrived. The barricades, made of thick, wooden pilings, had been cemented into the cobblestones of the street several days before. Inside Town Hall, the Beatles were ushered into the office of the Lord Mayor, a small, rotund, mustachioed man named Louis Caplan. He was wearing a white tie and tails and something called the Lord Mayor's evening jewel, a cameo which hung from the Lord Mayor's neck by a blue sash which was decorated by the Liverpool Coat of Arms surrounded by diamonds, emeralds and rubies. The first thing that John did when he met the Lord Mayor was to press his nose against the evening jewel.
"All right," said the Lord Mayor, "now John. . . Which one of you is John? There's a letter here from Victoria."
"Queen Victoria?" asked John.
There was a statue of Queen Victoria in Liverpool.
"Haven't they knocked her down yet?" asked John.
"It's a beautiful statue," the Lord Mayor said.
"They ought to knock it down and build a statue of us!" Ringo said.
"All right," said the Lord Mayor, "now Ringo. . . Which one of you is Ringo? They've got a desk and they've identified it as Ringo's desk at your old school. . . Now, Richard Starkey. Which one of you is Richard Starkey. There's a letter here for Richard Starkey. . ."
Lord Derby was there with a handful of souvenir programs, which he handed to the Beatles.
"These are for the Queen," he said. "The Queen asked me to ask you to autograph these for her."
Afterwards, I saw Neil Aspinall, the number one Beatles' road manger, expertly and flawlessly forging each one of the Beatles' autographs on the programs Lord Derby had said were for the Queen. Neil could sign the Beatles' signatures better than they could themselves.
In the Town Hall Plaza, some twenty thousand persons were screaming for the Beatles, with hundreds more leaning out of windows and hanging over rooftops. The Lord Mayor, up for re-election next year, decided to take the Beatles out for a public appearance on the Town Hall balcony. As he led them up the grand staircase, the Liverpool police band, concealed below, broke into You Can't Buy Me Love. Ringo danced up the stairs.
In the second-floor ballroom of the Town Hall, with the grandiose and priceless cut glass chandeliers above and a bouncing, creaky floor below, some seven hundred invited guests and some four hundred gate-crashers stormed a long, linen-covered table laden with canapes, cakes and whiskey. When the Beatles walked in, escorted by a single constable, the mob changed directions and stormed the Beatles, who ended up bent over double with pain as they were being crushed at their midriffs against the laden table by the pressure built up by the mob. The Beatles' number two road manager, Mal Evans, a jolly giant of a man, whom they'd drafted for the job after finding him helpful as a bouncer at the Cavern Club, finally rescued the Beatles with the aid of the constable. It was during these heroics that someone slipped Mal's watch off his wrist and made off with it.
The Beatles' next appearance was with the Lord Mayor on the balcony overlooking the ballroom. Brian Epstein, walking behind the Beatles, was also supposed to be on the balcony with them. In his pocket, he had a letter which he had carried fourteen thousand miles from the Lord Mayor of Liverpool in New South Wales for the purpose of delivering it to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, England, at that very moment. But, after letting the Lord Mayor and the Beatles onto the balcony, a doorman slammed the door shut in Epstein's face and he was left downstairs.
On the balcony, the Lord Mayor played a record with a sound and significance unrecognizable to me nor to anybody else I asked. Paul and Ringo started to dance and whistle to it. Then the Lord Mayor made a speech.
"I have here," he said, "a letter from the Orthopedic Hospital which says that when the children heard Beatle songs, they took a new lease on life and many were inspired to get up and walk for the first time."
From Town Hall, the Beatles rode in a motorcade through a cheering mob of twenty thousand more to the Odeon Theater for the Liverpool premiere of A Hard Day's Night. This time, I rode with them in their Austin Princess. Again, the crowd broke through the police lines, clawed at the limo, climbed on top of it, straddled the hood and blocked the view through the windshield. Two girls gabbed hold of the trunk handle, raced along with the car and finally tore the trunk lid open. Onstage at the Odeon, a telegram of congratulations was read from Prince Phillip.
X.
It was dark and raining by the time the Beatles rode back to the airport, but there were still scattered clumps of people on street corners shouting greetings at the Beatles' limo as it went by. At the airport, the Beatles had to wait for their plane and they were ushered into an executive's office, where Scotch, Coke and sandwiches wrapped in cellophane were promptly served. Several persons took bites on the sandwiches and quickly returned them to the trays.
"I wouldn't eat them!" said John. "I used to wrap them. I used to work here at the airport and I used to spit in them and wipe them in dirt."
The Lord Mayor was at the airport to give the Beatles a proper send-off and they gave him a proper send-up. He had a sheaf of papers to be autographed at the request of his constituents.
"Here!" he told Paul. "You'd better sign this!"
"Yes, your worship," said Paul, "I'd better sign this."
Then Paul turned toward John, saying:
"John, you'd better sign this for his worship."
The Lord Mayor produced another sheaf of papers.
"Here!" he said to Paul. "You'd better sign this, too!"
"Yes, your worship, your holiness," Paul responded. "I'll sign it right away!"
John, meanwhile, had begun to fondle the Lord Mayor's evening jewel.
"Yes, Looie," John told the Lord Mayor, "I saw people in that crowd today without any teeth. When are you going to get them teeth?"
There were about a thousand persons standing in the rain on the observation roof when the Beatles boarded the plane back to London.
"They was gettin' us worried," said John, waving good-bye from the airport
ramp. "They'll never say they don't like us here any more!" ##
NEXT:THE FIFTH BEATLE or EVERYBODY HATED MURRAY
CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMN SEVENTEEN
CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX
OF COLUMNS
The
Blacklisted Journalist can be contacted at P.O.Box 964, Elizabeth, NJ 07208-0964
The Blacklisted Journalist's E-Mail Address:
blackj@bigmagic.com
THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST IS A SERVICE MARK OF AL ARONOWITZ