book excerpt
I arrived back at Lime Street about a stone lighter, several shades darker, and probably five years older in experience. My hair had become a luxuriant mop, having not seen a barber for six months, and only having the briefest occasional contact with Maggie’s scissors. Walking up Mandeville Street to number 39 with my suitcase, I looked and felt like a different person from the kid who’d left in the spring. It was late afternoon and the house was empty, mum and dad both being at work. In my bedroom two unopened, official-looking letters sat on the dresser. I knew at once what they were, but didn’t feel like dealing with them until I’d had a nap, which turned into a sixteen-hour marathon as the body checked out for some much needed recuperative shut-eye. The folks let me sleep uninterrupted, so when I resurfaced the house was once again empty. Over a cup of tea I opened the first letter, the A-level results . . . passed all four at top grade . . . opened the second, from Leeds University . . . accepted, with a scholarship. My natural elation turned to trepidation almost immediately. None of this was theoretical possibility any more, but imminent reality. I looked at the phone number of the Butlin’s head of entertainment, who’d given me a month to get back to him on their offer. Within an hour I was in the local with Tommy Bennett, getting the lowdown on the Barons’ situation, which required a decision sooner rather than later, as to whether I was in or out. I sensed that there would be no easy resolution to any of this, with the first and biggest problem bound to be my dad.
My mother arrived home first, pleased to see me, I suppose, but more worried about what would happen between my dad and me. She asked me not to argue with him, which tipped me off, as if I needed to be, that he wouldn’t be in an amenable state of mind when he showed up. He came in at about seven, nodding to me briefly as he went upstairs to change from his work clothes and clean up before dinner. I waited downstairs uncomfortably, as ma stayed busy in the back kitchen, no doubt determined to stay out of the line of fire. When he came down there was no handshake, much less an embrace … not his style at all. His first words, typically, related to my hair and general appearance … “Didn’t have time for the barber today, eh? Get down there tomorrow, or I’ll take you meself. Look at the state of you! Did you open them letters?” I handed them to him, and he scanned both rapidly, then folded them with no words of congratulation, but with a kind of grim satisfaction.
During the meal he talked about whatever he chose to relate about his work day, with no questions at all about what I’d been up to for the previous six months, much less my academic achievements, then he went off to the pub for his nightly couple of pints. Could have gone worse, I thought. When he returned with the customary bottle of brown ale in his mackintosh pocket for my mum, I tried to engage him in conversation as he settled down for his last cup of tea of the night. “I really think we need to talk about everything, you know; I mean everything that’s been going on …” “What’s to talk about? You get your bloody hair cut and get some decent clothes on you, and you go to Leeds next month and get stuck in.” Utterly dismissive, as always.
The next day I met with Tommy, Lee and the new recruit on drums, a Doncaster boy named Mel Preston, who had a very easy way about him, which made me like him at once. Lee wanted his new band to be lean and mean, just one guitar, bass and drums to back his singing, but heavy on the harmony vocals and with really accurate chordal arrangements, which obviously played to my major strengths as a musician. I’d wanted to be in The Barons for what seemed like so long, that the chance being offered immediately trumped the Butlin’s deal, in my mind. Furthermore, the Merseybeat movement was gathering strength by the week, so it seemed, and here was my opportunity to finally play with my best mate in a group where I’d be the dominant musical force, would hopefully be able to ride the momentum that was developing for all things scouse, and wouldn’t have to leave the ‘Pool.
Although I didn’t particularly care for Lee Castle as a person - a deal too slick for my taste - he was unquestionably a hell of a front man, with girl-appeal and a pretty flexible singing range, especially when performing his preferred material, which was heavy on the Leiber/Stoller, Pomus/Shuman brand of latinesque Brill Building R ‘n’ B. It seemed that the promoter Brian Kelly and Bob Wooler were in his corner, and his new manager at Arcade Variety Agency, Jim Turner, appeared to be a straightforward guy, as managers went in those days. They’d secured the use of a working men’s club in Warrington, about fifteen miles east of Liverpool, for daily rehearsals, as the plan was to keep the “new” Barons under wraps until the big debut. I was impressed that there seemed to be an actual plan, as opposed to the haphazard flailing about that was all too prevalent around town, and when I went up to Warrington and we actually played together, it gelled very sweetly at once.
This was all happening in an impossibly tight time frame, as my departure for Leeds was increasingly imminent, and I couldn’t engage my father in any meaningful dialogue about my future. When I’d tried to tell him about the Butlin’s offer and the Barons situation, he’d simply said “Don’t be bloody stupid,” and when I made the mistake of pointing out that I’d just proved with my results that I wasn’t stupid, he’d said “Don’t get on your high horse with me, college boy!” As time ran out, I called the Butlin’s man and regretfully declined the offer, not wanting to burn bridges, but I kept my option with The Barons open until the very last minute, when my father took me to Lime Street Station and put me on the non-stop express to Leeds, by which time he and I hadn’t exchanged a civil word in a couple of weeks. As a final drop-back position, I’d made sure my guitar and amplifier were stowed at Tommy’s house, rather than mine, just in case, and as the train pulled out, and my dad, stone-faced and unbending, vanished in the smoke of the eastbound engine, I sat in a mixture of fear and fury, trying to figure out what to do, and feeling so totally fucking alone.
Forty-eight hours in Leeds took care of that! It was even grayer and more depressing than Liverpool, with, apparently, none of the vibrancy that made the ‘Pool bearable. I found myself assigned to a Victorian house, sharing a bedroom with five snotty, stinkfoot youths, and a kind of prefect, a second-year man who I clouted within an hour of meeting him. I knew I was gone, although I actually registered for classes and then spent the rest of the day making the rounds of the pubs in the University’s immediate area. They sucked, too …
I called Tommy after a few hours of what was a genuinely agonizing experience, and told him to meet the morning train ‘cause I’d be on it, and to find me some digs in Warrington, as I wouldn’t, couldn’t go home to the family house. It was the single most intense period of emotional turmoil I’ve ever experienced, to this day, but once I’d decided … that was that, forever and a day, and from then on I genuinely didn’t give a fuck what anybody, particularly my father, thought.
I arrived back in Liverpool the following day. Tommy picked me up at Lime Street and drove me up to Warrington. There was a room in the same boarding house where Mel, being an out-of-towner, was staying, so I settled in and went to work, rehearsing and keeping under the radar, or so I thought. The snag was that as I had registered and soon thereafter vanished without a trace, the university rapidly listed me as a missing person, with all the complications that you can imagine ensued. Obviously, in retrospect I regretted the manner in which I’d had to gain my independence in the face of my father’s obdurate refusal to deal with me on any level but his own, and I felt awful that the police and clergy had to be involved when I was safely up the road the whole time. Tommy, who still lived directly across the street from our house, and managed to keep his mouth shut but his ear to the ground during the whole charade, eventually suggested I’d better resurface before things got totally out of hand, so after about a month I returned to a far from welcoming fold.
My father would only speak to me indirectly through mother or one of the swarm of clergy that seemed to be in evidence at every turn. Mum was obviously distraught, which bothers me to this day, as I never wanted to hurt her, but by now I was feeling pretty bolshie about the whole thing, so I gave as good as I got, returning logic with logic, and anger with anger. After a couple of incendiary days, mother must have talked the old man into letting me back in the house, but it was an uneasy truce, and we never really had any kind of relationship after that.
With the dust settling, we began putting the new band together with a vengeance, and were soon ready for our debut, which was set to happen at Aintree Institute, behind a pretty impressive local ad campaign masterminded by Brian Kelly, Bob Wooler and Jim Turner. We had the mohair suits, we had the Cuban boots, we had the skinny ties, we were on the fly! Before introducing us that night, Bob Wooler approached me with a knowing smile, “You didn’t listen to me then? Well, good luck.”
It had been decided that the band’s unveiling should occur on a bill with The Beatles and The Strangers to ensure a good crowd, and we watched both bands from our hiding place in the closed back balcony, before taking a back way to the curtained stage. An opening had been devised where we played an instrumental riff as the curtains opened to reveal Lee Castle gyrating with his back to the audience, turning to face the crowd as we halted abruptly and froze in position. This supposedly dramatic silent pause was torpedoed by Lennon’s “Ee by gum, it’s young Ronnie!” loudly delivered from stage front in his best up-country Lancashire accent. Needless to say, the laugh was on us.
Lee Castle already had a following, of course, but the new streamlined version of the group, with the emphasis on his rich baritone, and the slinky latin grooves, went over very well with the young ladies, as we’d assumed it would. In a way, it was going against the prevalent trend, as Lee was more of a frontman in the older tradition, but it worked.
Jim Turner had realized that the trailblazing Liverpool hitmakers couldn’t be everywhere, so there was a potential goldmine in what would now be referred to as secondary markets, and that’s where he initially aimed us. There still weren’t that many full-time professional groups, who could be out on the road non-stop, so when we’d arrive in some far outpost in Northern England or Scotland, it was a big deal to the locals, and we’d be received with the same enthusiasm as the big boys.
We also had the advantage of carrying our own P.A. system; a rarity at that time, where most acts had to make do with whatever the venue provided, which was usually not much. Ours came courtesy of Brian Kelly, who’d been something to do with electronics in the military and knew his way around valves and wires. By modern standards, they were laughable assemblages, two twelve-inch speakers in hand-painted, open-backed enclosures, a metal frame tube amplifier, probably designed for ham radio use, and four Reslo microphones, three of which were used for vocals, the fourth placed in the general vicinity of the drum kit. No foldback or monitors, no echo or reverb, no mixing board . . . bare bones, but it gave us a big advantage over local bands who supported us, and the audiences could tell the difference, too. To actually have control of the overall sound was quite a novelty, and as we had also acquired Vox amps, and Tommy, Mel and I were outfitted with top-class instruments, Tommy with his Gibson EBO bass, Mel with Trixon drums, and me with a Guild Starfire electric guitar, the overall impression was that the pros had come to town.
For the balance of the year we hit the bricks hard, without the benefit of motorways, criss crossing the Pennines, beating our way around the borderlands of Cumbria and Northumbria, even venturing up into the Highlands of Scotland, and getting the star treatment at every stop. The mania was actually finding its way to the most unlikely outposts, and the magic words “Direct from Liverpool” provoked the expected reaction every time. The Barons were particularly strong in Carlisle (where we were actually smuggled in and out of the venue in an armored truck more than once), the Teeside area, Edinburgh, and up around Inverness. We found ourselves spending less and less time around Liverpool, as Jim Turner kept working this lucrative vein he’d found. The downside of this was that although we were probably making more money than most of our stay-at-home brethren, we were out of sight, and therefore out of mind. If you had asked around town who were the top twenty groups at that time, I doubt we would have rated a mention … in some parts of the country, however, we’d probably have been named in the top ten Liverpool groups, but there you go.
What we didn’t have was a record, or a record deal, and we were all coming to the realization that records were a necessity to advance to the next level. Of course what we didn’t realize at that time was the hoops Brian Epstein had been put through before he lucked into the deal with Parlophone, and even though the trickle of A&R people up to Liverpool was turning into a flood, I doubt that the local music business people, mostly beginners just like their young clients, had much of a grasp of how it all worked down in London.
One thing I did understand was that Arcade Variety Agency, and therefore Jim Turner, was in a commission-driven business, so even if our constant traveling wasn’t in the best interests of the band’s career, it was good business for A.V.A. I began agitating within the group to get Jim working on getting us a record deal of some sort. As far as I was concerned, I had a great deal to prove and a great deal to lose, so I soon stopped treating all of this as a teenage lark, whether the others did or not. I’ll admit that I started becoming a pain in the arse to Jim and the band, who were maybe not quite as motivated as I was, or should we say driven! I was in a hurry, and expected our little organization to share the urgency.
Fair play to Turner, he made an effort, lacing up his hustling shoes, and heading down to London to beat the bushes on our behalf. When he returned with the news that he’d set up an audition for Parlophone, we were over the moon - the label The Beatles were on! There was probably a degree of naivete on Jim’s part, at least I’d like to think so, and initially a whole lot on ours, because, again, none of us really knew anything about the internal workings of the music business in far-away London, and whatever Epstein was learning, he was naturally keeping close to the chest. All we knew for sure was that we had a date, place and time to show up in London for the audition.
As I recollect, none of us had ever been to the capital, except maybe Lee, so we were all pretty excited when we set off a few weeks later, the band, of course, making the journey by van, while Mr. Turner traveled by train. In those days there were only bits and pieces of motorway between Liverpool and London, so the two hundred mile trip was a long. slog down the old arterial roads basically the coaching roads of the previous century, ill-lit, if lit at all, the place names straight out of “Pickwick Papers” by Charles Dickens, my favorite book at that time. I remember waking up as we passed through Towcester on the A-5, and seeing the sign for The Saracen’s Head swinging in the dawn breeze, and a few miles later passing “The Cock” and “The Bull” in Stoney Stratford, the source of the phrase “A cock and bull story,” which, it soon transpired, was what we were embarking on!
Our roadie, Alan, guided us manfully into Central London, god bless him, and managed to find the hotel in Russell Square, Bloomsbury, which was our designated billet. We had the chance to grab a nap and get cleaned up before piling back into the van and winding our way into the fabled West End, and the address we’d been told to show up at, which was a nondescript office building in the vicinity of Charing Cross. Once there, we saw Jim pacing up and down outside, so we knew we were in the right spot. He instructed us to get the gear up to the third floor and into the office of one Harold Shampan … now remember, we didn’t know from Abbey Road, EMI, Manchester Square, or even the name George Martin at that time, and if Jim Turner did, he was keeping his mouth shut.
We lugged the gear up three flights of stairs, without the benefit of an elevator, and were instructed to set up in this bloke’s office, in front of his desk! Well, what did we know... Jim hustled us into the bathroom, where we changed into our stage clothes, then came back to the office, where Mr. Shampan was now ensconced behind his mahogany. Definitely what I later came to know as a Tin Pan Alley type, he was courteous enough, and after we’d played an abbreviated version of our stage show, thanked us, after which we were dismissed, and the grown men got down to business, which left the band with the balance of the day to explore central London, and get into mischief, which I certainly did.
After wandering round Soho with the lads, and not being really inclined to sample the strip clubs they seemed intent on patronizing, I found my way back to the digs. The Russell was the first real hotel I’d been in, and as I’d never even thought about entering any of Liverpool’s major hotels, this place fascinated me. The restaurant and bar seemed, at the time, very sophisticated (although I came to realize some time later that it was no more than a run-of-the-mill tourist hotel), so I decided to have a meal, and then sit in the bar like a man of the world. After getting over the shock of the prices, I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, and after dinner attempted a nonchalant stroll into the bar, perching on a stool, firing up a ciggie, and ordering a scotch and soda, which sounded rather worldly, I thought, rather than “Pint of mild, mate.”
The bar was reasonably busy, and I couldn’t help noticing what I immediately identified as an American couple; the man was large and crew cut, loud of voice and shirt, waving a cigar as he brayed away to his female companion (his wife, I assumed), the bar man, and, it seemed, anyone else within earshot. The lady’s elaborate hair-do was an indescribable shade of, I suppose, blue, and she wore butterfly-wing glasses, heavy on the rhinestones, and what struck me as extraordinarily high heels. It looked as though she was ahead of the field in the drinks stakes, as she probably needed to be, all things considered.
These were the first real Yanks I’d seen up close, and I was fascinated. They were, well, so un-English, like they’d never heard of the stiff upper lip, or keeping yourself to yourself. They didn’t seem to give a damn about what anybody thought, and the man seemed to take pleasure in flashing a substantial roll of fivers and tenners, which by our standards was regarded as the height of bad manners … in Liverpool you kept your brass to yourself. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off them … there was so much vulgar energy there! Then I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned away from them to face a very nice looking young woman, about seventeen, by my guess. “Hi, are you a beatle boy?” she asked in an unmistakable American accent. I hastened to deny that I was in The Beatles, but she shook her head, smiling, “I know that, I mean are you a beatle boy? You look like ‘em, you sound like ‘em.” “Well, I’m from Liverpool, and I’m in a group …” “See, a beatle boy! I knew it!” ...
My mother arrived home first, pleased to see me, I suppose, but more worried about what would happen between my dad and me. She asked me not to argue with him, which tipped me off, as if I needed to be, that he wouldn’t be in an amenable state of mind when he showed up. He came in at about seven, nodding to me briefly as he went upstairs to change from his work clothes and clean up before dinner. I waited downstairs uncomfortably, as ma stayed busy in the back kitchen, no doubt determined to stay out of the line of fire. When he came down there was no handshake, much less an embrace … not his style at all. His first words, typically, related to my hair and general appearance … “Didn’t have time for the barber today, eh? Get down there tomorrow, or I’ll take you meself. Look at the state of you! Did you open them letters?” I handed them to him, and he scanned both rapidly, then folded them with no words of congratulation, but with a kind of grim satisfaction.
During the meal he talked about whatever he chose to relate about his work day, with no questions at all about what I’d been up to for the previous six months, much less my academic achievements, then he went off to the pub for his nightly couple of pints. Could have gone worse, I thought. When he returned with the customary bottle of brown ale in his mackintosh pocket for my mum, I tried to engage him in conversation as he settled down for his last cup of tea of the night. “I really think we need to talk about everything, you know; I mean everything that’s been going on …” “What’s to talk about? You get your bloody hair cut and get some decent clothes on you, and you go to Leeds next month and get stuck in.” Utterly dismissive, as always.
The next day I met with Tommy, Lee and the new recruit on drums, a Doncaster boy named Mel Preston, who had a very easy way about him, which made me like him at once. Lee wanted his new band to be lean and mean, just one guitar, bass and drums to back his singing, but heavy on the harmony vocals and with really accurate chordal arrangements, which obviously played to my major strengths as a musician. I’d wanted to be in The Barons for what seemed like so long, that the chance being offered immediately trumped the Butlin’s deal, in my mind. Furthermore, the Merseybeat movement was gathering strength by the week, so it seemed, and here was my opportunity to finally play with my best mate in a group where I’d be the dominant musical force, would hopefully be able to ride the momentum that was developing for all things scouse, and wouldn’t have to leave the ‘Pool.
Although I didn’t particularly care for Lee Castle as a person - a deal too slick for my taste - he was unquestionably a hell of a front man, with girl-appeal and a pretty flexible singing range, especially when performing his preferred material, which was heavy on the Leiber/Stoller, Pomus/Shuman brand of latinesque Brill Building R ‘n’ B. It seemed that the promoter Brian Kelly and Bob Wooler were in his corner, and his new manager at Arcade Variety Agency, Jim Turner, appeared to be a straightforward guy, as managers went in those days. They’d secured the use of a working men’s club in Warrington, about fifteen miles east of Liverpool, for daily rehearsals, as the plan was to keep the “new” Barons under wraps until the big debut. I was impressed that there seemed to be an actual plan, as opposed to the haphazard flailing about that was all too prevalent around town, and when I went up to Warrington and we actually played together, it gelled very sweetly at once.
This was all happening in an impossibly tight time frame, as my departure for Leeds was increasingly imminent, and I couldn’t engage my father in any meaningful dialogue about my future. When I’d tried to tell him about the Butlin’s offer and the Barons situation, he’d simply said “Don’t be bloody stupid,” and when I made the mistake of pointing out that I’d just proved with my results that I wasn’t stupid, he’d said “Don’t get on your high horse with me, college boy!” As time ran out, I called the Butlin’s man and regretfully declined the offer, not wanting to burn bridges, but I kept my option with The Barons open until the very last minute, when my father took me to Lime Street Station and put me on the non-stop express to Leeds, by which time he and I hadn’t exchanged a civil word in a couple of weeks. As a final drop-back position, I’d made sure my guitar and amplifier were stowed at Tommy’s house, rather than mine, just in case, and as the train pulled out, and my dad, stone-faced and unbending, vanished in the smoke of the eastbound engine, I sat in a mixture of fear and fury, trying to figure out what to do, and feeling so totally fucking alone.
Forty-eight hours in Leeds took care of that! It was even grayer and more depressing than Liverpool, with, apparently, none of the vibrancy that made the ‘Pool bearable. I found myself assigned to a Victorian house, sharing a bedroom with five snotty, stinkfoot youths, and a kind of prefect, a second-year man who I clouted within an hour of meeting him. I knew I was gone, although I actually registered for classes and then spent the rest of the day making the rounds of the pubs in the University’s immediate area. They sucked, too …
I called Tommy after a few hours of what was a genuinely agonizing experience, and told him to meet the morning train ‘cause I’d be on it, and to find me some digs in Warrington, as I wouldn’t, couldn’t go home to the family house. It was the single most intense period of emotional turmoil I’ve ever experienced, to this day, but once I’d decided … that was that, forever and a day, and from then on I genuinely didn’t give a fuck what anybody, particularly my father, thought.
I arrived back in Liverpool the following day. Tommy picked me up at Lime Street and drove me up to Warrington. There was a room in the same boarding house where Mel, being an out-of-towner, was staying, so I settled in and went to work, rehearsing and keeping under the radar, or so I thought. The snag was that as I had registered and soon thereafter vanished without a trace, the university rapidly listed me as a missing person, with all the complications that you can imagine ensued. Obviously, in retrospect I regretted the manner in which I’d had to gain my independence in the face of my father’s obdurate refusal to deal with me on any level but his own, and I felt awful that the police and clergy had to be involved when I was safely up the road the whole time. Tommy, who still lived directly across the street from our house, and managed to keep his mouth shut but his ear to the ground during the whole charade, eventually suggested I’d better resurface before things got totally out of hand, so after about a month I returned to a far from welcoming fold.
My father would only speak to me indirectly through mother or one of the swarm of clergy that seemed to be in evidence at every turn. Mum was obviously distraught, which bothers me to this day, as I never wanted to hurt her, but by now I was feeling pretty bolshie about the whole thing, so I gave as good as I got, returning logic with logic, and anger with anger. After a couple of incendiary days, mother must have talked the old man into letting me back in the house, but it was an uneasy truce, and we never really had any kind of relationship after that.
With the dust settling, we began putting the new band together with a vengeance, and were soon ready for our debut, which was set to happen at Aintree Institute, behind a pretty impressive local ad campaign masterminded by Brian Kelly, Bob Wooler and Jim Turner. We had the mohair suits, we had the Cuban boots, we had the skinny ties, we were on the fly! Before introducing us that night, Bob Wooler approached me with a knowing smile, “You didn’t listen to me then? Well, good luck.”
It had been decided that the band’s unveiling should occur on a bill with The Beatles and The Strangers to ensure a good crowd, and we watched both bands from our hiding place in the closed back balcony, before taking a back way to the curtained stage. An opening had been devised where we played an instrumental riff as the curtains opened to reveal Lee Castle gyrating with his back to the audience, turning to face the crowd as we halted abruptly and froze in position. This supposedly dramatic silent pause was torpedoed by Lennon’s “Ee by gum, it’s young Ronnie!” loudly delivered from stage front in his best up-country Lancashire accent. Needless to say, the laugh was on us.
Lee Castle already had a following, of course, but the new streamlined version of the group, with the emphasis on his rich baritone, and the slinky latin grooves, went over very well with the young ladies, as we’d assumed it would. In a way, it was going against the prevalent trend, as Lee was more of a frontman in the older tradition, but it worked.
Jim Turner had realized that the trailblazing Liverpool hitmakers couldn’t be everywhere, so there was a potential goldmine in what would now be referred to as secondary markets, and that’s where he initially aimed us. There still weren’t that many full-time professional groups, who could be out on the road non-stop, so when we’d arrive in some far outpost in Northern England or Scotland, it was a big deal to the locals, and we’d be received with the same enthusiasm as the big boys.
We also had the advantage of carrying our own P.A. system; a rarity at that time, where most acts had to make do with whatever the venue provided, which was usually not much. Ours came courtesy of Brian Kelly, who’d been something to do with electronics in the military and knew his way around valves and wires. By modern standards, they were laughable assemblages, two twelve-inch speakers in hand-painted, open-backed enclosures, a metal frame tube amplifier, probably designed for ham radio use, and four Reslo microphones, three of which were used for vocals, the fourth placed in the general vicinity of the drum kit. No foldback or monitors, no echo or reverb, no mixing board . . . bare bones, but it gave us a big advantage over local bands who supported us, and the audiences could tell the difference, too. To actually have control of the overall sound was quite a novelty, and as we had also acquired Vox amps, and Tommy, Mel and I were outfitted with top-class instruments, Tommy with his Gibson EBO bass, Mel with Trixon drums, and me with a Guild Starfire electric guitar, the overall impression was that the pros had come to town.
For the balance of the year we hit the bricks hard, without the benefit of motorways, criss crossing the Pennines, beating our way around the borderlands of Cumbria and Northumbria, even venturing up into the Highlands of Scotland, and getting the star treatment at every stop. The mania was actually finding its way to the most unlikely outposts, and the magic words “Direct from Liverpool” provoked the expected reaction every time. The Barons were particularly strong in Carlisle (where we were actually smuggled in and out of the venue in an armored truck more than once), the Teeside area, Edinburgh, and up around Inverness. We found ourselves spending less and less time around Liverpool, as Jim Turner kept working this lucrative vein he’d found. The downside of this was that although we were probably making more money than most of our stay-at-home brethren, we were out of sight, and therefore out of mind. If you had asked around town who were the top twenty groups at that time, I doubt we would have rated a mention … in some parts of the country, however, we’d probably have been named in the top ten Liverpool groups, but there you go.
What we didn’t have was a record, or a record deal, and we were all coming to the realization that records were a necessity to advance to the next level. Of course what we didn’t realize at that time was the hoops Brian Epstein had been put through before he lucked into the deal with Parlophone, and even though the trickle of A&R people up to Liverpool was turning into a flood, I doubt that the local music business people, mostly beginners just like their young clients, had much of a grasp of how it all worked down in London.
One thing I did understand was that Arcade Variety Agency, and therefore Jim Turner, was in a commission-driven business, so even if our constant traveling wasn’t in the best interests of the band’s career, it was good business for A.V.A. I began agitating within the group to get Jim working on getting us a record deal of some sort. As far as I was concerned, I had a great deal to prove and a great deal to lose, so I soon stopped treating all of this as a teenage lark, whether the others did or not. I’ll admit that I started becoming a pain in the arse to Jim and the band, who were maybe not quite as motivated as I was, or should we say driven! I was in a hurry, and expected our little organization to share the urgency.
Fair play to Turner, he made an effort, lacing up his hustling shoes, and heading down to London to beat the bushes on our behalf. When he returned with the news that he’d set up an audition for Parlophone, we were over the moon - the label The Beatles were on! There was probably a degree of naivete on Jim’s part, at least I’d like to think so, and initially a whole lot on ours, because, again, none of us really knew anything about the internal workings of the music business in far-away London, and whatever Epstein was learning, he was naturally keeping close to the chest. All we knew for sure was that we had a date, place and time to show up in London for the audition.
As I recollect, none of us had ever been to the capital, except maybe Lee, so we were all pretty excited when we set off a few weeks later, the band, of course, making the journey by van, while Mr. Turner traveled by train. In those days there were only bits and pieces of motorway between Liverpool and London, so the two hundred mile trip was a long. slog down the old arterial roads basically the coaching roads of the previous century, ill-lit, if lit at all, the place names straight out of “Pickwick Papers” by Charles Dickens, my favorite book at that time. I remember waking up as we passed through Towcester on the A-5, and seeing the sign for The Saracen’s Head swinging in the dawn breeze, and a few miles later passing “The Cock” and “The Bull” in Stoney Stratford, the source of the phrase “A cock and bull story,” which, it soon transpired, was what we were embarking on!
Our roadie, Alan, guided us manfully into Central London, god bless him, and managed to find the hotel in Russell Square, Bloomsbury, which was our designated billet. We had the chance to grab a nap and get cleaned up before piling back into the van and winding our way into the fabled West End, and the address we’d been told to show up at, which was a nondescript office building in the vicinity of Charing Cross. Once there, we saw Jim pacing up and down outside, so we knew we were in the right spot. He instructed us to get the gear up to the third floor and into the office of one Harold Shampan … now remember, we didn’t know from Abbey Road, EMI, Manchester Square, or even the name George Martin at that time, and if Jim Turner did, he was keeping his mouth shut.
We lugged the gear up three flights of stairs, without the benefit of an elevator, and were instructed to set up in this bloke’s office, in front of his desk! Well, what did we know... Jim hustled us into the bathroom, where we changed into our stage clothes, then came back to the office, where Mr. Shampan was now ensconced behind his mahogany. Definitely what I later came to know as a Tin Pan Alley type, he was courteous enough, and after we’d played an abbreviated version of our stage show, thanked us, after which we were dismissed, and the grown men got down to business, which left the band with the balance of the day to explore central London, and get into mischief, which I certainly did.
After wandering round Soho with the lads, and not being really inclined to sample the strip clubs they seemed intent on patronizing, I found my way back to the digs. The Russell was the first real hotel I’d been in, and as I’d never even thought about entering any of Liverpool’s major hotels, this place fascinated me. The restaurant and bar seemed, at the time, very sophisticated (although I came to realize some time later that it was no more than a run-of-the-mill tourist hotel), so I decided to have a meal, and then sit in the bar like a man of the world. After getting over the shock of the prices, I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, and after dinner attempted a nonchalant stroll into the bar, perching on a stool, firing up a ciggie, and ordering a scotch and soda, which sounded rather worldly, I thought, rather than “Pint of mild, mate.”
The bar was reasonably busy, and I couldn’t help noticing what I immediately identified as an American couple; the man was large and crew cut, loud of voice and shirt, waving a cigar as he brayed away to his female companion (his wife, I assumed), the bar man, and, it seemed, anyone else within earshot. The lady’s elaborate hair-do was an indescribable shade of, I suppose, blue, and she wore butterfly-wing glasses, heavy on the rhinestones, and what struck me as extraordinarily high heels. It looked as though she was ahead of the field in the drinks stakes, as she probably needed to be, all things considered.
These were the first real Yanks I’d seen up close, and I was fascinated. They were, well, so un-English, like they’d never heard of the stiff upper lip, or keeping yourself to yourself. They didn’t seem to give a damn about what anybody thought, and the man seemed to take pleasure in flashing a substantial roll of fivers and tenners, which by our standards was regarded as the height of bad manners … in Liverpool you kept your brass to yourself. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off them … there was so much vulgar energy there! Then I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned away from them to face a very nice looking young woman, about seventeen, by my guess. “Hi, are you a beatle boy?” she asked in an unmistakable American accent. I hastened to deny that I was in The Beatles, but she shook her head, smiling, “I know that, I mean are you a beatle boy? You look like ‘em, you sound like ‘em.” “Well, I’m from Liverpool, and I’m in a group …” “See, a beatle boy! I knew it!” ...
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